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Paradigm Lost

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About this blog

My experience growing up in the fundie/Reformed/Calvinist community. 

Entries in this blog

The Sin of Christmas

I remember being about two years old (I have a long memory) and watching my dad plug in Christmas lights. That was probably the last year our family celebrated Christmas.  Both my parents grew up celebrating holidays like most of middle-class America, but as they began their slide into fundie-dom they started reading tracts and booklets about the evils of holidays. They believed that Christmas, Easter, and Halloween were evil throwbacks to paganism that had been perpetuated by the Catholics

Lisafer

Lisafer

Close Your Eyes and Think of Jesus

This blog post may be a little more vague than my others, as I'm not sure exactly how much detail I want to get into regarding my personal experience of sexuality as I grew up fundie Calvinist. But I do think it's an important subject, and I've seen so many questions on FJ about different fundies and how they understand and experience sex. I can't speak to each family, of course, but I'm reasonably certain that my upbringing was not far from the fundie norm. So to start: sex education. We d

Lisafer

Lisafer

Calvinism as I Knew It

Calvinism for my family wasn’t just an abstract theological concept. It informed every aspect of our lives, painfully so. The RPCNA, which I grew up in, is definitely Calvinist in their beliefs. They hold the Westminster Confession of Faith as subordinate only to the Bible in terms of doctrine. And the WCF is strictly Calvinist in doctrine. The TULIP acronym is a useful aid to what we believed and what our church believed: ·         Total Depravity: the doctrine that humans are co

Lisafer

Lisafer

H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks

H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks (A comical reference to the hot place, based on the shape of the last two letters)     The Christians I grew up around took Hell pretty darn seriously. They didn’t believe in expiation of sins after death: once you’re dead, you’ve lost your chance, buddy. If you weren’t saved by Jesus before you died, off you go in a handbasket to the hot place. For Reformed Presbyterians, this is compounded by the Calvinist belief that God has already determined who’s hea

Lisafer

Lisafer

Homeschooling

I thought I'd write a blog post about homeschooling, one of the parts of my upbringing of which I have both good and bad memories. To be frank, I'm actually currently homeschooling my own older child (the other is too young yet). I think a lot of the difference between me and my parents lies in why, not as much in how. I'm not doing it to keep my children from the world. I'm not Christian myself, but probably 90% of the public school teachers in this area are. I'm homeschooling because I en

Lisafer

Lisafer

Fig Leaves

When I talk about modesty and how I had to dress in my childhood, I am talking about my experience only. Although the church I grew up in promoted modesty as an ideal, they did not demand a certain dress code or style of clothing. What I grew up with stemmed from the far stricter beliefs of my mother, enhanced by various books and tracts on the subject. My mother did not grow up fundie. I was probably about three or four when she decided that shorts were inappropriate attire—and she took my

Lisafer

Lisafer

Adam and His Pet Dinosaurs

I was raised to believe without question that every word of the Bible was true, breathed from the lips of God and miraculously preserved over thousands of years.  And not just any Bible: the King James Version (Authorized Version) is the preferred, almost idolatrously revered version for a lot of Reformed Presbyterians and other Christian sects. Don’t try to convince a KJV-only believer that there’s anything better than their 17th-century translation! If you can’t understand the antique English

Lisafer

Lisafer

Why I'm Not Pro-Life (Anymore)

I grew up absolutely entrenched in pro-life (or pro-birther) beliefs. I had no doubt whatsoever that abortion was murder. Women who had had abortions had sinned heinously, and abortion providers were basically demons in white coats. My family was pretty quiet about their pro-life stance, though. We were not found protesting clinics or participating in marches. My parents were not demonstrative people, and also not terribly interested in something like abortion that did not directly affect t

Lisafer

Lisafer

Sabbatarianism

Since today is Sunday, I thought I'd make my first real blog post about Sabbath observance in my family of origin. I wrote this a couple months ago, and was waiting for an opportunity to share it with others. Enjoy! Or be appalled...whichever.  In Christian circles, there’s a range of views on the Sabbath and how it is to be observed. Most Protestants agree that the Sabbath is on Sunday, based on the New Testament description of Jesus rising on the first day of the week and Acts 20, verse 7

Lisafer

Lisafer

Introduction

Hi everyone, and thanks so much for welcoming me into the Free Jinger community! I'm very excited to be here. Please pardon any glitches with my new blog, since I'm just learning. To introduce myself: I was born into a large family, and homeschooled all the way through high school. My parents were from fairly normal American middle-class backgrounds, not fundie at all, but over time they became absolutely entrenched in the Christian fundamentalist way of thinking. We attended church service

Lisafer

Lisafer



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      Went here tonight for dinner

      They have a kind of Juicy Lucy called the Blucy - which is a type of Juicy Lucy with blu cheese.  When my mom, sister, brother in law, and niece were up last weekend we went to the 42nd street location in Minneapolis.  Tonight I went to the Como Ave location instead.  Yeah, it hit the spot.
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