WOTMQ: Indoctrination, Brainwashing, & Grooming

Higher education? Oh noes! Not EDUCATION! The HORROR! lol.

Much appreciation to both Louise and Brian. My sincerest thanks.

I was free to put a toe in any church I wanted. And I chose, arguably, the most fun churches that my friends went to. It was not a choice based on anything I believed in. (At 8, I believed I would fly if I jumped far enough from the tallest point I could climb to.) How could an 8 year old not love going to a church where the grown ups acted infuckingsane for two hours and let the kids join in? Dancing, whooping, hollering, amen-ing, shouting, shaking, running up and down the aisle, prostration, fainting, crying hysterically,.. it was fanfuckingtastic. That lasted for about two years and then I was onto other things that were becoming more interesting to 10 year old me. I have always looked back fondly on that time. Except… I never forgot exactly why I really stopped going. Unbeknownst to me, a prepubescent little girl (8-10), my friend that I had been so very close to and spent days, nights and weekends (we literally lived right across the street from each other until I was 12) at each other’s houses until I was 10, was being sexually abused by her father. The father finally wanted me to be a part of the abuse and I was met with a situation that I was able to extricate myself from by claiming that if I didn’t get home my mother would be at their door looking for me, as we were planning to go out somewhere. I don’t know where I said. Probably dinner, but I digress. I never was inside their house ever again. Church stopped. I lived in Arkansas. Military kid. The area I lived in was about as Southern as you could get. There was one school 1st-12th. Also served the base kids, it was a very good school educationally, considering many of the teachers were (mostly) military spouses, and a smaller number of locals, who taught. Regardless, the local population, of which there were about 6,000 (no kidding, the town was that small, base inhabitants were not a part of the census for local population) must have been churning out incest victims and perpetrators by the 100’s over the years as every couple of years one of the victims’ mothers found out, or had become able to finally fight back against their childrens’ abusers, as it would spill out in a very public way and then the law would become involved. One incident, in particular, has stuck with me. One of my friends that I had known since I was in the second grade, had been abused by her father for years. The normally sweet, exceedingly kind, extraordinarily generous woman that I had known her mother to be, will forever be remembered for the picture taken by a reporter of an eerily calm, exceedingly frightening, extraordinarily angry woman with a 12 gauge shotgun aimed at the head of a kneeling man with his hands behind him, they were tied, and his face distorted from the beating he had received from his wife and another of her family members. The father, her husband, had been caught red handed in bed with his daughter. Long story short, he lived and went to prison. The family moved away. The mother was never prosecuted. This was the third incident that had spilled over into public between my 5th to 8th grade years. It might sound like fiction, but I assure you, it is not. This was during the 70’s. Culture wars, politics and the law were still not inclusive of “family problems, best taken care of in private.” Shortly after my 8th grade year, we were transferred to another base, out of the State of Arkansas. (Then the eighties began. Reagan and the Satanic Panic engulfed a country! Oh yeah!) Please, take away what you will from my recollection of events. But as I have evolved and aged and become more and more disgusted with the slimy film of respectability that a majority attach to being a member of a religious group and community and have changed from being not only an atheist, but an antitheist, I am grateful for my fellows, like Brian and the others on YouTube, along with the other commenters, that call BS on Dennis Prager and the rest. As Christopher Hitchens said, “Religion poisons EVERYTHING.”

On the other hand the nuns and priests started showing their hands very early. I remember getting physically tossed out of catechism class (Catholic Sunday school) at age 8 because I asked where heaven and hell were. I mean everybody had seen that picture of John Glenn in his Mercury space capsule, and everybody knew the Godless Communist Russians had spacemen too. So I figured that pictures or a news article about somebody spotting heaven or hell would be available. The nun tossed me out for "asking impertinent questions" and threatened that I wouldn't be able to make first communion if I continued with my "evil behavior." (Her words, not mine.) Funny how they never answered the question--just decided I was impertinent. To a kid like me, who wanted to KNOW STUFF, well, that began my odyssey away, not to be completed til I ran away from home at 17.

Yup… groomed! As the parents had been by the grandparents, groomed by the great-grandparents, groomed by the great-great-grandparents… and on and on and on. I recognize such grooming everytime some right-wingnut sends out a christmas card with the entire family, including all the kids, holding AR-15 assault rifles. Groomed!

Yup. I grew up in just such a home--in my case, Catholic. I'm told that, by the age of two, I had memorized every prayer in the prayerbook, and could recite them on command. By the time I was eight, I had every prayer in the Catholic Mass memorized--in Latin. So, yeah, the indoctrination goes very, very deep.

I used to that bowing and clasping hands stuff. I also did the sign of the cross (I could never remember which came first, left or right). As a catholic I was baptised in the first few months (to be fair, I wasn't expected to last that long.