Reply #25: Well, I used to be able to say

[hyphenate]

it was all the idiots out there like Falwell, Robertson, Graham and their ilk. But it's not. My now former best friend, Barb, went fundie several years ago and has grown more and more nuts. I've written about her in GD, but just this month she went down to Kentucky to meet this guy she'd been corresponding with for six months, and she married him the first day, August 1. She didn't tell anyone except her daughter--the rest of her family was left completely in the dark, and I only found out about it when she and I went on our camping trip the last week in July. I told her if she was going to marry this idiot, I wanted nothing else to do with her, and I told her she was a fool. He's been married three times already, and supposedly runs his own ministry at the local prison.

So, yeah; I have had to deal with it on a continuing basis. There was also someone on another board I knew who was as fundie as you can get--middle class, Bible college, her father is a doctor who works with people like Randall Terry.

Barb swallowed the whole shebang. She is/was an intelligent woman who worked in the school system, but since her "rebirth" she has come to disrespect anyone who doesn't share her newfound views. She spits out the word "secular" as though it were a swear, and brands me an "evolutionist and believer in abortion." To me, those aren't a big deal, but to her, it's anathema.

She's tried to tell me that evolution is the devil's way of testing God's believers, because the devil put all the fossils there, and that the earth really is only 10,000 years old. She says that the Rapture is coming and only those who have accepted God will be taken. She believes every single word in the bible as literally from the lips of Jesus, and that nothing else matters. She's gotten tattoos on various parts of her body, including one on her neck with the word "adhonai" there, and across her whole back, all related to Jesus and God. And heaven forbid that you say "goddamn" in front of her!

Anyhow, I decided that I couldn't deal with her narrow-mindedness anymore and her complete self-involvement, and even though we've been friends for 22 years, she obviously didn't care enough to let me know what was going on in her life, so I said goodbye. I needed to give myself a break from all the drama she had contributed to it at one time or another, and life might ease up some now that I've decided to free up the portion formerly devoted to Barb and her piousness.