Well, this is fascinating: a former employee of Answers in Genesis comes out with her story.
What I found unsurprising is that AiG is an authoritarian tyranny that abuses its workers, with people monitoring social media of employees outside of work hours and threatening them with firing if they step out of line, on top of all the oppressive requirements to get a job there in the first place.
She came from a faith tradition that thought AiG was too liberal (I shudder to imagine it — some of her fellow employees even wore pants, which surely put them on a slippery slope to atheism). But she did not hurtle into godless evilutionism herself. What led to her breakaway from AiG was the exploitive work conditions and her growing awareness of the hypocrisy of her religion, and she now calls herself an agnostic who is on the fence about evolution vs. creation.
That’s all we can ask for, that people think honestly about their beliefs and avoid dogma.
Oh, man, Ken Ham is going to be so pissed off about this video.
They’ll just chalk up to demon possession or #FakeNews and move on.
It’s all satan’s fault.
It’s all satan’s fault or demonic possesion.
It’s all satan’s fault, demonic possession, or all part of god’s plan since he is in charge.
It’s all satan’s fault, demonic possession, part of god’s plan, or not enough jesus and holy spook.
Fundie xians have an elaborate system of imaginary beings and loopholes to blame and use so they never have to…take responsibility for their own actions!!!
That is one reason why xianity is not a source of morality.
I always find it a little disappointing when people leave their religion because its abusive (though obviously they should) rather than because they’ve found the beliefs wanting. I’m happy for her personally that she’s escaped a cult, and I guess that’s enough. I hope she’s able to unlearn a lot of indoctrination now that she’s free, but that step is a lot harder.
I love Paul’s videos. He has a real sense of humor about the brainwashing he received as a kid. He did an interview with Godless Engineer where he discussed his fall/enlightenment. Short versions is he was working on a comic book that featured dinosaurs and started researching the evolutionary biology and realized that it made more sense than the fairy tails he was suckered into. I can’t really do his story justice but his story is here.
#3. The abuse was only a part.
She states that she no longer considers herself a Christian because of inconsistencies in scripture and theodicy in addition to the hypocrisy of her prior faith community. In other words it is complex.
This is a wonderful video about an extraordinary woman. Watch it.
I was a Southern Baptist in southern Missouri and two of the three things that turned me away from Christianity turned her away as well. One was the hypocrisy of the church members and the second was getting a part-time job that made me work on Sundays and stopped me from attending church. (The third was going to college and learning about other religions, realizing that they all claimed to be the only “right” religion. This made me think that since they all couldn’t be right they must all be wrong.) That was clever of the Creation Museum staff to make her work on Sundays because that break from the steady input of religion and the realization that it’s really quite nice not to have to attend church every single week is powerful.
Her story of the man helping her reminds me of when I was a grad student in San Francisco. I noticed an old woman getting off the streetcar near my home with a heavy load of groceries. I offered to carry them to her house for her, which she accepted. When we got there, I put them down in front of her door and she thanked me, then asked if I was a Christian (was she going to give me a tip? invite me inside for milk and cookies?). I thought about it for a moment, then said, “No, I’m not,” smiled at her, and left. It was the first time I’d ever said that out loud and it made me feel really good.
An aspect of linguistics was called “kinemics” when I was in grad school. The woman spoke very well and seemed to use most of her facial muscles normally for a speaker of American English. But I noticed that her teeth never lost contact; she did not once open her mouth. What incredible oppression must have been inflicted on her during childhood! My late spouse, abused for 7-10 years by her father, a defrocked RCC priest, was still able to laugh aloud when she felt like it. It was a revealing vid, far beyond the words she uttered so carefully.