Quote of the Day

Don't try to win over the haters; you're not the jackass whisperer.

-- Scott Stratten

Quote of the Day

Now that I had left the church, Jason was trying to show me what he had already experienced.  His comment about it being like Christmas reminded me of the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas, where everyone lives in Halloween Town, and all they know from is a world related to Halloween.  One day the main character Jack Skellington wanders into the forest and finds seven holiday doors and opens a portal to Christmas Town.  Here, for the first time, he finds that there is a world outside of Halloween.  He begins to question all he sees when he continually asks "What's this?"  It was the same thing for me and I imagine for anyone else who has left a cult-like community.  Worlds open up to you that you were previously cut off from.  I now realize that there are plenty of people in the universe doing good things.  Not just Scientologists, as I was falsely led to believe.

-- Leah Remini with Rebecca Paley, Troublemaker, p. 223

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Honoring and protecting our integrity isn't easy.  Blackmailers shout down our inner guidance by creating confusion and uproar, and as they do, we seem to lose contact with the knowing parts of ourselves, only to kick ourselves when we realize we've given in again.

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 130

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The strange idea of having to love God so that He does not punish me for my rebelliousness and disappointment, but instead rewards me with the love that forgives all, becomes just as much the expression of our childish dependency and insecurity as the assumption that, like our parents, God is in desperate need of our love.  But is this not a completely grotesque idea?  A higher being dependent on inauthentic feelings dictated by morality is strongly reminiscent of the insecurity displayed by our frustrated and disoriented parents.  Such a being can be called God only by people who have never questioned their own parents or thought about their dependency on them.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 39

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If conservative Christians continue to treat LGBT people as second-class citizens and cry persecution every time they don't get their way, they will lose far more than the culture wars.  They will lose the Christian identity.  We've obscured the gospel when the "right to refuse" service has become a more widely-known Christian value than the impulse to give it.

 -- Rachel Held Evans, "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex"

Quote of the Day

I only accept and pay attention to feedback from people who are also in the arena.  If you're occasionally getting your butt kicked as you respond, and if you're also figuring out how to stay open to feedback without getting pummeled by insults, I'm more likely to pay attention to your thoughts about my work.  If, on the other hand, you're not helping, contributing, or wrestling with your own gremlins, I'm not at all interested in your commentary.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 171

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After thinking a certain way, and being told what to think based on strict policy for more than thirty years, learning to think for myself and make my own choices did not come easily, nor did it happen overnight.  Now, more than two years after cutting ties with the church, I'm still trying to figure things out.  This mindset, which had been drilled into me for decades, is not an easy thing to "unlearn."  With practically every decision I made when I first left (and still even now), I had to ask myself Is that what you really think, or what a Scientologist would think?

-- Leah Remini with Rebecca Paley, Troublemaker, p. 221-222

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Though we tend to equate integrity with honesty, it's actually much more.  The word itself means "wholeness," and we experience it as the firm knowledge that "This is who I am.  This is what I believe.  This is what I am willing to do -- and this is where I draw the line."

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 128

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A system of morality tells us what to do and what not to do, but it cannot tell us what we should feel.  Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated.  We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies.  But as we have already seen, our brains are permanent repositories of our emotions; these are retrievable, susceptible of experience, and luckily they can be transformed without risk into conscious feelings.  And if we are fortunate enough to find an enlightened witness, we can learn to recognize their meaning and their causes.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 38

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I've been watching people with golden crosses around their necks and on their lapels shout at the TV about how serving gay and lesbian people is a violation of their "sincerely-held religious beliefs."  And I can't help but laugh at the sad irony of it.  Two-thousand years ago, Jesus hung from that cross, looked out on the people who put him there and said, "Father, forgive them."  Jesus served sinners all the way to the cross.

-- Rachel Held Evans, "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex"

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When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection.  When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable.  If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits get crushed.  It's a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us reality-check the criticism and cynicism.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 169

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Even now, after decades in this business, I still have moments where I am trying to fit in as an actress in Hollywood, as if I were somehow an imposter.  For so long, I looked for acceptance from everyone from my dad to the people in this town.  What I have slowly come to realize, and often still have to remind myself of, is this: There is no "right" way to be.  I am flawed and imperfect, but am uniquely me.  I don't fit in and probably never will.  And I don't have to try to anymore.  That other person was a lie.  And let's face it, normal is boring.  We all have something to offer the world in some way, but by not being our authentic selves, we are robbing the world of something different, something special.

-- Leah Remini with Rebecca Paley, Troublemaker, p. 170

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How often do we deprive ourselves of something that's reasonable and well within our means simply because we fear another person's reaction?

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 127

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All their lives, (children) will force themselves to offer their parents something that they neither possess nor have any knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine, unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the recipient.  Yet they will continue to strive in this direction because even as adults they still believe that they need their parents and because, despite all the disappointments they have experienced, they still hope for some token of genuine affection from those parents.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 37-38

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As Christians, our most "deeply held religious belief" is that Jesus Christ died on the cross for sinful people, and that in imitation of that, we are called to love God, to love our neighbors, and to love even our enemies to the point of death.  And yet right now, the prevailing perception of American Christians is that baking a cake for a gay couple is too much to ask.

-- Rachel Held Evans, "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex"

Quote of the Day

Recently I saw a band play on Saturday Night Live.  It's mostly one guy but he tours with 9+ people, all of them men.  Every one of them wore T-shirts.  If a group of nine women wore T-shirts on a national TV show, people would 1) ridicule them for not trying to look pretty, or 2) think it was an art project.  At the very least it would be notable.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 192

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If we are the kind of people who "don't do vulnerability," there's nothing that makes us feel more threatened and more incited to attack and shame people than to see someone daring greatly.  Someone else's daring provides an uncomfortable mirror that reflects back our own fears about showing up, creating, and letting ourselves be seen.  That's why we come out swinging.  When we see cruelty, vulnerability is likely to be the driver.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 167

Quote of the Day

I understood that Scientology was about following the precepts, laid down in the policy by the leader, L. Ron Hubbard.  If you did that, your life would be good.  But if you committed overts, or transgressions, and didn't talk about them, didn't take Scientology courses and auditing, then you would receive something bad back from the universe.  And the only way to really do things right for yourself, and the universe, was to stay connected to the church.

-- Leah Remini with Rebecca Paley, Troublemaker, p. 16

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By hiding her feelings, she was training him to escalate his punishing behavior to keep her in line.  Blackmailers learn how far they can go by observing how far we let them go.

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 125-126

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What (the body) needs above all else is the truth.  As long as this truth remains unidentified and a person's genuine feelings about his/her parents continue to be ignored, the body has no choice but to go on producing symptoms.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 37

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Musicians, especially those who are women, are often dogged by the assumption that they are singing from a personal perspective.  Perhaps it is a carelessness on the audience's part, or an entrenched cultural assumption that the female experience can merely encompass the known, the domestic, the ordinary.  When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative, listeners and watchers must acknowledge that she's not performing as herself, and if she's not performing as herself, then it's not her who is wooing us, loving us.  We don't get to have her because we don't know exactly who she is.  An audience doesn't want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness.  Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening.  When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 165-166

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The discomfort of conservative Christians whose views on gender and sexuality are being challenged more than they once were is nothing compared to the suffering faced by LGBT people and religious and ethnic minorities in this country.  We would all do well to remember that.

-- Rachel Held Evans, "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex"

Quote of the Day

If you decide to walk into the arena and dare greatly, you're going to get kicked around.  It doesn't matter if your arena is politics or the PTO, or if your great dare is an article for your school newsletter, a promotion, or selling a piece of pottery on Etsy -- you're going to be on the receiving end of some cynicism and criticism before it's over.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 167

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Ironically, for me and for most other people who have left the church and spoken out against it, the very qualities that we've been penalized for -- defying, questioning, thinking independently -- are the same qualities that made us prime candidates for Scientology in the first place.

-- Leah Remini with Rebecca Paley, Troublemaker, p. xiv

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The hard truth is that every time we let someone undercut our dignity and integrity, we are colluding -- helping them hurt us.

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 124

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The body cannot relate to the commandments of morality.  Ethical concerns are entirely alien to it.  Bodily functions like breathing, circulation, digestion respond only to the emotions we actually feel, not to moral precepts.  The body sticks to the facts.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 33

Quote of the Day

The role of a woman onstage is often indistinct from her role offstage -- pleasing, appeasing, striking some balance between larger-than-life and iconic with approachable, likable, and down-to-earth, the fans like gaping mouths, hungry for more of you.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 138

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Furthermore, when Christian leaders predict God's impending judgment on the U.S. in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, arguing "our country's foundations are being destroyed," it suggests that slavery, genocide, extreme gender inequality, and Jim Crow weren't serious enough to warrant a response from God, but now that our gay neighbors can get marriage licenses, all hell is sure to break lose.  This reveals a profound ignorance regarding the suffering of other minority groups, both historically and presently.  When white conservative Christians obsess over their own perceived oppression, it becomes incredibly difficult to engage in important conversation about religious, racial, and gender privilege that are necessary for creating a more just society.  How can we begin to recognize our own privilege and the harm it can cause when it remains unchecked if we believe ourselves to be an oppressed minority?

-- Rachel Held Evans, "For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex"

Quote of the Day

I don't want the fear of floodlighting to stop anyone from sharing their struggles with the world, but being mindful about what, why, and how we share is important when the context is a larger public.  We're all grateful for people who write and speak in ways that help us remember we're not alone.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 162