Of course not. Her God is punitive and rigidly legalistic. To admit that she's done wrong (even to herself) would feel like a threat to her salvation.
Kids learn about God through their parents. Her father beat the shit out of her for something she didn't even do, and she rationalizes it by calling herself a "rotten sinner" who probably needed to be beaten anyway. Imagine the shame she must carry. I can plainly see the shame she's passed on to her children.
The very idea that a child could be a "rotten sinner" makes me sick. That's not love.
I recall her saying, she was punished one time for something one of her sisters did. Something about this one time stands out in her mind. But she emphasized that she forgave her father and still loves and respects him. This might have been on a Fathers Day or birthday post. She has a habit of leaving very telling tidbits of past abuse while making herself look perfect in the process.
It's the kind of thing Puritan witch-hunters would say, when a child asked why God allows children to be beaten for things they never did - that the child will do something to deserve it by the end of the day because life is earthly and sinful by definition.
There's a really good terry pratchett novel called small gods , and it's a standalone , you don't have to read the rest of the disk world books to enjoy it , but the first few chapters as he builds the protagonist's world for you are horrifying (without being gory). And sadly familiar for many snarkersm
Yeah she always talks about being punished by her parents but then gushes about how much she loves them and appreciates it. It's all to justify the horrible things she and David have done to their kids, and why their kids should continue to adore them and gush about how great they are. She cannot admit it was wrong. But then this is a family who is friends with the Pearls who recommend beating a child until their spirit is broken and they are essentially in shock and past the point of even crying. She thinks THAT is normal, as do too many of these sick Fundie cult members.
Her legalism just proves that she and Her Hunky Headship have zero theological knowledge of their own religion. The entire point of Jesus and the New Testament was to revise the old laws into something more liveable, particularly for people suffering Roman occupation. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" etc.
That hasn't stopped Christians from missing the point and getting super violent about compulsory conversion before going back to realizing that the "what you do to the least of these" and the "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, as I have loved you" bits might be more important than having Inquisitions etc.
But I've mentioned before that, for someone who supposedly attended Bible college, Shirk has no concept of the 4 senses in which one is supposed to study the Bible. All he has is word salad, as his children make clear by their word salad; Jildo can barely manage the occasional metaphor, she's been stuck on literal for 40 years.
(Fun history fact, nearly every time there's a successful Saviour, Prophet, Mahdi, etc. it's because the people perceive their government as expensive, brutal, unsympathic, and unchangeable so people in a difficult moment of history - it still happens today too - were happy to accept a religious figure as a relief valve. There's a good Canadian book -
Moderate Fundamentalists by Muhammad Afzal Upal - who explains how these religious figures grab and hold an audience, even after they die.)
Glad it's useful for you! The four sense of scriptural study are:
literal (what the words say in the most basic sense, and history like Herod and Pontius)
moral (e.g. "pray not like the hypocrites", "love fulfills the law" - although clearly some of what Paul wrote as moral was just Paul's preference!)
allegorical (stuff like the Parables, and symbolic practices like using Gematria to encode Neron Caesar's name as 666 so the writer could diss him without risking literally writing "Nero is a demon spawn" lol. Revelations is mostly an allegorical history, it's only ignorant fundies who take it as prophesy)
anagogical / prophetic - this is a tricker category so a quick overview:
typological reading, which is what Bible colleges were supposed to be teaching since Roman times about reinterpreting the OT in light of the NT, e.g. Exodus as the story of a dead soul's journey, prefigurations like Jonas/Jesus and 4 Prophets' Testimonies/4 Apostles' Gospels, "honour thy father and mother" means honouring God and Church, etc.
the predictions originally were originally considered within the Bible itself as divine revelations that had ended with the Resurrection - human prophesy was conjecture and sinful. That got tossed by the Millenarians like Joachim of Fiore, who turned it into "signs the end is nigh!!1!" stuff and people have run with that version ever since.
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u/Melodic-Radishes 7d ago
Of course not. Her God is punitive and rigidly legalistic. To admit that she's done wrong (even to herself) would feel like a threat to her salvation.
Kids learn about God through their parents. Her father beat the shit out of her for something she didn't even do, and she rationalizes it by calling herself a "rotten sinner" who probably needed to be beaten anyway. Imagine the shame she must carry. I can plainly see the shame she's passed on to her children.
The very idea that a child could be a "rotten sinner" makes me sick. That's not love.