Odds and Ends

More E-mail

82 Comments

It’s time again for….E-mails From Fundies!

you talk about how were so judgmental, this website is the apitamy of judgmental. you think we are crazy because we believe that the bible is the inspired word of God which it is, and because we try to separate ourselves. the bible says we are a peculiar people. we are not crazy. we know what we believe is right, and that Christ wants us to follow him and do what he asks of us. no matter where that takes us, yes there are fundies as u like to call us who listen to there flesh instead of God we arnt perfect. no one is. maybe you should quit making fun

Yes, we arnt perfect either but the difference is that we’re enjoying it immensely. To quote a well-known doctor: “It is fun to have fun. But you have to know how.”

Edit: But just to show I hold no hard feelings and in the spirit of helping everyone be a little better, I’ve fixed the grammar and punctuation so they’ll be a more effective communicator next time. It’s the least I can do.

82 thoughts on “More E-mail”

  1. Wow! Just wow! If I wanted to be taken seriously I would at least proofread my e-mails for basic grammar and spelling.

    Darrell does not deny that the Bible is the inspired word of God.

    1. Amen, brother! Every time I paste in King James verses it screams bloody murder at me. Stinkin’ piece of liberal garbage!!

      1. Maybe not as liberal as you first think. Could it be that when spellcheck underlines a word in red, it is just reminding you that Jesus spoke in red?

  3. Sigh. “you think we are crazy because we believe that the bible is the inspired word of God” It’s overgeneralizations and false assumptions like this that make it so difficult to have a rational discussion with a fundamentalist.

      1. She still thinks you’re a left-handed Albanian circus promoter?

        I guess I shouldn’t have fun though – I mean make fun.

  5. Spelling spelling spelling!!!!! Did her momma not teach her spelling!?!? GAH! And don’t even get me started on the grammar! (Yes, I once dated an English Ed major….)

    2. I can see you are not going to get along with george at all…
      jk… inside joke (very inside). george says he will like you anyways… 😯

    3. Dating an English Ed. major is not as bad as dating a Red Sox fan, so don’t be too hard on yourself, George. 😛

  6. I know someone who could have written this. She is a mother that homeschools and I have seen similar tirades from her before. She is the “apitamy” of the fundie home-schooler.
    btw, is that Greek? can you translate that, “MY! a pita?” Or “Wow, a flat-bread sandwich?” (yeah I know that last was the way the ESV would translate it.)
    Or is that the Greek Animal Rights group?

    1. Don, I think you’re headed the wrong way with the flatbread thing. Pita is also shorthand for “pain in the arse.”

      So maybe it translates: “My! A pain in the arse!”

    2. I envisioned it as a fundy literal translation of “a pit of me”, meaning “my armpit”, but that’s too modern language, and not a direct word for word translation like “a pit of me” put into the King’s english = apitamy. PITA makes a good point, but I don’t think a fundy like this is familiar w/ the PITA anacronym.

    3. Hey now, no fundy homeschooling hate 😛 My parents were independent fundies, and all of us homeschooled kids are spelling/grammar Nazis, as the saying goes.

      1. No offense intended to those who are qualified to home-school and who do a good job of it. Much offense to those who are not qualified to home-school and end up doing their kids near irreparable harm academically, emotionally and socially.

        @Easterlily241 sounds like you had a good experience.

        My experience with home-schoolers, in the fundy circles I came out of, the parents were not qualified to home-school and had no discipline to conduct class with their children. The examples I personally know are train wrecks… one family is still reaping the results of both home-schooling and “Christian” schooling… another is building up steam to be a spectacular disaster, worthy of Gomez and Pugsley Addams. 😯

  8. Wow, that is so sad. To think that they might be more credible, if only they would learn to spell past a kindergarten level.

    2. Somewhere in the south……
      “Hey all y’all, my mind reads that in a New Yorker accent. Does that make me smarter?” 😆

      1. naaah, your “mind has to read it with an English accent like Monty Python’s Holy Hand-granade skit in order to sound more smarter.” 😎

    1. we need to start a SFL dictionary with our favorite made up words and give them definitions.

      1. Thats OK but please no not include Gid. I never heard of anyone say it like that aznd I have traveled all over the US.

        1. Dave,
          A while back there was another keyboard mangler that came on here and in their righteous indignation misspelled God as gid.
          It has become a staple around here and is still getting mileage.
          gid bless,
          george

  12. To be fair, she heard her pastor once say epitome and has been waiting a few months for an opportunity to use it.

    When her home schooled children apply to PCC, I’m sure they will “except” apitamy.

  13. While this site may appear judgmental at times, Paul commands us several times in his epistles to be judgmental, but not to be condemning. There’s a big difference.

    If this site helps one person stuck in fundamentalism start thinking about it, and eventually come to experience true conversion, and the life that God intended for us, then it was worth all the research, the time, and the passive aggressive e-mails that Darrell has had to sort through.

  14. “Yes, we arnt perfect either but the difference is that we’re enjoying it immensely”

    Man, I laughed and laughed at this line. Another candidate for SFL slogans.

  15. I love it.

    Geez- I was homeschooled but at least I learned a little about spelling and grammar. That was horrible.

    1. Indeed. I went to a scary fundy elementary/junior high school, and the coverage of things like science and sex was a bit spotty, but they pounded spelling and grammar rules into our little heads, telling us that part of being a reflection of God was being able to communicate well.

    1. If they texted it from a cell phone, they’re clearly getting too close to the world, and quite probably already living in sin.

  17. I’d bet serious money that this came from a homeschooled teenager!

    How’s that education working out for you, heh? 😆

    1. Actually, many homeschooled fundies have a decent grasp on grammer/spelling, because A Beka does have an excellent English program (the only good program they have, IMO).

      1. I learned/(learnt) Spanish pretty well/(good) via video from Senora “Pardon my French” McLamb.

      2. I take that statement with a grain or two of salt. Their English literature book, when discussing John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”, used a lovely picture of an antique directional compass to describe the poem’s imagery. Unfortunately for them, Donne actually uses a drawing compass to describe his longing for his wife at home.

        1. ~snicker~ You’re right. Gosh all you have to do is read the poem to see what he’s talking about. He references the two “feet” in which one stays in place and the other moves, yet they are always connected no matter how far apart they get. Guess the publishers didn’t have time to actually read the poem.

    2. I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I looked at it and said “textbook case of the failure of public education”.

      I don’t dispute that there are poorly educated homeschoolers out there but I doubt that they make up any significant amount of the whole.

      I was homeschooled for all twelve grades (kindergarten was not required at the time) and learned to read in the first grade. I was reading the Hardy Boys by age eight. I graduated from an accredited, secular university this year with a 3.92 GPA. Maybe I’m just on the high end of the Bell curve :mrgreen:

    3. If parents only homeschool to remove their children from the eeeeeeeevil influence of public educators, chances are higher that they do not focus on academics. If parents homeschool because they believe their children will excel with one-on-one attention and encouragement to pursue what they love, they usually end up with really bright children.

      I was homeschooled until college and excelled in English from an early age. I was accepted to take a two-year writing course for adults when I was only 15. Homeschooled students do not have to be dumb. My college GPA was 3.97.

    1. Oh, no! Now I posted in the wrong spot! This was meant to be a reply to Loren above about starting an SFL dictionary of made-up words.

      1. that would definitely be in the SFL dictionary….

        Gid – a small god who fits in a box and needs mans help for everything.

        2. …and if your arnt right with gid, youd better git right or git left… 😆

          ur bro in gid,
          george

  20. “you think we are crazy because we believe that the bible is the inspired word of God which it is,”

    Something about that line made me read it like a line from Undercover Brother…

    “Let me tell you something about the word “good,” brotha. Good is an ancient anglo-saxon word, go-od, meanin the absence of color. I.E. it’s all good, which it is”

  21. I am a former English teacher, and reading this message gave me fits. Argh. If a person wants to communicate, he/she needs to learn to communicate clearly. Mispellings and bad punctuation only go to hurt your message. If I were still in the classroom, I would print out this email and show it to my students as an example of what not to do.

  22. It’s fun & easy & well deserved to mock the grammar & spelling, and poor logic of the e-mailer. Keep it coming.

    When I read that e-mail I see another trapped fundy that is starting to see the cracks and terrified of what it means to actually see them. The defensiveness (at least twice denied being crazy, when I don’t know who called him/her crazy, but it didn’t come from SFL). Made at least 2 references to the strangeness being what God wants (denial is more than a river in Egypt). The whole e-mail feels like someone trying desperately to protect him/her self or their family from that trauma of what it would mean to recognize & act on the core problems at the center of fundamentalism. I feel sorry for them. No one should have to live life w/ that level of constant defensiveness and denial. Not to mention the lack of grammar skills.

    LOVE the liberal spell check reference by @Darrell

    1. RobM, recently, on another site, I was involved in a discussion turn debate turn shouting match – a woman from a fundamentalist-type church came out and started swinging wildly. It so happens that there were several other folks around, one of them a pastor. Carefully, with reference only to Scripture, they tried to discuss her issues with the rest of us (dominated by Lutherans), but she just kept on with bold, capitalised typing etc. As soon as somebody asked her something to difficult, she claimed offense and stopped interaction with them. In the end it struck me that the reason for this behaviour is what you just described – the fear of confronting just the possilibty that she might not have al full, correct understanding of everything. For the fundamentalist of any stripe, salvation comes by correct belief and correct rules / laws. It demands perfection, and any remote responsibilty that perfection is absent, threatens to completely undo their world. Therefore any such suggestion is met with rage, anger and vitriol. Of course, this is clearly evident in fundamentalists of other stripes as well, be they Islamic or even Atheist (Dawkins has become quite adept at foaming at the mouth, it seems).

      I think fundamentalism has been furthered with Modernism, but it also corresponds with a certain psychological disfunction. I think that many, if not most, of these ardent fundamentalists, like the creature in the video above, suffer from narcissistic personality disorder.

      2. Louis,
        I did time in a small 100 members or so fundie church and with the exception of two families, I would describe every adult I had spent time with as suffering from NPD. The best was evedropping on a “conversation” within a group of them. No one listened to the other, NO ONE. Each waited for the other to shut up so they could talk. It was a nauseating display.

  23. “Yes, we arnt perfect either but the difference is that we’re enjoying it immensely.”

    I’m trying to decide if the misspelling in that sentence was intentional… 😆

    As a Grammar Nazi, I thoroughly enjoyed this post! :mrgreen:

  26. Holy run-on sentence, Batman! Reading that first one is hard to do without stopping to take a breath!

  27. Hey, Hey, Hey! It’s the Kool-Aid Man! We all know the writer must be a man because it would be out of line for any Fundy woman to speak on religious matters, much less rebuke a man.

      2. BWAHAHAHA! I’d love to supply fundy home schools with dictionaries and a word document on how to use spell check in common programs.

    1. Practically the whole thing is made up of comma splices. Where there are attempts at sentences, you can’t tell because of the lack of capitalization. In a couple of cases, a phrase is mistaken for a sentence. Grammar fail all around.

      1. Exactly. It’s such a mess that it’s hard to know where to begin to correct it!

  31. The thing that surprises me about this e-mail is that the person didn’t misspell the word “judgmental”, which is something I see a lot on comment pages and forums. It always make me cringe when people spell that word with two E’s.

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