Just Askin'

I Left the Laestadian Revival Movement . . .

I just found this essay online and am very eager to share it with you. It is by a Finnish woman from Ostrobothnia who left the Laestadian faith ten years ago. I hope she finds comfort and healing. I love her candor and sense a kindred spirit.

Here is an excerpt:

It was emphasised at services that it is not about rules, but rather the fact that a Laestadian wants to operate in a certain way. I recall how I preferred to speak about desires, rather than rules. I was pained to read newspaper articles about things that Laestadians “were not allowed to do”. The question was about what I wanted to do or to choose!
But whose desire was it really all about?
I was not asked what I wanted, or what I felt was important. For instance, the negative stance on birth control was taken in the late 1960s at a meeting of preachers, where only men were present.

I knew already at the age of 13 that I did not want to be the mother of a big family. It was not until I was over the age of 20 that I said out loud that I cannot stand the idea of a big family. My friends answered that “you can’t know in advance what it will be like”.
I was supposed to simply trust that God would give me exactly the right number of children, even if I did not use birth control.
I knew that my mind could not handle such an experiment. I simply did not want to become pregnant reluctantly. My thoughts did not find resonance, because they resounded with the voice of reason, not that of faith.

Some felt that faith is that people are encouraged to push their reason aside in big matters. For me rejecting reason would have been an abandonment of my own psyche.
I was not ready to bend at all in the birth control question, or to hide my opinions. The security of the Laestadian community began to turn into insecurity.

Church Attendance & Torture Approval Connection

First I want to thank Ex-FALC for sharing her story. I hope we hear good news soon about her husband's cousin, kidnapped in Mexico.

Following is an article arguing that people are drawn to either authority or partnership (no matter what they call their "beliefs").

What do you think?

"In case you missed it, Pew released survey data showing that the more frequently someone went to church, the more likely they were to approve of torture. (So much for total depravity on the outside.) Church attendance in this case may be a proxy for conservative religious belief. Of the groups surveyed, Evangelical Christians were most likely to think that torture is often or sometimes ok (62%), followed by Catholics (51%), followed by mainline Protestants (46%). Nonbelievers were least likely to agree (40%)."

Does Critical Thinking Prevent Extremism?

In his column today, Nicolas Kristoff says that Islamic scholars are beginning to apply tools of critical scholarship to the Koran. He argues that ultimately scholarship and intellect are one way to fight fundamentalism and intolerance.

But are they?

An excerpt from the article:

n Afghanistan, 300 brave women marched to demand a measure of equal rights, defying a furious mob of about 1,000 people who spat, threw stones and called the women “whores.” The marchers asserted that a woman should not need her husband’s consent to go to school or work outside the home.

In Pakistan, the Taliban flogged a teenage girl in front of a crowd, as two men held her face down in the dirt. A video shows the girl, whose “crime” may have been to go out of her house alone, crying piteously that she will never break the rules again.

Muslim fundamentalists damage Islam far more than any number of Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s inevitably the extremists who capture the world’s attention. But there is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world, and one window into this awakening was an international conference this week at the University of Notre Dame on the latest scholarship about the Koran.

“We’re experiencing right now in Koranic studies a rise of interest analogous to the rise of critical Bible studies in the 19th century,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame professor and organizer of the conference.

And a comment from a reader:

"Absolutely, but note that there is an increasingly large number of "Christians" in the US (and I suppose elsewhere) who decry biblical scholarship as the work of the Devil. They prefer charismatic, uneducated leaders who will open the book to whatever page comes up, read the text that God points their finger to, and lead off from there, as they believe they are then hearing the Word of God, and these people are as increasingly intolerant of any religious views differing from their own as anyone in the Taliban or any other fundamentalist religious group is."

What do you think?

OALC Compared to Wal-Mart

From The Daily News Online:

WOODLAND — A church under construction along Dike Road will be neighbors with a new Wal-Mart Superstore, and besides locations it will share one other thing with the retail giant. Like Wal-Mart, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church is expanding rapidly.

The new 36,000-square-foot sanctuary is the congregation’s third location, adding to churches it already has in Brush Prairie and Battle Ground in north Clark County. The new church will hold up to 1,200 people, making it one of Cowlitz County’s largest houses of prayer.

“Many of the young families ... have been drifting north toward Woodland because of lower property and home values” than Clark County, David Halme, a Battle Ground resident and church trustee, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

The church has been planned for about five years. It’s taken time to raise money for construction, obtain permits and get the 10-acre site annexed into the city, Halme said.

In the past month, a contractor has stacked dirt on the site to compact the ground and make it more stable. The site must settle, and the congregation still is raising money, so construction of the building itself may not start until next year and will take a year to complete. Congregation members will donate most of the labor and materials, cutting the expected $9.5 million costs in half, Halme said.

“It’s wonderful we have the opportunity to do that,” he said.

When the church built its Battle Ground sanctuary, about “99 percent of the work was done by the congregation,” he said.

Halme said the church purchased its land before Wal-Mart announced plans to build nearby, and the church doesn’t mind the close proximity to the box store. Wal-Mart is expected to start building its store in the next couple of months.

Church officials also welcome the opportunity to potentially neighbor a new Woodland High School. The church owns land next to 40-acres owned by the school district to someday house a new school. The school property sits between the church and Wal-Mart property.