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LINK Paige Patterson, Southern Baptist leader, pushes back about saying abused women should pray, not divorce - The Washington Post

This story is appalling and makes me agree with Hitchens that "religion poisons everything". Patterson, the head of a large SB seminary and a major player in the SB convention, tells this story about how he handles a woman coming to him for help with spousal-abuse: He tells he to pray and submit to her her husband. She comes BACK with two black eyes and says, "Are you happy now?" His response? "Yes, I am, because I saw your husband in church this past Sunday!" (This was caught on TAPE.) Un-fucking-believable!

BookDeath 8 Apr 30
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4

We need an "angry" button

Yeah, after all we unbelievers are just angry anyway according to many believers, so might as well live up to their expectations 😉

@mordant domestic abuse is never ok, I don't care what the religitards think about it

3

I'm sure he was really thinking that he was going to get some extra in the collection plate being the husband was there and maybe feeling a bit guilty. I hate these people.

3

I was in my first marriage for 15 years, which is 14.5 years longer than necessary (ignoring that it was a dumb idea to begin with) and I owe this to similar teachings to what you're citing here. There's a general divorce taboo, then there's the general fantasy of being a "one woman man", then there's little nostrums and sayings such as "god makes even a wrong marriage right". The latter suggests that if you have enough faith in god (or if you're a woman, enough submission to your husband as your primary expression of faith in god) that somehow everything ends up righting itself. It's the very definition of magical thinking.

Then there was the general deep suspicion of mental health care, which my wife very much needed. That suspicion in turn validated her own personal tendency to resist submitting to and complying with treatment. Here was a woman with paranoid schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, getting no encouragement from the church to take care of herself. And in fact being at times offered insanely unhelpful things like exorcism.

These completely unrealistic and illogical notions had me ramming my head into brick walls and taking a heapin' helpin' of emotional abuse. And to an extent, it damaged my children. So yeah, it's un-fucking-believable but true.

One of the most cogent things that ever came out of the mouth of any pastor I sat under back in the day was, "bad theology is a hard taskmaster". What he didn't understand is that there IS no GOOD theology. In fact theology isn't even a real discipline that has any connection to the real world. Religious faith is a failed epistemology, period.

But it IS true that it's a hard taskmaster. It keeps people rejecting reason, evidence, facts, and experience. Until eventually, a few like myself, after they are sufficiently savaged and diminished, come staggering out of that hideous system.

2

What a vicious, cruel demagogue. He should be tarred and feathered!!

2

I cannot even comprehend the wrongness to that entire dodge. You do not care about the people involved. You only care about making yourself and your association, business, church look good.You are perpetuating hell and not the santised storybook one into this and other generations. My first husband came back from Vietnam broken and violent. When I was advanced into my pregnancy he extended his paranoia to the baby saying I put it over him. That was when the Red Cross and military superiors advised me to stand by him and his colleagues advised me to get the hell out before the emotional became physical. I took my next spousal check and got out of Fort Sam.

2

I wonder how much this jerk abuses his wife? So what will he say when tRump's wife divorces him (which has been shown as a real possibility). Oh, of course it will be all her fault.
When will women learn that most evangelic religions are totally paternalistic and there is little room for them?

1

That's the kind of thing you get with 2000 years of teaching women are second-class citizens

1

How about if they get Guns?! As a former battered woman myself, blowing their head off is the only 100% effective way to insure that they will not kill you and your family!

1

Paige sounds like she has absolutely zero moral sense.

@BookDeath

I see that we're on the same "Paige", but not on the same line 😉

1

Further proof that religion is garbage.

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