| Author | Message | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 1 Registered: 4-2014 |
Retired attorney here, hence the name. Escaped Adventism at age of 21 with my sister, we left together and had no contact with family for two years, so afraid were we for our lives. I resolved to have nothing to do with religion again, although believe it or not, got involved with ANOTHER cult at the age of 26, looking for consolation after the unbelievably-grizzly end of my professional mountain climbing instructor career (the deal about wearing a climbing harness during a group funeral, with ropes leading to 5 separate caskets). The Adventist doctrine of "soul sleep" does not provide much consolation, and my incredible fear of death and the afterlife, knowing that I would never, ever make it given my failures as an Adventist. The "way back" to God was circuitous, but was initiated by an amazing experience I had in Rome during my undergraduate college days. I will just repeat it here. It will save a lot of time. I wrote it as advice to a friend that was visiting Rome for the first time in January of this year. It is long, but stick with it, it eventually has a point: "You'll love Rome. Gnaw it clear to the marrow and suck the life out of it. Have no regrets, promise? A part of me will never leave Rome. Your last comment is still a brutal stab straight through my heart, some 23 years later.......I'll catch my breath here, and proceed. I spent one whole summer in Europe, studying the ancient conventions of classic Aristotelian rhetoric in Athens, where I met a mysterious, beautiful and sad-eyed European tour guide. Greece will grab an American. They had their own Alamo. At the Hot Gates (Thermopylai), 300 Spartans fought under the leadership of King Leonides and eagerly went to their deaths against a million man Persian Juggernaut. You stand there and quake at this mighty inscription: GO TELL THE SPARTANS PASSERBY, THAT HERE OBEDIENT TO THEIR LAWS WE LIE The chemistry between us reached the white hot level at King Leonides's memorial, and she quickly became my girlfriend. Americans are strange and exotic foreigners there. She offered to take me on the grand tour of Europe and parts of the sunny, aromatic Middle East. And best of all, I could shut up. She spoke fluent Arabic, British-accented English, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, German, and one other secret ancient tongue she shyly insisted on disclosing.....Later. At the right time. Patience. Turkey (the onion domes of Istanbul and the seaside Temple of Diana); Israel (Church of the Holy Sepulcher via Via Dolorosa, the "Way of Grief"); Syria (dusty Damascus), Cyprus and Sicily Islands via cruise ship, landing at Venice. We disembarked there, took the singing Venetian gondola tour, then lazily drove to Rome. It was the high point of my short undergrad years at Boise State and I was blessed with my own personal professional tour guide for a couple of weeks touring, the leavings of the Roman Empire and gorgeous Florence as a finale. The darkness: she had the unnerving habit of staring blankly off into the far away distance almost in a trance for speechless silent minutes. I had to dig it out: she was at the Rome airport 5 years before when the Abu Nidal terrorists opened fire with machine guns killing and wounding many innocent bystanders and she ran and ran and ran for her life past piles of bodies...all the while panic dodging several near misses after bullets ricocheted and went zinging past her head. Pink sprays of blood. Everywhere. With head bowed, she crossed herself, whispering haltingly and darkly in heart-broken Italian. "Anni di' Piambo" ..... The Summer of Lead. One little bitty girl shot through the tiny lung died in her blood-slicked arms, coughing and choking on tiny rivulets of pink foam. I could tell whenever she remembered it..... those stricken dead leaden eyes. The darkness: just one sharp memory away. The least I could do is sit still with her and be silent: Mourning is forever. Leon Wieseltier said it best: "The contest between the light of memory and the words of mere history becomes acute, even excruciating, when the subject of of the backward look is catastrophe....you are being addressed across a gulf, through a thick wall of glass, from the farthest corner of a banished heart. You listen carefully, but an approximation of her experience is the best you can hope for. You begin to understand that there are situations in which memory is not a privilege: if history is your only source of knowledge about the darkness, then you are one of the lucky ones. You look at this woman in the work of recollection and you no longer remark on the beauty of memory, or on its utility for the perpetuation of the knowledge of the disaster, you wish only that memory would falter and die, and you bless the moments of forgetfulness and all the divagations of ordinary life after the end of the world." She lived in Rome, alone, in a beautiful penthouse apartment overlooking the ruins of the Coliseum. After midnight, she urgently shook me suddenly awake from a deep sleep. Airport panic again, I thought. She grabbed my hand tightly and without a word drug me on a crazy wild goose chase through a labyrinthine and cob-webbed system of dank and fetid tunnels underneath Rome. I lost all sense of direction and even experienced woozy vertigo in the pitch darkness. This was it. She had finally broken and lost her marbles from acute memory overdose. Mercifully, we started ascending back up and up and up to ground level via an ancient set of stone stairs, blessedly smelling a few stray wisps of fresh air. She had to fumble with keys to unlock the massive wooden door. Italy gives licensed tour guides license. We went into a gigantic enclosed space and into a wall of thick and sickly smells, of incense and centuries of acrid candle smoke. I was in some sort of mystically blurred ancient dream state set in stone, as big as a parking garage. Ambient light flickered from some tiny candles far far across the room from the entrance, washing the walls in a kind of halting light, in a light that seemed anxious about its own appropriateness. . She gasped a strange low wracked guttural sob, from the bottom of a shattered heart, furtively crossed herself and dropped to her knees on the stone floor. Crazy! Should I call the authorities? And how was I ever going to find my way back to her apartment? But I had no idea where we were, so I waited, glancing protectively as she repeatedly sobbed this whisper prayer: "Réquiem ætérnam dona ei Dómine; et lux perpétua lúceat ei. Requiéscat in pace. Amen." "Eternal rest grant her, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen." God's Grammar: The prayer language of mourning a stranger, a tiny girl. The Latin Prayer for the Dead. The riddle of the shy mystery language, finally resolved. My eyes took forever to adjust to the vast dimness......gradually, I could barely make out some seething vague shapes and haunting violent epic battle forms flickering on the ceiling high above, becoming more and more recognizable, like a long ago vivid midnight dream. You sort of can recall .........but strangely not quite completely. Not completely. One of the images gradually shifted into sharp focus, and I - a gobsmacked ex-Adventist filled to the brim with unexamined boyhood anti-Catholic hatred - clumsily crossed myself and involuntarily sank to my knees. So spellbinding is the jaw-dropping sight of unearthly Michelangelo's massive fresco of God touching the finger of and transmitting the first life to lifeless Adam......You lose reality, and time. I spent mute minutes staring mouth agape, eventually regaining enough composure to wobble upwards and stand on weak and shaking legs. It was just the two of us, in God's Condo, embracing and shivering. In shock. Talk is stupid in that place. Silence is eloquence. I boarded a plane three weeks later and never saw her again. My advice? Make sure you wear your drool bib at the Sistine Chapel.If you are like me, you'll be simultaneously mesmerized and electrified, you will lose all muscle control, mouth lolling agape staring dumbstruck at this earth-shattering otherworldly spectacle. At the greatest and most beautiful human-made phenomena in Rome, in Italy, in Europe, in the whole wide world. I will be haunted by those images on that early morning in the Sistine Chapel, the memory of that wracked sobbing Latin prayer for an anonymous tiny girl killed in an airport massacre and these overwhelming feelings of the direct and powerful presence of God...... until the day I die. | ||
| Mjcmcook Registered user Username: Mjcmcook Post Number: 1428 Registered: 2-2011  |
Resjudicata~ ~WELCOME~ to the Forum~ Have you published your 'Life Journey' ? If so, I would like to purchase the book~ ~mj~ | ||
| Asurprise Registered user Username: Asurprise Post Number: 3344 Registered: 7-2007 |
Yes, welcome to the forum, Resjudicata!  | ||
| Asurprise Registered user Username: Asurprise Post Number: 3345 Registered: 7-2007 |
I'd like to add that perhaps the little bitty girl wasn't Catholic and therefore had never been baptized by a priest. If that was the case and the traumatized young Catholic lady knew it, that church would have taught her to believe that the child would have immediately gone to hell. That would explain her desperate, tearful pleading with God to instead let the child into Heaven. I knew of a Catholic who had been taught that once every fifty years certain "holy" doors leading to the main “sanctuary/altar” of the vatican would open and everyone who crawled through on their knees would have all their sins forgiven! She was in the Air Force at that time and stationed in Italy. She wanted her sins forgiven of course so was pleased to take advantage of such a wonderful opportunity. After crawling through, she expected her burden of sin to have been taken away, but to her surprise the burden, if anything, seemed much heavier. I think though, over all, she enjoyed her stay in Italy. | ||
| Flyinglady Registered user Username: Flyinglady Post Number: 10131 Registered: 3-2004  |
Resjudicata, Welcome to the forum. Our awesome God led you here like He did all of us. Diana | ||
| Foofighter Registered user Username: Foofighter Post Number: 322 Registered: 7-2005 |
Hi Resjudicata Welcome to FAF. You definitely whet one's appetite for more of your story. I became an SDA at 24, was in for 27 years. Been out for 10. Feels awesome to be back to normal! I was wondering what the other cult was that you got involved with, if you don't mind me asking. Feel free to answer or not, whatever you are comfortable with. Whatever happened with your family? I love people's stories (can't you tell?). I still can't believe I got involved with Adventism, and ended up in it for 27 years! | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 6 Registered: 4-2014 |
I got out of Adventism a total mess and got sucked into "The Way International" at the age of 26. Yeah. It was over a woman. The BIG problem for me was that having been through 12 years of the Adventist educational system, reading the Bible, especially the KJV still gives me the hives to this day. So I was "low hanging fruit." However, I watched the entry level video course and I was immediately confronted with a war between Truth and Love. I am not proud of what I did next. But I would sneak out to the Nazarene College in my town and read just about every Christian Apologetics textbook I could get my hands on, and pretty much "studied my way back out again." It was horrible breaking up, but I wasn't about to waste any more time in my life in some toxic cult stew. Our family has totally disintegrated. My parents are in the LGT mode and their three kids are a huge disgrace since we all left SDA. My sister and I are very very close now. Her and I left home together and had no contact with my parents for two years, we were afraid for our lives if my dad found out where we were. We got the nastiest, most radical LGT version of Adventism growing up, coupled with incredible physical, mental, and emotional abuse. My sister, who calls herself a "Badventist," still goes to a church that sounds like it has very little in common with the church I grew up in. She confides in me that she thinks the church is a steaming pile of cow poo and it is just an exploitative business and she believes not one single word they say. So I say to myself: "Heck, that sounds pretty healthy to me!" So I really make no effort to try to dissuade her to leave or anything like that. It is basically her main social club, where all of her inlaws go, and that is probably 90 percent of why she goes. She probably spent 30 years out of the Church before going back because of her second marriage. | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 7 Registered: 4-2014 |
So I will continue. I did a triple major at a state college and then went to law school for a total of just 4.5 years out of my life. It was an amazing experience, compared to my Adventist Academy experience. I barely scraped by in Academy, dealing with some pretty severe depression (that is almost needless to say to anyone that has belonged to that church). But I was "ready for college" when I finally went right after I had an unbelievably horrific motorcycle wreck (hit two full-sized black Angus bulls at 90 mph, killing both of them instantly). I lost 36 units of blood that day, it was running out faster than they could put it back in. Life-flighted to 14 hours in surgery at the Harborview Trauma center. Basically my entire time at college, I was either on crutches or going through or recovering from five different surgeries. It slowed me down enough so I could study. I tried over 400 felony criminal jury trials and 5 capital murder cases in my career and something just kept PULLING me towards Grace. I retired last year, disgusted with Law and basically started thinking about my Adventist boyhood and wondering what in the world it all meant. So I got on the internet and wouldn't you know, I found Dudley Canright's book "Seventh Day Adventism Renounced." I could not put it down. The thought that I had missed the Resurrection my entire life just totally blew me away. I went to my very first Easter celebration two weeks ago at a liturgical church and spent the entire week of Holy Week there and the impact of the Resurrection as Christianity's main doctrine just has completely upended my entire life. Is that right, "main doctrine?" Or is it the ONLY doctrine? I am not sure yet. All I know is I have been thinking about it constantly. Every hour it comes into my head. I just can't stop thinking about it. | ||
| Colleentinker Registered user Username: Colleentinker Post Number: 14799 Registered: 12-2003  |
Welcome, Resjudicata. I'm so glad you're here! Your story is not surprising to me; God is so faithful. He knows His own, and He doesn't lose us! As Jesus said to His disciples in John 13:18: "I know the ones I have chosen…" We look forward to getting to know you! Colleen | ||
| Philharris Registered user Username: Philharris Post Number: 3031 Registered: 5-2007  |
Welcome Resjudicata, Your 'story' is amazing. I spent a day at Harborview back in the day when my pastor's family were all in a terrible auto accident. It's certainly where to be when you life is in the balance. Anyway, would love to hear the 'rest of your story' as the saying goes. Fearless Phil | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 9 Registered: 4-2014 |
You see daily incredible human suffering in my line of work. I needed a harder-bitten version of God that would infiltrate right into that Death Row interview room when I was holding the hand of a sobbing prison-tattooed murderer. Or standing with clients as they buried their two little kids that were savagely sexually abused for a week and then brutally murdered. Yeah, I am a tragedy junkie. It's easy to grasp the atheist argument that there is no God worth serving, since any God worth its salt would not permit suffering like that. He is either incompetent or evil. Why bother? The argument that somehow God wants to fix this situation by our following his "Ten Commandments" is just absurd and tragicomic. REALLY? SERIOUSLY? You expect me to believe something like that after 19 years of working hard with law to fix the world? After a year of retirement I still have those "law eyes:" a permanent disfigurement from 19 years of daily horrific tragedy. I look into the mirror and I am shocked by the shark-like, lifeless, dead-killer eyes staring back. Where is God in all of this? Only the Cross provides the answer. The atheists are comfortable pikers carrying on luxuriant dorm room bull sessions, abstract discussions about perfect justice and logically-bulletproof theology. Come with me and I will introduce you to the woman that drove drunk and killed her 30 day old baby. You got answers for that in your theological perfection? The Cross is absolutely devastating in response. Jesus Christ is the God "man enough" to "take a shank."(prison lingo for a crude stabbing tool). He is with us in our suffering and suffers with us every moment we are alive. That is just one small part of the equation that refutes Ellen White's piddly, contemptible and kind of incompetent Jesus who didn't accomplish much on the cross except for giving us a good example to follow. Meanwhile, he barely lasted as long as he did, due to the direct intervention on multiple occasions by some competent angels who arrived in just the nick of time. And his Resurrection was a cool hat trick, thanks be to some more strong angels that worked in various unseen ways. No thanks. Atheism really is superior to that. So it was a daily battle to fend off atheism and devise some sort of hard-bitten spiritual response in the face of the blackest and most senseless human tragedy. But I never knew real joy. The world was gray and sepia and tragic. Canright upended my world when I least expected it. He courageously waded through the senseless Adventist doctrinal thicket, pruning enough away for me to see some light, and knocking down one Adventist doctrine after another brought in more and more life and light. Yet I was STILL unprepared by the violent impact of the true and dazzling Resurrection. I am just stunned and speachless now.That Resurrection unleashed a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb that levels false religions and their fetid temples, shredding the veil to smoldering pieces in the Temple, and left vast fields of glowing, pulsating radioactivity. We look straight in the face of God now, doing what Moses could not do on Sinai. I just can't stop thinking about it. I think about it every hour on the hour. The Resurrection forcibly intrudes into my thinking whenever it chooses. I am blinded by the Son. | ||
| Ric_b Registered user Username: Ric_b Post Number: 2112 Registered: 7-2004  |
The Gospel doesn't make sense. There is no bulletproof logic that ends in the Gospel. This, to me, is the fundamental flaw with apologetics. You might arrive at moralism through logic, but not to the Cross and True Christianity. The cross, and the way of the cross for His followers, is foolishness to the atheist. And the Cross without the Resurrection is hopeless. Which is why Easter is such a Joy. But that is a whole 'nother soapbox. | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 11 Registered: 4-2014 |
Do you ever wonder why Adventism so strongly discouraged even the most tepid acknowledgement of Easter? I call it "Resurrection Denial." Every cult on earth participates in Resurrection Denial. Either they attack Christ's Divinity or they degrade and belittle the effect of the Resurrection. Ellen White made Stringent efforts to do both: - Ellen White's "Jesus" was a bumbling, incompetent but really nice guy that was constantly getting himself into jams, and being rescued by Angels. Yeah, he gave some anodyne teachings that we should probably carry out as best as we can, which shouldn't cause any more difficulty than applying ourselves to one of the more popular pop psychology self help books. We should follow his example of being bumbling and incompetent nice guys our selves, only with a bit of added tenseness as we look over our shoulders to make sure we are staying ahead of everyone else in the rat race to heaven. The Cross was another jam he bumbled into, this time he was in so deep the angels couldn't pull him out of the wringer. It was tragic, but the real lesson was the venality of the Jews and the Romans, whose obvious competence and power on display there foreshadowed the instantaneous corruption and Apostasy of the First Century Church. With a weak tea, underwhelming Jesus like that, it is no wonder that First Century Christians quickly joined ranks with the Pagans and huddled there for safety. As far as the Resurrection? So what! He had all kinds of angels helping him, so big deal. The germane lesson here is the restoration of the Sabbath to its rightful primacy. Which is when and where the REAL accomplishments are finally finished as each one of us bravely engages in a lifetime of flawless Sabbath Keeping. As poorly as Jesus conducted himself in life, on the cross, and in the Resurrection, it gets even WORSE in the Investigative Judgment. Talk about procrastination: what was it, 1844 years before he mustered up the courage to take on Satan? Here, that bumbling and incompetent Jesus is the Defense Attorney up against the more eloquent, polished, and better prepared prosecutor: Satan. Jesus is clearly outmatched, with only our perfect Sabbath Keeping at BEST giving him the paper-thinnest of margins of victory.....but not very often. Once in awhile God might "walk" a few of us in order to throw a bone to the incompetent Jesus, out of sheer pity. God doesn't want him to get too discouraged after centuries of incompetence. Why would ANYONE want to celebrate part of THAT rube's life and death and resurrection? | ||
| Asurprise Registered user Username: Asurprise Post Number: 3348 Registered: 7-2007 |
And every Adventist "keeps" Sabbath a different way. I, for example, firmly believed that immersing myself in a cool mountain stream on a hot Sabbath day was wrong, but it was okay to build up a sweat hiking or riding bicycles! | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 17 Registered: 4-2014 |
Well you were just WRONG about your Sabbath Interpretation. The CORRECT interpretation is that you could wade up to your ankles in water, but not full immersion. It was only recently on the internet that I found out other people had followed the same instruction. And here for 30 some odd years, I had resented an imaginary grouchy old killjoy in the local church for having just made that up! On the other hand, the average Adventist probably violates the Sabbath about 60 million times by driving to Church on Saturday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_Shabbat_in_Jewish_law And probably getting ready for church and then warming up that Sabbath potluck dinner violates the Sabbath about another 50 million times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat_in_Jewish_law Although good Adventists will take enormous self-righteous pride in thinking they are keeping the Ten Commandments and the Sabbath perfectly by snoozing in a Lazy Boy Recliner, burping up on an overdose of green bean casserole. Although arguably, you are still "working" on the Sabbath, even if you don't drive your car, since modern cars, even when they aren't running have mobile entertainment system computers that continue running and so does the car's engine management system, even when it is fully stopped and turned off. Therefore, those automotive computers are "working" just as hard as any Desktop computer that you have managed to sneak away for a game of Angry Birds on the Sabbath Day. I have been urging Adventists to disconnect the battery cables on their car over the Sabbath for just that reason. You can never be too cautious. JJust parking your car for the day is clearly not enough. (Message edited by ResJudicata on May 02, 2014) | ||
| Freeatlast Registered user Username: Freeatlast Post Number: 921 Registered: 5-2002  |
Just when I thought I knew where all the Adventist bones were buried, Resjudicata brings up a new one. ANGELS RESURRECTED JESUS?! Well, yes, according to Ellen: "You would drop as powerless as the Roman guard, who watched around the sepulcher of Jesus Christ, when the angels there descended to resurrect the Son of God. As that light fell upon the Roman guard, they became as dead men. They fell to the earth. They could not endure the light from Heaven, which was reflected from one mighty angel. Ellen G. White, Review and Hearald, April 12, 1870 Jesus raised Himself according to the Scriptures! Add this to the list of contradictions. | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 18 Registered: 4-2014 |
Ellen White's "Jesus" was pretty incompetent. I think about the maximum you could trust him to do is run some interference and distract everyone while you sneak into the computer room and play a furtive Sabbath Day game of Angry Birds. Although opinions vary on whether that is technically Sabbath Breaking: http://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/8968/is-using-the-internet-on-shabbat-against-melachos In which case, one wouldn't even need him to run interference. | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 19 Registered: 4-2014 |
Freeatlast, I probably shouldn't have disclosed that. Remember Harry Anderson picture of people walking that steep path to heaven, with one falling off the side now and then? Information like what I inadvertently released could have came in handy in that situation. It's like having a theological "elbow" to throw into the ribs of other people competing with me for the same nice wide spot on that trail. | ||
| Mjcmcook Registered user Username: Mjcmcook Post Number: 1431 Registered: 2-2011 |
Freeatlast~ The quotation you posted #921~ ...."They could not endure the light from Heaven, which was reflected from the one mighty angel." Since Ellen G. White wrote these words, it is evident to me she was being 'channeled' by that "one mighty angel", Lucifer himself ! Who, I believe, channeled ALL of her other writings as well~ ~mj~ | ||
| Resjudicata Registered user Username: Resjudicata Post Number: 20 Registered: 4-2014 |
That's a conclusion that I actively resisted for about 33 years, but I have recently realized that something very very bad was happening to that woman. You just cannot lie and steal like that and stay any sort of normal human being. What she did with her literary thefts and lying about where she got the material, she would end up in prison nowadays. For the most part, the thieves that I have represented over my long career have been for the most part, pretty decent people. They found themselves in desperate circumstances and took a chance that didn't work out. Ellen White did her thefts over more than 50 years, lying about her visions when it is clear that she stole the vast majority of "her" books from other writers. No ordinary criminal I ever met could have gotten away with something like for that long. Second, the thiefs I have known have been pretty honest criminals. They just want your money. They have no interest in possessing your soul. They have stuff they just would not do. Ellen, on the other, was a soul stealer. She had the power from her "visions" to totally manipulate and control people. She took ruthless advantage of them, like they were vassal slaves with no rights. She did more damage with her soul-thefts than her literary thefts. That is no ordinary human criminal. |
