Pentecost IS a Mental Problem

Source:- http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/

When confronting a Pentecostal, one must remember that Pentecostals are stuck in a mental thinking loop that prevents them from thinking in the normal sense about anything relating to religion. They have designed an enormous list of code words designed to trigger thinking patterns in a particular way. Think of it as a computer program or a computer virus. When you hear the words “reprobate” or “backslider” or any other code words, they are designed to trigger a particular thought pattern. Another phrase that comes to mind is “touch not mine anointed!” The last one triggers thoughts of incapacitating terror at the thought of questioning the pastor about anything. Also, there are particular gestures that are designed to trigger certain thoughts like the tightening and closing of the eyes followed by something like “Woo, I feel something in this place, let’s pray for that guy right now!”

And, so it is. It is hard to even speak about religion to these Pentecostals stuck in the mental traps because the minute you try to question them, those code words, and those gestures come into their imaginations, without even them hearing them or seeing them, and these things short-circuit the mental processes to the point where they cannot hear the words you are saying. The mind is stuck and has something like a computer virus.

Often, it takes a tremendous effort to break these people from this state of self-hypnosis. Sometimes it takes a dramatic event for them to begin to question. Sometime the pastor betrays them so deeply, they go through terror, depression, and many other things that are so unbearable that they have to begin to question the system.

The services are designed to nurture these thought systems and loops that they cannot break out of. All the emotional things that go on from excitement to terror, to grieving, to anything with extreme emotions - all this contributes to the deadening of the mind to thinking outside of the particular mind set.

Their minds are stuck. They do not know this. You can tell them this and often, they do not understand what you are telling them because their thoughts are stuck in a short circuit. Sometimes we have to spend many years or months trying to figure out a way to break within a particular person’s mind to break it out of the shorted-loop. Each of us has a lot of work to do if we are to do this. Each case is different, and I suspect that there is a particular KEY to each person to break them out of the loop. It just might take a long time to find the Key to break the code and delete the looping control loop of their mind’s software programs, in a manner of speaking.

So, do not ever be surprised that you cannot communicate with these people. It is part of the design of the system to keep them trapped in the mental control loops triggered by words, gestures, music or whatever a local preacher can design. The pastor does not do this deliberately as in, “How can I design a system to keep them trapped,” but he simply does it by trial and error in Darwinian fashion as to what works with a particular person and congregation and what does not. This is how it works. And whatever system of controls survives the experimentation is what survives in the same way as animal species survive in the process of natural selection in the Survival of the Fittest. The better the system design, the harder it will be to break them out of the mental loops.

Note: For reference to some of the code words, check out this thread and you might be able to think of others from your own experience:

p212.ezboard.com/fexpente...=485.topic

Pentecost: West African Tribal Religion

The critical juncture is Azusa Street where the white people’s experiment from Parham in Topeka Kansas met up with African American folk customs together in one congregation. After a period of melding these two things, they exploded across the world. The African tradition and the white tradition alone could not push it forward, but the melding of the two made for the perfect recipe to start a new religion. William Seymour, the son of a slave was the genius to put together this new religion. In West African religion you had the ancient belief of “the little me within the big me.” This “little me” was another person inside of someone that was in tuned to the spiritual and “came out” during spiritual times, which is where we get the term referring to African Americans as “soul” when we know that deep-felt feeling in their music and other customs. This “little me” in the West African tradition was the part of the person that got possessed with the spirit of animals, such as a bear. When the “little me” would get possessed with a particular animal, the person would become for a time acting like that animal.

Now, transfer these West Africans into the American Christian context. Well, they no longer were possessed by a bear or a tiger, but by “Jesus.” This is where Pentecost inherited the African American traditions from Azusa Street. They “get the Holy Ghost,” or so they think, but it is a pagan ritual inherited form West Africa. This “little me” can be explained when Pentecostals go about their normal lives seemingly as normal people – or close to it. During times when the “anointing” comes upon them, they take on another personality and “speak under the authority of the Holy Ghost” like they are a different person. This is the inheritance of the African “little me” becoming possessed by a God, which is now Jesus instead of, say, a tiger.

You can also see the great cultural inheritance of this African phenomenon in American music in things such as improvisation in Jazz and Rock where the person “just jams to the music” with another part of the musician just pulling music from the depths of his soul – the African “little me.” It is like another part of him playing the music without any notes or program. You can also see this cultural inheritance from African American entertainers when they just “break down” and become another person in their “groove” which makes them some of the finest entertainers in the world. Some white people can do this, but not many.

I know some of this stuff because I grew up in a place where I could absorb elements of this culture by being in a predominantly black junior high school and being in the band where I picked up these musical techniques that had served me well as a Pentecostal musician. And I can tell you that the phenomenon of the “little me within the big me” is the key element to all of this stuff. The strange thing is that it is an inheritance of West African Tribal religion and custom. You can read about this in Harold Bloom’s book, “The American Religion” on Amazon.com if you are interested.Without the grafting of African American culture joining up with Parham’s tongues experiment in Topeka, there would be NO Pentecostal movement. Remember that William Seymour, the African American Azusa genius, was a student of Parham’s for a time, and took it exponentially further at Azusa Street to begin another religion.This is why you will see a shy little woman “come under the power of God” and start screaming, yelling, and shouting her hair down. The “Holy Ghost" supposedly intoxicates the “little me” inside her but in fact, they are really practicing West African tribal religions customs repackaged as Christianity.Interesting, huh? I find this fascinating.

Source:- derkrash-at-yahoo-dot-com

Why are Pentecostals So Self-Destructive?

Many on this board have noticed that Pentecostals regularly self-destruct. They go on for days – even weeks – as rational people in their normal lives, but inevitably, they will explode, lose their cool, and destroy something in their lives. The reason for this is that they are addicted to a Life Changing Transformation accompanied by an intense emotional ejaculation. Recall the central experience of Pentecostals: speaking in other tongues under emotional hypnosis accompanied often by a violent emotional release. I have made the analogy to “receiving the Holy Ghost” as modern Pentecostals experience it as a psychosexual orgasm.

However, this life changing experience is addictive in many ways. Like drug addicts, one feels such an intense high the first time, that he spends the rest of his life chasing after that first high, so he needs the drug in higher and higher doses to get the emotional high. The problem with this state is that intense emotions tell a normal person that something is dangerous. Whether it be love, hate, or anger, most take intense feelings as something to control and monitor, not something to inflame to destruction. However, since the Pentecostal’s defining religious experience is an emotional explosion in speaking in tongues under hypnosis, he cannot admit that unbridled emotions are dangerous; he sees them as something to experience regularly - a Life Transforming experience is good, if accompanied by strong passions. This might not be articulated as such, but that is the basis of their actions. In some cases, we can go through occasional life transformations, but to do this on a regular basis promotes instability and destruction because the person cannot commit to a plan of action in life and is continuously searching for striking Gold with the next Life Transformation Experience. Now, take this to addictive levels: the Pentecostal is bored UNLESS he is blowing up emotionally on a regular basis. So, where does this lead the Pentecostal? He can blow up in church in psychosexual emotional releases “at the altar.” Where else can he get these intense emotions? He might pursue sexual promiscuity with the accompanying risk, followed by an intense moment of “repenting at the altar.” Where else can he get his emotional high? He can self-destruct on a regular basis, thus promoting intense feelings of risk, failure, fights, monetary damage, which in themselves produce strong emotions, followed by another trip to the altar to “get the victory over the devil attacking him with all these problems” as he shouts, dances, screams and yells in a victory march. What is another way to get these intense emotional ejaculations? He can instigate trouble at work; get his boss angry to the point of putting his job in jeopardy. He can instigate fights among the people in church and cause a ruckus to get some excitement going.

In all these cases, the desire for a Life Changing Transformation can be a Destructive Life Changing Transformation, when this end is pursued vigorously and recklessly, as the Pentecostal will do. So, this is why there are regular splits, fights, and breaks in friendship and cooperation among Pentecostals. It is similar to the Death Wish in that they hope for destruction because of the intense feelings and emotional outbursts it will cause. They are addicted to strong emotions on the psychosexual level of intensity. There are only so many things in life that can give a person this that are constructive. After they exhaust the constructive emotional outlets, they get bored and want more; then, all that is left is destructive pursuits of emotional ejaculation. One can think about a nasty car wreck where rubberneckers look on; this is an “exciting” thing to see – body parts scattered about the highway. This is the morbid truth about seeking after intense emotional experiences.

I have not met any Pentecostal that does not regularly self-destruct. If they do not, they are probably not practicing Pentecostalism. This is one reason why Pentecostals can be dangerous. Making friends with them can cause a ruckus because they are looking for emotional highs. When they exhaust the constructive emotions of friendship, all is left is the destructive outlets of emotional ejaculation. Like the rubbernecker that wishes to see body parts all over the road in excitement, so does the Pentecostal destroy the things around him. He is addicted to a psychosexual orgasm, and intense emotions as the central part of his being, his religion, and yes, his entire life.

source:- http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/2004_10_10_ex-pentecostal_archive.html
JPIderkrash-at-yahoo-dot-com

Doing the Right Thing – The Courage to Change.

I wish to open this to a possible interesting discussion.

After many of us have been out of Pentecostalism for a considerable length of time, when we look back on our experiences we notice one glaring thing about the entire experience. Pentecostalism promotes Bad Character. It has a problem with basic morality. It attracts people of low morals and the leadership seems to be infested with scoundrels. Once inside Pentecostalism, we learn terrible interpersonal habits like backstabbing, gossip, stretching the truth, making outlandish statements with no proof or support, and many other things. It is like Pentecostals are experts at shady dealings and shady promotion. We all learn the techniques, and it eventually becomes a part of us. We believed things that were really not true – like miraculous healings – but we could not admit our doubts, so we lied and kept on lying. We hurt those around us by telling them they were going to hell, but we could not apologize because then we would have to question the religion that would make us do that in the first place. Preachers repeated lies, but we never checked out the facts, because we were told to “obey the pastor.” There was a rule that whatever the pastor said was good right and moral. Thus, Morality was not a universal principle of Natural Law shared by all peoples at all times, but it was what the pastor said. Thus, we did things that were immoral because we were obeying the pastor – recall Hitler’s generals – obeying the leader. This is why as Ex-Pentecostals we must regain a sense of universal, natural morality of everyday life, apart from obedience to some freak who claims to be the “man of God.” We all learned these bad habits because the system itself was a defective model equating morality with obedience. We modeled ourselves after corrupt preachers because they were our leaders, and all people look up to leaders for models, and thus, you have entire churches and organizations mimicking their corrupt leaders. The leaders use fear, intimidation, and other forms of abuse to keep people in line, and Pentecostals take their cues from the leaders, becoming little by little, less moral over time just like the evil leaders of the churches. We were under the impression that the right thing to do was that which benefited the “church” or the pastor. We failed to realize that true morality looks for the good of the entire community as a whole. True morality asks if something benefits himself and his church for sure, but also the family, the community, the nation and the world. True morality is organic and takes into consideration things as a WHOLE – possibly this is where the true meaning of “Holy” comes from – to have a “whole” perspective, balancing everything out in their proper proportions – whole – holy. Is Pentecostalism “Holy” in this sense of the term? No. Why? Because the benefit is off-balanced – it is skewed toward the pastor and his church – and does not account for society as a whole – it is not “holy” so to speak.

So, we learned bad habits as Pentecostals. The task we have ahead of us is to recognize the immorality of a skewed, unbalanced, “unholy” system, and begin to look for the habits of a proper, healthy, and good person. We were good at criticizing people and making them feel guilty. We were good at preaching things without proof and support because the preacher told us it was so. We were emotionally unstable and prone to bouts of explosive anger because emotionalism was our religion. We tended to obey our leaders without question, and we should remember that the real world does not operate this way – we should never obey anyone blindly, if we should obey anyone at all. We should always ask “Why?” of our current leaders, and we should not take things at face value, but ask, “Is this really the right thing to do, taking everything into consideration?” How many times we lied to others and told them we were healed because we wanted to believe it so bad? Well, do we still practice this in our lives if we want to believe something so badly? How many times we wrote other people off as nothing because they were not in the same church? Well, how many people we do the same thing to nowadays when they disagree with us? Are we holding on to old Pentecostal habits? Again, these are questions for the soul that we must all ask, because we picked up some really bad, nasty habits as Pentecostals, and these things can linger with us for years unless we recognize the after effects of the evil of Pentecostalism within our hearts.

I think that Pentecostalism has a corrosive effect upon the character of a person, turning good people over time into defective moral agents with a skewed sense of right and wrong to the point that wrong is right and right is wrong. I think that good families get sucked into this system, turning them into seriously dysfunctional families because they are picking up bad habits of defective character and morality. People, instead of working through problems rationally, develop the “fight or flight” mentality which can be very destructive to personal growth and human relations.
I think that we all have a lot to learn and relearn as Ex-Pentecostals. We have to rebuild an entire life based on something completely different from Pentecostalism. We have to pick up the pieces and build upon the ruins of a life we never lived. Sometimes it takes groping in the dark to find the answers, but find them we must, because we must live life, and live it to the fullest. We must look deep into our hearts and try to bring out the best within ourselves in every situation. We must look beyond the immediate anger and frustration of the moment and consider the whole – the long-term effects of our actions, and the effects upon those around us. We must become “holy” or “whole” in the proper sense of the term – whole people making whole decisions – doing the right thing as best as we can. We must rediscover, and relearn the universal principles of humanity that make life worth living and make the order of life more pleasant. And, we must seek peace within our hearts, and find the strength to carry on.

We are Ex-Pentecostals. Let us make the prefix “ex” really mean something and try to get rid of those old nasty habits.

Any comments on this perspective?

Source:- http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/

Pentecostal Fraudulent Style of Thinking

In dealing with Pentecostals, one will notice that even among those who are intelligent, that they have a particular style of thinking that resists open and rational discourse. One will notice that in debates with Pentecostals that it is extremely difficult to get them to focus upon the issue. One will notice several errors in thinking and logic among them when speaking with them, even if they are intelligent.

The central characteristic of Pentecostal thinking is The Hustle. They do not use ideas AS IDEAS, but as a way to manipulate people. This is a very important point in discussions with Pentecostals. Notice that they will pick up and use slogans without much logical connection to the subject at hand. The also will use Suggestibility and Rhetoric as substitutes for logic and reason. Thus the frustration that one encounters when speaking and discussing things with Pentecostals is that they are not discussing things with you to arrive at the Truth of an issue, but they are trying to manipulate you to believe what they believe and to do what they want you to do. One can understand this by recalling a discussion you may have had with someone you have a disagreement with on a particular issue. Often, rational people will agree to disagree. They can understand the logic of the other person, respect their position as a valid argument, but disagree with the argument possibly because they are starting from differing premises or ground rules. This is the proper way to disagree with people.

However, when a Pentecostal cannot get you to agree with his memorized slogans or his procedure to manipulate you into doing and thinking in his way, he will dispense with you as a corrupt, or even as an evil person. Furthermore, if his mind is working even at a deficient level of efficiency, and part of his mind can see that you have a valid point, he will immediately recognize your “logic” as a threat and he is likely to attack you personally, and accuse you of ulterior motives for holding such “logic.” However, he cannot see that his response is not a rational response to a respectable argument, but a change in the context – he changes the subject from the topic at hand to you personally, and proceeds with this attack. This, I assert is the basis of FRAUD. This is why Pentecostal methods of preaching, recruiting, and thinking are fraudulent. It is based upon a faulty system whereby the person is not bound by the ground rules of a logical system. They are not engaging in a debate or discussion with you; they are trying to manipulate you. They might try to deceive you into thinking that they are open to discussion or a respectable debate, but they are not; they are being deceitful, crafty, irrational, and devious. Again, go back and read what I described above. If they talk to you and then proceed to attack you personally instead of focusing upon the subject at hand, they are playing a manipulation game and not entering into a serious discussion. When they accuse you of bitterness without listening to your arguments, they are hustling you; the same goes for any other number of epithets they use to dismiss you and attack you personally, like backslider, reprobate, rebellious, etc.

Another form of the hustle to manipulate you is when they try to bait you. They will attempt to find a hot-button issue to push on you to get you frustrated and angry. In their minds, when you respond to them with anger to their provocations they become smug in their attitude that you are “angry and bitter.” Well, do you notice the blatant manipulating deceit in this technique? They try to get you angry so they can dismiss you! They bait you in order to dismiss you as angry and bitter! How is that for intellectual fraud? An illustration is when they might say that because you wear makeup, you are trying to incite lust in men so that they will want to go to bed with you the same evening. On the face, such a statement is ludicrous and insane; however, they are trying to bait you into getting angry, so that they can dismiss you. Again, this is not honest debate; this is intellectual fraud. (Furthermore, on a side issue, I think that this could be connected to the criminal mind, but that is for further analysis later.)

One can also ponder the effects of such a corrupt form of discourse on the morals of Pentecostals. How can this affect their ability to tell the truth? How can this affect their honesty? Can you really trust what they say? Are they trying to manipulate you? Are they trying to manipulate people on the job in the same manner? Also, I think that this can explain the connection to certain periodic frauds among Pentecostals like multi-level marketing schemes, and other business scams we hear about so prevalent among Pentecostals. Multi-level marketing schemes are usually based upon the hustle also: manipulating ones feelings with visions of millions of dollars without any serious logical explanation as to where all this money will come from, and how can one make such huge amounts of money will little effort – logic please?

Always be aware of Pentecostals trying the intellectual hustle on you. They are very well trained in fraud and baiting you. Do not fall for the fraud or the bait.

derkrash-at-earthlink-dot-netJP Istre

Former/Current Pentecostal Musicians

I have been a musician since I was 10 years old on the trumpet. I then picked up the French horn, the bass guitar, the drums, and the electric guitar, with piano chording thrown in for good measure. Much of my musical career has been in Pentecostal churches, although I now play for my local Lutheran church about once per month. I think that being a musician kept me in Pentecostalism for longer than I would have otherwise. It gives one a place to vent our musical talents on a regular basis – three times per week full of jam sessions and pretty good playing in most places. You get a sense of accomplishment and you get a certain amount of insulation from the rules and regulations that others are more closely scrutinized with. Perversely, the emotional ups and downs of Pentecostalism produce extreme stress, and Pentecostal musicians have an outlet to vent all of these frustrations. Thus, there are powerful incentives for musicians within Pentecostalism. If certain musicians have sufficient reputation, they can have more power than the pastor in some cases. For a pastor to have good musicians is a big draw for churches, and this means more people which means more money. Thus, musicians who know this can bargain for better treatment with the threat of leaving or something similar.

So, those of you who are lurkers and musicians, you must ask yourself: is this right? Why do I sacrifice my moral integrity for the chance to play or sing? Do I really believe this garbage or am I just putting on a show to allow preachers to manipulate people? Ask yourself if you are doing the right thing in serving such a corrupt system that manipulates people are you are the main instrument used for the manipulation.

When will you face the Truth that you are doing things that are really not right? When will you stop serving the wickedness of preachers? They cannot live without you, so why are you supporting the corrupt system?

Think hard about that.

+++
Sometimes I also wonder about the emotional releases and explosions during Pentecostal services. Perhaps all these rules and regulations in some places, and obeying the pastor in other places like shepherding causes people to have bottled up emotional problems where they can vent during these services of intense emotions. So perhaps the emotional intensity of the particular service is a “gas gauge” as it were as to the magnitude of the emotional problems of the congregation.

Think about it. If you are a Pentecostal and you think you are “saved,” why would you spend an enormous amount of time kneeling at the “altar” weeping and shedding buckets of tears? If you are saved once, why all the extra weeping and emotional displays? I know that there is this thing among Oneness Pentecostals that one sin can make you lose your salvation so maybe that is the reason. But also all this emotional abuse and restrictions have a vent during high emotive services. So perhaps in a Darwinian fashion, the system has developed its own way to cope with emotional abuse with all these intense services, which are usually driven by the musicians.

There is also this phenomenon among Pentecostals with musical addictions. I know several people on these boards over the years have mentioned that they had particular songs or bands that they had to listen to to get through the day. I think that I had a similar problem within Pentecostalism as I can recall. I always had to be around music to probably soothe the guilt and shame of being Pentecostal. Maybe I listened to that stuff constantly like an alcoholic drinks too often: it was a way to cover up things that really needed to be looked at and taken care of. The novelist Ayn Rand once mentioned that the root of all evil is evasion. Evasion is when one refuses to look at things in front of their eyes, and they refuse to face the facts of reality. Perhaps music in Pentecostalism swept us up into an induced emotional fog for the very purpose of evasion. We were getting drunk on music to forget the problems and the pain.

What do you think?

JP Istre
Source: - http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/

Dealing with Cynicism after Pentecostalism (JP Istre)

Source :- http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/

When one initially leaves Pentecostalism, it is a bitter cup to drink to admit that we were fooled and that we believed in something so stupid. Usually, after we leave, we must build defense mechanisms to protect ourselves. We do this because after a recent escape, we must vow never again to be fooled by any such movement or anything similar. This is a necessary process in most cases. We are so close to the exit from the religion that fooled us, and we might be vulnerable to get fooled again if we do not take steps to build up our defenses. Thus, we study the techniques used to manipulate people, and we form a way of thinking that sifts through the potential rubbish of anyone or any idea we meet. If we do not sift through the stuff that comes at us, we can end up in a similar situation that we left.

Emotional appeals to a particular political movement, or for a car sales pitch, or to meet some interesting person must be severely sifted. We were sucked in through the manipulation of our emotions, and we must be on guard like an armed sentry at the gate of our heart.

This is where the process of leaving can get difficult. We have been hurt severely and we vow to fight anything that even remotely would threaten us. We see potential friends approach us with an upbeat smiling face, and we have flashbacks to that evangelist preacher who had a similar smiling face who promised healings that never happened – but we deeply believed the evangelist. We look at the new potential friend or acquaintance with suspicion and cynicism. So, we link what we saw in the past with the things we are introduced to in the present. The past haunts our present.

Such a state of mind can produce a mild to severe form of cynicism in the Ex-Pentecostal. We were fooled so deeply by people we loved - in some cases with all our hearts. This has the potential – with a high degree of probability - to make cynics of us all. We see the potential evil in humans. We look at people we meet every day and try to figure out what type of manipulating evil they are capable of. We have come face to face with pure evil in our past and we begin to see evil all around us in the present.

Why do we do this? Is this normal? Is this potential cynical outlook bad?

I do not think that being a cynic as a recently emancipated Pentecostal is a bad thing. I think that we need a good dose of cynicism to balance out the lack of cynicism we overdosed on for years within Pentecostalism. Think of a pendulum. We were at one extreme of a big pendulum in Pentecostalism with full trust of our leaders. It is a good thing that for some time we swing to the other side of the pendulum to the point where we trust nobody. We must learn to build a solid boundary. Initially, we will tend to build a fortress of steel, iron and brick, as it were. Again, this is not a bad thing for a period of time to learn how to build boundaries. A strong dose of pure cynicism could be the proper dosage to offset the disease of Pentecostalism. However, after our mental immune system is healed with this serious, bitter dose of medicine, we can begin to wean ourselves from this bitter pill.

After a few years of getting our bearings, rebuilding our social networks, working through emotional problems with counselors and trusted friends, we should be able to let go of most or even all of our cynicism toward the world and toward other people. After we go through this dark period of treatment with the bitter medicine of cynicism, we can begin to love again – although we must start out slowly. We must test ourselves in many cases to see how easily we fall for scams, but we can begin to reach out to others once more. Our bitter cynicism will be seen by the observant ones a little behind our eyes, and that will be a mark of wisdom through trial in our souls. We will be able to see evil without affecting the innocent. We will be able to recognize evil long before it affects our families and social circles long before so that we can take preventive measures from this experience of wisdom.

We must always remember that as Ex-Pentecostals we have several stages to go through before we are truly healed and free. If we suffer from cynicism, we just need to remember that this too shall pass, and that tomorrow is another day, and each day it gets a little easier.

derkrash-at-earthlink-dot-net

JP Istre