Xuchilpaba — Of course you can repost this article if you like:-) If you choose to do so, please just keep my author information and the CC License notice, and have a link back to the original so people can find me easier. And of course I would be very curious to know where it goes! You can shoot me an email at the address on the About Cehualli page if you want.

I debated with my aunt about it. And the bible shit, bringing up all the polytheistic influences of early Hebrew worship, and instances in the bible about it that confer to the archeology of the Middle east. She claimed I sounded like i knew it all, which I never said. That I know nothing because I’m not a scholar, but the scholars are wrong, so basically science proves nothing. And how people in India worship something w/ eight arms, which made her sound ignorant. (Pissed me off, because I love Hinduism and she had no fucking idea what she was talking about.) I got told this by someone who has never picked up any books or sources that I have read, telling me that the scholars are wrong, archeology is wrong, sciences and textual evidence, including in the bible is wrong, and I don’t know what I’m talking about because I am not a scholar. Yet she refuses to check these sources herself and shes a teacher!

>Since then? We haven’t discussed religion directly, but she’s continued to send me annoying bits of Christo-spam email.

I feel your pain. My mother is insane into Xtainity. She spams me about everyday with that Xtain email shit. I have kindly told her to stop sending me thing because I’m not a Xtain and she refuses, ignoring me. I’m probaly considerably younger than yourself (no ofenese) back when I live at home, she tried to make me repeat passages in the bible everyday and she read it to me. When I came out as a pagan when I was Wiccan at 16 or 17, I asked her not to rea the bible and etc to me because I’m not one. Just like your family, she refuses to respect my religion. She still refuses and ignores it to this day. She believes I will come back to god someday. Well like you, I have no experiences with Jesus. I had some with God, who I believe to be Yahweh, not Jesus Christ. I belong to Tlaloc, however, I know this.

I am 39 years old, married to a Christian who has more traditional beliefs, with three children and I still will not talk much about my beliefs to my mother and father or grandparents. Both my mother and father tend towards the fundamentalist beliefs, and I am pretty sure it would damage my relationships with both of them if they heard me talking about my “Pagan-ways”. I see no reason to express my beliefs to them, aside from the odd comment from time to time that makes them give me the hairy eyeball stare. My spirituality is my own, and it must remain private because of how it might affect my husband and my children in their lives, and I don’t want to be preached to by my mother or father (they are divorced, by the way, so that’s why I talk about them separately)

One day, my mother may wander up into my private art room and discover I have a bookshelf of alternative spirituality books. I’d rather she didn’t, and if it happens I will just tell her I am interested in many religions and I study them all. She won’t like the ones that have “witch” in their title, but I can’t help that. But there is no way I am going to bring up this discussion. My father is the only one that wants to know why I don’t get myself into church and why I’m not reading The Word everyday, but he doesn’t bring it up often. Mom doesn’t attend church, so she avoids the conversation because I could just as easily ask her why she’s not in the pew.

I don’t think being outed is inevitable, but I certainly wish I could be open and joyous about my beliefs as Christians are. I teach my daughters about my beliefs, and I think my oldest daughter is interested in magic.

Thank you for your story, and I’m sorry it’s been so hard for you.

Raincrow

Anyway, I remain completely

Thanks for your comment and understanding towards someone who’s of a different faith tradition, things like this give me a little hope that the intolerance *can* eventually be eliminated.

And thank you for sharing your own experience of intolerance, you have my heartfelt sympathy for what you’re going through with your own family. I wish more liberal Christians would organize and speak out against the deafeningly-loud fundamentalists in this country — you guys are just as much “of the Devil” as people like me, to the bigots! Hell, in some way, more so, as I’ve heard liberal Christians get tarred as “evil apostate false teachers, wolf in sheep’s clothing, etc.” a nauseating number of times. Ugh. I can only imagine how sick *you* are of being called slurs like that! It’s sad that things like this can happen, especially where someone’s job is tied to religion — my partner’s a UU who’s working on his Masters of Divinity, and ever since he came out about being a UU, my family ignores anything touching on his religion… even though it’s a huge chunk of his life.

I’m familiar with the definition of fundamentalism you’re referring to, and yeah, it can and does show up elsewhere. I can think of a fundie Asatruar’s blog I’ve seen, and I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with fundamentalist Buddhists in large numbers over on a certain major Buddhist forum out there.

I’m with you about 90% of the way that it’s the fundamentalist mindset that’s the problem. I have to reserve about 10%, though, for some of the material that’s in the canonical texts generally accepted as scripture by most Christians. There’s unfortunately some stuff in there that’s like catnip to fundamentalists, attracting them and giving them ammo with which to built their grotesque versions of Christianity. If it wasn’t there, they’d have a harder time doing their thing.

I don’t consider this “10% problem” as something unique to Christianity, though, it seems there’s seeds of potential hate scattered about in every religious tradition. It seems to be human nature to sneak in crap about how “we’re right, and everyone who doesn’t agree is wrong… and should be changed… actually, *must* be changed… damn, they’re really bad people, actually, if they don’t change, we must MAKE them change…” Tribalism, in its worst form.

I do think that the problem can be overcome though, by applying more flexible methods of interpretation and honestly identifying these problematic bits of text or tradition, no matter what religion we’re dealing with. I wish anyone well in this endeavor!

Well, that’s enough of my rambling for the moment, I suppose. Thanks again for your thoughtful comment, Brian, and I wish you well in dealing with the fundamentalists in your own life.

-Best,
Cehualli