All of them
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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Asklemmy
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I've got a bunch of horror stories that take some detail to explain, but I remember a couple moments of shock in particular.
Was actually a Methodist service, Easter Sunday. it was when they cut a baby lamb's throat and it bled. It was great special effects with a real lamb but children started crying.
Also, the time we all went to see Passion of the Christ, 9:00 or 10:00pm showing. There was a mother smacking the shit out of her toddler for crying when the torture started. I'm a different person now and would put a stop to something like that now.
I ripped one on a pew during a Christmas eve service once
The one when it was my job to carry the crackers for communion up to the alter. About a half dozen slid off the plate when I turned.
Nothing stands out in particular, they were all pretty dull. Haven't attended one ever since I was 16 and could make my own choices.
Oh my God this brought back a memory. It was probably the time my friend invited me to their church and expected me to speak in tongues. Like wouldn't let me leave until I was filled with the spirit and speaking in tongues. It was terrifying.
Can you type out a longer, detailed play-by-play so we can eat popcorn as we read it?
It was so long ago, I remember being surprised that such a regular girl belonged to such a terrifying church, I guess if you grow up in it, it seems normal?
We arrived with her parents and sat towards the middle of the pews, there was the usual call and response and singing and a sort of sermon I don't remember but then one by one the people in the audience started standing up and babbling. Then my friend did and their parents and the pastor was exhorting us that EVERYONE needed to submit and be filled with the spirit, EVERYONE!! Who, me? EVERYONE! I stood up and made some nonsense sounds and that seemed to satisfy them. I was congratulated and hugged and then there was some more churchy stuff not so crazy.
I mostly remember being scared, and also being so confused that this was "church" to my friend. My mom made us go to "church" and it was guys in robes and some singing, a sermon, some praying, a little more singing, a benediction (really pretty - "May the Lord bless you and keep you, may he make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you") and then walk out in an orderly fashion. Mostly really boring, not scary because I didn't believe any of it.
But to her, "church" was this mass of people being crazy and babbling and the preacher yelling, and it never, like, coalesced into order, it was literally a pack of shouting mostly adults, who seemed convinced this was an essential sign that God was speaking directly through you.
The sign said, "Everybody welcome, Come in, kneel down and pray"
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, I didn't have a penny to pay!
So I got me a pen and a paper, and I made up my own little sign.
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me, I'm alive and doin' fine".
Woooooaaah!
When I was like six or seven years old, my great aunt Ruth stayed over Christmas eve. She was a nun, so because it was important to her, we were going to open all of our Christmas presents after mass.
Mass was almost three hours. I remember this pretty clearly because I had a cheap casio wristwatch and I was timing it. I probably didn't hear a word of the sermon.
Making kids wait ~~to~~ and do anything but open presents on Christmas day is criminal, imo.
My grandmother's funeral comes to mind. Some old preacher dude walks up to the podium with a legal pad, flips over a page, drops the "we're at a funeral, act somber" body language like you'd drop a bath robe, and starts what I assume is an average Sunday sermon, occasionally remembering to point to the corpse behind him and insisting "That's what she believed."
He had the gall to offer his hand for me to shake.
"Heh, sure are easy when they're stiff like this! ...and very sad." (one of the treehouse of horror episodes)
Not church per se, but my uncle blew his brains out. At the wake, the priest turned his little speech into how evil abortion is. Yes, let's talk about killing babies... Anything not to tell about the dude who killed himself.
This is a grand example of how people in such positions, are prone to making any and every moment about something that's been on their minds when it really shouldn't be.
(Sorry for your loss. That must have really hurt to get the news.)
All of them. But specifically this one place my parents took me to that just started speaking in tongues right in the middle of the sermon. This went on for like, half an hour, everyone just flailing around and speaking in "tongues", which was just them making up a bunch of gibberish.
My dad said it wasn't a great service.
He's right, it was the worst.
Also, that, plus many other stupid and incongruent moments led to my exodus from the church, and religion as a whole.
I'm much happier now, not being forced to attend these silly wastes of time that are church sermons.
Went to a wedding and the pastor's pre-ceremony sermon was fire and brimstone followed by a rant about how it was God who gave him the right to marry, not the state. Lots of stuff about the wife being subservient to the husband and acting as his servant. The deep state government was being controlled by a satanists who call themselves secular humanists. Marriage can only happen between a man and a woman and the state was defiling marriage by allowing gays to marry, but it wasn't real marriage according to God. Some really wacky stuff to talk about at a celebration. Killed the mood.
Turns out my friends had joined one of those extreme, right-wing cults and this was their normal pastor. This group was worse than any of the usual bad actors and interacting with any of their congregation was weird. We fell out of touch for some reason.
Reminds me of my great aunt's funeral.
So I come from a muslim(ish?) background, but no one in my family or extended family goes to mosque or anything, or says "selam aleykum" everytime we meet (we just say "merhabalar" (i.e. 'hello')). It's just a cultural thing. Most cultural christians want a priest at a funeral, and most cultural muslims want an imam.
Anyway, back to my great aunt's funeral. The imam was there, doing the prayer in arabic because that's what you do, even though no one could understand what he was saying. At one point however, he switched to a language that we could understand, and it was very clear he was telling us that we were bad people and bad muslims for not attending mosque, and that our aunt will pay the consequences of our failings.
Needless to say, at the next few funerals we went with a different imam. A nicer one. One who understands that religion is not a key aspect of many people's lives, but that spirituality in times of distress can be a great comfort.
That first imam, kicking the family while y'all were already down. :/
When i was six i had to sit in my own poop for an hour long sermon because nobody would let me get up to go. Course they also had to sit in it with no reaction heh
That is outright neglect. That level of strictness is just ridiculous. If they really wanted you to sit and listen, and take the sermon seriously, you certainly can't do that while sitting on a turd, while also having the attention span and understanding of a six-year-old.
Yeah the 60s were a different world heh
Learning about Jesus while your underpants are full of poop is a good way to make a negative association.
Seeing that religion is generally full of shit, I find some irony in this scenario.
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