Narrow Way Cafe

Many encounter fear in Exvangelical Deconstruction. Why?

Ultimate solitude. Nobody can decide for us.

Life after whatever this is that we experience temporally? What’s actually in the future void? Is there a void? Or something else.

“Look and see for yourself. You aren’t alone!”

We are together in the solitude of our thoughts. Aloneness is the definition — it’s required to be an individual. But, I am one among many.

Deconstructing pastoral tyranny is hard, lots of #exvangelical folks struggle in an autocratic vacuum. People leave church for many reasons. A primary reason is that leadership impunity demonstrates itself for what it is. A recent glaring example is the Southern Baptist Convention admission of Sex Abuse and pastoral malpractice1.

In deconstruction, sometimes for the very first time in life, people afford themselves the opportunity to decide for themselves, on their own. Some discover a deep fear of the unknown.

Deconstruction can be a deeply disturbing and simultaneously liberating experience.

Deconstruction partly involves suspending one’s dependence on the opinions of others. This means devaluing what people think of us, and what we think of them. Relationships dissolve. This is painful, because the void of interdependence (or co-dependence) becomes an open wound, with nothing to fill it. Addiction to approval is real.

Deconstruction is partly a process of abandoning traditions. Questioning answers that most of our peers hold. It’s a churchy thing, to unthinkingly adopt points of view supplied by someone else. They follow Pastors that regurgitate what they were taught by their pastors taught. Theological training results in a credential, not originality. Religion provides cover for the think-less, an easy way out, not thinking for self.

Claimants to free will, who remove the scab of religion face the void.

Some flinch and recoil. If fear drives internal dialogue, why? What ‘something’ is so valuable that fearful thinking dominates? Fear of loss? The unknown? Not getting what we want? Was it taught? Were our minds contaminated by violent imagery suggested by others? (Heaven v. Hell.) Or did self-discovery uncover it?

Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Sentience *is* independence and freedom. Aloneness. It requires private examination or, failing that… flight into community with clones who drink autocratic coolaid. Welcome to the awakening. Genuine thinkers here are hard at work.

Not that community is a bad thing, we survive in creation by taking our place in community. We function best, working together. Each child depends on a village to reach the age where they become contributors to community success.

So what about autocratic Pharisee’s and other religious parasites? Pity the fools. Bitterness, anger and resentment poison recovery. Don’t go there. Be healthy. Be wary.

For me, that I exist and can perceive … what I see peering into the void is unfathomable self-less beauty. The vast potential of others, individuals together in the freedom of aloneness. BUT I also sense the potential for hideous, selfish evil. The chains of selfishness become a kind of imprisonment. Insatiable parasitical gluttons will find nothing but dissatisfaction in the void. Self-ish-ness becomes its own confinement. Imprisonment by desire and freedom in service. Both are real.

The cosmology that contains our sentience is filled with symmetry like this. Modern physics depends on symmetry. Our minds operate rationally and sometimes compulsively, irrationally. Sentience swims in an aether supplying dimensions to the self-less counterposed with the self-ish.

And we see this symmetry looking into the mirror of the void. Either something is there, or it’s not. Neither conviction depends on us. This symmetry just exists.