religious conflict: a theory of why i am being shunned

i got a note back from him. i have mixed responses to it.

first, i'm glad to receive real information from a real person, because all this time, i haven't been told anything at all about what the problem is. that gratitude is real. it's not just something that i say because i have to. i am grateful that he communicated.

when i got the note, i refused to read it until after i had left work, because i knew that i would be upset no matter what it said. this was probably because i have seen his facial expressions a couple of times recently, and when he looked at me, he looked sad and apologetic. he didn't say these words, but i interpreted it as 'i'm sorry, i can't.' so i anticipated that his response would be something negative or disappointing.

i'm not going to quote it directly, but i will summarize it and paraphrase it. he says that he has been avoiding me because i wrote him something that suggested that i wanted to be more than just friends, that he was only open to friendship, and that he has a good relationship with somebody else.

here is a theory that i have based on the overall situation and the history of my interactions with him, and my observations of his emotions.

i think that i'm being 'shunned' because of a difference in religious beliefs. it is probably because he is christian and his religion forbids premarital sex. they would forbid all contact with me, and they would classify me as the 'inhuman evil entity,' because i am an atheist and i question a lot of christian beliefs. it seemed throughout this time period that i represented the evil entity, someone without feelings, someone to be treated as inhuman, not even given the courtesy of communicating or explaining what the problem was, even though i expressed feelings of distress and suffering. i was not willing to marry him (no, he didn't ever ask me to) - that was something that 'the voices' were saying for months, that i had to marry him. the 'shunning' began early in the summer, and then i was severely attacked by voices, for weeks and weeks, interrogating me about many things, including whether or not i would marry him.

(i have to mention that i did not know anything about his religion until i read his blog, many months after the 'shunning' began. nobody ever said anything to me about it. he came from a christian family and they went to church. i came from an agnostic family. officially, my family is episcopalian. and we didn't go to church, and my parents did not push any particular religious beliefs on me, and they didn't mind that my brother and i became atheists.)

it was this approach: cut off all contact immediately, do not acknowledge this person, do not communicate with this person at all, this person is inhuman and has no feelings and deserves no respect or courtesy. it was a cruel and ruthless response, and it did not even allow any negotiating or compromise. it was a 'no contact whatsoever under any circumstances, period' response. as in, don't even be 'friends' with this person (even though he says in the note that he was open to friendship only, what has actually happened is not what i call 'friendship,' but rather, two total strangers who don't speak to each other at all, and that's not friendship). it was the assumption that i would corrupt him or persuade him merely by talking with him. they assumed that i was so evil and so untrustworthy that i would not even listen or have respect for his wishes and his beliefs. it was enough that he could not even communicate through email or the telephone - not just in person - because i would corrupt him with my beliefs. (when i say 'they assumed,' i have a mental image of his family - mostly his mother - or the representatives of his church.) i could not even know whether or not he received any letters, and spent all this time wondering if our email was being hacked, or what.

these past few months of being ignored was a 'total nonexistence' response. it was not merely a 'let's just be friends' response. for instance, i know that i myself have occasionally had people who were attracted to me, while i wanted to have a 'platonic' relationship only. i did not shun them and refuse to speak to them for six months. (almost six months: the total silence began in early summer. during that time we have only spoken a few words, just about things having to do with work - sentences like 'here,' if i give him something, or 'can you help me with this?', that kind of thing.) i usually continued to have a friendship with them, and continued speaking, writing, and talking on the telephone, but i simply did not have sex with them. that is what it means to have a platonic friendship-only with somebody who expresses an attraction to you. i would point out that he has other platonic female friends.

i agree about one particular thing, which is that the words that i say cannot be trusted. i really do experience alternate personalities jumping in and saying things that i do not agree with. (note, once again, i believe those are caused by an external attacker, and that they do not come from within, and that they are not merely a 'persona' or a 'multiple personality.' but it's easier to call them a 'persona.') i would agree with him that in that way, i can't be trusted. but the external personas corrupt my behavior, not in the area of religion, but in my whole approach to human relationships and interactions. i don't agree with their way of doing things. their attack is so severe that, much of the time, it totally suppresses my personality, so completely that i do not even exist.

so anyway, by the 'no premarital sex, no friendships with untrustworthy evil inhuman atheists, cut off all communication immediately' theory: i find him attractive and i did tell him that i wanted some kind of dating relationship; and, in the beginning at least, it seemed like he was attracted to me. if two people are attracted to each other, and then suddenly somebody cuts off all communication completely - not even by email - it doesn't seem like a 'let's just be friends' approach. it seems like there must be some other reason.

there is one thing that happened which involved my writing something that was not from my own personality, and it has bothered me a lot, because it seems to have had harmful consequences. when he told me that he had a serious relationship with somebody else, i wrote something back to him in reply. i myself believed him and took his word for it, but the reply was something sarcastic which was created by another voice in my head. i don't know if he'd ever believe me if i told him that - i don't know if he believes me about my experiences of alternate personalities that i do not control.

well, a few things happened with the sarcastic reply. it seemed to trigger a 'you don't believe me, you don't take me seriously, you don't respect me' feeling from him. again, that wasn't something he said or wrote. it was something i observed in his behavior afterwards. it was an impression i had.

and there was the same feeling in me, in the persona that had given the sarcastic response. it came out later because i did something that was helpful for him at work one day, and afterwards, that persona said 'see? i'm useful after all.' it was someone rejected as useless and worthless. i know which persona it was - i've called him 'severus snape' because his way of speaking sounds a lot like him, and he portrayed himself as similar to that character. his image was a man in a wheelchair.

the other thing, which i only found out much later, was that some of the information in my letter's sarcastic reply was actually based on something he said in his blog. as in, i accidentally made a reference to something in his blog, as though i had read it. but i had not read his blog yet, back then. when i read it, months later, i saw something which seemed related to what i had said in the sarcastic reply. i also saw a couple of other things that 'they' had been telling me. much of what 'they' told me had come from his blog.

my experience of the voices is that they occasionally tell me things which i later verify to be true. but they also tell me a huge amount of things which are lies, or confusing, or impossible to interpret, or meaningless disruptive noise and garbage that just interferes with thinking. or i find out what it means, much later, and it is totally different from what i thought it meant.

if i were physically able to stop it, i would be happy to do without any external mental 'voices' at all, even if they sometimes give information that turns out to be true. i believe that my own brain's way of functioning is good enough by itself and i would rather not be disrupted by noise. this is an understatement. to be more accurate, i would say this: using an electronic device or system to 'communicate' or control or interfere with someone's mental functioning in any way at all, without their consent, without their being able to stop it, is a crime and a violation of human rights, and it has a severely destructive impact on people and society. to interfere with someone's functioning, so severely, so destructively, that they feel like their own personality is totally suppressed and nonexistent, is the same as murder, except the person's body is still alive. so it is an understatement to say that i merely would 'rather do without the voices.'

anyway, the other harmful consequence of my sarcastic letter was that it seemed like he became more distrusting afterwards, like he thought that i 'knew' things about him, when i don't. meanwhile, i myself knew nothing, and i still know hardly anything about him - he is almost a total stranger.

*************

so, when i came home this evening, i sat for a while thinking about the rule against premarital sex. and i wanted to say that rule myself, to paraphrase it, to agree with it, as though i had thought of it myself for the first time, and nobody had ever thought of it before. i was badly disrupted by voices who put other people's words and phrases into my mind, and i could not make my own observations, and i got very angry. the result was that i still don't know what the real nicole j. binns would have said, but i can at least tell you the things that other people have said about it.

why is premarital sex forbidden?
1. pregnancy
2. diseases

...even if you use birth control?
3. bitter breakups
4. losing opportunity
5. wrong kind of people / bad crowd / bad lifestyle overall
6. fails to produce a LARGE family with many children and with a religious upbringing, because it postpones (at least) the beginning of the marriage

i had a couple other vague ideas, but that was most of them.

#1 means a child needs material and financial support, and social and family support, and doesn't get it, because of the difficulties of being a single parent. that's assuming that they don't get married after discovering that the woman is pregnant, and she has a baby out of wedlock. either that, or it leads to abortion. giving a child up for adoption is also not as good as keeping the child in a secure family. and in the modern united states, and probably other countries as well, there are government agencies that enslave people for years to something called 'child support payments.' every person who i have ever talked to about the subject of child support has been bitter about it. i have never heard anyone say 'i'm happy with my experiences of dealing with the government and paying my child support.' there is always a problem, where somebody thinks the amount of money is too much, or too little, or they're spending the money for frivolous things that have nothing to do with the children, or it's too hard to collect the money and enforce the law, or you'd rather not communicate with that former partner at all because they're crazy and impossible to talk to. there is always something. child support payments can be a great way to get rich quick, to take your former partner's money and spend it in a way that they wouldn't have wanted. get pregnant, then break up with your (wealthy, high-income) partner, keep the child, and then demand payments, which are based on his income (instead of being based on an estimate of minimal, frugal supplies for the child). spend the money on clothing, television sets, a nice car, whatever you want, and live a life of luxury. i have seen people do this, and i have seen people who seem to have not the slightest guilt, not the slightest remorse about doing it - they think that it is RIGHT, and they're ENTITLED to get rich quick this way, that there is nothing wrong with it.

#2 means, the more partners you have, the more likely you are to pass or receive STDs. this is a problem for me personally, because i get cold sores, which are caused by a common contagious virus, and i don't want to pass that to other people.

#3 means that if you have short-term or medium-term relationships, eventually you will break up with somebody sooner or later. that is the sort of relationship that i have always had: medium-term relationships that do not lead to marriage. and imagine that you had a PREmarital relationship with somebody, but then broke up with that person, and married somebody else. that person you broke up with might get angry and jealous. they might retaliate or interfere with your current relationship after they've been rejected. dating relationships would need to be non-sexual, to avoid getting too involved, so that breakups would be less damaging.

#4. loss of opportunity means that you might casually date different people over a period of years, and then you would be older and less able to find a spouse and produce a family. a woman would be closer to menopause. a man would be older and might be less able to compete against young men, although that's not necessarily true, because an older man is more likely to have acquired wealth. but even so, being older might make a man less able to find a wife. it probably depends on how old he is and how physically healthy/attractive he still is. so, during those years when you were dating people without marrying them, you missed an opportunity to find your spouse. if you had 'held out for something better,' instead of casually dating people without intending to marry them, you might have found your spouse earlier, or been more serious about searching for that person.

#5. people living a lifestyle with nonmarital sex, nonmarital relationships, casual sex, or whatever you call it, might tend to be irresponsible, unreliable, immoral, etc. they might tend to be less religious, less likely to put a high value on passing religion on to children, less serious overall. they might tend to have more personal problems and financial problems.

#6. if you have premarital sex, with birth control, and you don't get any diseases or have bitter breakups, and you have a stable, medium-term or long-term informal nonmarital relationship, and it's a decent, responsible person without any financial problems or personal problems - assuming this isn't a 'common law' marriage where the two of you live in the same house and spend your lives together for all practical purposes... then, you're still failing to produce a large family with lots of children who have all been taught your religious beliefs. modern mainstream christians usually DO NOT try to produce large families, and i've wanted to write about this topic but haven't had a chance yet. but in the past, before we had this type of economic/slavery system that we have now, people did produce large families, and this was important. i'll have to write some other time about how the modern economy/slavery system destroys families and prevents people from marrying and having children.

so those were my thoughts about why premarital sex is forbidden. it was the only explanation i could think of for why someone would totally shun me for six months merely because i asked for a more-than-friends relationship. (the particular words and sentences that i said and wrote were controlled by the external personas, but they were based on real feelings. i might have written or said it differently, or at some later time.) again, this wasn't just a 'let's be friends' response. it was six months of total silence, no response to dozens of emails (although again, if i'd had my way, i WOULD NOT have continued writing emails after he stopped answering. many of the emails were triggered by incidents where i woke up in the morning, or woke up after a nap, and had some 'idea' in my head and an inexplicable 'urge' to write him a letter about it, which indicates a puppeteering incident, especially since i was usually using sjw when this happened), no return phone calls (although i didn't make very many calls, because on MY end of this disaster, i was terrified of being accused of harassment, and i was constantly fighting against those urges to call him or write to him), no talking at work, and a rejected facebook friends request after i found out he was on facebook and i tried to contact him there. this was a 'you are evil, you are inhuman, you do not exist' response, not merely a 'why don't we just be friends' response.

as i said above, i am grateful for his response in the note. i mean that. it was a negative response, but it gave me enough information to at least suggest some kind of a theory, some explanation of why i am being shunned.

i still feel anxiety, because i can't control the fact that i have voices and personas that make me say things i don't want to say, and write things i don't want to write. and i still need to use my st. john's wort, because i have a lot of things to do, and they're very important, and this antidepressant helps me to do them. if i could, i would stop the attackers from giving me those 'ideas' and 'urges' to write him more emails, when he would rather not communicate with me. and i can't control that or prevent that. so i am still not completely at peace, i am not without anxiety, and i still fear that i could be accused of harassment at some time.

i wish i could know when he will graduate. whenever he leaves town, i won't see him at work anymore, and i will feel less connected with him, less reminded of him. that means the no-response, one-way emails will sooner or later seem pointless and i will stop writing. now that i understand that the 'urges' to write emails are actually caused by electronic harassment, i have a slightly better ability to fight against them than i used to. in the past, the first time this happened, i did not know that i was being forced to keep sending emails. i thought they were my own internal urges instead of an attack.

this situation is not really resolved, but i have slightly more information than i had before.