I graduated from a Christian school last year and the teachers were really narrow-minded and didn’t allow people to question the bible-which I did all the time (no one in my family is particularly religious by the way) So, 12 years at a Christian school was very traumatic for me and every time I hear about something involving religion I get really irritated, so how do I move on from my religious past?
Posted: December 22nd 2008
SmartLX www
Find something else to think about, basically.
Some apostates don’t simply try to leave it behind. They find a public forum (in the general sense of the word, not just the message-board kind of forum) to speak out against religion and unpack their thoughts on it. They can go about their lives in peace the rest of the time, and their frustration and anger towards religion and its effects has a healthy outlet. Furthermore, it’s educational in its own way.
It’s not healthy to repress your feelings toward religion. You need to make your peace with it. You don’t like it, but it’s probably always going to be there and be hard to ignore. Just take comfort in the fact that it’s declining.
To help you move on, you need another driving passion. Find something which is so important to you that it barely registers when people talk about religion – who cares about that old hat?
Where you find that passion is up to you. It could be as simple as your family, or as grand as breaking an athletic world record. If you’re not religious, there are a million things in this world which are more important than religion. Take your pick.
Posted: December 22nd 2008
logicel
You are starting in the right direction by identifying your emotion. Your remembering the sharp sting of your irritation and how uncomfortable it is, is a good thing. We are often motivated to change, but we lose awareness of our motivation. That discomfort will keep your motivation to change upfront.
Irritation, with its morphing sometimes into anger, like all emotions, including the sought-after one, love, has both negative and positive aspects. The negative aspects of irritation/anger/disgust are that you devote too much of your valuable emotional energy in beating a dead horse, or running your mental wheels in the sand, churning like mad but not going anywhere. You become emotionally/mentally exhausted with nothing to show for it.
The positive aspects are these emotions serve as motivation for effecting change both in yourself and beyond. You need to learn and hone ways in which you accomplish the positive aspects while learning how to let go the negative ones. For example, you could focus on some aspect of your Christian education that really irritates/angers you, that makes you grit your teeth, and then focus on being an expert in dismantling its lunacy.
Once you are confident in your skill, get that skill and knowledge – in a way concomitant with your abilities and talent – out in the public sphere, including the Web. Keep in mind, that this an approach that can be used in any problematic situation, not just religious ones. Focus on the developing the skill and adding to your knowledge base, not on dismantling religion.
As far as letting going of the negative aspects of your emotion, if you emphasis your achieving skills and amassing knowledge, then when religion raises its ugly head, you can bask in your centered and grounded state, take a few deep breaths and limit the amount of time spent banging your head against the proverbial wall of religious inanity while rejoicing that you are clearheaded and unburdened with the crushingly heavy baggage of religion. And of course, hang out with others of like mind. And have fun and enjoy life! Theists seeing fulfilled and happy non-believers is probably one of the most potent ways of challenging religion without even being confrontational.
As for further understanding the role of emotions in general and their constant role in all of our lives, browse the subject on the web, in a library, and in bookshops. In the Wikipedia article on “Antonio Damasio”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Dam%C3%A1sio, you will find a bibliography of his works.
Posted: December 22nd 2008