Religious Dogmatism versus Living a Truly Good Life


I am publishing this in two places – I took it from the daily blog – because I think it is one of the real problems in American society. Many people are being trained to become violent by our old folkways and religions. This concerns the Leonards of a non-denominational church who beat their son to death to make him repent. Bad move!


CHURCHES AND PHYSICAL PUNISHMENT 2015



http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/cultlike-practices-at-word-of-life-church/ar-AAfwRJ0?li=AAa0dzB&ocid=iehp

Cultlike Practices at Word of Life Church
Newsweek Max Kutner

Photograph -- Bruce and Deborah Leonard


Before this week, few people knew about what went on inside the brick walls of the Word of Life Christian Church in the village of Chadwicks, within the town of New Hartford, New York. But the recent beating to death of Lucas Leonard, a teenage church member, has begun to pull back the veil on the mysterious group, and details from law enforcement of the incident are consistent with what academics call “religious abuse” and possibly cult-like practices.

Police say that following Sunday Mass on October 11, six church members, including the 19-year-old’s parents Bruce and Deborah Leonard, beat him so he would confess his sins during a “counseling session.” The beating was so bad that family members eventually took Lucas to a hospital, where he died from blunt force trauma to his abdomen, back, thighs and genitals. Law enforcement later found that his brother, Christopher, also showed signs of assault. He too was hospitalized.

Deborah and Bruce Leonard face manslaughter charges and are each being held in lieu of $100,000 bail. A felony hearing was scheduled for Friday. Four more church members, including the boys’ half sister, face assault charges.

Mary Alice Crapo, author of the nonfiction book Twisted Scriptures: Breaking Free From Churches That Abuse, says the details of the Word of Life incident are “absolutely” consistent with those from accounts she has studied and indicate a fringe or cult-like abusive church. “In their minds, they’re thinking they’re helping him. And even though the parents cringe, they really don’t want to do it, they feel bad about it, they’re also pressured by that group.”

In the early 1990s, around the time when about 80 people at a religious compound occupied by the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, died during a standoff with law enforcement, experts in psychology, sociology and religion began writing about what they called religious or spiritual abuse. Cult-like churches are not always as overt as the Branch Davidians. Such abuse can happen anywhere—from small Bible-study groups to mega-churches, the experts say.

In 1991, the Spiritual Counterfeits Project published a 37-question checklist to help people discern if their churches or religious groups were abusive, with questions like: “Does your church interact with other churches?” “Does your church staff avoid secrecy?” “Are your children happy to attend church?”

“If you’re in that church, it’s so subtle,” says Crapo, who is the survivor of what she describes as a New Age cult. “People don’t understand their minds. They think, Oh, my mind’s strong, I’d never believe that.”

The New England Institute of Religious Research describes “aberrational Christian or Bible-based” groups as following “some [religious] principle of greater strictness, more single-minded dedication, or more intense renunciation of the world and its attractions.” Such groups often take scripture out of context, the institute says, separate members from the outside world and practice “spiritual elitism.”

In his 1992 book Churches That Abuse, Ronald Enroth identifies several characteristics of abusive churches, including controlling leaders who manipulate members and impose on them rigid lifestyles, and who make it difficult for members to leave. One victim told Enroth she felt leaving the church would “endanger her salvation, as well as the salvation of her outside friends and family.”

Religious abuse “is inflicted by persons who are accorded respect and honor in our society by virtue of their role as religious leaders,” Enroth wrote. “The perversion of power that we see in abusive churches disrupts and divides families, fosters an unhealthy dependence of members on the leadership, and creates, ultimately, spiritual confusion in the lives of victims.”

Little is known about the Irwin family, which reportedly ran Word of Life in Chadwicks. But its mysterious practices are consistent with accounts in Enroth’s book.

“I had never heard of [the church] before, and I’ve lived here in the area for 67 years,” says an employee at a church in New Hartford, who asked Newsweek not to name her or her church because she did not have permission to speak to the press.

“The parishioners at my church have always been puzzled by what kind of a church that is,” says Reverend Terry Sheldon of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Chadwicks. “People said nobody came in, nobody went out. So it was quite a mystery building.”

According to The New York Times, a prosecutor said Thursday the beating may not have involved the confession of sins, but rather may have occurred because Lucas planned to defect.

Difficulty leaving is a key aspect of abusive churches, experts say. Lois Gibson, an abusive church survivor who now runs support groups through her website Spiritual Abuse, says the mentality is, “You will be doomed if you leave. They’re not like a healthy church where if somebody decided to leave for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel like they were leaving the ‘truth’ or leaving God or something bad was going to happen to them.”

Since she started her website in 1997, Gibson says she has heard from hundreds of people who said they were the victims of abusive churches across the United States and abroad, including Canada, Australia and England.

If the beatings did in fact involve confession, that too could be a sign of cult-like practices. “Confessions are really, really powerful in the mind to control people,” Crapo says. Gibson agrees, saying sometimes church leaders will later use confessed information against members in order to blackmail them.

The lengthy Word of Life beating, as police have described it, matches victims’ accounts from Enroth’s book. One victim told Enroth, “‘There was punching, hitting, children were whipped with belts, women were whipped with belts.’ This behavior was defined as ‘love’ for the victim, because, ‘if you really love someone, then you're going to pay the price for that person to be set free.’”

Another account from Enroth’s book said public confessions would last “anywhere from four to 20 hours. These sessions usually usually took place at night.… These intimate details, including those related to one's sexual behavior, were [later] brought up over and over again to produce feelings of deep guilt.”

Even the lawyer for Deborah Leonard, Devin Garramone, says the signs point to cultlike practices, of which he says his client was a victim. “In my meeting with my client, right away I had the distinct feeling that this woman had some sort of trauma about her. She was very meek and timid.” She was a member of the church for decades, Garramone says, “so that’s a long time to get indoctrinated.”

Garramone adds, “She’s very distraught and she breaks down and cries sometimes when I get into what went on. She’s reckoning with a lot and I think this may be the first time in a long time that she's been on her own away from the church and she’s dealing with a lot. Maybe she’s realizing for the first time how manipulated she had become.”

Donald Gerace, a lawyer for Bruce Leonard, paints a different picture of the church and its practices: “Everything I’ve learned about the church...has indicated that the church has regular Sunday services: It has Bible study; it has an outreach program to provide food to disadvantaged individuals; it has regular annual events.”

Referring to his client, Gerace adds, “What had occurred was as a result of a revelation to him by his son regarding some of his son’s past behavior, and it’s an unfortunate and tragic event affecting the lives of many people now.”



https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415969680

Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence
edited by Nicky Ali Jackson and published by Routledge
© 2007 – Routledge

820 pages

About the Book


The Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence is a modern reference from the leading international scholars in domestic violence research. This ground-breaking project has created the first ever publication of an encyclopedia of domestic violence. The primary goal of the Encyclopedia is to provide information on a variety of traditional, as well as breakthrough, issues in this complex phenomenon.

The coverage of the Encyclopedia is broad and diverse, encompassing the entire life span from infancy to old age. The entries include the traditional research areas, such as battered women, child abuse and dating violence. However, this Encyclopedia is unique in that it includes many under-studied areas of domestic violence, such as ritual abuse-torture within families, domestic violence against women with disabilities, pseudo-family violence and domestic violence within military families. It is also unique in that it examines cross-cultural perspectives of domestic violence.

One of the key special features in this Encyclopedia is the cross-reference section at the end of each entry. This allows the reader the ability to continue their research of a particular topic.

This book will be an easy-to-read reference guide on a host of topics, which are alphabetically arranged. Precautions have been taken to ensure that the Encyclopedia is not politically slanted; rather, it is hoped that it will serve as a basic guide to better understanding the myriad issues surrounding this labyrinthine topic.

Topics covered include: Victims of Domestic Violence; Theoretical Perspectives and Correlates to Domestic Violence; Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Religious Perspectives; Understudied Areas within Domestic Violence Research; Domestic Violence and the Law; and Child Abuse and Elder Abuse.





http://childrenshealthcare.org/?page_id=146

Religious Attitudes on Corporal Punishment
Children’s Healthcare Is A Legal Duty, Inc.
by Rita Swan
October 17, 2015


Corporal punishment, defined as discipline that intentionally causes physical pain, has been meted to children throughout recorded history in most cultures. However, nineteen countries, beginning with Sweden in 1979, have laws prohibiting all corporal punishment, while courts in two other countries have ruled it illegal.

A few religions have spoken out against corporal punishment while others not only permit it, but declare it to be divinely mandated.

The United Methodist Church is the first Christian denomination to take an official position against corporal punishment. The church passed resolutions in 2004 discouraging parents from hitting children and calling upon states to prohibit corporal punishment in schools, daycares, and residential facilities for children.

In the 19th century the founder of the Baha’i faith prohibited corporal punishment of children in his scriptures. Some scholars say Baha’i was the first religion to oppose corporal punishment.

While few denominations have taken a position against corporal punishment, individual clerics and devout believers have written that Jesus’ teachings advocate respect for children and training without striking them. End Physical Punishment of Children posts several such statements on its webpage at www.stophitting.org. Teresa Whitehurst’s How Would Jesus Raise a Child? and her webpage at www.jesusonthefamily.org, Christians for Nonviolent Parenting at www.nospank.net, and the Lawrences at www.parentinginjesusfootsteps.org present Jesus as leading by example with the qualities of the beatitudes to nurture the internal moral compass of individuals, including children. Jesus valued affirming, nurturing relationships above legalistic rules, they say.

The Catholic Church does not have a national policy on corporal punishment, but the Ohio-based Center for Effective Discipline wrote to 174 Catholic dioceses about their policies. All of the 132 dioceses that responded either prohibit corporal punishment in their schools or said that none of their schools use it. Several diocesan spokespersons told another researcher that their policies against corporal punishment related to theological teaching on the dignity of the human person.

Several studies have shown both the practice of and belief in corporal punishment to be much higher among fundamentalist Protestants. Researchers for www.religioustolerance.org found they are the only religious group that publishes doctrinal justifications for corporal punishment.

Many fundamentalists believe that hitting children is sanctioned or mandated by the Bible. They cite these verses in the Old Testament’s Proverbs as authority for their belief: 3:11-12, 13:24, 19:18, 20:30, 22:15, and 23:13-14. The latter claims that if you beat a child with a rod, he will not die, but instead will have his soul saved. One tape-recorded sermon advises parents to “wound” the child with corporal punishment because Proverbs 20:30 says a wound cleanses away evil.

Punishment by putting tabasco sauce on the tongue or clipping a clothespin on the tongue is recommended for verbal defiance, biting, and lying in Lisa Whelchel’s Creative Correction. She cites Bible verses as authority for her disciplinary methods. The publisher is Focus on the Family founded by James Dobson, the most prominent advocate of corporal punishment.

No recorded words of Jesus recommend corporal punishment of children or subjugating them. No New Testament verses say that children should be struck with the hand or with implements. In Hebrews 12, St. Paul speaks of fathers “chastening” and “correcting” their sons as an analogy for the trials Christians encounter in their spiritual growth, but the verses do not indicate that chastening should be physical. Paul says that children should honor and obey their parents, but also says fathers should not anger or discourage children (Ephesians 6:2-4, Colossians 3:20).

Paul does, however, set forth an authoritarian model for the family with wives and children subjugated to the adult males. A few verses after declaring that women should keep silent in churches and be in subjection, he says that fathers must rule their households and keep their children in subjection in order to be able to take care of the church (1 Timothy 3:4-5).

Several scholars indicate that conservative Protestants’ approval of corporal punishment is based on their beliefs that the Bible is inerrant and has the answers to all human concerns, that children are born with original sin, and an apocalypse or “rapture” is coming soon. Many fundamentalists advocating corporal punishment read Proverbs as a literal injunction to hit children with implements. They reject advice from secular parenting books because the Bible has the correct advice on all matters. Their determination that the Bible is the literal, absolute word of God throughout leads to insistence on authoritarian relationships. They fear that sensuality and libertarianism in popular culture threaten their ability to impart religious values to their children. They do not see the government as supporting their parenting ideals, but rather as interfering with them. They believe that babies are born sinful and naturally inclined to rebel against God and their parents. Reflecting the divine order, men should be in control of their wives and children. A child’s reluctance or refusal to obey a parent’s order is as offensive as Satan’s original rebellion against God. Corporal punishment is sacralized as a divine mandate. Parents must break a child’s will in order for the child and parents to be saved from hell when judgment day takes place in the near future. Fundamentalists are more likely than others to hold images of God stressing punishment and judgment.

Fear of rebellion is prominent among fundamentalists. Dobson recommends that parents be flexible and use various non-violent discipline methods for most problem behaviors of children. But for “willful disobedience” he believes corporal punishment should be a parent’s first resort and that a parent must “win decisively.”

Many, but not all, fundamentalist advocates of corporal punishment recommend striking children with implements rather than the hands so that the parents’ hands will be perceived as instruments of love. Some emphasize that corporal punishment must be continued until the child’s will is broken as shown when the child “accepts” the punishment. Some advocates warn that children may cry during corporal punishment as a strategy of rebellion and should then be hit harder.

Several present corporal punishment as a ritual with firm directions about how to do it, what to use, when to stop, and what to do afterwards. Dobson recommends holding the child close after he accepts his punishment, assuring him of the parent’s love, and then praying with the child in confession that we have all sinned and asking for God’s forgiveness.

Articles on the Christian Parents Network at www.christian-parents.net say parents have a religious duty to do battle against a child and win. Corporal punishment gives children “a foretaste of the potential terror and pain of eternal separation from God,” one says. Another warns parents not to have sympathy for the child when they hit him and accuses non-spanking parents of laziness.

Several fundamentalist advocates for corporal punishment place important caveats on its use. The majority say parents should never strike a child in anger or frustration for then they will be displaying loss of control. They say that children will develop their image of God from the parents’ behavior and therefore parents should show love as well as punishment of sin that is inevitable and consistent.

Dobson and others set age limits. Corporal punishment should not be used on babies younger than fifteen months and rarely if ever used on children more than ten years old, they say. Some fundamentalist leaders, however, recommend hitting infants with switches because they are born with the sin of rebellion and the earlier corporal punishment is started, the easier it will be to control them later.

Judaism does not interpret the verses in Proverbs as authority to hit children with implements nor does it believe children are born into original sin. Israel prohibits all corporal punishment of children.

While several scholars believe that a hierarchical, authoritarian model of sacred and secular relationships and strict gender roles contribute to endorsement of corporal punishment, the Mormons are an interesting counter-example. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) has an all-male priesthood, to which every boy over the age of twelve may belong. Gender-prescribed roles are a map to salvation and the basis of hierarchy and distinction in church doctrine.

The child training literature of this patriarchal religion, however, is radically different from that of fundamentalist Protestants. The Mormon Church’s sacred scriptures do not express the doctrine of original sin, view children as inherently rebellious, nor recommend corporal punishment to break their will.

Joseph F. Smith, the church’s tenth president, advised parents to “use no lash and no violence” with their children. Gordon Hinckley, the fifteenth president, said, “I have never accepted the principle of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child . . . .’ Children don’t need beating. They need love and encouragement.” The church’s magazine Ensign publishes articles calling corporal punishment ineffective and promoting other methods of discipline.

Several studies indicate that religious belief is a better predictor of corporal punishment than socioeconomic status. Features of the larger society, however, may shape religious beliefs or parenting practices. For example, rates of corporal punishment and of religious belief are high in the African-American community. While there may be a causal relationship between those two factors, several scholars have found that racism, urban violence, and high rates of incarceration are causes of corporal punishment among African-Americans. Many of these parents spank their children severely because they want to protect them from street violence and from the punishments of a white power structure.

Critics of corporal punishment say that most injuries and even deaths due to physical abuse of children begin as discipline. Beatings have gone on for hours because children would not apologize or meet another parental demand. Some say that a religious rationale increases the emotional harm done by corporal punishment. Insisting that the physical pain comes because of love and that a supernatural being has ordered it compounds the assault on the child’s sense of self. The parent’s love is conditioned upon stripping the child of will.

Critics also point out that hitting children with implements makes the parent less aware of the force being used. They find the claim that parents may win salvation by hitting their children insidious. Some claim that even the conservative Protestants’ emphasis on hitting without anger is harmful. They feel that this religious group has made corporal punishment a ritual in which the parent becomes emotionally detached and irresponsible on the assumption that he is acting as God’s agent.

Furthermore, the doctrines of supernatural evil and original sin may lead adults to believe the child is demon-possessed and to attempt an exorcism. Children have been tortured and killed because of belief in demon-possession.

Most research on the impact of corporal punishment is criticized as unscientific and misleading by proponents or opponents. The many variables involved make scientific conclusions difficult. Elizabeth Gershoff reviewed 88 studies of corporal punishment with 62 years of data and found that corporal punishment was associated with ten negative outcomes for children and the only positive effect was short-term compliance. Robert Larzelere, however, found that corporal punishment confined to loving parents’ infrequently giving toddlers a few swats on the buttocks was beneficial. One study found that persons who believe the entire Bible is literally true have more unrealistic expectations of children and less empathy toward children’s needs than nonliteralist Christians. Another found that fundamentalist Protestants who are involved in their churches spend more time participating in their children’s activities and talking to them than other parents. The quality of the total parent-child relationship influences the impact of corporal punishment.

Public policy

Twenty-nine states prohibit corporal punishment in public schools. Most of them also outlaw it in state-licensed daycare and residential facilities for children. Only two of those states, Iowa and New Jersey, prohibit corporal punishment in parochial and private schools. New Jersey became the first state to abolish corporal punishment in the schools in 1867 and Massachusetts became the second state in 1972.

Many fundamentalists lobby for school personnel to have a legal right to hit children. The trend, however, is to prohibit it in more public schools, partly because of civil liability. In nine of the 21 states that allow corporal punishment by state law, more than half of the students are in school districts that have banned it. In the 1999-2000 school year, Texas had the highest percentage and number of children given corporal punishment by school staff with 73,994 instances. By 2005, however, the school districts of Austin, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and many other Texas cities had prohibited corporal punishment.

Forty Christian schools filed suit to overturn the United Kingdom’s ban on all school corporal punishment, charging that it prevented them from teaching morals to their students and interfered with religious freedom. The European Court of Human Rights and UK courts ruled against them. In South Africa 196 Christian schools brought a similar challenge; the South African Constitutional Court ruled against them.

Given the strength of religious conservatism in the U.S. and the lack of consensus in scholarship, the U.S. is highly unlikely to ban corporal punishment of children by parents in the foreseeable future.

References and Further Reading


Bartkowski, John and Christopher Ellison. “Divergent Models of Childrearing in Popular Manuals: Conservative Protestants vs. the Mainstream Experts.” Sociology of Religion 56, no. 1 (1995): 21-34.

Capps, Donald. The Child’s Song: The Religious Abuse of Children. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.

Dobson, James. The New Dare to Discipline. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1992.

Ellison, Christopher. “Conservative Protestantism and the Corporal Punishment of Children: Clarifying the Issues.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 1 (1996): 1-16.

Ellison, Christopher and John Bartkowski. “Religion and the Legitimation of Violence: Conservative Protestantism and Corporal Punishment.” In The Web of Violence: From Interpersonal to Global, edited by Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz, 45-67. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Ellison, Christopher, John Bartkowski, and Michelle Segal. “Do Conservative Protestants Spank More Often? Further Evidence from the National Survey of Families and Households.” Social Science Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1996): 663-73.

Gershoff, Elizabeth. “Corporal Punishment by Parents and Associated Child Behaviors and Experiences: a Meta-analytic and Theoretical Review.” Psychological Bulletin 128, no. 4 (2002):539-79.

Gershoff Elizabeth, Pamela Miller, and George Holden. “Parenting from the Pulpit: Religious Affiliation as a Determinant of Parental Corporal Punishment.” Journal of Family Psychology 13, no. 3 (1999): 307-320.

Greven, Philip. Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Grille, Robin. Parenting for a Peaceful World. Alexandria, Australia: Longueville Media, 2005.

Hines, Denise and Kathleen Malley-Morrison. Family Violence in the United States: Defining, Understanding, and Combating Abuse. Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage Publications, 2004.

Kimmel, Tim. Grace-based Parenting. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2004.

Larzelere, Robert. “Child outcomes of nonabusive and customary physical punishment by parents: an updated literature review.” Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 3, no. 4 (2000):199-221.

Straus, Murray. Beating the Devil out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families and its Effects on Children. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001.

Whelchel, Lisa. Creative Correction: Extraordinary Ideas for Everyday Discipline. A Focus on the Family book. Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2000.

Whitehurst, Teresa. How Would Jesus Raise a Child? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2003.

Web pages with material on corporal punishment

www.stophitting.org

www.nospank.net

www.jesusonthefamily.org

www.parentinginjesusfootsteps.org

www.religioustolerance.org

www.christian-parents.net

www.corpun.com

[A version of this article appears in Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence edited by Nicky Ali Jackson and published by Routledge.]




While my greatest fear surrounding religion is the tendency of fanaticism to emerge within doctrinaire religious groups of all kinds, which fosters community violence and often war with other groups, I have other complaints as well. I see this kind of thing emerging within the US among Fundamentalist Christians since 9/11 and the influx of various types of Islamic groups into Western societies, and we’re seeing an absolute epidemic of that in the Middle East and other places right now. I’ve had two frequently forwarded emails from a more conservative friend of mine haranguing against these ultimate outsiders the jihadists.

While I do see a genuine potential threat from the possibility of Islamic jihadists making their way here under the guise of escaping ISIS, I think we should let the police, FBI, Homeland Security, etc. deal with them. That is their job, in my view. When radically militant and very "different" religious groups enter the country in large numbers as they have in Germany, France and other European nations, it is impossible to vet individuals sufficiently well to avoid having a national security issue. As a Unitarian liberal, I am only able to relate to people as individuals with differing characteristics, because I don’t believe in group hatred; and I want to avoid buying into the current mood of “conservative” hysteria that is so much in the news. It is entirely possible for lynch mobs and church/mosque/synagogue bombings to occur here. That social reaction to the Islamic threat is equally as dangerous as the enemy we wish to fight off. City neighborhood warfare is not impossible here and it would surely destroy what we hope is civilization.

This particular type of religious extremism in the story above is not as commonplace, luckily, as the anti-Islamic furor of the present. Most Methodists or Baptists would not treat a child of theirs in this way, or at any rate not to such an extreme. It has, however popped up in our country many times down through our history, from the witch burnings at Salem to the White Supremacist “Christian Identity Churches” that are in mainly rural parts of the South and West, and are more closely linked with Fascism than with religion of any recognizable kind.

Unfortunately, extreme Christian groups such as the Word of Life Christian Church are a natural outgrowth of the very common beliefs among Fundamentalist Christians in being saved based on how strongly held the individual’s “faith” is in the exactly repeated and memorized "word of God," in other words the King James Bible. That faith is, as opposed to logic, gentleness, love and individual thought, mandatory for membership. They are indeed “Christian Soldiers marching on to war,” much more than true disciples of the teacher who preached love, acceptance, giving to the poor, helping the sick, and individual introspection.

These groups are a direct result of the much prized guarantee of our “freedom of religion.” Personally, I think our federal and state laws should step in to stop things like this very brutal “punishment” of a teenaged boy who admitted to some sin, perhaps homosexuality or simply fornication. It’s like the Roman Catholic problem with sexual child abuse among the clergy. It isn’t just a “sin,” it is a crime, as these ignorant and unfortunate people the Leonards are finding out. I almost feel sorry for people like that, but not quite. The inculcating of rage, hatred, and violence as the ruling factors in our personalities is something that is, at least halfway, a voluntary personal decision. It makes timid or "disrespected" people feel powerful, and so it is preferable. I would submit, however, that the parents who do something like this were probably treated the same way themselves when they were young, and are as a result mentally disturbed. Mrs. Leonard is described by her lawyer as being unnaturally timid. She has probably been the recipient of similar treatment many times. Much mental illness masquerades as religion.

Sexual sins are generally considered to be the worst by these churches. Their view is really very similar to the Fundamentalist Islamic position on all sexual misbehavior, who have been in the news within the last few years for sometimes stoning a sinner to death in a public place, just as the Jews were about to do to an unnamed woman when Jesus stepped in and stopped them by simply saying “He that is free from sin cast the first stone.” Think, people!!

If any of you feel that I shouldn’t have used the word “themselves” in the paragraph above, go to the following website and look it up. Here, I’ll do it for you:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/themselves

them-selves
[th uh m-selvz, th em-]

plural pronoun

1. an emphatic form of them or they :
The authors themselves left the theater. The contract was written by the partners themselves.

2. a reflexive form of they (used as the direct or indirect object of a verb or the object of a preposition):
They washed themselves quickly. The painters gave themselves a week to finish the work. The noisy passengers drew attention to themselves.

3. (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine himself or the definite feminine herself):
No one who ignores the law can call themselves a good citizen.

4. (used in place of they or them after as, than, or but):
no soldiers braver than themselves; As for the entertainers, everyone got paid but themselves.

5. their usual, normal, characteristic selves:
After a hot meal and a few hours' rest, they were themselves again.

Origin of themselves

1300-50; them + selves; replacing themself, Middle English thamself; see self


Usage note Expand


See myself.