The Ryno Pen

Dear Reader A and Reader B,

Should your humble blogonaut write more about leaving Fundieland?


I dropped out of ministry training with the Assemblies Of God, and eventually left charismatic churches altogether some years ago.

The trip has been an interesting one: for a start I learned how to actually read the source documentation. Exegesis means, literally, “to draw the meaning out of” (a text), and use only that text when deriving the meaning.

Exegesis has an Evil Twin, Eisegesis, who doesn’t have to play so fair.

For example: there’s a passage in John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha (a work thoroughly recommended to the skeptic with a sense of humour) which shows how eisegetical baggage can impart a targetted meaning to an extract of text:

“As L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp say, we may as well decide that Shakespeare wrote the Forty-Sixth Psalm, for the forty-sixth word from the beginning of it is shake, and the forty-sixth word from the end is spear.”

So yeah, if you’ve got a barrow to push, you can load it up with torn verses of bible, out of context, and cover your load of greed/power-lust/xenophobia/whatever, and pretend you’re pushing nothing but divine will.

I could probably rabbit on in theological terms about how whacked some of these dominionist guys are when they try to establish a (supposedly) christian state on earth, or do little parlour tricks like quoting passages of the bible to show how (ironically) ungodly the current surreptitiously-proselytizing Australian federal government is, using the context and the derivations of the original Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and all that.

Late Edit: this blog post has some very interesting and damning (pun inevitable) information on dominionist links with the Oz government.

(Image nicked from the always-on-target Mr Fish)

But I’d probably rather not dwell on this stuff unless Readers A and B are both getting something out of it. The journey out of the woods has not been without its painful moments, and there is some shame in knowing my presence was interpreted as support for pretty rank hypocrisy in worldly matters as well as doctrinal ones.

A big “hello” to the Man Who Would Be Politician: you told a few whoppers from the pulpit on the way up: I still remember, and I know who came over by taxi, too!

And of course it doesn’t matter if you’re as miserable as fuck for all of your life from the moment you’re popped out of the black hole, wet and wailing, to the time you approach the black hole at the other end, it’s only the unborn and dying who appear to concern some people.

Anyways, let me know what you think. (Sorry, I tried to add a poll but it’s borked.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 pm and is filed under charismatic churches, ex-charismatic, ex-church, fundamentalism, hillsong, meta, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.