I believe many fundies are from severely dysfunctional backgrounds and haven’t worked through their

[raccoon]

Instead, they’ve convinced themselves they now have The Answer. Their parents may have been abusive shitheads, but now, God and Jesus love them and that means they’re worthwhile. They just shove their old issues up under the carpet and Praise God and Jesus.

It’s like putting icing on a dog turd, to quote Stephen King. All the old stuff is still there; it’s just covered up with something prettier. They’re still in a lot of denial. Their excessive religiosity is another form of dysfunction.

[Captain Hilts]

1. That's a gross over-generalization. nt

[raccoon]

2. I said "MANY." nt

[tinrobot]

12. Still a generalization.

[izquierdista]

3. Good observation

The only way it can be seen as a positive is if their previous dysfunction was even worse, like alcoholism or meth use.

[RagAss]

8. Yes...and I have found that it usually is.

[TZ]

4. Most of the fundies I have met actually have really stable

family backgrounds...and therefore have little reason to question the way they were raised...:shrug:

[rrneck]

5. Their world view was

ginned up out of some corporate office somewhere as a mass produced one size fits all humanity; ready made right off the shelf. The more you let somebody else design your motivation for living the less human you are. The less human you are, the more of a tool of the system you become. Selling that kind of religion to kids is no different from selling them cigarettes.

[RagAss]

9. You just gave cigarettes a bad name....

and that ain't easy to do.;-)

[moggie]

6. Don't fundies usually come from fundie families?

It's no great mystery. If your parents are fundies, you're likely to be a fundie. If your parents are liberal Catholics, you're likely to be a liberal Catholic. If your parents are Mormons... etc etc.

[Help_I_Live_In_Idaho]

7. As a therapist I can verify that one.

That is a very good inference. It is indeed about feelings of inferiority and religion of this type is a defense mechanism against the reality that one has to create meaning. It does not actually exist. Religion is a way of creating a reality one can cope with. That is if you don't like truth. If we want truth and we want to evolve we study science.

[ironbark]

10. Many “dog turds” stay in their community of faith

(regardless of how absurd the theology is) because no matter how stinky and dysfunctional they are…the community >still< treats them like sweet divine icing.

There in resides the lesson for any organization/ideology (including atheism) that seeks to grow.

It's called the Golden Rule.

;-)

[Dogmudgeon]

11. Icing on a dog turd?

I think it's more like putting anesthetic on a gunshot wound.

Oh, I don't take issue with either you or King. The "turdliness" of religion is pretty easy to see ... er, smell. I just think that we seriously underestimate how deeply the "need" for religion runs. John Lennon was NOT the first one to say that religion is a painkiller; William James once wrote "The cure for dipsomania (alcoholism) is religiomania."

--d!

[ironbark]

13. A A A? Atheist Alcoholics Anonymous?

An Eleven Step Program?

No ‘Higher Power, as you see it’?

Go for it guys, set one up, I’d love to see how it flies.

;-)

[Dogmudgeon]

15. It already exists -- it's called "Rational Recovery"

--d!

[DeSwiss]

14. The Gospel of Super Jesus

http://thesuperjesus.wordpress.com/">''Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions.''

[Occam Bandage]

16. I don't believe that's realistic.

Fundamentalism is strongly correlated with ethnicity/socioeconomic class/region, and is even more strongly correlated with fundamentalism in both the community and in the family. I really don't think it just so happens that lower-middle-class Southern/Interior-Western Caucasians are significantly more likely than anyone else to have histories of abuse, and that there just happen to be entire families--nay, communities--that are all abused generation after generation.

[maxsolomon]

17. a lot of them are just lazy

it's easier than thinking, or facing the uncertainty of a meaningless existence.