soapboxdiner

In which I rage in righteous indignation and moral superiority

Wanna here something crazy? So there I am at the grocery tonight when who do I run into but Steven's Rainbows teacher, who we haven't seen in almost five years. You see, I decided back then that the AoG (and nearly every other organized religion I've encountered) have almost no redeeming qualities and therefore stopped attending church.

Now, please allow me to preface this entry with a disclaimer: While I have absolutely no desire to attend a church, I respect that many other people DO desire organized religion in their lives. If your life is enriched by attending to your spirituality in the form of well honed doctrine, then I applaude you for following that. It is important to have a rock of belief to lean on in life. However, for myself, I find too many faults and inconsistencies in organized religion to ascribe to it. And I do not need or desire testimonies from the faithful. Thanks (for abstaining from testifying) to who ever among you who might be so inclined. End disclaimer.

Where was I? Oh yes. Haven't been to church in five years, saw the Sunday school teacher tonight. Well, she wasn't just the Sunday school teacher, she was also in the women's study group I attended as well as having a daughter Steven's age, all of who we also socialized with outside church functions.

She approached us in the meat department and said, "Oh my goodness! SBD! You have been on my mind so much lately. How have you been, are you still unemployed, are you still living in the trailer, have you had to go on the government cheese and public housing, where are you going to church now?"

At first I thought her interest was sweet in that "catching up on your life" sort of way, but then I realized, Jesus, this woman is pumping me for juicy gossip, hoping I've fallen on hard times so she can take it back to the ladies in church! Can you believe that?

And then she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and said, "Have you heard about CPJ?"

No, I haven't really talked with her since her miscarriage and had the hysterectomy back when she closed down her daycare (that Steven attended as an infant and toddler). How has she been?

"Oh goodness... She's... getting better now."

Better? Has she not been well? Has she still been having female problems?

"Oh well, she had the hysterectomy and then she got pregnant (...?...) but she had to be on bed rest through the whole pregnancy and they final had a little boy and oh my were they happy after having the three girls but then the baby dieda month later. SIDS you know. The whole church was just traumatized but CPJ took it real hard and went kind of crazy and she's in recovery now but for a while there she wouldn't come to church and when she did she was late and you could smell the liquor on her breath and I heard so-and-so say she heard from such-and-so the Preacher's Wife that she was into really hard drugs too and then her husband left her and she is living in a half-way house for her recovery but she relapsed at Christmas and can't see her kids because the half-way house is really strict and her husband left her. But she is doing better now because before she would just stand in back during service but now she is right up front with her hands up to God and she is crying all the way through! Isn't that fabulous?!? Oh, and the church has been so good to her; they even cover all the costs for her kids to attend the church school and everything because her husband (who lived off her business for the entire time Steven' attended her daycare) is raising the girls alone now."

Now call me a cynic, but Jesus H Christ on a fish stick! Is this what Christianity has become? A woman has three miscarriages in a row, then loses a child, and then her husband walks out on her with her three other children in tow, and the very best you - as her Life Skills Teacher - can do for her is blab her business all over town to who ever will listen? I do not believe that is very Christ like, lady. I don't even think that is very higher plane of consciousness. I think that is petty and unnecessary. Does the woman not have enough to work through in her life without having every damn body spreading her troubles around and looking at her with pity and at each other with snide knowing smirks of superiority?

This is EXACTLY the reason why I left the church without a single twinge of guilt. A woman came to church and shared that she was a recovering alcoholic who had been molested by her father all through her childhood who then shared she was in counselling and on medication. The church told her she was leaning on Satan to expel Satan and that she was on the wide road to hell.

Make me sick. How is this justified in any campassionate person's mind?

But please allow me to digress and step down off of my own high horse of moral superiority. I just think that is a horrible thing to do to another human being. And it just makes my heart hurt that these righteous people cannot see how damaging and wrong this kind of behavior is.

I am by no means a perfect person, but even I know it is wrong to kick a person who has already been stomped, repeatedly, into the ground.

8:26 pm - 02.23.04
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