"This is a forum in which survivors may express and discuss their spiritual journey as it relates to the abuses they’ve encountered. Posters are encouraged to share in first person narrative how spirituality or “spiritual” persons positively or negatively impacted their life, abuse situation, and/or healing journey. Discussions on a wide range of spiritual topics or belief structures are also welcome.

MaleSurvivor recognizes that a survivor’s spiritual journey is often times something he holds very close and dear. Because of that it is asked that all postings in this forum be made with consideration and respect for other users. Statements that marginalize ANY group or belief structure, or remarks that specifically demean or otherwise target them for criticism, will be subject to editing or removal by the moderators."
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Translation: Speak freely about your beliefs, so long as you can figure out a way to do it without anyone holding contrary beliefs feeling contradicted and thus "marginalized", "demeaned" or "targeted" " for critisism.

Lot's of luck atheists. Alright, I'm not saying you always have to slam another belief system to talk about your own, .. but, how do you suppose an atheist such as myself would "share in first person narrative how spirituality or “spiritual” persons positively or negatively (underline mine) impacted their life, abuse situation, and/or healing journey" without making statements that could be seen as ones that " marginalize ANY group or belief structure, or remarks that specifically demean or otherwise target them for criticism"?

Tell me what the MaleSurvivor politically correct way would be to say that i was as much hurt by the shame and fear of Christianity as i was by my abuse and that the two re-enforced each other. How would i go about rephrasing that so that Christians reading it somehow do not think of it as in any way critisizing their cherished beliefs?

Beliefs can be precious to us, but if we really believe those beliefs, words can not threaten them....that's why people and their need to communicate freely about whatever they need to in order to help them recover should, in my opinion be more important than popular belief systems being "sacred cow" subjects.

Hopefully my "Thread For Spiritual Minorities" in the "Open Forum" will be more able to reflect these priorities.

Christianity never hurt anyone but Christians. There are many sad SOB's that call themselves Christians who are in fact evil. Gives everyone a bad name. Try addressing the persons specifically and their actions or behavior with out attacking the the whole group. Lets face it God has some strange and funny kids. I don't blame you a bit for being an atheist. I have been atacked by atheists but I prefer to respond only to those specifec people and not the belief as a whole. Generalities get one into much trouble. I am sorry for you pain.

blueshift,

The basic issue here is that we are a community dedicated to facilitating the recovery of men and boys from childhood sexual abuse. Our guidelines are formulated with that aim in mind, and our policy is to ask guys to talk about triggery topics such as religion/atheism in terms of what they think and feel and to avoid criticisms presented as fact rather than opinion.

For example, a statement like "men of faith are idiots" will not be allowed under any circumstances, but nor will similar statements about atheists. Which (if either) of these two viewpoints is correct is not our concern as moderators; the problem is that such statements invite not reasonable discussion about abuse issues but bitter arguments that compound the feeling of emotional turmoil that already troubles many guys coming here. This is not something we can encourage.

Entirely different, however, would be a statement like this: "I have never been able to understand how guys who are sensible in every other way could ever become religious." This statement is different because it allows for a reasonable reply and a dialog among differing points of view.

Also please bear in mind that this site cannot be made a venue for an endless battle over the merits or faults in either religion or atheism as such. There are plenty of sites for that elsewhere. Here our interest is in how various forms of religion or religious expression, including a rejection of religious expression, has figured in our abuse issues in the past and in our recovery in the present. For the record, your statement:



strikes me as perfectly okay as it stands. But you are likely to receive responses suggesting that the shame and fear came not from Christianity but from those falsely claiming to speak and act in its name, and you would have to respect the right of other guys to say that, just as you have the right to state your side of the issue.

By way of general information to all those interested in this topic, please bear in mind the following:

* Providing a trigger warning does not release a user from following forum guidelines.

* Statements like "I need to say this for my healing" do not release a user from following forum guidelines.

* If you feel you have been personally attacked do not respond in kind. Take the issue to a moderator and we will look into it for you. That's why we are here.

* The ModTeam consists almost entirely of survivors like yourselves who have their own abuse issues, families, jobs, worries, etc., and we are spread out over 11 time zones around the world. We cannot promise we will get things right every time or from the very first moment, but we do keep working at it.

I cannot overstress the fact that this site is not a venue for general campaigns on other subjects, however presented. Those who feel the need to speak out on such matters of course have the right to do so, and the opportunities for that are endless in cyberspace. But here it should be anticipated that the need for guys to be able to talk about their abuse issues in an atmosphere of safety and brotherhood will take precedence.

Much love,
Larry

Hey Blueshift i consider myself athiest and i apreciate not being the only one here!

But i think for us to be taken seriously we must find ways to talk about religion without just sounding like we are atacking it out of anger. we must have every single thing we say backed up by undisputed facts.... and also i don't think it is appropriate here to confront those that disagree with us simply because they disagree with us. We do have a responsibility though to defend our beliefs and expect the truth from other peoples.

We can have a very good discussion here on our beliefs and how our abuse has effected them.

with my above statement still ringing true i do think we can have an open discussion here.

Roger how can you say Christianity has only ever hurt other Christians? The catholic church for example is responsible for loads of bad stuff that happened and continues to happen to those that don't agree with there belief's.

The LEADERS of the Catholic church at times were bastards. No doubt about it. But I have no problems with catholics per se. We have to start addressing and hold accountable the People whose actions betray the tenets of their faith. String em up or do whatever you want to with them. Punish or attack or what ever you are comfortable doing with people whose behavior is evil or malicious regardless of what name in which they perform their meanness. Why is this such a hard concept?

There are people who behave well and people who behave badly. Regardless of the flag they happen to be flying. Believe me Chris, No one has a corner on persecution. I know.

Also there are good institutions run badly by well meaning people and vice versa. What shall we do? We don't need better laws. We need better people. This is what this site is all about. Turning bad into good by helping people rehabilitate themselves from what bad people have done to them.

You Chris, are a great expample of that. I so admire the progress you have made in spite of the sad start you had to life. To become side tracked with critisizing atheist, christians, muslims, jews, gays, straights etc. does nothing but further separate us from our goal of uniting and helping each other heal.

Sure I don't agree with everyone but everyone has a right to his or her beliefs and I would prefer to focus on our common pain and its solutions and then when more centered and less sensitive and defensive from our various wounds go out into the world in a better frame of mind to address these other issues.


Finally, the christian beliefs have been the cause of many a christians death, torture and maim even to this day. In that sense a belief in christianity has hurt the christian who is asked to lay down his life. There is no argument that people in power in the christian institutions have misused that power to kill, torture, amd main in the name of God.

That says nothing in my mind about God. It says a lot of negative things about people with to much power. People in power in the United States Government had done some horrendous atrocities over the years. Should we denounce and nuke the whole country? I think not. Again no one has a corner on stupidity and ignorance. Not even the christian chruch. Trust me Chris it is spread fairly evenly around the globe.

Hey Roger i want to continue this discussion with you in PM i think were going off topic i am leaving now though so i will pm you later or talk to you about in Chat

I don't want to quarrel over beliefs or criticize anyone's religion, but nor do i want to sweep something under the diplomatic rug that deeply hurt me. It still hurts me, just like the sex abuse and keeping hush about it won't make it better.

You don't have to agree with what I say and your welcome to voice your disagreements, but to limit what i can say to only what is noncritical of other's religions limits my ability to help myself recover and protects you from .....what? Criticism of your beliefs? Personally, i want my beliefs criticized if it's real criticism an not just some mindless attack.

But if you don't want to hear it, great! read another forum and let me and like minded people talk about it! Because that's what i'm here for, if anything, to have meaningful discussion about becoming a whole person again.

But it's hard enough to talk about it without trying to keep it all worded up in nice pretty accepting-of-Christianity package. I don't want or expect others to tread carefully lest they say something critical of my beliefs and don't feel it's good for me to have to do it either. That's just the way i feel.

The reason i'm so hung up on this whole freedom of speech issue is that i just don't know how to go about talking about how the religious ideas that i was taught played into my abuse, without saying critical things about religious ideas! And i don't know how i can really help myself if i can't talk freely to someone about that stuff!


So limiting my freedom of speech limits this site's usefulness to me as a tool for healing.

It's as simple that really.

To tell you the truth, TK, i don't think it matters much,(at least to me) how seriously we atheists are taken by believers, as long as we are able to talk each other and support each other, that's what matters to me...but if all us atheists are just trying to keep our mouths shut about our own ideas for fear of offending someone with different ones, then it we have what looks like a disagreement acceptance problem. Disagreements are part of having discussions.

I agree that confronting everyone who says something we disagree with can be counterproductive....sidetracking the issue in question with argument about something said is annoying, but ultimately i have no problem with anyone saying anything here short of blackmail, threats, or malicious deceit. And i don't really feel any responsibility to defend my beliefs....but I do feel a responsibility to defend my right to talk about them and everyone elses right to talk about theirs.

I don't think the Site Guidelines are terribly unreasonable, but the part about not holding any group or set of beliefs up to criticism is something that directly hinders my ability to talk about/work on my issues of religious shame tied up with my abuse. To even say that last sentence, technically is violating the guidelines because to say that i have issues of religion based shame is implying criticism of a religion.

I can probably get away with a lot by over-repeating the phrases " in my opinion " and "I feel" or "I think" to qualify everything as being only my opinion, but that can be awkward and cumbersome when most of the time it's already taken for granted that you are only voicing your own point of view.

I donno. I'll keep trying it out here. I do appreciate that there are other atheists like you who stick it out here. It makes me feel like trying to also.

One of the problems with the discussion about believers and Atheism is that Athiest discussions tend to comprise mostly of saying "this.. is why I don't believe in god" and alot of the "this" is the hypocracy seen in religion or it's followers.
Seems that no matter what an Athiest says about his reason's it will be taken as an attack on believers. Atheism isn't a religion, were a group that discusses why religion is a fallacy to us. Our belief's are just an idea to be discussed, they centre more around what we don't believe in that what we do.

I posted a video in a discussion about religion, it was a video of a horrible Christian person spouting off all kinds of ugly things and she had to be the most intolerant person I've ever seen in my life. Instead of her getting denounced by real and good Christians all I got was "oh great, more stereo types of Christians". They still wouldn't denounce this grotesque person, they didn't really defend her but they did in a way by intimating that I shouldn't have posted the video. Somehow I was saying that all Christians were just like her.

What I felt was the same silence from Muslims about terrorism and the black community about violence. They would rather stand together with terrorists and murders than denounce their own kind. Seems pretty secularist and........static to me. Better to shoot the messenger than admit the problems.

I don't feel like I can have a discussion on Atheism, period.

Stay strong
Mike