Anger like any other emotion is a biological state brought on by an event or stimuli. A response of our nervous system. If we call our responses sinful, we learn to hide them or repress them causing not only separation from self, but also a sense of danger that doesn’t exist.
Because we are telling our brain we cannot show our emotions openly and in a healthy way. And that they are sinful or bad. Our brain feels in danger every time our nervous system fires these valid response, and learns to protect us from them. That’s psychological trauma.
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Over time, psychological trauma changes our personality, our brain, and our chemical responses. We learn to cope with it as we find ourselves in perpetual cycles of trauma (because emotions never go away). And we remain distanced from our true self.
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Church and toxic spirituality can be such a coping mechanism. So asserting that people’s anger is sin maintains people’s dependency on church or church leaders. A belief that only really benefits churches that don’t want people’s healing but their labor and money instead.
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Emotions are like compases, they are meant to inform us of what’s happening within and lead us toward safety and wholeness. They are meant to be explored. Consciousness and self awareness are the practices of exploring not only our environment but the world inside of us.
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Instead of “anger is sinful” we can ask “what is this anger trying to tell me.” One approach distances us from the self, the other brings us closer and toward healing. Healthy spirituality should lead us toward being the most aware, conscious beings. Not the most disembodied.
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A gentle reminder that using Pharisee to mean hypocrite or “bad guy” is antisemitic.
Believing Christians are the “new” chosen people and replaced Jewish people is supersessionism and its antisemitic.
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Using Old Testament to mean Hebrew Bible is a type a supersessionism that sees Judaism just as a precursor of Christianity, and it’s antisemitic.
Believing the Hebrew Bible is about Jesus as messiah, and only properly understood under that lens;...
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makes Jewish understanding of their own Scriptures “incomplete”, and it’s antisemitic.
Appropriating Jewish traditions for Christian purposes, like lighting a menorah for Christmas or hosting a Passover Seder for Easter, is very inappropriate and disrespectful.
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Apparently Lara found an old medium post of me being honest about how Christianity taught me to see others and myself and decided she knew all about me. She of course took it out of context and made it sound like this is me now.
I don’t have any shame about that anymore. I have compassion for the woman I was. I feel compassion for the internalized racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia... just general self hatred that then projected into others. And I’m so proud of how hard I’ve worked at healing.
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Also societally we’ve all been indoctrinated into those beliefs. I can admit I held them honestly and openly. It’s shameful when people try to pretend they were born healed and societal indoctrination never affected them. But alas, that’s where we are.
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Back in 1960 MLK was interviewed by ‘Meet the Press’, he said: “I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America.” 1/
It’s been 60 years since that comment and while a lot has changed, not a whole lot has changed. The white evangelical church continues to be the force underneath white supremacist ideologies in the US. And we keep talking about white supremacy but...
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failing to address that it is toxic theology what pushes its ideological notions.
Before the civil rights movement White Evangelical Christians were overt in their alignment with white supremacy, before the 13th amendment that changed the rules of slavery in 1865,
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76% to 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump according to the NYT and NPR. That’s the highest percentage of a people group aside from Republican. (1)
Religious freedom inside of Toxic Christianity has always meant religious freedom for them, and religious oppression for everyone else. It’s meant freedom to discriminate based on Christian beliefs, and the demand that others aren’t allowed to discriminate against them.
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Religious freedom inside of toxic Christianity has always meant screaming persecution when they are asked to be inclusive and understanding of other beliefs, and persecuting those who don’t agree with their religious beliefs.
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All of that to say, Happy Samhain!!! Samhain is a Gaelic festival celebrated at the end of the harvest season. It means “end of summer” and it marked the beginning of the darker half of the year. It had religious connotations too;
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