Russ has mentioned on HMA that he’s closing up shop, and removing all of his content here (if anyone finding this blog after the fact wants the resultant gaps in any of our conversations filled in, email me).

To that end, with regards to the subject line of this post, I am putting all remaining material on ISA, as well as my earlier blog, the Purple Hymnal, under Creative Commons License. I am still getting a scattered email from the PH, and from remarks made by commenters here, I still feel strongly that we are a small piece of the puzzle of websites (including the better-known and more well-established ones like The Painful Truth and Ambassador Watch),that exist to help people in processing their exit from the church.

I also hope that ISA and the PH can provide a counterpoint; where PT and AW provide cold, hard facts, I would like to think that my posts will continue to provide catharsis, for some lonely child of the church, sitting up late at night after having read through most of the PT and AW. Or for some staunch ex-believer who finally realizes, “Maybe growing up in that church wasn’t as rosy as I thought it was.” Russ and I always seemed to be good counterpoints for one another in our posts (it wasn’t intentional on my part, but maybe that was why he invited me along for the ride, in the first place), and it’s my hope that someone stumbling on to these archives, or even the archives of the PH, will find the same catharsis that I did, in writing it all out.

As for our disparate reactions to the past, and moving on from it, I can honestly say I was never angry. OK, maybe I was self-righteously angry, after the changes first hit. I was also the one praying hard for “God” to correct “His Church”, so there’s that. I was considered a freak from another world when I was a child, but I can’t muster any anger about that because, in the first place, I would likely have been considered a freak regardless. Secondly, through it all, at least I remained faithful. Faithful to what is another can of worms entirely, but that’s not where I’m going with this post.

Yes, we were the closest thing to Christian supremacists that existed in advance of the Neo-Nazi movement. Yes, the church was a giant ponzi scheme designed to make one man, and one man only, rich beyond his wildest dreams (it worked). Yes, we were anti-Semitic in the extreme (The Jews got their own calendar wrong? Bitch, please.) and to frost that particularly toxic cake, we co-opted some of their rituals and all of their holy days, to boot.

And yet. And still. In a world where I was never accepted as “standard” or “like everyone else” or “normal”, I had the sense (even though it was misguided, as the deacons and their wives, to the very last one of them, all believed I was demon-possessed) that I was still OK.

Yeah yeah I was a precocious little shit, and more self-righteous than any child deserves to be. Also I was generally clueless about the world and religion as a whole. I expected Armageddon and Petra and a returned Kingdom of God before I was grown. (If I had stayed in one of the splinters, at the age I am now, I would seriously be starting to question.) But there were things my childhood taught me, things I never would have gained, if I did not have exactly the life I had, up to this very moment.

I learned perseverance in the face of opposition. I learned self-discipline (maybe at too early an age, but whatever). I learned self-worth, even if it was only a delusion. Not even a delusion shared by my fellow church-members, at that! I learned to take whatever life decided to throw at me, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent. I learned (the hard way) the cause-and-effect of black-and-white belief systems. I learned that I would not (and will not) be struck down by the hand of God if I talk about the church to the worldly or unconverted. (Still working on that with my family. Best let sleeping dogs lie sometimes.)

Am I angry about my past? No. Was I ever? Not really, since I didn’t get as bad a ride of it as others have. (More psychological, than physical, in my case.) I can’t even work up a righteous enough anger at the fact that it’s continuing, because the Armstrongist universe seems to be undergoing a geometrically exponential entropy, as time in this universe wears on. Soon, not soon enough or all too soon, the bubble will close completely. No one will remember the church or even the telecast or the PT, except those few survivors who were members.

Have I changed as a result of my two years on this and the other blogs and forums? I don’t know. I honestly don’t think I have. Changed, I mean. I haven’t done a 180 from where I stood two years ago. Also, in many respects, I think the church got it right, with regards to professing Christianity. Although I disagree with them that it’s evil or that makes the RCC the great whore of babylon. I also don’t believe in the church’s version of god either. I keep the Solstices under the guise of their Christianized celebrations (my family doesn’t ask and I don’t tell), but I was never, I am not now, and I never will be a Christian. I’m certainly OK with that, even though others are not.

Of all the emotions that I have worked through in the past couple years, the one that has been coming most to the forefront lately is wistfulness. I’m certainly not nostalgic, because there’s no way in hell I would go back to the church, supposing the Apocalypse really did happen, trumpets and vials and Wormwood and everything, live on TV. If I wake up after I’m dead, you can bet your bottom dollar I’m coming up in the Third Resurrection, and doing a swan dive into the Lake of Fire. Laughing all the way down. And you know what? I’m OK with that.

I am no longer focused on the future. I’m focused on my personal future, yes, and I’m coming to terms with that as I and my family members grow older and the world moves further around the wheel of time. I’m no longer waiting for a promised Kingdom that’s never going to come. I make my own life, such as it is, and I make what I can out of all that I have.

And yet. And still. When I lived a sheltered, blindered life, with my loudly-proclaimed black-and-white beliefs, things were so much simpler. I knew how my life was going to go, I knew how the world was going to end (and begin again with “new heavens and a new earth”). I knew the Bible (jigsaw) and I knew I was one of the chosen elect (sheep). I had an answer for every question of church doctrine, even though we were never questioned, because we never proselytized.

In a twisted, roundabout way, even though what I believed was hateful and vile and racist and misogynistic and bizarre, and even though I was always, always, always, treated like a second-class citizen in the church because I and my family were pariahs, when I believed, I was happy. That’s what I’m wistful for today. That sense of self-confidence, no matter how poisoned the source, that let me walk out into the world with my head held high. I certainly don’t have that anymore, for obvious reasons.

I’m lucky, and I’m thankful, that Joseph Tkach Sr., told me my church was false. It just added one more church to the list of religions that I already knew to be false. I would not be where I am today, if that sermon had never been given. I would never have been introduced to my extended family. I probably never would have had a career. I certainly would not have gotten any higher education, regardless of the spotty bit I have managed, on my own.

I would still be parking my butt in a rented union hall every Sabbath, singing the same old songs, and playing the same old waiting game. I would be happy, yes, but I would be clueless. Naive. Self-righteous. Puffed up. Oh so very certain that I was loved by God “anyway” and that I would be “healed” when Kingdom Come.

I don’t want happiness, at that high a price, but a part of me misses being happy. A part of me always will.