I have a confession/situation

hope-for-a-waking-dream:

All my life I’ve believed in god and been forced to go to church and pretty much overwhelmed by it all and now I’m sick of it, so fucking sick of it. I don’t know how to tell my dad that I’m pretty much agnostic and have been for awhile, he’ll be all disappointed and shit :/

Help.

Hey, since this is an open ended question, I thought I’d throw you some advice.

First off, if you think there’s any threat to your safety, like if your dad is abusive or will throw you out of the house or create an emotionally unstable environment for you, don’t tell him. You’re 17. You’ll be grown and out of his house before you know it. However, if this is a conversation you really feel you need to have with your dad and you’re confident that your safety and your relationship with him will remain stable, I suggest you have that conversation with yourself first. Ask what you believe and why. Ask yourself what you think the term “belief” means. When you think you’ve figured out your position well enough to explain it, wait for the right opportunity. Catch your dad in a reflective, open-minded, introspective mood and mention something about how you don’t really think all this god stuff passes the smell test. It’s not an assault on him as a person or a parent, you’re not saying he’s wrong or dumb or a bad dad (make that clear, because he may be offended. Religions specifically try to make people think that the religion is part of who they are, but it’s not) you’re just saying that your worldview just doesn’t have room for something so clearly fabricated or, at least, so poorly justified.

Would it perhaps soften the blow to explain that you have a moral gauge that seems to work for you in spite of pretending to be convinced of a magical spirit from a supernatural dimension? If your dad really thinks you need a book to dictate morality, I recommend Aesop’s Fables. It holds up quite a bit better than the Bible and, for my money, it’s more entertaining, too.

Slimeball Cardinal Keith O'Brien resigns as Archbishop amid sexual misconduct allegations →

Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric, Scotland’s Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has resigned his position as archbishop of Edinburgh and St. Andrews amid allegations of “inappropriate behavior” just days before he would have taken part in the conclave to elect the next pontiff.

…

O’Brien was had been taking advice from lawyers after British newspaper The Observer reported that three priests and a former priest had filed complaints to the Vatican alleging that the cardinal approached them in an inappropriate manner.

Coward Pope probably resigned in scandal after all →

Reports coming out of Italy suggest that the pope decided to call it quits not because of his old age but instead to avoid the fallout that could come from a secret 300-page dossier compiled by three cardinals he tapped to look into last year’s leak of confidential papers stolen from his desk.

Those papers, widely known as the “VatiLeaks,” raised questions of financial impropriety and corruption at the Vatican. The investigation that followed, however, may prove even more uncomfortable for church officials.

Scientists use 3-D printing to help grow an ear, make-believe gods have yet to replace any missing body parts →

Scientists at Cornell have put 3-D printing to an incredible medical use: They’ve made an ear remarkably similar to a natural one. Using 3-D images of a human ear, they printed a mold to be injected with gel containing collagen from rats’ tails, HealthDay reports. Next, they added cartilage from cows’ ears.

Scientology’s worst enemy

thegodlessatheist:

Already plagued by scandal, the church is getting punched in the gut with another harrowing exposé — this time, by the niece of its leader, David Miscavige

At the age of 6, most kids are learning their numbers and playing with blocks. According to Jenna Miscavige Hill, she was hauling rocks on a chain gang in the desert.

“We would get the rocks out of a running creek,” says the slight, 29-year-old blonde. “And it was freezing cold. A lot of times our uniforms didn’t fit us, because we were growing kids, so we’d be wearing shorts in the winter. We’d have to go into the creek bed and pick up the rocks. We’d either have a chain where we would pass them to another kid, or we’d just carry them all the way up, and we would make rock walls.”

Hill is the niece of David Miscavige, the current leader of the Church of Scientology. Her parents, Ron and Blythe Miscavige, were officials in the prestigious Sea Organization, which required its members to work 14-hour days, and Hill and her brother largely grew up in the care of church members at a desert school for high-ranking Scientologists’ kids in San Jacinto, Calif., known as the Ranch.

A Scientologist until her early 20s, Hill is now releasing a memoir, “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape,” which chronicles her “education” inside the L. Ron Hubbard-founded organization many have described as a cult. The Post spoke with Hill about the book and her memories of the bizarre experiences she had being raised as a Scientologist — starting with signing a billion-year contract with the Sea Org at the age of 7 — and her eventual decision to leave and help others do the same.

“At the age of 10, I was the medical liaison,” Hill says. “Every morning, I would have to go around to all the kids at the Ranch and say, ‘Do you have any sickness?’ And I’d make a list of yeses and nos. I would make vitamin packages for everyone for every meal, and make this Cal-Mag [calcium and magnesium] drink that Hubbard invented.

“It doesn’t taste good,” she adds. “It tastes like feet.”

If a child flunked daily room inspection, he or she would receive a “chit.” On the third chit, she says, “you can’t go to sleep until you pass a white-glove inspection. On the fifth, you get assigned to ‘Pigs Berthing,’ a run-down room with a mattress on the floor. There weren’t any lights, so you had to use a flashlight. And there were bats in there. My friend got sent — she was about thirteen.”

One of the steps of Scientology, Hill says, was purifying the body from supposed toxins. As Hubbard had taught that drugs clouded the mind and prevented it from attaining clarity, even children had to be detoxed. Because Hill had taken Tylenol while in the hospital when she was little, and had Novocaine at the dentist, she was sent to Purification.

Pope Benedict XVI Says He Will Resign →

Pope Benedict XVI, 85, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who took office in 2005, said on Monday that he will retire Feb. 28, the first pope to do so in six centuries, citing deteriorating health.

Alternate headline: World’s leading molester underground railroad advocate steps down.

Evangelism’s secret history of racial discrimination - Salon.com →

[W]hat galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed.

What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation. In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.”

Salon shows the history of how the political arm of Evangelical Christianity, as you might have suspected, is nothing but a veil for racists to try to push segregation and keep minorities oppressed.