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The OP asked if people's churches have made them feel unwelcome or otherwise hurt them, and your first response--without hearing even one single personal account in response to that question--was that if they did, it MUST be because they didn't want to be told they were doing something wrong. That is not true, and yet it was the first thing that came to your mind.
I never got an answer from him on this point, either. He seems incapable of understanding that feeling "unwelcome or otherwise hurt" can have many causes, other than the one cause on which he's obsessing, and in fact, his diagnosis is one of the far less likely causes. In fact, implicitly, this thread was about discussing those other causes, otherwise it would have asked something more like, "If your church cramped your style or tried to question how you live".
And, sure enough, not ONE person who shared about "feeling unwelcome or otherwise hurt" gave an account of how they were censured for being libertines. We had a long-time deeply involved member given zero support when their child was in crisis. We had a mother abandoned by her husband AND the church. Just to name two stand-out examples.
But I think where this nonsense comes from is a deep-seated belief that if you are right with god, your husband won't leave you and your church will support you -- those things don't happen to good people. Ergo, they must be bad or insufficiently pious people who aren't telling the whole story.
That this is the first place their minds go is not unusual at all in my experience. Indeed, my first impulse when various calamities befell me in life was to assume I must be at fault somehow. In the end though I concluded that if I was at fault then it was hopeless for anyone to be "good enough". No brag, just fact. Same thing happened to my oldest brother. An elder in his church, as constant and faithful a Christian as ever there was -- yet had fatal cancer. These two things are not supposed to go together. He was both inconsolable, AND unconsoled.
Good answer, jimmie, good answer. Excellent verse choice. I'm not kidding.
There's more I could say, but it can wait. For now, to you and BaptistFundie and all the others here who revere the birth of Christ, have a very Merry Christmas.
Peace be with you all.
I knew you would like my response. Merry Christmas to you, also.
I never got an answer from him on this point, either. He seems incapable of understanding that feeling "unwelcome or otherwise hurt" can have many causes, other than the one cause on which he's obsessing, and in fact, his diagnosis is one of the far less likely causes. In fact, implicitly, this thread was about discussing those other causes, otherwise it would have asked something more like, "If your church cramped your style or tried to question how you live".
And, sure enough, not ONE person who shared about "feeling unwelcome or otherwise hurt" gave an account of how they were censured for being libertines. We had a long-time deeply involved member given zero support when their child was in crisis. We had a mother abandoned by her husband AND the church. Just to name two stand-out examples.
But I think where this nonsense comes from is a deep-seated belief that if you are right with god, your husband won't leave you and your church will support you -- those things don't happen to good people. Ergo, they must be bad or insufficiently pious people who aren't telling the whole story.
That this is the first place their minds go is not unusual at all in my experience. Indeed, my first impulse when various calamities befell me in life was to assume I must be at fault somehow. In the end though I concluded that if I was at fault then it was hopeless for anyone to be "good enough". No brag, just fact. Same thing happened to my oldest brother. An elder in his church, as constant and faithful a Christian as ever there was -- yet had fatal cancer. These two things are not supposed to go together. He was both inconsolable, AND unconsoled.
I temember you telling of your brother.
My friend lost her brother this year, and she said something similar. They are Jewish, but she converted to Catholicism when she married, and her younger brother, who had been living in Haight-Ashbury in the 60s, had an epiphany of some sort and became involved in the early days of Jews for Jesus. Later he became disillusioned with the organization, but continued to live as a Messianic Christian, observing Jewish feasts, and every year dressing up as part of a local Bethlehem reenactment, making pottery by hand.
He retired, and waited for his wife to retire, and then they bought a $100k RV to travel in cross-country. But first, he went to the doctor because when he got up in the morning, he noticed some weakness in his legs.
ALS. The RV was sold, unused. He died a year and a half later, suffocating as his lung muscles failed. He remained strong in his faith, but my friend is devastated that her younger brother, a man who devoted his whole life to telling others about Christ, got cheated out of his retirement.
She went out to visit him and was furious that one of his religious friends came over and they would talk about how this illness was a blessing and a gift. She did not see it that way.
Do you really think that's what the apostles did? Ran around telling everyone they were sinners? Or did they maybe draw people in with the way they lived in closeness to God so that people came to recognize their own sinful natures without someone pointing it out to them?
Again. It's sad that you simply don't care to accurately represent me. Seriously. Even when I explicitly tell you the opposite. No one is making that claim, nor am I doing that. Good grief, this crap gets old.
For me it wasn’t really a specific, individual or personal type of ‘hurt’
It was more an internal realisation that the traditional, ritualistic types that were being drummed into us by indoctrination was at odds with who I perceived Jesus to be at a more personal level
The more questions I asked about ‘the purpose’ the responses I got was centred on believe or be eternally tormented and that was the deal breaker for me personally
For me was more about a dissonance and not fitting in that type of organisation (and it did affect me for a long time because what I have discovered is that we may leave the organisational but the system is set up that the teaching/indoctrination we receive does not leave us, it is retained and is for us to use later)
He retired, and waited for his wife to retire, and then they bought a $100k RV to travel in cross-country. But first, he went to the doctor because when he got up in the morning, he noticed some weakness in his legs.
In my brother's case he had made a doctor appointment because his leg hurt, but before he could get to the appointment his leg snapped in two, due to bone cancer. In a guy who had never smoked or done any other risky things.
This is why I'm much happier as I now am, having let go of the notion that life is in any way personal or directed. Stuff just happens, and we don't always like what happens. But it's not a referendum on your worth as a person or god's level of approval of you or something. Nor is it a referendum on god's constancy or reliability, since he's not in the picture and I no longer have Expectations of him or need to reconcile his (in)actions with my understanding of his promises.
My brother's distress was because he still had expectations based on his beliefs.
Your friend was right to object to the attempts to call something as horrible as ALS a blessing in disguise. What is the problem with people admitting "that sucks" and just being present for someone who is suffering? I guess that's more distressing to THEM than just being supportive, especially for those who absolutely must have an "answer" to every question. Most of the things people do to "comfort" the suffering is really just to ease their own discomfort.
For me was more about a dissonance and not fitting in that type of organization
Cognitive dissonance drove me from the faith entirely. It's a powerful motivator. For me the dissonance purely had to do with the incoherent theory of knowledge (epistemology) I was dealing with. Maybe eventually, way down the road, I might have come around to seeing it as a bad fit, too, but that just never entered my mind at the time. I was way more interested in anaccurate understanding of how reality and life worked. If I could have had that, I'd have been very forgiving of organizational tics. But everyone's different on that score.
That's the exact opposite of what they should have done.
It probably reflects the tendency to assume that when infidelity occurs it's always the woman's fault somehow.
Not always. Believe me.... I'm a man with my own story to tell. In my case, the infidelity was a false accusation in 2006 against me by my wife whose imagination was working overtime, and the church just ASSUMED I was a scumbag. She later apologized and admitted her accusation was based on nothing but imagination. But the church just went mum and declined an opportunity to help us through it.
My wife and I are still together (31 years total) but we quit going to that church. The American church as a whole is messed up. Probably explains why the country is in such turmoil. It's hard to understand what it stands for anymore.
American Christians are so proud of all their different sects and denominations as being a sign of "freedom of belief" instead of being symptomatic of division and impotence is a big warning bell. We've eschewed theocracies but gone off the deep end in the other direction. Salt and light have been baked into a big casserole of confusion.
You would have loved the program I went to a few years ago. My favorite museum is The Cloisters, on the northernmost part of the island of Manhattan, the medieval collection of the Metrpolitan Museum of Art. They did a program of singing in Latin chant the story of Christmas, complete with medieval instruments.
I love The Cloisters! One of my grandmothers lived in the Riverdale area of the Bronx and we I visited frequently as a child.
While I missed that program, I'm on their mailing list, but I haven't visited in years. Visiting the Cloisters is a very special and spiritual experience that I would recommend to all.
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Merry Christmas to you, also. 
