Dare to Doubt discussion
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You Are Your Own
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In what ways did your brain develop that you connect to religious teachings?
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This is one of my favorite topics! My name is Natalie Grand I just created and released a feminist, educational, romantic comedy, based on a true story titled CULT GIRLS. It was a passion project to raised awareness for children in cults and also to give the young adult crowd the courage to jump off the fence in their cult. People don't know but the Jehovah's Witness cult is one of the largest cults in the world and they are FORBIDING children to get higher education and do not allow them to have extra curricular activities, they are to work traffic for the company. The policies include shunning children, sexually interrogating them, accusing them of "willing participants" in child involved sexual crimes and they sacrifice them to the religion in the rejection of blood transfusions. It really is a destructive cult, destroying lives and families. It is an indy graphic novel and it was so difficult to even find a paid author to touch this subject, because they were afraid of retaliation of this extremely rich organization. Any reviews you leave are deeply appreciated because I am trying to get this in libraries and lowered the cost of this full color book, because I only just want it in the public hands. It was featured in Cult News 101. If you want to talk more I am very active and accept messaging on twitter. My handle is Natalie Grand @CultGirlsAuthor I am not always checking my good reads account. There is sample pages people uploaded int he reviews of Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Girls-Nat...
"Our brains developed in a state of restriction, hesitation, and lack rather than a state of permission, wholeness, and freedom."
This manifested in my upbringing as letting the Holy Spirit guide one's decisions. We were not to trust the sinful hearts we'd been born with, yet we were simultaneously told that God cared about the desires of our hearts. We were taught that the tree of knowledge was the antithesis of trust and obedience, yet expected to know when an inclination was God's guidance or Satan's temptation. This mindf*ck resulted in an extreme lack of security in myself, in a self-denigrating helplessness that Christians mistook for humble submissiveness.
As a post-Christian adult, I had to learn how to trust myself for the first time. And in order to do that, I had to first learn how to hear myself. Jamie writes about how she didn't even know her favorite color after leaving Christianity. I related to this juvenile-seeming sense of helplessness so much. When I lost the only compass that had guided my life - God, and the magical-thinking lens of his open and closed doors that had guided my decision-making - I had to take responsibility for myself for the first time. Nearly three years of therapy helped me with this.
Did you also have to meet yourself for the first time when you lost your faith, or when you rejected certain aspects of it? How did you learn to trust your own instincts and intuition?