StrangerThan
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Joined: 4/25/2008
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quote:
ORIGINAL: imperatrixx
This isn't a troll thread.
If I see someone post...Muslims hate women, Muslims are terrorists, Muslims are whatever, I react to the prejudice.
But the more I read about fundamentalist Christians doing abhorrent things, I find myself thinking...typical fundie freak. Fundamentalist Christians beat their kids. Not surprised. Fundamentalist Christians want to teach creationism in public school? Of course, those backwards motherfuckers do.
I'm really starting to become prejudiced. Not against all Christians, but against the really devout ones. I know that most people are Christian in name and I don't hold that against them, but the super evangelical fundamentalist ones...is what I'm feeling prejudice? I don't like having an automatic disdainful reaction to a group of people, no matter who they are.
So the question is - how do you stop prejudice? I always see people talk about stopping prejudice in society, or in other people, but how do you stop it when you feel it growing inside yourself?
Because I will be honest - I hate these people. I really do. And that kind of scares me about myself.
I grew up in a fundamentalist household. When I see things like the post where a seven year old was spanked to death because God wanted them to, what I see has less to do with religion, and more to do with simple mental instability. If you want to know where I reside on the religion meter, it is a point that has and will be a moving target. I left home when I was 16, and left religious things behind me. Probably the most communication that went between my mother and myself over the next year was trying to get her to sign the paperwork for me to join the military. She eventually did. My dog tags read NONE next to the religion stamp.
That's about where I stayed for the next fifteen years. The time since has been a graduated move back towards some of it, but I'll be the first to tell you, I will never again be at the place I was before I left home. A couple of things figure into that, the first being the understanding that religion is a personal matter, at least for me. While the Bible talks a lot about society and how it should conduct itself, the overall lesson is that when you;re called to answer, you're not answering for other people. You're answering for your own actions.
More than that though, what pulled me back was seeing my two daughters actually love going to church. I didn't take them. My ex did. So I went with them a time or two to see why. In there came another realization in that, one's view of religious things can depend a great deal on who is doing the teaching. And the fact is, there's value in what they're teaching. A lot of folks like to talk about founding fathers and Christianity. I suppose I've read that Jefferson was a deist a thousand times in response to someone saying the US was founded on Christian principles.
Jefferson's life to was one where religion held the status too of being a moving target. What he wrote about the teachings of Jesus was that they contained the "outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man". This was after he took all the mystical stuff away and concentrated on what was actually taught.
Having been there, run away, sort of drifted a distance back, what I can tell you is that fundies don't normally beat their kids to death. I had enough whippings as a kid, but never was I in fear of my life, and generally I deserved some punishment. A good bit of the political actions from the fundie side come from two points. One they had a power over society that's been eroded over the years. They're no different than any other group when it comes to power. I don't care who it is nor what their cause is, power becomes the absolute goal. The second is they see a good many actions taken by the left as a direct attack upon them, and rightly so. A lot of left minded folks hate the church. They can argue it all day long but the obsessive need to sever Christianity's influence from society describes that fact better than any words ever will. That battle, like just about everything we do as a society has reached the land of absurdity so often that what is clear from it, is there no middle ground.
I'll admit, I'm prejudiced against fundies to a degree. I'll also admit that I can understand where they're coming from, and where the other side is coming from. I can see answers that could reduce the tension between them for the most part, but also realize for those totally hanging on the ends, whether it be fundamentalism or hatred of, there is no set of answers that will ever satisfy either side. There are a lot of good people who believe strongly. Like many issues, however when it comes to anything religious- or political for that matter, - it's who is pushing the buttons that drives the mob mentality.
Personally, I don't have a problem living next to one, cause I do. I don't have a problem either living next to atheists, done that too. I've brought people into my house before, for sometimes an extended period, because they had no where else to go, and that included fundies, gay couples, pagans.. mainly because if you take the time, you'll find both good and bad in any belief, and in any lifestyle. The question boils down to where you will engage yourself, and whether or not you will allow either side to push you away from your personal center.
_____________________________
--'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform' - Mark Twain
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RE: Confronting Prejudice. - 
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