GOD in the Sunday Richmond Times-Dispatch

[underpants]

Growing up, Renee Cobb knew only a wrathful God.

She got her idea of a heavenly father from her biological father.

"My father was a minister and well-respected in the community. But what they didn't know was that he was a monster behind closed doors. He was very abusive to me and my mother," said Cobb, a western Henrico resident who travels the world as a conference speaker and corporate trainer.

She also is the founder and president of Woven, which stands for Women of Value in Every Nation. It is an educational organization helping women and their children find and fulfill their destiny or greatness.

The abuse was emotional and physical. Cobb's father called her horrible names in addition to shaking, hitting and burning her, she said. Her father had wanted to have her aborted, she learned years later.

"At night after my father had abused me all day, my little 4-foot-11-inch tall mother would take me on her lap and tell me over and over: 'You are here to change the world,'" recalled Cobb, a member of West End Assembly of God on Parham Road.

"I never had a view of God being anything but wrathful. I didn't have a mother figure of God," she said.

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/lifestyles/2010/nov/14/s-godd14-ar-645081/

[Jackpine Radical]

1. This is very interesting in a horrifying sort of way.

Stockholm Syndrome as the basis for mean-spirited fundamentalism. A projection of Father's traits onto one's conception of God.

I want to make it clear that I don't think all fundamentalists are like this, but certainly a fairly large subset of them seem to be.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Not just fundamentalists

Or at any rate, not just those we call fundamentalists. There's a lot of what the article talks about in traditional Judaism, stemming from, or based on, its inherent view of children and wives as property, the man as lord and master in the home, and the duty of children to be obedient and deferential. When the father is a rabbi of the old school, the situation is that much worse.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Sure. That's where the crazed Christians got most of

their "best" ideas. They seem to be pretty focused on the bloody-minded portions of the Old Testament. I would include some Jews, some Christians, some Muslims, and some Hindus under the rubric of "fundamentalist."