Isn’t Trumpets coming up next? I don’t even follow the schedule anymore. If it hadn’t been for Wacky Weinland, I wouldn’t even have paid attention to when the “seven annual sabbaths” were this year. I certainly never did, every year prior to this one, all the way back to 1996.
Anyway, a few mentions of Atonement here and there have twigged me to make a post about it. Although I fear it will not be one of those horrifying posts, and I’m of two minds whether or not I should actually make it.
Until I got older, and had to endure caffeine withdrawal on DoA I don’t remember Atonement being that bad. Now, through the lens of Armstrongism, that’s probably because I was entrenched with the idea that I “deserved” whatever physical discomfort I was experiencing, so that’s probably why I don’t remember it as being so physically abusive as it actually was.
Fortunately, by the time my time in the church came around, onset of fasting was usually “proposed” (i.e., suggested with a strong hint of being enforced if not accepted) somewhere around the time the child reached the double digits or, depending on the health, the constitution and the “faith” of the child in question, one to two years before. Infants and nursing mothers were exempt by this time, fortunately.
I have mentioned elsewhere that I have seen more than one parent scarf a cheerio in my time! The hypocrisy irked me, back in the day. Now, I just wish I’d had the temerity to join them!
Woulda coulda shoulda.
The one thing that always struck me about the fast was how the church seemed to go out of its way to make our surroundings just as unpleasant as our physical deprivation. Every year, we always met in rundown, old, or otherwise dingy venues, which we would never have acceded to meet in, for the sabbaths, nor any of the other feasts. Just so they could hammer home the point of how worthless we all were, and how we should “grin and bear it” no matter how bad our physical surroundings were.
Still, nothing beat that first sip of lentil soup, as the clock strikes the second after sunset…….Why was it always lentil soup? Or does it just seem like it was always lentil soup?? I thinkanything would have tasted good, after 24 hours without food or water.
I can still remember trying to find a corner in whatever dilapidated place we were meeting, and just trying not to move, conserve my energy. What little energy I had left. All things considered, until I hit the caffeine withdrawal years, I never really had it as rough as some of my friends did. I know of more than a few kids who got really sick consistently year in and year out. And yet they were never exempted.
Hard to believe it has been thirteen years since I last deprived myself of nutrition. Funny though I can’t even remember what my last Day of Atonement was actually like. Maybe if I had known it was going to be the last time I was ever going to do that again, I would have paid more attention. Mostly they all blurred into each other: One Atonement was virtually identical to the next, from the hymns sung, to the sermons given, and the starving tithe slaves……
Once it was over, then there was the anticipation of FoT though. I think that’s what made it bearable, in some ways. “First the fast, then the Feast!” people would say. A chance to live within our actual income level for once, albeit only for eight days.
As with everything involved with Armstrongism, there was always a carrot at the end of the stick.
Another blog post, excerpted by PasadenaGuy on WCG-A. So powerful, it deserves a reprinting here. The original can be found here, halfway down the page.
Cast amongst the unbelievers, the long discussions with the priests had been excruciating. It had caused great concern in the family, particularly with his mother, that as he turned 13 he began to express doubts. Their family had been ridden with the deep fears and insecurities that came with fundamentalist Christianity; and had swallowed whole the propaganda from the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W Armstrong and Garner Ted Armstrong. They had been blessed by God, and told the truth, here at the end time. The bottles of stored water mounted in the cupboards. And all was lost, lost, when he couldn’t reconcile his own stirrings with the strict proscriptions being hailed down upon them.
Was he really going to go to hell? For what exactly? Why was God so unmerciful, so cruel. Why didn’t he care about those he was condemning to death. He wrote his first major poem, about this fearful God and the queues of the condemned. They snaked out through stone pillars and under arching stone walls, they spilled down mythical steps and they kept on coming, hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses. Oh if only they had been good, instead of being here, facing their destiny, their death, their judgement.
Was he really going to die, just like them, just because he had the precocity to doubt. Just because he demanded to be convinced. Just because God didn’t make sense to him any more, in his young, adolescent, longing brain. He didn’t want to go the church on Saturday’s any more. Saturday was yet another point of difference with the mainstream churches. They had chosen Sunday, the Roman day for worshipping the Sun God, and had betrayed the Lord. All around them was corruption. Mini-skirts were creating headlines. The Rolling Stones really were of the devil, even worse than the Beatles. Licentiousness surrounded them.
He would be beaten, yet again, until crying and shivering from the pain, he would be forced into a suit. He would sit in the back of the car, silent, tearful, the welts stinging on his legs and on his back, inside a gale of tears and regret, unable to see any way out of this living nightmare that was his life. He hated the suit he had been forced to wear. He hated his parents, who kept beating him so badly, all because he didn’t want to go to church. And he hated God, for being such a fascist, forcing him to believe when he just didn’t want to. Why so cruel? What did he care whether he believed or not?
But the belts snaked out until he was forced, literally forced, to recant and don the suit and get in their Holden, and sit in the back with those storms of tears inside him, and watch sadly, sullenly, as the brick green and red colours of the suburbs flowed by, as they exited their narrow winding street with its demonic trees and eternal rusting, its sandstone caves and the heat filled secrets of the bush. The only time he began to rally was when the suburbs became the city, and his interest sparked up. What would it be like to live here, or here, what was it like behind that door, or that one, were they happy?
And after the beatings and the long drive and an insanely boring service, where Ezekiel and Isaiah and a thousand other ancient horrors thundered from the pulpit of the Petersham Town Hall, after the thunderous virtues and the neatly dressed families sitting ram rod strait, their hair combed and their ears clean, after it all his concerned mother would drag him around for a special conference with the priest. He was excruciatingly embarrassed. What business of anyone’s were his own myriad doubts?
He sat there and had what he thought were relatively advanced theological discussions, where he set out to prove that God did not make sense, that he shouldn’t be imposing all this suffering on mankind, that if he really was a kind and compassionate and all knowing being he wouldn’t be inflicting all this pain. The priest quoted scripture, and together with the priest, in a back room of the town hall, the family knelt and prayed for his salvation, for him to be rescued from evil thoughts, from doubt, from the wider world.
He didn’t want to be rescued from evil thoughts. He wanted to escape the nightmare that was his life; the beatings, the brutality, the overwhelming despair, the gusts of emotion that crippled him. It was here in these painful days that he developed the philosophy that was to live with him throughout much of his adult life: he didn’t want to feel anything at all, because to feel anything was to be hurt.
Behold, one and all, young and old alike, I present to you Grandpa John and God’s Electric Pickle!!! Found on Cretins For Christ, this video is a much better advertisement for atheism than its actual intended target, Christianity.
OK maybe the subject line is a gross over-generalization. But all the ministurd’s kids I knew got away with bloody murder, compared to the rest of us who got the children-are-seen-and-not-heard-I-don’t-CARE-what-the-minister’s-kids-get-to-do-YOU-have-to-set-a-godly-example lecture.
Case in point, a somewhat hidden discussion forum I stumbled upon recently (no I’m not linking it), with a lot of adults who attended the same congregation I did. Most of them were children of the lay-ministry at the time. Yeah, they’re all shiny-happy-and-wasn’t-it-so-great-and-don’t-you-remember-so-and-so and blah di blah blech now.
I initially wondered if I had happened upon evidence of a parallel universe, because I certainly didn’t remember the events or the people they were recounting with any amount of fondness.
Then a commenter on Ambassador Watch brought up this link. Read the entry. The entire entry. Sound like the kid is upper-class nouveau riche? You got that right.
…the first day of the cruise we were in Newport, Rhode Island….the second day we were in Gloucseter, Massachusetts. of all the places to go on a cruise..it was so not a tourist town. why did we go there??!!!! what a waste of a city…..the third day we went to Bar Harbor, Maine. (aparently all the locals pronounce it “Ba ha ba” becuz of there accent, but i never heard anyone say it that way..except people making fun of how the locals say it lol)……day 4 we were in Halifax, Nova Scotia. that was fun. …….. and my dad, being the “beer conasuier” that he thinks he is, found “brewery tour” on the list of tourist attractions and wanted to go there. i must confess this did not excite me. over the years, whenever we travel, my dear father always manages to find a brew pub or some such silliness.in truth i think half the reason for us going to some of the places we do for supposed “church visits” is just an excuse to go find a pub… when i was like ten, i think, we went to pennsulvania and new york, and i swear we went at least 2 pubs a day…but i digress. so he wants to take us to this place called “Alexander Keith’s Brewery“…
Not to put too fine a point on it, but gag me with a spoon, man. The salient point to take away from this poorly-punctuated, hormone-laden teenage whinefest is the fact that the kid got away with excoriating her pops for his drinking problem on the Internet. Four years later, and this entry is still there, and presumably the “kid” did not even suffer a batted eyelash her way, for suggesting that dear ol’ dad might be a drunk.
Oh, just in case you were wondering: This is Junior’s hellspawn. Read it and weep. With laughter.
Saturday, August 16th, 2008 | Author: AggieAtheist
A recent go-round with one of Junior’s pet apologists who has either taken it upon himself, or been given the mandate, to infest Ambassador Watch with endless reams of “get over it” and “it wasn’t so bad” and “you’re all hopelessly godless pagans only now you’re all gonna fry SO THERE”, got me to thinking.
Particularly what twigged me was the idiot’s remark (to me) that I had better shape up or ship out, wasn’t it a terrible thing that I had lost my “faith in gawd”?? He didn’t say that exactly, but in so many words, that was the gist. He went on to say that it was similar to the plight of the young priest in the movie The Exorcist. To which I replied, “At least you’re allowed to watch The Exorcist. I never was. Still haven’t seen it, to this day.” That’s what twigged me, and triggered this post.
For all intents and purposes, I spent the first twenty years of my life in an alternate universe. It was almost, but not quite, the same as the world around me. The differences, as is often the case with alternate universes, were the most telling of all. There continue to be things that I do not share today, that are a part of the “common history” people of my generation possess. For instance, pop culture references to films like The Exorcist, and Ghostbusters, and Gremlins, just to name three off the top of my head.
The title of the blog post is taken from the Goo Goo Dolls song “Name”, and the lyric goes: We grew up way too fast/Now there’s nothing to believe/When reruns all become our history. That’s about where I am, and where I have been, for the past twelve years. I have come a long way, and I have filled in a significant number of gaps. But there are still a few undetonated landmines, as my exchange with the Exorcist-lovin’ new-WCG-apologist above demonstrated. I can’t fill all the gaps because, if I were to try, it would just drive me crazy. Try and live twenty years of pop culture over again? By the time I got done, I would be twenty years behind the times again!
It isn’t even about the movies or the popular references that I don’t “get”. There are gaps that I am just never going to fill. I’ve come a long way in regards to celebrating (secular) Christmas, but my annual Winter Solstice festivals are anything but “traditional”. They probably always will be “eclectic”, for want of a better word. So I have acclimated, and quite nicely, if I do say so myself. But, always, there are gaps.
Like watching an elderly relative of mine break down as she watched the little kids rip into gifts and presents and generally make mayhem. Why was she upset? Oh because I (meaning me) “never had that”. Nonplussed was the best reaction I could come up with. I mean, exactly how, are you supposed to answer that? I don’t perceive a lack, at least not around making merry over mountains of stuff (which still seems vaguely wrong, to me, but that’s more of an anti-materialistic bent of mine than anything else), or dare I say exemplifying “the way of get”.
It isn’t the lack of not having had “Santa Claus” and “Christmas morning” and presents up the yin-yang that I feel the most strongly, usually during whatever moment I have stopped long enough to reflect, during the busy Xmas season. (Which is why I often try not to stop and reflect at all.) It is the sheer and sometimes overpowering lack of a common past experience with others.
I cannot go back and get a do-over and be swamped with toys on Dec. 25 and surrounded by wrapping paper, with trees and tinsel and bows, every year of my childhood. Nor would I want that. But I will forever be an outside observer of millions of others who had exactly that past, and who share that past, with millions of others like themselves. I lived in a alternate universe, where that experience did not exist.
(It occurs to me as I relate the above anecdote/musing that I am a month late for “Christmas in July” blogging. So I can’t even get that right.)
The same holds true for (for instance) Halloween. Or scary movies. Well. Considering the feast films on the Last Great Day, we had our own scary movies, only those were reality (to us)! People my own age may be able to make in-jokes about Ghostbusters and Carrie, but hey hey! I can crack wise about the golden statue with the feet of iron mixed with clay and the seven-headed beast!!
Yeah humour helps. Sometimes.
Moral of these mental maunderings? I guess there will always be gaps, no matter how well-adjusted I like to think that I am. And I guess they will always catch me by surprise. (Even though they are much fewer and further between than they used to be.)
Do not mistake me: This is not a “poor-me-look-how-I-missed-out” wallow-fest. By no means. It is merely an observation of that wistful “wish I could understand what that’s all about” puzzlement that catches me off-guard sometimes. That prickling nostalgia for a life never lived that now never can be. A fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of one eye, at what might have been. Only if.
We grew up way too fast,
Now there’s nothing to believe!
When reruns all become our history.
A tired song keeps playing on a tired radio,
And I won’t tell no one your name.
It’s a discussion on Unitarianism, so I don’t know how accurate “Christians” would be, in this context. Regardless, I’m sorry, that is just disGUSting………
Saturday, August 09th, 2008 | Author: AggieAtheist
Sorry for the somewhat cumbersome title. It was either that or “How Sci-Fi Saved My Life!” and that just sounds too evangelical for my atheistic tastebuds.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last little while, and it is definitely something I see “through a scanner darkly” (Gaaahhhhh — I’ve been drowning myself in SF and the Discovery Channel lately, probably as an antidote to all the Christianized worldviews I have been mired in, for the past ten months.), and I’m not entirely certain why.
I really don’t remember what it was like to be a believer.
Now, I know why I was a believer, and I can even spout back the erroneous beliefs I “held fast” to, as fast as I can snap my fingers. But I just can’t get back there. I just can’t wrap my mind back around the headspace I was in, when I was a true believer. I can remember when and how (and exactly how traumatic it all was) I made the transition from belief, to unbelief, to agnosticism. I was seriously depressed by it at the time, it is not something easily forgotten.
Before you ask: I was depressed as in, won’t-get-out-of-bed-for-days-and-stops-eating depressed. Those were a bad couple of years. And I didn’t even have a fairy tale Sky Buddy to pull me through it. And yet I survived, and came out the other side. Not necessarily better, not at that time, because I still hadn’t processed any of what had happened to me, courtesy of the church. But back to my point.
I know my younger self believed wholeheartedly because I was thought-reformed (brainwashed), and because I was never, ever, at any point given any kind of solid comparative religion background or study.
(Any religions I did “study” were either filtered through the lens of the church, or they were newage crack-dreams of false profits worse than ILFPRW — anyone else besides me remember Jimmy Redfield? He made a cool three million bucks, then disappeared off the face of the planet. And oh yeah the world was supposed to end on Y2K.)
I can tell you exactly what pulled me out, though. I know what saved my soul, from really going off the deep end, after Tkach dropped the church on its head in December of 1994.
This is the part where I tell you how science fiction saved my sanity.
The smarmy, wishy-washy, shiny-happy-white-bread-future of Star Trek was a fan favourite, with the ministry. Therefore, if the ministry watched it, it was OK for the members to watch it. Even encouraged.
(I can remember being told from the pulpit that the Kingdom was gonna be just like Star Trek. I remember thinking to myself at the time, “Yeah, only Q will be in the Lake of Fire!” Little did I know at the time that “Q” (the Demiurge) was the deity that I was actually worshipping. But back to my point.)
Star Trek was OK, as a matter of fact, Star Trek actually pre-dated the church, in my family. Science fiction was a staple of my childhood literary diet, although when I was younger, it was relegated to, you guessed it, Star Trek novels. (The one time I was assigned The Hobbit for school, that raised a few eyebrows, presumably because Tolkien was an evil member of the church of the great whore of babylon — but they never banned me from reading the book outright.) That and Heinlein juveniles, which were being reprinted when I was coming of age in the ’80s. Anything SF on TV was also OK. Anything aired by PBS was absolutely never questioned, although everything else I watched was scrutinized with a fine-toothed comb, for “the appearance of evil”.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Star Trek became my gateway drug. By the time I started watching Doctor Who, things were getting a little iffy. I mean, I knew what I was watching was ever-so-slightly subversive at best, and out-and-out completely batshit evil “worldly” at the very worst. But at the same time, it seemed innocuous enough. That part of my brain that was ordinarily taken over by cognitive dissonance, somehow shut itself off, whenever it encountered science fiction in any form. Remember that, it’s important to what follows.
By the time I started looking for books by authors who had written the Star Trek novels I had read and enjoyed when I was younger, the slope was getting steeper, and just a little greasier.
Then cyberpunk and the home computing craze hit at the same time, and I threw myself into both with complete abandon. Remember that, it’s critical to what follows. All bets were off. I was reading stuff that would have gotten me locked up in the crazy ward at the local hospital, never mind disfellowshipped! And yet, and yet, no one had a fucking clue.
It is only fortunate that the sheer volume of written material in the family home was such that, it was impossible for family members (let alone fellow church members, who rarely saw the inside of our house anyway, since the converted parent was “a spiritual widow(er)”) to know what it was I was into, at any given moment.
Then the local PBS station started playing Doctor Who serials in full, and my transition was pretty much complete (although I wasn’t aware of it at the time; it’s only in hindsight that I can see this now). Red Dwarf followed, as did a subversive little British science fiction show called Blakes 7. Blakes 7 started airing on my local PBS affiliate right around the time of “the changes”. And it’s a good thing too.
With my church abandoning me completely, and my family trying to push everything I had ever believed to be absolutely, incontrovertibly, 100% true under the carpet, the only religion I had left that hadn’t abandoned me was my SF. Needless to say, I threw myself into it with abandon. Taped every episode of The X-Files (because it was still ungodly to my sensibilities, at that time, to watch it when it aired on Friday nights), I watched Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine and Outer Limits and Dark Skies and Strange Luck and VR.5 and Nowhere Man and The Sentinel and Millennium and TekWar and Forever Knight and Highlander and War of the Worlds and…….You get the picture.
But for all the slick American SF TV that was so popular in the ’90s, nothing beat the sheer heart and soul of the British SF that aired on PBS. Cheesy FX, recycled sets, nothing mattered it was absolutely compelling. This included (but was not limited to) a little-known show called Blakes 7. There was literally nothing about it on the Internet at the time, that’s how little-known it was. Something like two home-grown web sites, to the plethora of ten thousand X-Files sites that were out there at the time.
Friends and family knew I was an X-Phile, hell, I had an “I Want To Believe” poster plastered on my bedroom door!
(Irony Police you need not cite me, I am now more than well aware of the multiple infractions I violated at the time.)
What could the family say? The church was all about relaxing the rules; X-Files would have been the Mark of the Beast, if it had aired back in the ’80s, but in the oh-so-liberal WCG of the ’90s, the steady diet of ghosts, goblins, vampires, and UFO nuttery was A-OK. I ate, breathed, slept, and basically lived X-Files. I was a daily poster on alt.tv.x-files. My first Internet flamewar was on alt.tv.x-files. Ah, memories. But here’s what I never told anyone.
The X-Files was my cover story. I knew if they were OK with X-Files, if they thought that was “the worst” I was watching, then I was definitely flying under the radar, and so long as they didn’t have a clue what I was mainlining in the way of SF literature, I was golden. Doctor Who was OK because it was a kids’ show anyway, and the FX was just sooooooo bad, there’s no way it could be subversive, right? I was a Trekkie, I was an X-Phile, I was completely bananas for all things Enterprise-related or UFOvian. Or so the friends and family thought. They had no idea that was only my cover story.
Blakes 7 and Doctor Who and Red Dwarf and Omni Magazine and cyberpunk SF was my little secret. And knowing full-well what it was that I was actually watching and reading at the time, I kept it that way!
Anyway, right around the time that I was hitting the Internet Infidels website and figuring out that I fit into the category neatly labeled “agnostic”, Blakes 7 was airing on my local PBS affiliate. Think Star Trek, only turned on its head: This Federation was Evil with a capital E, and the villains were the heroes. This wasn’t no shiny-happy-future, and it dovetailed perfectly with the dystopian SF literature I was devouring at the same time.
I was at this point just trying to keep my head above the dark waters that threatened to pull me back under at any minute (we are talking about my having just experienced spontaneous remission of a severe and prolonged clinical depression that went untreated because shrinks were still viewed as the next thing to evil at that point), and I was also trying to “find myself” as an individual.
(A brainwashed individual with no pre-cult personality to speak of. It’s a fucking wonder I ever made it out alive.)
So yeah here I was looking for a role model, and the “eligible” individuals in my immediate circle of family and friends were not-so-shockingly-in-retrospect, non-existent. I wasn’t consciously looking for a role model, you see, but I was groping around in the dark. That was when I started really watching PBS.
The family has often wondered just where it was that I morphed from the sweet, charming, wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-housefly little kid, into the cynical, blunt, hardcore realist that I am today. It was somewhere around the mid-90s, we always knew that much.
In the crap shoot that is human adolescence, I definitely came up snake eyes, and nobody to this day, is entirely certain why or how I did. I wasn’t quite certain myself, although I always attributed it to my family’s swift quick-change from loyal church legalists, to Christmas carols at full volume from Halloween through New Year’s, without even batting an eye. Surely that was a contributing factor.
Remember what I said about throwing myself into cyberpunk and the home computing craze with abandon? I recently found this on YouTube, and all the memories came flooding back:
The character in black in the clip provided is a computer engineer onboard the Liberator, the “Enterprise” of Blakes 7. Anyone wants to blame my hardnosed, tell-it-like-it-is and I-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck-what-you-think-of-me-telling-the-truth personality on anything, blame it on that. Avon always was my favourite character, although I never quite knew why.
I have been reading on a lot of the ex-CoG boards lately, about family members lamenting their spouses, friends, and relatives, who are still trapped by the Demiurgic deity espoused by Armstrongism. Now, it’s all well and good for us to pipe up and say, “Hey, I was born and raised in the church, and I made it out OK!” The next question that logically follows on from that is, “HOW? How did you make it out?” Which is why I started pondering it. And thus my answer.
I can’t guarantee it’s a solution that will work for everyone, let alone anyone. But it definitely worked for me. So here is my advice, for whatever it’s worth:
Slip a Robert Heinlein kid’s book into the next CARE package you send them, or a Star Trek or Doctor Who DVD. For the kids, if not necessarily the parents. You never know, science fiction may be just the thing that switches off the cognitive dissonance part of their psyches, for a little while, at least. It worked for me.
And that, for all four of you who read this blog, is how Aggie got “saved”. Mythological baby Jebus fairy tales need not apply.
The hypocrisy irked me, back in the day. Now, I just wish I’d had the temerity to join them! 
Mostly they all blurred into each other: One Atonement was virtually identical to the next, from the hymns sung, to the sermons given, and the starving tithe slaves……
People my own age may be able to make in-jokes about Ghostbusters and Carrie, but hey hey! I can crack wise about the golden statue with the feet of iron mixed with clay and the seven-headed beast!!
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