Increasing COVID numbers in the second year of this shit show pandemic
Hospitals running out of vents (again)
Hospitals understaffed
Watching the end of a shitty war and a country falling to religious extremism
A category 4 hurricane hitting the LA coast on the anniversary of Katrina, maintaining a lot of its strength while moving onland to the Northeast
Incompetent Governor and state politicians
Towns being swept away with ~20 dead a couple of hours away
Deaths
Texas effectively banning abortion and SCOTUS remaining silent
We aren’t waking up to a fresh hell anymore. It’s this stale shit that we keep fighting regularly. Honestly, some of these issues are why I left religion and became a liberal.
When I was in bible college, I believed my professors. They were educated, right? They wouldn’t lie to us. They did their own fact checking before they taught us about “Science and the Bible” and “Christian Evidences.”
No, they didn’t. Biases led them to use outdated, retracted, blatantly false information and fed it to us for thousands of dollars a year. I had to take a “course” on something that essentially was a family values class. We read a book about abortion that was a solid 500 pages (or it felt close to that). It said birth control contraceptives like Plan B were abortifacients. Climate change was just a liberal tool to take away our rights. This earth wasn’t our home anyway, and God gave it to us to use until we got to Heaven.
That’s religious trauma. It’s a form of PTSD. It shaped my childhood into part of my 20s.
I left that bullshit once I started taking college courses at a local university (they warn you about getting involved with people/places that create doubt, btw). But I see they’re still running the same playbooks because a decade after I left, Evangelical Christians are still leading people away from common sense laws, public health advisories, and trying to erradicate women’s rights.
I know not all of Christianity (or religion, for that matter) is this way. And some of my former classmates who are still in Christianity have seen how deep we were into what is essentially a cult or cult-like behavior. But we have millions of Americans who are still following this path and it creates not just one issue, but they’re all connected. And unfortunately, the people on that side of the fence are cool with the hell they’ve created for the rest of us.