Leaving a Harmful Religion?
It's not the end of the world!
Come to a supportive weekend with others
who can understand.
"RELEASE AND RECLAIM" Recovery Retreat
May 29-31, 2009; Loveland, CO with an optional third day to relax!
Friday at 7pm until Sunday at 3pm
at a beautiful vacation home by a lake in the mountains
(Also July 31 - Aug. 2, 2009 in Berkeley, CA)
This program is for you if you want to let go of toxic, authoritarian beliefs and reclaim your ability to trust your own feelings and think for yourself.
Leaving your faith can be a very difficult process, but you don’t have to go it alone. A group process is nurturing and powerful for healing and personal growth.
At a Release and Reclaim Recovery Retreat participants can:
Share personal stories
Examine key issues
Learn coping strategies
Meet others and build a support system
Enjoy meals, relaxation, and fun
These retreats are led by Marlene Winell, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. Dr. Winell has a private practice in Berkeley, CA and also consults by telephone.
COST: Sliding scale: $200 - $320 for workshop, $125 for room and board (all meals included). Other financial help available - PLEASE ASK.
TO REGISTER: Write to recoveryfromreligion@gmail.com (subject line “retreat registration”) or call Dr. Winell directly at 510.292.0509 to discuss. Retreat space is limited so contact us as soon as possible.
WANT TO TALK? If you are unsure, you are welcome to chat about your situation and consider all the options available for meeting your needs. Just call Marlene at 510-292-0509
COMMENTS from previous retreat participants:
Speaking as a person who has attended three or so retreats organized by Marlene (intended to support the deconversion process), I would just like to say that attending a retreat, if at all possible, will be one of the smartest things you ever do. I was *very* scared to attend one. And it was really intense being at one of Marlene's retreats and confronting what I had been taught in Sunday school and coming to see it as the poisonous indoctrination it was. However, I am so, so, so glad I went and got help and had Marlene to talk with me and work with me. I know our economy is in a recession but if you have any inclination to attend one of Marlene's retreats, I can't recommend it highly enough. Super helpful! She's knowledgeable, organized, and healthfully irreverent. All the retreats I've been a part of have helped me tremendously.
- M.K.
I can speak about these retreats first hand. I attended Marlene's retreat last summer. At the time, I had been doing a lot of reading. Intellectually, I was already an atheist. Emotionally, I was a real mess. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't suicidal or anything, I was just feeling a bit like Neo in the Matrix: everything I had been taught to believe was wrong.
What the retreat did and what Marlene and the other did, was give me the courage to trust myself and follow through.
It has been six months. I am in a much better place.
- C.R.
For video clips from retreats and more comments from participants, go to: http://marlenewinell.net/event/leaving-your-religion
MORE RETREATS ARE ON THE WAY:
The next one is Berkeley, CA: July 31 – Aug. 2, 2009
Also, if you would like to organize a retreat in your area, we can work with you to do so.
Read more!
Showing posts with label freethought. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freethought. Show all posts
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Monday, August 18, 2008
Where all roads lead (1)
by Dale McGowan, author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief
---------------------------
I have 22 posts jostling for attention at the moment, but a Saturday night conversation with my girls has sent all other topics back to the green room for a smoke.
The three of us were lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. "Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad," said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. "Promise?"
"Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic," said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.
"I plan to be furious," I said. "Out with it."
“Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”
I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!
"What’s a ‘God fight’?"
“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”
Regular readers will recognize this as an almost letter-perfect transcript of a conversation Laney had with another friend last October.
I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”
"Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things."
Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’
Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?
Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’
Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.
Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?
I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”
Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”
Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I told Laney the same thing I told him—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.
She nodded.
“The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”
“Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”
"Maybe another God made that God," Laney offered.
“Maybe so, b...”
"OH WAIT!" she said. "Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!"
They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian:
…and Russell in turn was describing Mill, as a child, discovering the same thing. I doubt that Mill’s father was less moved than I am by the realization that confident claims of “obviousness,” even when swathed in polysyllables and Latin, often have foundations so rotten that they can be neutered by thoughtful children.
There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.
It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
"I don’t want to die."
(To be continued.)
____________________
Visit The Meming of Life.
Read more!
---------------------------
I have 22 posts jostling for attention at the moment, but a Saturday night conversation with my girls has sent all other topics back to the green room for a smoke.
The three of us were lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. "Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad," said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. "Promise?"
"Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic," said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.
"I plan to be furious," I said. "Out with it."
“Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”
I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!
"What’s a ‘God fight’?"
“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”
Regular readers will recognize this as an almost letter-perfect transcript of a conversation Laney had with another friend last October.
I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”
"Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things."
Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’
Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?
Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’
Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.
Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?
I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”
Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”
Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I told Laney the same thing I told him—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.
She nodded.
“The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”
“Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”
"Maybe another God made that God," Laney offered.
“Maybe so, b...”
"OH WAIT!" she said. "Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!"
They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian:
I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.
…and Russell in turn was describing Mill, as a child, discovering the same thing. I doubt that Mill’s father was less moved than I am by the realization that confident claims of “obviousness,” even when swathed in polysyllables and Latin, often have foundations so rotten that they can be neutered by thoughtful children.
There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.
It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
"I don’t want to die."
(To be continued.)
____________________
Visit The Meming of Life.
Read more!
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