My God helped me get through a bad time. You NEED to worship My God too if you wish to "recover"

BethK
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My God helped me get through a bad time. You NEED to worship My God too if you wish to "recover"

I've run into this statement, "My God helped me get through a bad time. You NEED to worship My God too if you wish to "recover" " time and time again in various sorts of IRL and online support groups for all sorts of things. It's almost gotten to the point where I just don't want to seek out groups of others to work things through with. Lots of people call it "isolating", but when you're looking for some support for anything from a bereavement to stopping a bad habit, the last thing ANYONE wants is to fight off those who would change a basic outlook. Now, in this kind of a situation, I have no problem with someone else whose belief in an invisible friend helped them with their emotional crisis. I don't even have a problem with them getting specific about how this belief helped them. I DO have a problem when that person says theirs is the ONLY way.


At the same time, whenever I or other disbelievers in supernatural sources for help talk about our own use of natural means to get beyond it (anything from thinking things through, to time brings healing, to actively doing something about the situation), we get shouted down for our "lack of faith" or "your best thinking got you here." Sorry, it wasn't "thinking" that caused the problem..... in fact, in many cases it really "wasn't thinking" that allowed or caused me to make a poor choice. Asking a nonexistent entity to take over for me because I won't is not going to change that one iota. Or, we get asked to leave because we're "not being supportive" to the believers, or because someone wrongly assumes because I or someone else is telling something different than this party-line fundamentalist protestant belief, that we are trying to convert them or others to our disbelief, or outright "lead them astray".


I've run into similar situations when I worked in hospice. It seemed that we were "expected" to come up with these trite quips from protestant Christianity - even if we did not believe in it, nor did the person dying nor his/her family. Why the need for hypocrisy? If neither they nor we believed in a god, or that god, or worshiped him/her/it/them in that way, why the need to act like we did? For whose benefit or comfort is it?  Some other hospice employees? While hospice is supposed to be about comfort for the dying, it seemed to have a second agenda even with a secular organization.

How's my proselytizing? Call 1-800-FANATIC

Beth