this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Thank you for explaining. I didn't understand it that way. How it read to me was "children are idiots, and it's idiotic to have a study to know it."
I was reared Christian; after my parents divorced, both of them ended up evangelical. The one who reared me did incredible, horrific damage. The other was merely absent and that did it's own damage. I wasted decades being damaged, and I damaged my own life for decades. I rebelled and denounced everything to do with the book and the faith. But I had no understanding, only what was preferred politicized teaching to maintain preferred political policies. Eventually, I was not receiving what I needed to heal, so I determined it was sink or swim. So I got busy. And I had questions. Lots of them. About the faith, the damage, whys and wherefores. And I found them.
Today I understand my parents' trauma. They know it, without understanding. They seem to think they were the only ones traumatized, and their own children had blissful, fairytail upbringing. Multigenerational trauma and epigenetics are real. And after a long time, I forgave them. That doesn't mean they're necessarily proximal, you understand? But now I see the value of the book. The whole book, as far as we currently know. And the faith that birthed it, and the one that birthed that one, and cousins of those faiths, and siblings, and so forth. Even faiths that seen utterly unrelated are eventually related. So in that sense, of course maybe people consider me an apostate. But I don't live with those people. I live with me.
The page is jumping as I write this, so I have to post before I can proof it. I hope it's legible and makes some sort of sense. But first, apologies are in order, elsewhere.
Evangelical teaching really marketed itself to appeal to traumatized people who were afraid of repeating the mistakes of their parents (or of their past selves). It promised that if they just did what the parenting books and the pastors told them, that their kids would turn out right and go to heaven and all would be well. I've gone back and looked through some of those books, and they are truly, truly vile. And not just those that get the most publicity now - the others that seem much more palatable are no less dangerous.
I'm glad you've found your own healing. It's a hard road to walk.
Thank you. It sure is, and it is a lonesome path, in Hicksville, Deep South, USA. A church on every corner, and a liquor store, bootlegger, chemical substance and human trafficker in every third structure, that may or not attend your (or your parents') church, sit on town council, county commission, be a part of the PD or SO, your prosecutor, defender, governor, etc ad nauseum.
The stories are tribal, meant to explain happenings as best they could, bind commoners together, and later, as villages, cities, states, arose, to cement leaders into power. But leaders using the stories to sow and exacerbate division is eventually how empires eventually fall. Imo, that's the story of the Tower of Babel; not that people would become gods (behold I created you little gods, but you will die like men), but that they misused knowledge, and the power gained from it, to "lord it over" the commoners. The split language represents how , as seen itt, a person can say and mean one thing, and the audience understands it wildly differently. We progress and regress, and as brutal and unfair as it is to the masses and other life forms, resets happen, from evolutionary* pressures of opposing forces. The Big Bang. Dissipating noxious gasses to a breathable mixture, drinkable mixture. Extreme evolutionary pressure causing mutations that are a hindrance† now, useful adaptation later (the fittest isn't the strongest, most clever, but the able to adapt. Can we do it in a compassionate manner? Dawkins answered it in The God Delusion.)
In* the Tarot deck, the High Priestess* sits between the temple pillars, Boaz and Joachim, Wisdom and Compassion, Mercy and Severity, Masculine and Feminine, right brain, left brain. She represents both super-and subconscious wisdom, the counterpart to the heirophant, which at the most distilled level represents our core values, things we don't compromise, and she asks us to reevaluate what's written in stone (commandments). Either we are growing and changing, or we are dead, emotionally, mentally, physically. That's why a British spy said "Do what thy will (the truest will, heart's unchanging desire, not the ones that change) shall be the whole* of the law; love is law, love under will. We are not to regard the personal physical, emotional, social, or monetary loss or gain, because by not following our truest heart's desire, we have lost our ruach* - the spirit in the body (what does it profit a (hu)man to gain the world, and lose the soul?) There will be a time we are not physically able to chase our dreams. And that's why some end up tech bros. Their truest will is power, no matter how many or whom they sacrifice. But when the gasses inhabiting a world, cellular, corporal, planetary, universal, reach a state of perfect equilibrium, that world collapses (way oversimplified, but you get the point). The tensions and pressure are necessary for evolution. And that is the ultimate will of the collective life forces, isn't it? I have to post this to proof it. I hope it's legible and understandable, whether anyone agrees or not.
Blessing you, and everyone itt.