Use school officials and classmates to help you escape your religious home
Are you being spiritually abused at home? Are you being forced to attend religious services that are anti-atheist, anti-pagan, anti-LGBTQ or anti-female and you identify with one of these groups or sympathize with them? Do you find this to be unethical? Are you being banned from practicing your own polytheistic faith or focusing on rational philosophy? Are you being told you are going to hell, are possessed by evil spirits, or are somehow ethically unfit? Then you are being abused and as an atheist, pagan, or LGBTQ teen, you need to get out.
Getting out of a cult home is very hard, still today most people believe that parents have the right to raise their children in whatever religion they want, even if the child resists and expresses the teachings are giving them harm. Children and teenagers usually have no other place to go outside of home than school. At school, you are under the care of the state and under their protection. But don't think all the adults at the school will understand or sympathize with you, indeed many of them are monotheists themselves and are torturing their own resistant children.
The first place you should go to is other children. Start opening up to them about being atheist, pagan, or LGBTQ. Find others like you and find those who are allies with you. You need to feel as though you have something, and the first people who are likely to join you are other children. Let them know about what is going on at home and see if they have similar stories. You should demonize your parents to them to make them feel more confident in demonizing their own parents. Get child allies first.
Once you have some friends (or even if you can't find any) go to school authorities and tell them you are being abused religiously. Your school officials will likely not recognize the category of "religious abuse" because they give the parents so many rights to be pushy with absurd and hateful ideas, but you must very cogently explain that you are being denied the right to practice your religion, are being forced to practice a religion, or are being attacked and characterized as "evil". You should make it clear at first you are not ready to let your parents know about these meetings but that you eventually want something to be done. If you are able to, involve other children, go as a group, bring forth a group complaint, show power in numbers. And don't let them scare you into stopping advocating for yourself, you are being abused and it needs to stop. The abuse will not just be at home but with school officials as well, you must be strong and stand fast.
Discuss your problems with school counselors until they understand you are under duress from your home treatment and don't feel safe. Write a list of all the offenses being made against you and give it to them and update them. Try to find faculty and staff who are supportive of you. Establish or infiltrate pagan, atheist, and LGBTQ clubs at school and use them to recruit more children into the polytheistic/nontheistic faiths and to accept their sexuality or gender identity. Use these club activities as a time to bring up cultural problems that pagans, atheists, and LGBTQs face at the hands of monotheists. When the time is right, speak of your own abuse, unless your parents can't find out yet.
Start uniting as pagans, atheists, and LGBTQs to politicize the school zone. Petition to have religious symbols associated with homophobia, misogyny and anti-paganism removed like Christmas Trees and menorahs. No monotheist holidays nor any other religious holiday should be celebrated on public property; children who are victimized by these religions should not have to feel as though these abusive institutions are being legitimized by the state and school. I support paganism, but you should not try to have pagan holidays added to school celebrations, some people have been abused by paganism, my mother was raised in abusive black witchcraft, but as polytheists, we can denounce our own backward sects as well.
If your being raised in a religious household, you really only have one place to go and that is school (other than the police if it is that bad). At school build up your army, starting with children, then teachers, then the faculty. Once you have support, you can confront your parents. If this subdues them then you have won, but if it does not, and they only become more abusive, you have your excuse to get out of your home. If you are abandoned in your abuse by the school, then you will eventually likely become suicidal and once you express that to them they will have to send you to a hospital where you can refuse to go home on threat of taking your own life. Going to state care is not great, but it is better than living in a home that is definitely abusive, at least now you have a chance.
Comments
Post a Comment