It uses SHAME to control people. Institutionalized shame. Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 3:14:



That allows any bishop to make up his own rules and then shame anyone who disagrees with them. There are other passages that justify him doing this. Matt. 18:18:



There are passages that tell him how to shame disobedient members. 1 Cor. 5:4-5:



So the bishop makes a huge display in front of the congregation with tears and sighs and all the pious stuff and says this bit. But what does it mean in real life? Again, Paul to the rescue, Verse 11:



Let me add that the bishop does not look very carefully whether the person is a brother or a sister. Nor does he need much evidence whether the offense is one of the specific items listed in that specific verse. All he needs to know is that he has a divinely sanctioned right not to eat with a person who defies his rules. And possibly not talk to, or do business with, such a person. That this puts the person and family in material need is beside the point. It will only speed up the process and force them back into the church so much the sooner. The disgrace will mark the family forever. That, too, is scriptural, i.e. Deut. 23:2:



Okay, so what if "tenth generation" is not quite the same as "forever"? It's about two hundred years and that is forever so far as it concerns any single human life span. That, let me assure you, includes any bishop no matter how righteous and blessed of god he might happen to be.

But HE, self-righteous tyrant that he is, will use shame to control his people and his people will use shame right down the hierarchy and chain of command from the greatest to the least to control every last little member. This is abusive religion. It is mind-control. It is EVIL writ large.

I predict you'll be calling me names before I can count to three. I have not called you names. The only person I've called names in this post is the bishop and you're not my bishop.

I have no intention of calling you names, RSM. Why on earth should I? I just wanted to ask about this 'bishop' you're talking about.
I wasn't aware that the Mennonite Church had bishops - I thought it was just an RC thing. Is he the leader of all the ministers/pastors, or is it the
title you give to your minister/pastor?


Marti (entering here at my own risk )

Marti, I apologize for saying that. It was wrong and inappropriate of me. I deleted that part of my post but apparently not before you had seen it. I was not thinking so much of you as of some of the trolls we get on exChristian. Even so, it was wrong of me and I am sorry I posted it.



The Old Order Mennonite communities each have a hierarchy of bishop, preachers, and deacons, in that order. There is no central government for the Old Order Mennonite communities like there is for the RC Church. It is by verbal agreement re who fellowships with whom. However, these verbal agreements are binding across time and geography. With the rule of excommunication and shunning in place it is impossible to break or cross these boundaries. Each bishop represents his own church and makes final decisions for his own church. He also does the marrying, baptizing, and disciplining. There is a plan in place in the case he is ill or for some reason unable to perform his duties.

Religion's foundation is superstition and bad logic. So scared are religious people that they will attack mere students for making reasoned arguments for atheism and for showing up the illogic of unsupported authoritarianism. Not even the liberal open-minded and well-educated Christians are exempt from this. Two people who have acted as mentors and support people and who have claimed to understand me and care for me have attacked me when I was most vulnerable. One lies about me and says I am socially isolated because she doesn't like my atheist and humanist friends. I'm an introvert, for crying out loud, I don't want to socialize. No matter. She thinks I should. Who does she think she is.

And that Christian prof--yeah, yeah, he's got full rights to attack me when I'm already shaking in my shoes for the oral exam. He's got this right because I dared suggest--and argue that--unsupported authority cannot stand. Who does he think he is. He taught me how to make solid arguments and how to support every shred of argument I make with solid research and logic. Now he attacks me and rejects every shred of logic I present to defend my answer. Then he makes an argument that faith can stand on its own.

Faith! What is faith?!?! This was MY paper. He had said I should write it my way and about my personal experience. HE had written the disclaimer and promised to stand by me if anyone did not respect those conditions. Yet HE attacks me for doing as HE told me.

Yeah right grace is free. Cheap grace--that is what the Mennonites call this Lutheran concept of grace. And today I came across yet another translation of the Greek word that is translated into grace. Edmund D. Cohen, atheist I think, says the word that is translated loosely into grace should not be translated that way at all. I forget what he said it should say but it was NOT grace. More in the line of predestination and/or favouritism. I thought, "There you go you filthy Lutherans with all your hyped up religion."

Edited to clarify, and to correct spelling.

Honesty is another thing that is wrong with religion. Religion is dishonest to the core. That's why Christians (I have too little experience with other religionists to comment on their behaviour) get so defensive for no reason and why they think we're being disrespectful simply by disagreeing with them. This is why they get their backs up simply when we critique their arguments. We're showing them up and they can't handle that. They want to brainwash us and they get mad when their brainwashing is exposed for what it is. They want to hoodwink us. They get frantic when their hoodwinking is exposed for what it is. I'm not speaking about any specific person here; just Christians in general when they're up against a wall when I'm trying to have a discussion about something. Can't get beyond the basics. They just start going in circles, but they won't take any responsibility--OH HORRORS NO!

They have god on their side so it HAS to be the atheist who is wrong. And of course the atheist's feelings never have counted and never will count. After all, the Bible says the atheist's heart has been cauterized and hardened beyond feeling. My personal opinion is that the Christian is projecting his/her own personal hard cauterized heart onto the atheist. Again, honesty has nothing to do with it. Honesty with their own feelings is such an alien concept that they would deny not being in touch with their honest feelings. But the ugly and dark unconscious acting out of their real feelings is so obvious that one just knows. Like my prof what attacked me. If his faith were as strong and honest as he professes it to be he would have had no need to attack me. He claimed to be trying to teach me something.

Yeah right! Another twist in a tangled web he was weaving.

Religion turns people into bigoted, hypocritical, self-righteous monsters.

1. Religionists act as though they are the only people on earth who really know The Truth. (I've seen both Christians and Muslims act this way.)
2. Religionists act as though rules of social etiquette don't apply to them because they are god's/the universe's darlings, after all, and can do as they like. (I've seen a number of religious and ethnic groups act this way, some of which are mutually exclusive; mutually exclusive means you can't belong to both at the same time.)
3. When Christians are called on for their bad behaviour--that they committed in the name of religion--they pout that they are being persecuted for their religion. Maybe others do it too but I haven't seen it yet.

And some of this "justification" comes from the teachings of Jesus. It was Jesus who said "If you are persecuted in one place, shake off the dust of your feet and go to another." It was Jesus who said to "Spread the gospel to the uttermost corners of the earth." It was Jesus who said to forsake family--that "Whosoever loveth wife or children or father or mother or brother or sister more than me is not worthy of me." (I did not look up any of these verses just now so I may not have the wording exactly right but I think readers know what I mean. Also, I don't know exactly where to find each verse, except that they are somewhere in the Gospels.)

So what is wrong with religion? It teaches people to hate and kill each other. It divides people against each other. It teaches people that they are better than others based on which imaginary friend they like best--or which version of that friend. It instigates people to drop bombs on each other to prove whose god is best. It seems neither Allah nor Biblegod can stop the bombing. One reason could be because neither exists.

At other times, in other parts of the world, the thing that caused war and cost human life had more to do with such abstract stuff as how to get off the Wheel of Death and Rebirth. Sorry if I've got the terminology wrong here. It was Buddhists fighting each other in Asia long ago. It may have been one or two thousand years ago. But fighting over religion, all the same.

When I learned that I felt really seriously betrayed. Buddhism is supposed to be such a peaceful religion. And here they were fighting just as much as the Mennonites. Incidentally, the Mennonites are a peaceful people, too, by official theological position. Both Buddhists and Mennonites are supposedly peaceful. Both hate enough to kill. And they find ways to do it--inside the sanctions of the law of the land and their theology.

All of this applies equally to Islam and Christianity as a whole.

Here you can see one man "Giving Christianity the Respect it Deserves." At one time he was a missionary and organized church planting in large numbers. But when God could not stop the terrorists on September 11, 2001, he understood that the reason was that there was no god to respond. This was not his only problem with Christianity. The lying and bullying he encountered by the "brethren", the lies he was bullied to preach against his conscience--all of this played into his deconversion. I know these things from posts he wrote on exChristian; he does not say it on this blog.

In his blog, entitled Decent Exposure, he asks:



He answers his question:



Anyone reading this can tell that this man can preach. The church loses talent because it misuses and abuses people. This is not what Jesus preached. Jesus taught respect for the individual. The church teaches humiliation and subjugation of the masses; it suppresses people who preach otherwise. Consequently, it deserves to have its own respect humiliated and subjugated to something better.

Originally posted here.

All the contradictions and seeming errors of the Bible can be beautifully harmonized, explained, and believed as God's Holy Truth. But problems still remain. If this were not the case, I would not have deconverted. No amount of harmonizing and allegorizing can do away with:

1. the infanticide when Baby Jesus was born, and when the Israelites fled Egypt millenia earlier
2. the slaughter of all that lived when Joshua took Canaan
3. the trading of women as war prizes in the time of Saul and David
4. the general immorality and horror throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation
5. the total lack of logic required for profession of faith in a cosmic sacrifice for "sin and total depravity" that does not exist (that is why I was obligated to deconvert: I could not lie any longer)
6. the general lack of logic throughout the Bible, its compilation, and the religion as a whole; not even the platitude that "faith is not logical" meets the need

That boils down to two major offenses: lack of morality and lack of logic.

In conclusion, religion is both evil and stupid. Can any curse be worse than that?

TITLE: Be Ye Therefore Perfect: Perfection as a Moral Standard
AUTHOR: Daniel June

The article begins with a look at Jesus' saying in the Sermon on the Mount, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." It goes on to show the structure of the sermon, and concludes that by being perfect Jesus means to follow the injunctions in his sermon perfectly. In a nutshell:



As June points out, nobody can live like that. Perfection of that kind is beyond human reach. And this puts Christians in a perpetual laissez faire attitude regarding morality. "Nobody is perfect," is the message put forth by the entire Western society, June maintains, and evil is normal.

This is why I'm posting this review in "What Is Wrong With Religion." Anybody who says evil is normal is simply WRONG! Religion bashes people down to the lowest denominator so it can lift them up. It says humans are inherently evil, depraved, ravished with original sin, what-have-you, so that it was worth Jesus' dying on the cross so that they can be saved. Paul writes something about the meaninglessness of Jesus' death if we don't believe the right things--as though Jesus' death needed more meaning than that of many thousands of others crucified under Roman authorities.

Back to June's article. Laissez faire is my term but I feel it fits the lassitude so well that he describes. See this quote:



Finally I understand. So many sermons and admonitions did I have to listen to on repentance. I began to suspect that something was seriously wrong. Why did the same people have to re-repent all the time? If they were sinning this much--if they lacked morality so badly as they professed, there was something seriously wrong in their lives and they needed to make some big changes.

Yet they never did. Such a thought seemed not ever to enter their minds. The sole purpose of the sermons and admonitions seemed to be to remind people to depend on Jesus for their salvation and not to wander from the faith or become self-sufficient. But why use lies, half-truths, and blatant untruths to achieve a noble end? Might it be that the end is not so noble, perhaps?

In the words of June:



June ends his article with a look at the impact of perfection on atheists and humanists. Does the goal of perfection damn us, he asks. He suggests we simply try to do our best because "our best" is something we can do consistently.

I agree. Religion, however, keeps people from doing their best lest they achieve perfection and no longer need Jesus. Or, on the other extreme, it forces people to obsess on their weaknesses and feel forever inferior for being unable to be good enough. And for the less intense and less conscientious people, who are well-balanced despite religion, they are Christian in name only--CINO.

I don't know the Christian who is interviewing Richard Dawkins on his problems with religion. He asks Dawkins many of the "Big Questions" about life and existence. He makes some reference to Dawkins's book The God Delusion. Dawkins answers very candidly. I think both Christians and atheists will enjoy this video.

Here is the link: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_Lrs_x3Ag

In the video Neil deGrass Tyson: Bible in Classroom, Tyson clarifies that since scientists do not knock on church and Sunday School doors telling Christians how to preach, neither should preachers tell scientists how to teach science. But this is not the way Christian preachers et al treat the situation.

Post 37



If you sit down to do the math, Eric, I think you will see that a larger percentage of the atheist members of this forum responded to your question than did of the Christian members.

[The question of the thread to both Christians and atheists was: Are you a good or bad person? Answer with only a yes or no. One atheist responded and perhaps five or six Christians. There are roughly a dozen atheists on the forums and hundreds of Christians.]

As for your decision re whose answers were honest when you requested a subjective evaluation--it is impossible for you to know how others feel about themselves unless they tell you. Thus your decision is inappropriate. Your judgment re honesty is beside the point and meaningless.

If you do consider yourself to be qualified to judge which answers are honest or dishonest, you need to provide the evidence for your statement. And it had better be objectively observable evidence. How you will provide this for other people's personal feelings about themselves I have no idea.

Next time you post a poll you might also provide definitions for the main terms. "Good" and "bad" are defined so extremely broadly by such an extremely wide spectrum of humanity that you cannot expect everyone to use the same measuring stick when judging themselves. For example, for a major portion of earth's human population, Christians are bad people--or just another category of humanity. Yet you make them out as The Good People. Obviously, that is a purely subjective evaluation on your part.

Also, I have learned to realize that most people believe themselves to be good. This includes the self-denigrating Christians who profess to be totally depraved and that they are saved alone through the shed blood of Christ. You show it in this thread. You praise people for answering no. Everyone likes to be praised. Apparently, it is good to say "I am bad." At least, those are the people who get the biggest rewards in this thread, i.e. the most praise.

As for my answer. It is impossible to answer a general question with an absolute answer like you request.