Guide Breakdown 3, the lesson and back cover

In which I digress, quote Wikipedia, and say a god who tells you to kill your kid should neither be obeyed nor worshipped. Trigger warning: Contains my swears and mention of SA, no details.

Guide breakdown, part 3

And now, after a bunch of stories of that-happened quality, including one surprisingly not-horribly-racist, one where everyone clapped, and one implied miraculous radio, we come to the week's lesson.

It's a "REAL TIME FAITH STORY". Top of page is a photo of a white teen boy, hand to face, image is heart shaped, ripped in half. This is another story, ominously titled "You Can't Take It Back!".

Ooooh! Will it demonize perfectly normal things like most Purity Culture stories? Let's see.

We have our hero, Joe. "Joe was not popular", oh dear. He is from "a home that was less than perfect" with, oh horrors let's shame the mom and not the society which has shitty social network for working moms, a mom who is "always working".

Joe is parentified. "He has to take care of his brothers and sisters when his mom was not around." Brothers and sisters are both plural, so we're looking at theoretically four younger siblings.

I've personally handled around that many younger siblings, give or take, since I was in my single digits. It's not easy.

Per Wikipedia, "Parentification... is the process of role reversal whereby a child or adolescent is obliged to act as a parent to their own parent or sibling."

"Parentification is harmful when it is unfair and significantly burdens the child," says Wikipedia. Effects include "maladaptive parenting, child maladaptation, physical abuse, sexual abuse, behavioral problems, decreased emotionality, and poor social competence...higher risk of depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and low self-esteem."

This is factual. In my later teens, I had every one of the Parentification effects listed above from Wikipedia except “behavioral problems”.

Also per Wikipedia, Parentification means one loses one's childhood, and if one's contribution to the family is ignored, the child winds up "lonely and unsure" and hits adulthood with "anxiety over abandonment and loss...difficulty handling rejection and disappointment within interpersonal relationships".

I can personally speak to feeling "lonely and unsure" as a parentified teen. Gotta say it is unsettling to be reading Wikipedia and it exactly describes how I felt way back when. I always felt I was so damn weird, and here is plain English saying this happens to many parentified humans. Guess I ain't so weird.

I also want to say that I have no idea what it is like to have a childhood. Not really. I was responsible for meals, cleaning house, laundry, making younger siblings clean house, etc., from ages probably 8 on up until I left home age 19.  Childhood, what is childhood?

Back to our hero Joe. So there we have it. Joe's (likely) got multiple types of horrible abuses going on, he's definitely lost his childhood, (likely) has mental illness, (most probably) has issues with relationships and rejection. There, I have put all the weasel words in.

This, naturally, is NOT mentioned in the story. Adventist stories don't bother mentioning that sort of thing.

Ok, so Joe makes friends with a girl named Katie, tutors her, he thinks he loves her, she "breaks off the relationship" after six months.

Except, per this story, they're platonic friends and he developed feelings for her. There's no romantic relationship here.

Storytime! This is remarkably like this one Adventist guy I grew up with, knew him since I was 16. We were age mid-twenties, messaging each other on Facebook. I enjoyed having a pen pal from home. He assumed we were boyfriend and girlfriend, without even asking me. I found out through the Adventist rumor mill. I had to clearly explain to him in plain English that, no, Facebook messaging alone does not a romantic relationship make.

Conservative Adventism straight up socially stunts people. This is caused by denying kids basic sex education, demonizing developmentally normal things like crushes and masturbation and private sexy thoughts, and preventing platonic opposite-gender relationships. Assuming someone is your girlfriend or boyfriend without firmly establishing that in a conversation? That's high school level stuff there. Perhaps middle school level, I wouldn’t really know, as I never was a student in a middle school nor a high school. (Exception to the rule: Driver’s Ed.)

Ending platonic opposite-gender relationships is an Adventist control method, which I can tell you from family stories, has been around since at least the 1940s. The underlying assumption is platonic opposite-gender relationships inevitably lead to premarital sex.

Ok, back to the story. So Joe has abandonment issues, as Wikipedia has told us happens to parentified humans.

Joe "decided to never let anyone be close to him rather than suffer the pain of a breakup again".

Odd. Prior paragraph simply states they "were very good friends".

It takes Joe "years" to "open up" and he had "a great deal of baggage from [his relationship with] Katie". Sounds like quite the six months tutoring relationship they had.

We are told Joe often wondered if he could make a different decision and “take it all back”.

"But once a decision is made and action happens, you can't take it back!"

Ok, so Joe should never have tutored Katie. Got it. But wtf. He could have stopped tutoring her any damn time. It's not like tutoring someone is an irrevocable covenant.

Also that "action happens" vagueness is vague and harks back to language used in the rapist Allen Brock Turner’s trial. His dad defended his raping, saying it was only "twenty minutes of action".

So is it vaguely hinted at that Katie and Joe had twenty minutes of consensual “action”? Article don't say.

Next, Joe became engaged to a woman with jealousy issues. His fiancée "wanted to be involved with someone who was completely hers, and not have memories of other people he loved. Sound crazy?"

Yes. This is crazy.

"It's not, really. Think about it!"

I have thought about it.  It's absolutely delusional levels of crazy.

"Wouldn't you like to be that someone special for your future husband or wife?”

What the hell kinda question is this? Of course, I AM going to be special to anyone I ever marry or I would not marry them.

Shame on Guide for encouraging irrational jealousy in relationships. It is remarkably unhealthy to be jealous of a girl your fiancé tutored “years ago”, for only six months, whom he no longer has contact with.

But let's humor our Guide Purity Culture advocate who is implying that prior relationships, and prior crushes, prevents one from “being that special someone” to their future spouse. This theory comes straight from Joshua Harris’s book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He was a twenty-one year old homeschooled in child molester Bill Gothard’s homeschooling curriculum, Institutes in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), of Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People fame.

Three IBLP books, Character Sketches, were part of my homeschool curriculum. I read the heck out of them as they have cool anecdotes about all kinds of animals, great illustrations, and turn sparse Bible verse stories into fully-fledged stories with lots of details. These books blamed Dinah for her being raped. Not even the Bible blames her for being raped.

So Joshua Harris was homeschooled in a patriarchal as fuck IBLP curriculum, founded and led by a child molester, with books that blame girls and women for being raped.

This patriarchal twenty-one year old had a painful breakup, wrote a book recommending no dating—the better to avoid the pain of breakups. He mixed Jesus and purity in his book too. His parents were well-connected in homeschool IBLP circles, they knew their audience, marketed well, and Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye became a best seller.

I read and believed that book. In it, he says that every person you ever date “gets a piece of your heart”. And that piece of your heart stays with that ex-date forever, though Joshua Harris never specifies how. Some kind of imaginary magic?

Anyways, Joshua Harris says, the more folks one dated, the more pieces of one’s heart is one leaves behind, and one’s marriage partner only gets a tiny leftover sliver of one’s heart on the wedding day.

And that's the assumption in this Guide story—that any romantic relationship with another human other than one’s spouse removes love from the marriage relationship. Dating another human prior to marrying one is tantamount to cheating on one’s future spouse, in Purity Culture.

Joshua Harris got some life experience, denounced his book, and stopped publishing it.

Contrary to his book’s claims, love is not an object that breaks into tinier vanishing pieces the more one has loved. Love grows more as it is given away.

Let’s take my favorite source, Wikipedia, here for another rebuttal of Harris’s ridiculous pieces of broken heart theory: “Christian psychologists Henry Cloud and John Townsend suggest that avoiding dating in order to avoid suffering, as Harris advises, causes those who do so to forgo opportunities to mature, especially through learning how to create healthy boundaries.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Kissed_Dating_Goodbye

So Purity Culture coerces inexperienced, immature young adults to marry young to one of the first people they date. That's what Guide is suggesting here.

There’s a number of Purity Culture married folks on social media who are still schilling "marry young and only court and don't kiss and don’t date prior to marriage!" and have obviously dysfunctional relationships, OR leave Purity Culture and say they wish they'd dated and kissed and slept with other people prior to marriage.

I know of many rushed Purity Culture young marriages that ended in divorce because the two humans were simply incompatable.

And frankly, it's easier to date a self-aware someone who has had relationship(s), knows what they're looking for in a partner, knows what their body feels like when it is turned on (read: I didn't know until after my first relationship, thought I was sinning and going to hell for feeling those feelings, when I finally read Scarleteen and got basic sex ed and was like "oh!".), knows what they like to do for fun, knows consent and respects boundaries.

It takes empathy, honest conversations, and dating around to see what you want in a partner. And working on yourself during and between relationships.

And it takes realistic expectations, which in our Guide story, Joe's fiancée does NOT have.

Feeling like you are in love with your first crush, like Joe did, is normal. Having a lifelong soft spot for that person is normal. Holing yourself up for years because you didn't wind up marrying your first crush, a la our story’s Joe, is maladaptive, to borrow a term from Wikipedia. Writing a religious book on how dating is morally wrong because you had a breakup, a la Joshua Harris, is maladaptive too.

Incoming rant on breakups: Yes, breakups can be incredibly horrible. A severe breakup can actually cause “broken heart syndrome”, a potentially fatal heart condition. A dear friend of mine suffered this after a painful divorce. A relative of mine suffered this after their pet had to be put down. It's real. It hurts. It's natural to want to avoid a breakup. Humans like to avoid pain.

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/conditions/cardiomyopathy/takotsubo-cardiomyopathy

Back to our story. Contrary to Guide’s normalization of Katie’s irrational jealousy, being jealous of a girl your fiancé tutored for “six months, years ago” and has zero contact with is hella unhealthy. Joe needs therapy to learn how to pick a partner who treats him with love, trust, decently, and respect. Katie needs therapy on getting over jealousy.

Next in Guide. There is an orange stripe right below Joe’s story with verses from the love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. It says love is patient. And there's a quote on being very good Christians by Ellen White, the Adventist plagiarizing prophetess.

There's another orange stripe. One is to imagine one is left alone at a concession stand with their crush. One is committed to not date for several more years. Quick! What Bible verses should they use as thought-stopping techniques?

Mentally recite Bible verses instead of conversing with one’s crush. Got it.

Page 25. Here's little daily worship things. Every day has a read this verse, write this down assignment.

Monday. It is about being a good example. One is to unscramble a verse. Then one is to write down an answer to: "How can you build your relationships so they're pleasing to God?"

Well, for starters, one should talk plainly to their crush about relationship status instead of assuming one is in a relationship, for one cannot read minds. That’s God’s business, if there is a God, and God said plainly in the Ten Commandments that he’s a “jealous God”. Let’s pretend this means God doesn’t approve of humans thinking they can mind-read another. Also, pretty sure God reserves jealousy to himself, so Katie in particular should knock off her jealousy of a girl Joe used to tutor.

Tuesday. It's all about you have time to decide on whom to date. Make a list of traits. Set boundaries. Talk to parents or trusted adult. This is all ok advice. Kudos for recommending boundaries. They should have recommended Scarleteen too.

Wednesday. Bible verses on staying pure and to love God. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Yay, that hugely used clobber verse. And a game! Match the partial Bible verse phrases to the Bible verses!

I can do that all day long, for Adventists had me memorize reams of Bible verses. King James Version Bible phrases live rent-free in my mind, and I spot them everywhere in society.

(Read: King James Version Bible phrases are everywhere in society. Even random places. For instance, British audio drama creators Big Finish Productions has a writer on staff fond of 1 Corinthians 13. In their audio drama The Diary of River Song Part 1, story Signs, a monster morphs from a humanoid form to its regular monster shape. “For we saw in a mirror, dimly, but now face to face,” monster paraphrases 1 Corinthians 13:12. See? Random KJV phrases in random places.)

On my badass Bible verse skills: I can also find a memorized Bible verse for nearly every situation—from being too loud in the morning to studying too hard and verses about unicorns and frying pans. I can find precise verse location in the Bible thanks to Google. Not all friends and family are amused with my Bible verse for every occasion skillz.

Page 26. Thursday. Your choices now "are critical" for the future friendships. They mean dating and marriage. Emphasis on staying pure. Given “pure” here means “has not had before-marriage genital contact with another human,” this is not so cool. You're not “dirty” because another human had contact with your genitals. Be kind if you want a kind person. K, cool cool.

Have boundaries! They mean don't have sex, but they don't say it. Instead they ask if God approves of your thoughts? Aaaaand we are back to thoughtcrimes are a thing again.

I'll tell you what. If I ever meet Jesus, I'm telling him how much damage he did by setting up "thought crimes are a thing!" in that shitty verse about "if you imagine having sex, you have committed adultery in your heart!!1!"

Yes, and? Nobody gets hurt when private sexy thoughts stay private. Intrusive thoughts are a thing too. Shut up about thoughts.

Friday. It's about being pure and blameless. There's a chart. 3 columns labeled "I AM", "I WANT TO BE", "I AM LOOKING FOR". One is to be “as honest as they can be” while filling out this list. Guide suggests listing things like "honesty, integrity, joyfulness". I can tell you I totes fail on that last one. I have depression. Omfg.

This "be honest as you can! Write how you are not who you want to be!" reminds me of the confessions totalitarian regimes make folks write. I know this is a thing, because multiple Adventist mission story books are about reeducation camps in foreign countries. The hero always has to write confessions. One wrote how God saved him in his confession and he was beaten because confession not self-denouncing enough. Another was tortured by electricity to his genitalia. Yay, Adventist mission stories for kids!

So anyways, Guide then has one write three steps how to become who they want to be. Three steps for every word like “honesty, integrity, joyfulness” one wrote on their chart. There’s no suggestions on how to perform this drastic personality overhaul. Nope, Adventist kids have to make up those three steps themselves from whole cloth.

Taking tiny baby steps, doing one thing at a time, having specific measurable goals? Not mentioned. Fuck you, Guide. You did say “have boundaries”, but you mean “don't have sex”, and you aren't telling kids how to change habits. You could have, right here. It's an important life skill.

Page 27. The end of a story. See Guide Breakdown 2.

Page 28 and 29. Two page spread. There's a color illustration of a white bearded man in stereotypical Bible robes with his right hand on the head of tween boy, also in Bible robes.  There's a stone altar the boy is sitting on. White bearded dude has a dagger in his left hand. His shoulders are slumped. The tween's body language is relaxed. No visible expressions.

The story is how God told Abraham to kill his son Isaac. So Abraham gave it his best shot, went to a mountain and tied Isaac to an altar and was coming at Isaac with a knife. God freaked out and canceled that plan, and there was a ram in bushes they sacrificed instead. Poor ram.

So we're supposed to be just as obedient.

Nope. Screw that. I don't give a flying fuck who or what is talking to me, if some one tells me to kill my kid, I'm not doing it. I'm signing myself in to the nearest mental health facility. Sure, Abraham had God Himself telling him. I don't care. You don't sacrifice your child to any God, that God can go kick rocks, and nope, any damn God that wanders around telling folks to kill their child deserves no worship.

Wikipedia on its page The Binding of Isaac tells us that one Jewish view of this story is to make clear child sacrifice is not ok. I'm ok with that interpretation.

There's a cool ancient mosaic of this story on that page, too. Circa 500 CE. Looks like a first grader drew it. I'm partial to the wild-eyed look of Abraham, and his white beard that looks like seven chin-fangs. There's two red-palmed hands extending from a cloud from the top center, guess God is red-handed?? Most fitting. Oh, and Isaac looks about five, and he's got bulging eyes staring down at a flaming altar that Abraham's holding him one-armed over. This mosaic is better than any illustration in this Guide. I'm uploading this mosaic with this post.

I have digressed.

Page 30. Another daily lesson plan. Titled Power Points. It is summing up the moral of the story of God telling Abraham to murder Isaac. This week's Power Point is "God shows His grace by stepping in to save us."

Except that didn't happen. At all. Nowhere in the entire story. Nope, psycho God told Abraham to murder Isaac. Nutcase Abraham gave it a damn good try. God stopped him last second, had him murder a sheep instead. God set up the whole damn situation. Nowhere did He “step in to save us”. “Us" literally are NOT in that story.

Memory verse is relabeled "Power Verse" to sound cool probably. It's "So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided".

That's much better than Young Disciple's memory verse of "Ye have not because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts". So there's less spiritual abuse going on here, so that's good.

So the lesson plan is daily things related to Abraham almost unalives Isaac story. One is to write things, look up words in a concordance, pray specific things like "Ask God to make you remember that He provides!". It's ok. It's boring, it is bland, but if trusting God works for one, this is great. Go for it.

Page 31. This is a three panel cartoon illustration of the Abraham didn’t actually kill Isaac story. The ancient mosaic off Wikipedia has more character.

Back page. There's a photo of a conventionally attractive white teen girl. Her hair is shoulder length brown. Her head is tilted down, eyes closed. She's holding a bible to her chest. It's all holy golden lighted.

Words say FACTORY FOCUS. And Benefits Of The Sabbath. Benefits include: you live longer per a 2005 study (that Reddit says is quite flawed), you get closer to God, you get closer to family, rest is good for you. Sources include an Ellen White the Adventist plagiarizing prophetess quote, a SDA Loma Linda study, National Geographic article on the 2005 study, aaaand some other SDA website. So that's sources: 4 Adventist ones. One allegedly flawed study.

At least citations are cited. Citing citations is not a typical Adventist thing, not in sermons, not in books, not in stories.

Summary: Well, at least this magazine isn’t as bad as Young Disciple’s dire magazine telling kids that praying for mom to go to heaven is a sin *if you have any motivation besides God’s glory for wanting her in heaven*.

I still wouldn’t recommend this magazine to any impressionable true believing Evangelical kid. Purity Culture messes up people. Opposite gender relationships can be platonic, and are healthy normal things. Dating around helps you mature, learn boundaries, learn if you want a spouse and xwhat traits you want in a spouse. Fuck Guide for promoting Purity Culture. Fuck Guide for failing to teach kids how to change habits.

Fin.