The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 18/04/19
Idiot Talk And Imaginary Enemies
I may have come across the name of Seth Andrews before - possibly in my peregrinations (perhaps not the most apt word in the context) around the atheist blogosphere - but I certainly had never seen or heard him.
This was remedied by chance a couple of hours or so ago, when - browsing YouTube (who seem to know what I like for some reason) - I idly clicked on one of his videos.
Andrews was raised in a typical Protestant fundamenalist family in Oklahoma, was - as a direct result of that vicious indoctrination - a (to use his own term) 'true-blue believer', a leader of religious activities in his school and beyond and, no doubt, an all-round pain in the ass.
It took him until his late thirties before he was able finally to liberate himself from the prison of his upbringing's propaganda.
Here, in the first of two talks Seth Andrews gave in 2017, he describes with great humour and sharpness the one thing which makes him madder than anything else about the way he had had to live for so long; that the Christianity forced upon from his infancy made him talk like an idiot:
Shortly afterwards, he gave another talk about the 'Satanic Panic' which was concocted by religious loonies (mostly, but by no means exclusively, in the US), fed and fed upon by cynical politcians and insolent hacks, and which destroyed - often literally - the lives of so many. Here, the wit of the earlier lecture is augmented by a forensic analysis and a genuine rage about what happened and why. It ends with a brief but moving description of his own release from the bondage of ignorance and bigotry and a call for the hope that that freedom brings:
