Prelude

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What is this?

A breakdown of the textbook Understanding the Times. This was my Bible textbook for two years of high school. My parents approved of it and nothing that I learned in it was surprising or dissonant with what I had been raised to believe, so for me this is a very good distillation of the teachings I was raised with. I suspect this will be so for some other people also.

I am doing it mainly for personal catharsis. However, I hope that it will be helpful for other ex-Christian fundamentalists also and might shed some light for non-fundamentalists on how these views operate. I don't expect it to be convincing for current fundamentalists, because that's not really how it works.

It is not likely to update on any particular schedule, because this is a stressful project and I have day jobs.

I'm also not going to be objective. Some of this stuff hurt me, and I don't intend to hide that. However, I'll be doing my best to point out factual errors or logical fallacies where they occur and I will try my best not to commit any of my own.

Who are you?

My name is Book. That's not my real name, but it's my internet nickname. I was raised in a series of fundamentalist churches throughout the mid to late 90s and the 2000s. I've been in nondenominational churches and denominational ones, all evangelical, Calvinist, and confessional. I attended two different Christian schools, and between them I was homeschooled for about half of my education. It was in the second of these schools that I encountered this textbook. 

I left the church about five years ago, when I was in my early twenties. I left my parents' home for graduate school shortly after. My leaving was precipitated both by the realization that I was queer and trans, and by my growing awareness and concern for social justice issues. I use they/them pronouns and that's all the information I intend to give about my gender and sexuality on this page.

I'm white, American, and obviously from a Christian background and which is relevant because this textbook is often racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic, and while I will try to address that, please feel free to point it out if I go about it in a way that instead reinforces bigotry.

Introduction - Part 1

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Let's get started with a bang.

 

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Introduction - Part 2

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Starting off early early again.
 

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Introduction - Part 3

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Part Three starts off interestingly:

 

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