tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-463445167640495548.post3964089414801853300..comments2024-03-28T23:40:02.776+00:00Comments on Ex-Christadelphians: Faith is FearUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-463445167640495548.post-55077449574424725192019-03-30T15:30:36.461+00:002019-03-30T15:30:36.461+00:00A standing ovation for this essay. A standing ova...A standing ovation for this essay. A standing ovation. I return on very rare occasions to Christadelphian houses of worship, and listen to the awful music and the droning interminable sermons, and I think, "This does not constitute being alive."<br /><br />I belonged to different Christadelphian churches over several decades, and one in particular was run by an iron-fisted firebrand who on occasion yelled and blustered and cowed the other members into submission. To defy him was to defy God, or so we consciously or unconsciously believed. How and why we came to internalize such thinking is still a mystery to me, because he was simply an old dragon, using the church as his private club in which to bully and shove people around, because it made him feel important. This behavior would have been tempered if he had ever shown any real compassion toward us or any genuine interest in our welfare and lives. It never, ever happened, in my experience. Finally, a member began sending the firebrand anonymous letters, listing scriptures pointing out the moral errors in his behavior. She lived in terror that he would discover her identity, but, in retrospect, and despite responding to him anonymously, she nonetheless exhibited bigger balls than the men in the ecclesia, who cringed in fear whenever he raised his voice. He even left the church and worshipped elsewhere for a time, then returned for a period of time, but finally retired to another part of the country. The member who sent the letters struggled morally with an imagined need to disclose her identity to him; I told her that her anxieties were wasted worry, and I strongly dissuaded her from stepping forward. Mr. Man would have promptly detached her head from her body. He even had one of his stooges get up in the pulpit and denounce the person sending the letters as "having jeopardized their salvation and having a moral need to come forward to confess their sin." Jesus H. Christ. It was in that moment that I thought to myself, "This place is simply a dog and pony show, and there is no reason why these people should cripple themselves by participating in this religion." And shortly afterward, I began defecting out of "The Truth," because I had achieved the clarity of vision necessary to see that it was simply a feigned form of living, a deathtrap scented by coercion and peer pressure and fear. The old monster finally died of prostate cancer. In a church parking lot, I later quietly asked one of the more genteel and elderly ladies in the ecclesia what she thought of his death and his contribution to Christadelphianism. She held her handkerchief up to her face and whispered, "I am reluctant to say it, but I think it was entirely appropriate that it was prick cancer that killed him."Deborah L. Morgannoreply@blogger.com