Category Archives: Fundie Stuff

There, that ought to get a bunch of people to not read it. Anyway.Continue Reading →

Yesterday, editing the podcast, I caught myself saying five-man dungeon. It’s a common phrase, used in World of Warcraft discussion. It grows from a common phrase for crewing things – man the cannons – and basically it means the same thing as five person dungeon.

I thought about this turn of phrase, as yet another little bit of everyday sexism that’s worn into my mind, and where the alternative isn’t just unfamiliar, it’s linguistically kinda worse. Without trying to sound like a whiner on this, five-person and five-man are two terms that have distinctly different flows; the consonant stop in the middle is a distinct thing and it shapes the term differently. This isn’t to say I want to keep using five-man – I corrected myself both times.

I also kept in that I made the mistake.

There’s a strangeness that comes from hearing yourself, played back, regularly. My podcasting compatriots don’t hear it, unedited, the same way I do. They don’t hear the raw audio, over and over again. I’m not responsible for anyone else’s manner of speaking, but I am responsible for my own. My language is not just embedded with the signs of the typical intersectional overlay of kyriarchic bullshit that we all deal with but I have an extra bonus layer coming from my fundamentalist upbringing. Even the way I swear, explicitly a rebellion against that kind of thing, reflects that upbringing. I learned to write and read under an American regime, then had Australian corrections amend it in some superficial ways dating back from before modern spelling. I learned to spell ‘waggon’ and ‘gaol,’ words of no practical application in the modern day but as strange curiosities.

I feel a need to be honest about these mistakes. I mess up. There are others I don’t catch. Editing audio – especially hours and hours of it – is really hard. There’s stuff that slips through. Sometimes, hugely embarassingly, sometimes not.

Lemme tell you about socialised speech.

You learn a lot of how you talk from the things around you. A lot of kids learn slang and shorthand from one another. Swears and other language, things that have meaning that they share with one another. I didn’t have many friends – I very rarely ‘socialised’ with other kids. Not just awkwardness, but also the divides and factionalism in our church, and the, you know, violence. Common public media wasn’t okay either – and any words that were ‘wrong’ were met with a pretty consistant punishment.

I remember reading Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and seeing Zaphod Beeblebrox use the word ‘photons’ as a swear. He used it like the word ‘heck’ or ‘dang.’ It was a good word, it had that nice ‘t’ in the middle and it wasn’t a word, as far as I could tell, that was rude at all. It had something to do with laser guns, I think? And so I used ‘photons’ when I was hurt, when I was frustrated, when I fell off things or when I touched my chest and felt the bruise spreading. “Ah, photons.”

Then one day, my dad grabbed me, by the side of the head, and yanked me out of the flow of traffic. He looked me, very seriously in the eyes, and told me to stop saying that.

“Is it a rude word?” I asked, terrified. Had I been doing A Wrong?

“You know what you really mean,” he growled, and that was all the explanation I got.

I was lost. I was confused. That… what did I reall mean? Was Photons a dirty word in another language? Was it in the Bible somewhere? This prompted a little research project that took me six months before I finally gave up. The guilt of the action wracked me.

Another source of my language flowed from the god-awful media I had access to. There were these strange 1970s nostalgia pieces my dad and mum kept, the videogames that slid in, but ultimately, what I read and saw was from that particular Christian media bubble. I read a lot of fundamentalist Christian literature, and the ‘cool’ edge of that (trust me, you’ve no idea). Narnia, But Written In 1990 America To A Word Count.

One of the hallmarks in that kind of story of the protagonists? The character you were meant to emulate?

He called people sir.

Oh, he called women ma’am, too, that was definitely part of it, but the sir thing stood out. When I left that media bubble and called teachers sir they looked at me confused. When I called strangers sir on the street, they gave me the same look. When I called a woman a few years older than me ma’am, I got a filthy look.

As a teenager, it was weird. As a young adult working service industries and low-skill jobs, it was old-fashioned. Now, in my life, a ‘sir’ at the wrong time can be an act of violence.

This is scored in deep on my mind. This is etched in my brain. It leaps out of my mouth barely passing my conscious mind, and not doing so sets me on edge because those terms are tied to respect in my life, they are tied to politeness and in refusing to do them, I am in some way, preparing a defensive or offensive posture. They are words meant to reassure that have stopped working, but my urge to be kind, my want to be nice to be people tries to re-apply these broken tools.

I’ve taken to using ‘y’all’ a lot. It has the nice side effect of also being a word that can be used to obliterate ‘you guys’ or ‘guys.’ That sort of substition is something my brain can handle. When the ma’am comes up I can replace it with y’all – “How are y’all” somehow sits right in place of “How are you, ma’am?” Of course, now, I’ve traded the chance of upsetting strangers and misgendering people for instead, a familiar conversation with people who want to know why I’m using it. It inevitably results in someone cleverly pointing out that they are not multiple people. My efforts to expunge harm have instead exposed me to pedantry, and boy hoy howdy do I love me some pedantry. The concern about it usually comes from people who only deal with me in text, and what’s weird there is it’s not like any of them have any idea how I do talk, or how I should talk.

That in particular is weird, because I don’t talk like an Australian.

I mean I barely ever say the word ‘c*nt.’

I think about this sort of problem a lot. And I think any time someone retweets or shares a tumblr post that ends with “THIS ISN’T HARD PEOPLE.”

It’s hard for me.

Every time I write about fundamentalism I feel like I need to make this huge-ass preface and denoument to explain that I’m not applying this to everything and I’m sure you know some totally nice fundamentalists and all that. It’s tricky. I don’t want to be an asshole about it, but I do want to make it clear that thing is bad and I am allowed to think thing is bad. Just this tug between ideas.

Still!

In fundie school-churches, we’re trained to be disruptive assholes. Not to ourselves – oh god help you if you were disruptive in my school. No, we were taught to be disruptive and harmful to other people’s lives, with the most self-righteous of motivations.

The thing with the fundie bubble is that they know they can’t hold you forever. They can’t keep you from interacting with outside. If they want to control you when you’re not under the thumb, then, they need you to work to keep yourself enslaved – and guilt will do a lot for that. Know what else does a lot for that? Being an asshole.

There’s this wave of behaviours I have and I’ve recognised in myself and in other fundies. We argue. We argue hard and we argue with this visceral sincerity that means we’ll often be an asshole even when we lose. We’ll break out arguments at picnics and family camps. We’ll interrupt teachers. And we share stories about the people who do such things, these sorts of ridiculous modern myths about being persecuted for being Christians that really, when you listen to the story, are actually stories about bein ignored for being assholes. This was the meme of my childhood – the idea that I would raise my hand in class, and ask a secularist teacher at some sad point in my future ‘were you there?‘ and watch as they crumpled. The world was full of ridiculous paper tigers, who would fall when you threw out these arguments, and you would sweep in the glory of the lord. And if they didn’t fall, you were being persecuted, and could embrace that, too!

So many stories, so so many stories. So many stories that taught us to challenge the other authorities, to act like petty assholes, and then act offended when people treated us like assholes.

I actively worked to make the science education of my fellow students worse. I argued with teachers who knew better than me but didn’t have it in them to tell me to just shut up so they could get on with the class.

I imagine if I hadn’t had the crises of faith I had, this sort of self-fulfilling perpetuating behaviour would have probably driven me back to the church, because the church had crafted me to outsider myself in all other situations. You become crafted socially broken, then told your brokenness will only be accepted in the circle of prayer.

I’m cis –

Yeah sorry. About a lot of things. But anyway.

– and I never had to deal with a lot of the experiences I’m hearing about today. Some of them still echo in me, resonating with my childhood, with things I heard, with ideas I learned. One little story that sticks in my head, from a song.

This is a pretty weird song in a pretty weird album. I legit don’t know what it’s ‘about’ or if it’s about anything. They Might Be Giants do that sort of thing all the time and the songs on that same album also include the strangely horror-story driven Spiralling Shape and the mind controlling music of The Bells Are Ringing. It could be this song is about trans issues and I have no idea.

But I heard this song as a kid, in the secret clandestine way we heard music in our home lives during that stage of my life, and I liked it as part of the album it was on, which I had taped from a friend of a friend’s CD in an overnight borrow that I had to return the day afterwards, no option.

You kids with your ipods, I swear.

Anyway, I heard this song a few times, in my bedroom. And thought nothing much of it. It was just weird – I mean I could sing ‘like a girl’ at the time, which in my mind meant that I was capable of singing soprano. I actually flatter my memory to think I had a really good soprano voice before my voice broke to its more boringness now – I know that to properly put my voice behind a song in choir and at church, I had to really go for it. I got accused of pride for this a few times, which I dunno. Probably true, in the world of sins. The point being that that was all it was to me: A song wondering about having a ‘girl’ voice.

My sister, out of nowhere, at a family dinner, brought it up as if it was pornography.

The idea that this song was somehow obscene and disgusting was brought up and talked about. My parents didn’t know what the song was – so they relied on my sister telling them about it. I remember being confused and stunned by it – and finally being given the advice I should never sing that song.

Now I’m a cis boy.

But how fucking patrolled is that gender boundary? How utterly weird is it that a half-memory of a song I didn’t understand that just used the phrase ‘like a girl’ was something my family thought was important enough that my sister ratted me out about it? When I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong?

Also probably the first place I heard the word ‘objectified.’

I can’t imagine how awful the life I’d led would have been for someone who, in addition to the problems I had with violence and identity and want and self-acceptance, was struggling with being told their gender was wrong, and they were stuck with it. I can’t imagine being that cruel to someone who was doing nothing wrong. I can’t imagine it because we make that action, the policing of gender, a tiny invisible action we all do every day, so none of us notice when we do it.

Today was my birthday. I spent it avoiding homework, failing to eat things because there wasn’t that much in the house, and leaving a can of shaving cream on the counter, which was pretty stupid because I know I’m going to get yelled at for it later even if I had a reason for it. It’s just how it goes, the little things you get wrong in a day pile up in your mind afterwards.

I also have been listening to and watching a lot of videos today that are filed as euducational, in part because I’ve also been writing in private about my childhood and my education and my experiences with religion, and those things do not work well together. I wound up watching the ever-gentle voiced Daniell Dennett, who I am sure someone I care about will happily tell me is a monster, and some work by the man David Fitzgerald and Matt Dillahuntie, people I wasn’t familiar with. They’re both white and male and as far as I know, cis, and they’re both atheists.

Anyway, while I was watching Matt Dillahuntie talk about talking with theists, he did deliver this very nice, simple line, a line which has some sinew to it but makes a few other things in my life more horrible, when I consider them.

When you’re talking to a theist, remember that they’re not evil, and they’re not stupid.

A line meant to remember the humanity of the people you’re talking to (which is nice, and good), and a practical piece of advice for engaging others in these large conversations about greater ideas, just leaves me sitting here, dreadfully, dreadfully sad.

I’m pretty sure it’s still a good general rule. I know many people who are theists and they are not evil and they are not stupid, and that’s fine and I don’t mean to think those people are. I am, as it were, not talking about you.

Many of the people I am talking about are dead.

Here in Australia, creationism is in trouble. Outside of Queensland (the Fuckhead State), it’s banned for mention in science, and since 2010, the Australian Academy of Sciences has stated categorically that any science education that includes non-science information, explicitly citing Intelligent Design and Creationism, does not count as any form of education and will not be considered as acceptable for any nationally recognised credit. Simply put, in Australia, if you teach creationism as a science, you’re messing up. In Queensland, you can do it,  but if the kid can’t pass tests on Evolution – including questions about ‘how does it work,’ then bam. Get lost.

There are other problems, the efforts of the religious to earn Special Religious Institution status, and they suck, but the point is, in Australia, a minority of a minority with very little political power believe in creationism. If you were a creationism lobbyist, if you were trying to, on an ideological level, spread creationism for its own sake, you would probably want to be here, working as hard as you can to push back against this terrible wave of disbelief.

I mean, if that was your thing.

So why the fuck is Ken Ham in Kentucky?

Kentucky already is a creationist space. It’s a space where people can happily espouse the idea that Creationism is true and Evolution is a lie from hell. It has political representatives who espouse creationism. It may even have a creationist presidential candidate – or two! – soon. Its state government gave millions to a creationism museum and money to build an ark!

Kentucky is pretty damn safe space. Why are the crusaders milling there?

It’s almost like there’s some incentive system that pulls them there. Almost like they’re not actually all about the promotion and distribution of their ideology, and like they’re moving to the greater centres of reward.

Hm, hm, hm.

I didn’t listen to sermons very often. My dad preached a lot, but what knowledge I gleaned from the sermons tended to be while I was trying to distract myself, gleaning tiny notes I could add to conversations later on to avoid an ass kicking. But I did pay attention to the one my dad gave with his hand on the pulpit, his voice loud and terrifying, when he began THE ROCK IS GOING TO FALL ON US.

He quoted the whole song.

Not as a song, not as this tale of back and forth. He recited it as poetry, without pitch and timbre, and with the building, frothing cadence of a preacher. From the timid lurking fear of the beginning to the crashing, potent terror of the last segment, this song was turned to the Christ metaphor. He closed a sermon that was laden with eschatalogical terror as it was with exhortation to do better in our own lives, with the line the rock slips a little bit.

The story of the original song, when expressed by Harry Chapin didn’t seem to have that same religious potency. It was about people. It was about listening to the outsider in our midst. It was about a person who respected what could go wrong so well they worked and struggled and strived and used what they had, even to their last, to try and save people from worse fates.

It’s a scary fucking song.

But the thing about the song that I’m reminded of today is of a friend, dear and kind, who is up on the hillside, building barricades. They’re fighting against something that doesn’t have to happen again. They’re striving and struggling and they are doing their work in part with poetry and with music, things that scored this message into my mind in the first place.

You do not believe it right now, so I have written it down and you can come back and check:

You are beautiful.

You are wonderful.

You deserve to be heard, respected, and loved.

And anything that tells you otherwise wants to lie to you to control you.

Please do remember this.

Once, I used to think holding the door for a lady was important.

A little while after that, I was taught ‘feminists’ hated it, so it was even more important to do it.

A while after that, I learned that it was a bit patronising unless you did it to everyone.

A while after that, I spoke with an enby who was intimidated when it happened – because it meant someone was standing behind em.

I think about this a lot. It’s one of those strange selfconsciousnesses that seize me. Am I making peoples’ days worse by holding the door for them? Am I making them uncomfortable by not? Either way… I do my best to take care. Look to people’s reactions – and for fuck’s sake, don’t get huffy and uppity if people don’t appreciate your gesture. You are a few seconds in a strangers’ day, don’t get wound up about it.

Unpleasant talk ahead. In lieu of that, and to keep it from being too easy to read, here is a video of a wombat playing with a zookeeper. If you’re not in the mood for unpleasant talk about violence, consider going elsewhere and not reading this post.

The rest is after the fold.

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When I was a kid, there was this media form I listened to a lot that I never really got until I was an adult. They were tapes, tapes of stories, usually interspersed with songs. There were a few that were classics of older forms, particularly a few different reinterpretations of the story of Pilgrim’s Progress, or old children’s stories interspersed with hymns. The most common and odious of them in hindsight were the Patch the Pirate series.

I’ll level with you, Patch The Pirate is creepy-ass Christian kid-targeted propoganda. It flat out promises to be, with its notions of ‘instilling good values’ and ‘wholesome family fun’ which are cloakwords for a fundamentalist Christian perspective on values and relationships. It preaches against Evolution, against Public Schooling, against a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, against ‘Mixing With Worldly Elements,’ against self-interest and holy shit it preaches against the idea of youth independence. How creepy is it? Check out this trio of girls singing one of the enduring memories of the Patch the Pirate legacy, to me, “I Wanna Marry Daddy When I Grow Up.”

I won’t blame you if you don’t click the video after an intro like that.

Anyway, this sort of thing defined my youth experience. We’d be allowed to listen to these little records, on tiny little record players, we’d transcribe them to tapes, we’d learn the songs and sing along with them and that was acceptable and permitted ‘popular culture.’

I didn’t realise it until a few years ago but the reason these things even exist is because you have one person with some talent, a bunch of people who work for cheap (the cast of Patch the Pirate was Ron Hamilton’s family – so yes, his actual daughter sang the above song), and limited assets. The low cost of audio production gave this mass media form a low barrier to entry.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s kind of inevitable I was going to try out podcasting.

Last night I meant to sit down and talk about curation as expression, and I didn’t, because somehow I wound up finding the comics in my old schoolwork, and so I tweeted about that, at length.

Here’s a link to the storify.

Really, this is as much for my benefit as for yours. Archiving things on my blog is embarassingly easy to search for future reference.

I have to tell this ~spooky~ story every now and again, and it’s always been one of my go-to-narratives for how messed up my views on popular culture were as a child.

Most things we weren’t allowed as a kid were, coincidentally, popular and expensive things that parents would want to buy their children based on marketing malarkey. While boy toys were generally left alone – I was still allowed Transformers and toy guns and GI Joes and whatnot. Well, I was allowed the cheaper knockoffs of those (and some branded ones, and some secondhand ones). Anyway, weirdly, the toys I remember the most blatant weirdness about were toys I can only really think of as girl toys.

One of the toys we were told you cannot have, you could not own, you could not let your daughter own, was a cabbage patch doll.

Why not?

Because, in America – and in America was a catchphrase you knew could justify any lie no matter how ludicrous, because that place was so very, very odd – a cabbage patch doll had been witnessed floating across the room, and strangling children. It would whisper to you in your sleep. The doll would strive to open your daughters’ heart and possess her.

You see, it was about how the dolls were made. All cabbage patch dolls were distributed with a little tag that indicated the ‘birth day’ of the doll. The thing is, that date marker was a lie – that wasn’t the date the doll was manufactured, that was the soul of the unborn baby that was trapped in the doll was aborted! It was, it was! And all the dolls were manufactured, in one day of the year, on Halloween!

I remember sitting under a kitchen table, playing with my transformers – quite scared – as I heard the adults talking about this, ardently. Seriously. Basically I grew up reared by people who thought Child’s Play was a documentary.

Yesterday, if you missed it, I contributed a guest post on Leaving Fundamentalism. If you haven’t read it yet, I must exhort you, my friends – since that’s mostly who’s reading this – that story is full of horribleness. You don’t need to read it if you’re sensitive, or to understand me.

On the other hand, if you have read it, and you’ve decided to come here and check my stuff out… hi! I don’t write much about my experience as a religious abuse sufferer, because I find it’s not very respected and mainly just upsets people. What I try to do instead is entertain people with my words. There’s a Web Serial going on right now, called One Stone, and there’s a pile of game reviews, creatively called the Game Pile. Please, check it out!

Okay, Christians, I’m sorry, we have to talk.

I know you don’t like Fred Phelps. I know you don’t like the horse-ass Americans who interpret the Bible to say the world’s only six-thousand years old. I know you don’t like the Americans who use the words of Jesus while they slash benefits for the poor and threaten military brinksmanship in the Middle East. I know you don’t like those people.

They are still just as Christian as you.

Find me one of those people, and chances are, they can justify their position with quotes from the Bible. Hell, odds are they can justify them with quotes you didn’t know existed, but there they are. I’ll bet whatever it is they believe, they can find as many verses that support them as support things like the trinity or salvation.

The nature of the Bible is a work of constant interpretation. It’s actually one of the reasons I dismiss it so readily as any kind of ethical model, because you can interpret any book to gain life lessons, but this one just seems to have some sort of strange public prominence despite all the nasty stuff in it. The thing is, that nasty stuff means that when someone comes up, wearing your club shirts, you can’t say they don’t count. If you want the power that comes from being a cultural hegemony, with all the weight and value that brings, then you have to own all the parts of it.

The strangest thing is, this sort of thing is practiced by the people who also want to tell me that Atheists are all Reddit Atheist Fedora Men, with their transphobia and biological essentialism and sexism and rape culture, but that they are not in any way connected to the other people who hold up their own holy book as a source of inspiration. Ignoring for a moment that atheism does not draw from a common source, isn’t that trying to have things both ways? Unique context for thee, but not for ye?

Let’s talk about the word religion.

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1 Samuel 15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.
1 Samuel 15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

The language we use to discuss art and culture is shaped by that same art and culture. There’s nobody alive who doesn’t know a few Shakespearean words even if they can’t tell you where they came from. There are idioms and turns of phrase we have that owe their genesis – ohoh, there’s one now – to one of a tiny number of literary works that are just so old, and so foundational, they helped shape our very language. These are fountains of our culture – places from whence words flow, change, and are reshaped by the surfaces over which they run.

The word philistine is typically only used in modern culture by people who are either very cultured, or parodying people who consider themselves very cultured. It’s a term that was more popular in the past to refer to uncultured people, others, people who did not respect God, or beauty, or culture. It was a fancy, Biblical way to call someone a Barbarian, or as we might say it today, a redneck or bogan.

One word that is similar in its origin but less popular in its use – ie, I don’t think anyone uses it at all – is Amalekite. I’ve written about the Amalekite Genocide before, but it was in passing as part of another, larger work, and honestly, it was probably the weakest, most confusing part of that story. If you’d like an acquaintance with the text itself, here is one of the most readable versions of it you’ll find, which doesn’t do the normal Biblical retelling of hiding the fact that this was about the wholesale slaughter of a civilisation. Modern Biblical critics often refer to this as The Amalekite Genocide.

In summary, at some point leaving Egypt, Amalek and his children – possibly a tribe – attacked the Israelites as they fled Egypt. Since we know that no, that didn’t happen, we can just as easily project that Amalek’s attack probably didn’t happen. This didn’t stop the Biblical God – or more likely, Samuel as the figurehead of religious power – from using that attack, four hundred years later, to order the absolute genocide and destruction of the Amalekite people. Biblical apologists like to point out the Amalekites are once again mentioned, many hundreds of years later, suggesting that the genocide wasn’t successful, which of course, makes it all better…? Anyway.

The Amalekites were numerically inferior, they were swept underneath Saul’s army so easily as to avoid even mentioning the fights. Saul acted without even the strength of the Lord on his side – some say – which suggests that from the Bible’s perspective, this genocide was truly an oppressive act against a weaker people.

The Amalekites did not die.

Think about that. God himself, supposedly, wanted these people dead, and they did not die.

“Be not,” said God.

“No.” They answered.

They say they like this collection of short stories, writings, poems and books, though they don’t know what’s in them. They have a vague, somewhat memorable impression of what’s important to them. They know a few of the major figures by name, they have a vague impression of him or her or them. Maybe they remember their values, maybe they can remember the names of the stories they’re from.

They consider themselves devotees of the work, so who are you to judge?

I cannot decide if I am thinking of Lovecraft fans or Christians.

It’s come to my attention that Christians really don’t like talking about their faith in concrete terms, in any environment that is not primarily composed of other Christians talking about the same subject. Like they don’t like the way their religion is judged by people outside it, or the way people who aren’t part of it consider its moral and ethical sentiments, or its historical accuracy, or the many people who have done things using it as a justification.

I think, fellows, that you should think very hard about why that is.