About Your Captain

Hi, everybody! This is your Captain speaking. You can call me “Cas” if you want.

I’m in my 40s. I spent the first half of my life in Christianity in various denominations starting with Catholicism and ending with fundamentalist Pentecostalism, then turned around and left it all behind about 20 years ago. I love tabletop RP games, history, traveling, 80s pop culture, and (duh) cats, and you’ll probably get an earful about all of them in due time.

If you’re wondering what my background is, I was married to a preacher who was angling for full-time pastor/ministry work. I’ve studied and read extensively about history, sociology, game theory, and a host of other topics, and hold a degree that involves history and psychology. I will never pretend to have been some kind of expert at advanced theology, but I know a fair amount, and I’m very familiar with most of Christianity’s doctrines and ideas. I’m also quite familiar with other religions’ ideas.

You’ll likely notice that I don’t talk much about my beliefs or current relationships/jobs/situations here. I don’t think my  current religious leanings or opinions are relevant to a discussion of Christianity, and I don’t think it’s respectful to proselytize, so if you leave it at “deist” or “humanist,” you’ll be close enough. I don’t identify as an atheist, though I am very sympathetic to atheism and share its over-arching goals of promoting science and critical thinking and also helping to bring about a secular society where folks are free to pursue spiritual fulfillment however they think best. I’m not willing to go so far as to say that I don’t think there are any gods, just that I am 100% certain and comfortable saying at this point that the god portrayed in the Bible can’t possibly be real.

Dale Arden (Photo credit: Wikipedia). I don’t look a thing like this.

For a long time, I was fairly quiet about my disbelief and my having left the religion. “Live and let live, that’s my motto,” as Dale Arden said. I was out of the loop for a good long time. Then I realized that with religion’s growing encroachment on people’s rights, that a big part of Christianity was becoming downright abusive in its grasp for power. When I returned my attention to the matter, I was shocked to see just how politicized Christianity had become and how shamelessly it was hurting people and alienating them. Clearly I’d missed a lot after deconverting, and the more I saw as I caught up, the more horrified I was. Finally, it became crystal-clear that staying silent was not an option anymore for me. Abusers depend upon their victims’ silence. And so I am not silent anymore.

A quick little note about names and other specific details:

As you might guess, I usually change the names of private people in this blog. Public figures, of course, don’t get renamed. I also reserve the right to change small details about specific incidents so they’re harder to track and trace. My memory is also not perfect, so I research things as much as possible, but there are points–especially in my “testimony”–where dates may not work out perfectly. If a date or some other specific detail is terribly important, I will make sure it’s correct. If I can’t, I’ll make clear that I’m not totally sure about it.

On that note, my preacher ex-husband is not actually named “Biff.” I call him that because he’d remind you of the villain from the movie Back to the Future. He was big, kind of a tough guy, talked a big game, misused big words and couldn’t construct an analogy if his life depended on it, and had a dismal view of women’s rights and bodily autonomy. At least he was more cute and charming than the movie Biff and at least at first not quite as threatening.

Atheist stickers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)