Peter

“People must be able to reconstruct their own pattern of meaning, regardless of what it looks like or how long it takes—it simply must be all their own. Experiencing depression or numbness is normal during this phase of recovery (Winell 23). I have had clients who have even gone so far as to describe it by saying, “I don’t feel alive.” Losing a former faith story means losing the meaning-making method by which a person made sense of their life and the world around them.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“C.S. Lewis puts it well in The Screwtape Letters. The veteran demon describes a Christian at prayer: If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many … ingredients. There will be [e.g.] images derived from pictures of [Christ] as He appeared during … the Incarnation…. I have known cases where what the [person] called his “God” was actually located … inside his own head…. [Such a Christian will be] praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him.17 This, I think, is the unintended truth of the slogan of Jesus as one’s “personal savior.” He is a different savior in the eye of every beholder. Your personal savior is customized a bit differently from mine. He doesn’t have all the same options.”
― Robert M. Price, Jesus Christ Superstition

“It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was likely completed in response to the exile, and the subsequent formation of the prophetic corpus and the “writings” [poetic and wisdom texts] as bodies of religious literature (canon) is to be understood as a product of Second Temple Judaism [postexilic period]. This suggests that by their intention, these materials are . . . an intentional and coherent response to a particular circumstance of crisis. . . . Whatever older materials may have been utilized (and the use of old materials can hardly be doubted), the exilic and/ or postexilic location of the final form of the text suggests that the Old Testament materials, understood normatively, are to be taken [understood] precisely in an acute crisis of displacement, when old certitudes—sociopolitical as well as theological—had failed.[”
― Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

“Within fundamentalism, humans are trained towards passivity and codependence because of the emphasis put upon external guidance and divine control.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity