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In reply to the discussion: Any Ex-vangelicals? [View all]hunter
(38,264 posts)It was my good fortune the J.W.s booted my mom out of their Kingdom Hall before I started questioning anything. It was literally big bouncers at the door barring her entry.
My mom is a wonderful person. She can't stay out of politics and she talks to God directly. The Witnesses couldn't deal with that. Neither could the Catholics before them.
The only religion that ever embraced my mom was the Quakers. She'd speak her mind, people would listen respectfully, and then they'd move on.
I was the weird kid in school who ignored the flag salute. Participating in that crap bought you a free ticket to hell. I may still believe that.
"One Nation Under God?"
It was my good fortune, or maybe my bad fortune, to grow up in a religiously diverse Wild West family. The only official religion in my extended family is "NOT MORMON."
Christmas was always a time of religious warfare in my childhood, similar to the Troubles of Northern Ireland, or the schism between the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Pacifist Protestant Churches. It was sometimes bloody. Thankfully all those bloody minded old people are dead.
Half the old people in my family couldn't agree if celebrating Christmas was a sin and the other half were fighting about the date.
Easter wasn't any better.
I had just one grandparent who celebrated traditional U.S.A. Christmas and Easter but she was long past convincing anyone else it was about Church or God. She and her sister had run away to Hollywood because they couldn't imagine any fate worse than being married off to good Christian California dairy men.