{"id":654,"date":"2010-11-02T00:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-02T00:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/mocking-teen-suicide-victims.html"},"modified":"2010-11-02T00:30:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-02T00:30:00","slug":"mocking-teen-suicide-victims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/mocking-teen-suicide-victims.html","title":{"rendered":"Mocking Teen Suicide Victims"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So another Halloween has come and gone and with it the perennial \u201cHell Houses\u201d that the fundies like to host.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure they\u2019re really fun, but I\u2019ll pass.\u00a0 This year, in the wake of teen suicides by bullying victims, Wilmont Place Baptist Church in Oklahoma City held their version called \u201cJudgement House<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Here\u2019s a report by the Oklahoma Atheists<\/a> on one of the scenarios in this entertaining attraction:<\/p>\n

Rachel is a teenage girl who was poorly raised by drug-dealing parents who do not show her much love, and as a result she now lives with her grandmother and dresses like a goth. She is persuaded by her pious grandma to hang out with the church youth group and goes off to church camp, where she is ruthlessly mocked, maltreated, and ostracized by Christian youth\u2026.<\/p>\n

At camp, Rachel gets the chance to hear a sermon about Jesus, however, just after hearing the gospel message she is given the news that her grandmother has died. \u2026In the next scene, she swallows a few pills, scrawls suicide note expressing her wish to escape from suffering, and then has a prophetically hellish drug trip while writhing on the bed in the throes of death\u2026<\/p>\n

In the next room\u2026a stern archangel\u2026adjudges Grandma as saved, and Rachel as damned, based on whether they had believed in Jesus and prayed the right prayer. Grandma forgets all about her beloved granddaughter\u2019s plight and skips off happily into eternal bliss. Rachel, however, remembers her Grandma as the one person who has shown her love and loudly calls for her, but is told by the stern angel that \u201cShe cannot hear you now\u201d just before damning her to hell for her unbelief.<\/p>\n

\u2026Next we are taken to Hell, in which we find Rachel being pushed around and bullied and mocked once again\u2026. It would appear that Hell is not without a sense of irony, torturing Rachel in the afterlife with nasty echoes of her short but unpleasant Earthly existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m sure this was not a coincidence.\u00a0 It is a watered down version of the very real suicide of a Norman, Oklahoma 19-year old<\/a> and the other teens who have taken their own lives.\u00a0 Note that they made the victim in \u201cJudgement House\u201d a sympathetic character.<\/p>\n

That wouldn\u2019t matter to these people. \u201cRachel\u201d didn\u2019t say the right magic words.\u00a0 In their twisted imaginations, heaven is filled with otherwise detestable people who believed in Jesus.<\/p>\n

They really believe this garbage.\u00a0 They have no idea how shockingly immoral they really are. \u00a0Oh well, I guess they\u2019re not the only ones who can be \u201cjudgemental.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Thanks to Jerry Coyne<\/a> and ERV<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So another Halloween has come and gone and with it the perennial \u201cHell Houses\u201d that the fundies like to host.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure they\u2019re really fun, but I\u2019ll pass.\u00a0 This year, in the wake of teen suicides by bullying victims, Wilmont Place Baptist Church in Oklahoma City held their version called \u201cJudgement House.\u201d\u00a0 Here\u2019s a report […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12,16,27],"class_list":["post-654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-fundamentalist-christianity","tag-homophobia","tag-morality"],"yoast_head":"\nMocking Teen Suicide Victims<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So another Halloween has come and gone and with it the perennial \u201cHell Houses\u201d that the fundies like to host.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure they\u2019re really fun, but I\u2019ll\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/mocking-teen-suicide-victims.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mocking Teen Suicide Victims\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So another Halloween has come and gone and with it the perennial \u201cHell Houses\u201d that the fundies like to host.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure they\u2019re really fun, but I\u2019ll\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/mocking-teen-suicide-victims.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Atheist Rabbi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-11-02T00:30:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jeffrey L. 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