TonioTimeDaily

Autism is my super blessing! I'm a high-school valedictorian, college graduate, world traveler, disability advocate. I'm a Unitarian Universalist. I'm a Progressive Liberal. I'm about equal rights, human rights, civil & political rights, & economic, social, &cultural rights. I do servant leadership, boundless optimism, & Oneness/Wholeness. I'm good naked & unashamed! I love positive personhood, love your neighbor as yourself, and do no harm! I'm also appropriately inappropriate! My self-ratings: NC-17, XXX, X, X18+ & TV-MA means empathy! I publish shows at 11am! Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support

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episode 93: I am a recovering fundamentalist!


"1. Sin Watching

Sort of like bird watching, except instead of looking for birds, you’re looking for sin. Sin watching is keeping a close eye on someone else’s behavior with the intent of pouncing on them if you perceive they have made a mistake. It is practiced when a person establishes themselves as a kind of moral gatekeeper who believes it is their job to police everyone else’s behavior.

For example, a woman at my former church would befriend all of the younger people in the church on social media and then keep an eye on their newsfeeds to make sure that they were behaving themselves.

On one occasion, she saw a photo of a group of them enjoying a few drinks at a local club and dutifully reported this to the church leadership. The church disciplined the young people. Most of them ended up leaving. The woman patted herself on the back for faithfully admonishing her brothers and sisters in Christ towards greater godliness.

2. Futurism

Futurism is keeping people living in fear of a certain future which ultimately prevents them from living life now. For example, a person who believes that the second coming of Christ is imminent may delay going to college or getting married because, hey… what’s the point if the world is going to end?

Futurism also absolves Christians of social and environmental responsibility by allowing them to claim that social and environmental decline are merely signs of the ends times. We shouldn’t have to fight it. It was all prophesied about in Scripture.

Above all, futurism uses the fear of future punishment (eternal damnation or hell) as a tool to manipulate and control behavior in the church. If you are repeatedly told that the threat of hell hangs over you unless you listen to and apply the preacher’s words, it actually gives the preacher power over you. You must keep coming back to them for assurance.

3. Service Abuse

Service abuse is taking advantage of the good nature of people by pressuring them into volunteering their time to serve the church without the expectation of reward or compensation using the argument that service to the church is the same as service to God.

For church staff members, it can come in the form of being expected to work way above and beyond the hours for which they are paid or being paid at an unreasonably low rate because they are ‘serving the Lord.’

For laypeople, it can manifest as being guilted into serving in various church ministries or activities by church staff who only have a relationship with you to ensure that you keep on serving and only try to reach out to you to find out how you are going if you happen to stop serving.

4. Forced forgiveness

Forced forgiveness takes the words of Jesus in Matthew 16:15, which says: “If you don’t forgive others, then your Father in heaven will not forgive you,” and uses them as a weapon for forcing you to forgive people who aren’t necessarily sorry, repentant, willing to take responsibility for their actions, or willing to change.

During the middle of a sermon that I was preaching one Sunday, I somehow offended an older man in the congregation. He jumped to his feet and, from his pew, unleashed an almighty tirade of abuse, shouting at me about how wrong I was. It was, for me, a total public humiliation.

After the service, the church elders got this man and me together in a room for mediation. In this meeting, I was forced to offer my forgiveness to this man who had publicly torn me to pieces, even though he didn’t seem particularly perturbed by his actions.

At its most wicked, forced forgiveness has been used to keep women locked in domestic abuse situations, all in the name of forgiveness."

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 October 26, 2021  43m