I just got back from Christmas with the family. Stayed at my sister's house. She is (like so many are) an ex-drug addict/alcoholic turned religious fanatic. For years and years, literally since junior high school (and she's in her late 40's now) she was addicted to cocaine and drinking, and stayed that way until her mid-30's. Now she's changed her addiction to drugs to an addiction to Christ. She's better now, because she's no longer poisoning her body, but her way of thinking is so black and white that she's poisoned her mind.

Her worldview is very simple: as she puts it, she has given herself to God. Therefore, God lives her life for her. She no longer has any responsibility for her decisions, nor can she take any kind of real pleasure in what she does, because God is the one that does it. She claims to enjoy her life and what she does (and she has done some things to be proud of) and at the same time she doesn't even believe that she did them, and every time she mentions anything she says that God did it through her.

What's the point in living if you're not living your own life? If you aren't actually responsible for your own achievements, then why even make any? And if you're not responsible for your achievements, then what about your failures? If she hit a kid on the way to work, wouldn't that be God's fault too?

She has actually told her kids on occasion that things like storms that occur when they are going out to party are signs to not go out from God, and never obnce thinks about how that storm may have caused an accident which killed someone (it happend while we were there actually). What kind of God would send a storm which kills other people as a message to someone to not go out and have fun?

She believes that everything is a potential test by Satan to turn her away from God. Every event, every object, every action. Satan is behind every bush (no pun intended BTW) trying to turn her away from her righteous path. So every decision she "makes" is actually prayed on. She literally cannot open the door without asking God whether she should.

How do you live your life being constantly afraid of the boogeyman? doesn't this sound less like Christianity and more like voodoo? It seems really animistic. Everything is possessed by a demon that's trying to deceive you.

She's got serious trouble with raising her kids, who are now all adults. She mad a lot of mistakes in raising them, and they show the damage. But now, she refuses to let them live their own lives, she continually undercuts their authority with their own kids, and she goes on about how she wants to keep them from making the same mistakes she did - which of course makes them rebel all the more, and make the same mistakes. As much as I would like to talk to her about what is going on, I can't. Her worldview is such that if she has an idea, God must have put it there, therefore it's infallible so anything she does is sacrosanct. There's mo room for discussion.

Her middle daughter was actually trying to tell me that Christianity started at the same time as the United States! Anyone before the US was founded wasn't a Christian, and anyone outside the US isn't a Christian either. I set her straight in short order, and she did realize what she was saying, but she had been indoctrinated to the point that she could spew crap like that and not know it was crap.

I really worry about these people. They're not sane. They no longer live in reality. and they do believe that it is their right to convert everyone around them. Fundie churches target the drug-addicted on purpose: not because they are really interested in saving those people, but because they make the best shock troops. She goes off and witnesses all the time, and forces her kids to come along when she can get them to. It doesn't matter that that is trying to force beliefs on someone else, or that that turns people away more that anything else, or that if someone is forced into religion then it isn't because they believe and really doesn't count, she does it anyway and nothing will stop her. Christ addicts will stop at NOTHING to get what they're after, because they truly believe that they will go to hell if they fail. My sister is a Christ addict. She may have given up the physically-damaging effects of drugs, but the addiction is still there, along with the extremism that makes it damaging.