Will a Christian stand up for me about this?

Amittai said:

Interesting question, given how little I hear this sort of thing mentioned.

It would be a sort of cross between Abraham's prayer for the inhabitants of a certain city, and St Paul's (with a sacrificial attitude) for the people he had been nurturing.

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Amittai said:

Pardon my semi-inarticulacy earlier, for a fuller picture here are some more thoughts. It appears some of you know what I mean.

At one time, some decent people were allowed to have the upper hand in affairs, who would want ordinary boys and men to have the scope (if their families allowed) to develop their own sense of integrity and their own discretion in what in religious jargon is termed "purity".

Alongside this there were and still are the repressive moralising and finger-pointing involving shaming and put-downs in families and sects.

Enter the goons who use the latter as excuse to undermine the nascent integrity and discretion of those less powerful than themselves (but kid us into swearing they are "empowering" us).

(This was reinforced by the television images being filmed with the hands of a personality out of "camera view" but not out of cameramens' view and knowledge, where they shouldn't have been about the person of girls hardly older than me, in order to simultaneously subliminally and openly degrade them, in relation to largely indifferent "music".)

I've never been comfortable with the sort of hand-wringing, nagging, megaphoning and victim-blaming that has been coming from churches. Nor with the "moral equivalency" that I have witnessed: a clergyman told us he was very nearly as degenerate as us and "regaled" us with an instance of his "fantasies" (turning us into his "confessors") and very strangely has moved to another country.

Sorry I don't have the title of Russ Parker's book any more. What he is talking about, is a kind of intercession - a kind of carrying the world on our shoulders - that I think some denominations used to do, from time to time, a long time ago (last heard of in Austria in 1955).

Click to expand...

Amittai said:

Pardon my semi-inarticulacy earlier, for a fuller picture here are some more thoughts. It appears some of you know what I mean.

At one time, some decent people were allowed to have the upper hand in affairs, who would want ordinary boys and men to have the scope (if their families allowed) to develop their own sense of integrity and their own discretion in what in religious jargon is termed "purity".

Alongside this there were and still are the repressive moralising and finger-pointing involving shaming and put-downs in families and sects.

Enter the goons who use the latter as excuse to undermine the nascent integrity and discretion of those less powerful than themselves (but kid us into swearing they are "empowering" us).

(This was reinforced by the television images being filmed with the hands of a personality out of "camera view" but not out of cameramens' view and knowledge, where they shouldn't have been about the person of girls hardly older than me, in order to simultaneously subliminally and openly degrade them, in relation to largely indifferent "music".)

I've never been comfortable with the sort of hand-wringing, nagging, megaphoning and victim-blaming that has been coming from churches. Nor with the "moral equivalency" that I have witnessed: a clergyman told us he was very nearly as degenerate as us and "regaled" us with an instance of his "fantasies" (turning us into his "confessors") and very strangely has moved to another country.

Sorry I don't have the title of Russ Parker's book any more. What he is talking about, is a kind of intercession - a kind of carrying the world on our shoulders - that I think some denominations used to do, from time to time, a long time ago (last heard of in Austria in 1955).

Click to expand...

Amittai said:

I want to give constructive-minded agnostics a chance to join in this thread but they had better have a better-than-good reason to contradict me.

Exactly 50 years ago, when I and my classmates were aged 14 and we were at a secular state-run school, several new teachers came in and told us, during lessons, we should be having sex before marriage.

This is COMPLETELY different from informal material circulated by us amongst ourselves. I am reporting something that was handed down to us from authority.

Are any Christians going to do what Russ Parker says, "representative confession"?

Click to expand...

Amittai said:

I want to give constructive-minded agnostics a chance to join in this thread but they had better have a better-than-good reason to contradict me.

Exactly 50 years ago, when I and my classmates were aged 14 and we were at a secular state-run school, several new teachers came in and told us, during lessons, we should be having sex before marriage.

This is COMPLETELY different from informal material circulated by us amongst ourselves. I am reporting something that was handed down to us from authority.

Are any Christians going to do what Russ Parker says, "representative confession"?

Click to expand...