Church Taking Action

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,469928,00.html

http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Church_Extortion.pdf

The first link is to the article, and the second link is to the pdf of the letter from the church to Rebecca Hancock. You'll love this one, Matt. The woman (in her 40s) is divorced, and has a boyfriend, and is having sexual relations with him outside of marriage. She talked about it with a mentor from the church, and that person went into a three-step discipline process the church used in the time of Jesus. They tell the elders, then they tell a few witnesses, and lastly they tell the whole congregation about her sins, thus humiliating her into stopping it and repenting. She's tried, unsuccessfully, to leave her boyfriend 10 times. She left the church (non-demoninational) after the 2nd step, but they warned her they'd do the 3rd step on Jan. 4 '09 even though she left.

The letter itself is really interesting. I've never heard of people in a church doing this recently. The churches I've been in haven't really made issues like these public. The only personal stuff they would bring up would be praying, "Such-and-such is sick", and would pray for more personal stuff only if that person requested it. It's also weird that the church would continue with the discipline even though the woman left the church. I guess, they thought that she's still a Christian who needs their help (in the form of discipline through humiliation). When she told her mentor about her sinning, I guess she didn't expect him to go, "Ok, stop what you're doing, or eventually everyone in the church will know about it."

I don't even know how I can respond to this without completely tearing apart the whole "sex should only be done in marriage" bit that religion loves to throw out there...but I will because that's the kind of asshole I am.

See, this is interesting. Any creature on earth capable of reproduction goes about and has sex with just about anything that looks like itself of the opposite sex. Humans, being creatures of this earth, are no different. Or at least, we were no different until people began to, for whatever reason, claim that sex is immoral. Sex in public I will agree is immoral (no one needs to see that) but sex in private, as in between you and your loved one (or even a very good friend that you care about deeply...technically loved one based upon your personal definition), is alright simply because it is essentially the only way of showing a "true bond" between you and your loved one. Religion essentially took this a step further saying sex should only be between two people of opposite sex (depending on the religion as some don't explicitly state it) that are married. Marriage is an interesting concept people came up with since animals don't exactly get married, or at least we don't exactly know that since we can't communicate with animals. It's also another way of separating ourselves from animals, as animals for all we know just have sex with whatever in order to reproduce.

I'm kind of getting off topic but not really. This is part of the reason I really don't like religion simply because some of the basic aspects of life in general (as in not just humanity but every living creature) are regarded as sin unless you have some elaborate ceremony that might as well say "these two people will now live together forever and can now do what they were created to do in the first place because we say it's ok!"...and by "created" I mean the whole concept of male and female...reproduction...whatever.

One thing I also noticed...isn't getting a divorce a sin? I mean, if the church is going to go all out in making her life hell for having sex with a man (and only that one for the time being, essentially making him her husband since she claims to love him and that's all it takes for a man to become a husband if the definition is to be believed), why didn't they make her life hell when she got divorced? I mean, the whole "till death do us part" bit might as well have caused the church to gather up a mob and hunt her and her ex-husband down and murder them since that's the only way a religiously married couple can effectively divorce right?

Sometimes I wonder why people go to such great lengths to deny others happiness...true happiness, I mean. Not sick twisted happiness that psychopaths get when they kill/torture/rape people. That's just fucked up.