ATI

Burn In Case Of Evil: Cain’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team21 Comments

Burn In Case Of Evil: Cain’s Story, Part One

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Cain” is a pseudonym.

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In this series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

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Religious fanatics simply ruin children.

"Evil rock and roll saved my life."
“Evil rock and roll saved my life.”

The quaint, happy, innocent life of a child can quickly be replaced by the stark absolutes of fanaticism. Muslim, Christian, and Jew are one in the same monster. Their fanatics take different names, they act in different ways, but they are all the same.  Fanatics know no middle ground.  They know no compromise – other than our mutual destruction. Bill Gothard turned my parents cultists and they focused all their energies “training up” a perfect son. My parents attended an Institute of Basic Life Principles conference and eventually joined ATI, Gothard’s homeschooling cult.  I remember my mom coming in to tell me we were going to burn some things to remove the evil:

“Honey, your father and I have decided to make some changes around the house.  We’re going to stop getting cable and we’re going to get rid of some of our things.”

“Ok, mommy. What are we getting rid of?”

“We are going to get rid of our evil books,” she said.

I had never thought a book could be evil. But I certainly wanted to get rid of all the evil books we had! My parents explained that we would be burning books, movies, and records. 

 “Of course, mommy!  I’ll look through my books right now!”

There was only one book that stuck out to me as especially “evil.” I can’t recall the exact title, but I remember that the title had something to do with the devil. Of course, it was really just about a submarine voyage, or maybe some Moby Dick variation. It was part of a compilation, so my mother said we didn’t have to burn the whole book, maybe just the title page. Not many people have experienced a book burning, I must say. I guess that makes me special?

Children are so impressionable. In retrospect, most everything I was taught was ridiculous and mostly untrue. Rock and roll was not invented by the devil, or even just by the “evil Africans” who brought over their “demon beats” in an attempt to corrupt America. But what child is going to risk being possessed by demons just because they listen to rock music? I certainly wasn’t. It was easy for others to convince me I needed to proselytize, pass out tracts, and otherwise make myself a general asshole. My adolescence was little more than a protracted church service.  When you’re homeschooled, the son of fanatics, and not allowed to even go in the neighbor-children’s houses, it’s difficult to think for yourself. I was always a well-mannered, funny kid, so I had friends, but I was beyond sheltered. 

I always felt that “normal kids” had it so easy. I envied the kids that attended private school and my parents would not let me attend a school outside of our home. Of course, I did not envy the public school kids, because I was told that they were being brainwashed by a communistic system and God was being forced out. Before I became involved in NCFCA (a Christian, homeschool speech and debate league), I was a huge sports nut and I always craved the camaraderie and friendship of the people on my team. My parents did not allow me to go into my neighbor’s houses because I might see some television – yes, I am being serious. 

Without the internet, without Wikipedia, or without message boards, it’s possible that I would be a mindless, fanatical robot. But, for a sheltered child with very little contact with the outside world, the internet is like heaven. Unfortunately, that internet usage was limited by firewalls, parental filters, and the like. However, Wikipedia was never blocked, nor was peer-to-peer downloading. Most children without sex-ed are left to flipping through encyclopedias and dictionaries to discover sexual issues. I knew the very basics from my parents, but they never cared to elaborate. I was taught that AIDS was a GAY DISEASE, that gay people received from being gay. I was taught that if I had more than one sexual partner, I would most likely get an STD. Reading studies, normal people’s thoughts, and seeing that my parents were crazy about just about everything helped me grow up a lot. 

The internet was my trail-guide on the trip to knowledge and enlightenment. When you hear of the 18th century “Enlightenment,” some people might think that term is a bit ostentatious, but I disagree. There is nothing like the pure bliss of understanding the truth. Indeed, to cut through the bullshit that the powers-that-be throw at you on a daily basis. To rise above the propaganda. To cut through the paranoia. Some people call me arrogant, and I suppose I can come across that way. But really, I just want to share my enlightenment. 

The strangest feeling is after your enlightenment, when you return home. My relatives had served in the military, been “around the block,” and refused to believe that my college education gave me any insight into the truth. To my reborn self, everything in my parent’s home became a symbol of my oppression and repression – all the books, the magazines, the religious rituals before mealtime, and the constant use of Biblical allusions in conversation. Every conversation with them eventually comes to a head with their religious beliefs – a black and white world.  Every time I asked them for advice, I don’t get just a normal answer with life advice. It’s all about God’s will, his plan, his desires. 

For the longest time, I could not even admit to my parents that I believed evolution was true. It took me three years to work up the courage to tell them that. I knew it would upset them because they spent so much time indoctrinating me about creationism. When we get into arguments and they start breaking out Bible verses and condemnation, I have an uncontrollable physical reaction. So many arguments in high school, which usually involved them telling me to stop talking to a girl that I really liked, ended with me feeling trapped and isolated. On one occasion, at the age of fifteen, my parents made me call the girl I’d secretly been IM’ing (because I wasn’t allowed to talk to girls over email or IM and they caught me) and break up with her. Then they sentenced me to a month of solitary confinement – I was banned from talking and hanging out with any of my friends. I could attend the weekly speech class held in our home, but that was it. I was stuck in my parents’ house, trapped by their ideologies, with no one to talk to. As you can imagine, that’s a lot for a 15 year old to handle. 

Essentially, I was imprisoned and the people who put me in there were constantly there with me. I couldn’t go to school every day and get that escape and that’s all I wanted. My only escape was a Sony Walkman that included an FM radio. I remember laying in my water bed, with my headphones in, tears streaming down my cheeks. I don’t know exactly what emotion I was feeling at the time. I don’t know if there’s any worse feeling than being forced to not speak to the one girl who loves you and listens to you. Sure, I was only 15 and I wasn’t going to marry the girl, but why be a bitch about it, mom and dad? I knew my dad kept many handguns in his room and plenty of ammo. At the time, I was in total desperation. I couldn’t tell anyone about how I was feeling, not even my guy friends. This left the thoughts and feelings to run laps around my brain, never stopping. The only way I felt like I could be whole again was to kill myself.

Translucent, I wonder the halls,

In search of companion,

In search of purpose,

Cannot gain traction.

Reaching out, my hand passes through,

All the bodies,

All the walls,

Everything.

Ironically, that’s when evil rock and roll saved my life. I don’t know if I would have actually killed myself, but I was pretty damn close. The fact that I heard that specific song at just that time seemed absolutely divine. The girl I’d been forced to break up with and I both loved Green Day, especially the song Time of Your Life (Good Riddance). Thanks, Green Day. Their punk asses understood my teenage angst and told me that everything would be ok.  After this point, I decided I had to have privacy and I had to have an escape.

My laptop became my secret diary, if you will. It included all the instant messages I sent to the girls I wasn’t supposed to be talking to, all the movies I wasn’t supposed to download, and let’s not even mention all the evil rock and roll I wasn’t supposed to even own. As I said before, even my internet was covered with protections. If I ever visited a site that could be considered related to drugs, sex, nudity, anarchism, or full of profanity, my parents would receive an email telling them exactly where I went. The internet was also set to go off at 10pm. This was pretty shitty since all my girlfriends were long-distance (you just try to date someone who lives in the same city when your parents track your every move). I found a way to circumvent the Evil Firewall and talked to my girls on AIM or Gtalk. 

I dove headfirst into books, films, and music. I wanted to learn about these beautiful expressions of self that touched me so dearly. I read books about what good films were supposed to look like and my friends and I made our way down IMDB’s Top 250 Movies. I obsessively began to immerse myself in popular culture. I went 15 years not understanding movie references, pop songs, and TV shows. I know it seems petty, but when everyone is talking about their favorite band, something they saw on tv, it’s easy to feel excluded. Even the other homeschool kids could listen to rock music, but not me. But after that I didn’t care because I just wanted to be able to cultivate healthy relationships with people who liked me. 

To be continued.

homeskooled )q.e.d.): A Poem by Adam O’Connor

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

homeskooled )q.e.d.): A Poem by Adam O’Connor

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johnny asked a question

his momma couldn’t answer

billy popped a pill

he knew he couldn’t handle

then the dog got hit

while out runnin’ the street

that boy limped home

and he got a treat

so i woke up late

and left my bed unmade

so I could come home

to fall asleep again

some love too much

and others too little

but both

clip

and snip

what is held

most tender

cause the lesson

done took

much more

than it gave

so see

i dig me some

shallow graves

*****

adam
Adam O’Connor.

About Adam

Adam O’Connor’s homeschooling was, at first, sprinkled with other forms of education. Homeschooled for preschool, he then went on to attend public school for the first and second grades, private school for third, charter school for the fourth and fifth before finally returning to his homeschooling roots for the remaining years of primary education. His family joined CHEF, where he taught photography and tutored in English for his local chapter. In his sophomore year his family joined NCFCA and IBLP / ATI. He found himself a modest success at speech and debate and competed in the national tournament in his junior year. The year following his graduation he left with a small group as an ATI sponsored initiative to teach English in Yuli, a rural town in Hualien, Taiwan. It was during this year that the accumulated years of indoctrination and his otherwise ultra-conservative, hyper-religious mindset began to unravel and he soon found himself in a crisis of faith. Although it took much longer to fully realize the effects of this year, he lost his faith in Taiwan and came home unrecognized and at odds with the social circles he had spent his entire life thus far building. He spend the next year commuting to Nicholls until transferring to Louisiana Tech for nearly three more years, dropping out one quarter shy of graduation. He is now pursuing his writing, particularly poetry, and hosts the Secret Meetings of the Dinky Tao Poetry Hour, the second oldest reading in New Orleans, currently located at the Neutral Ground Coffee House. He has been seen reading at the 17 Poets at the Goldmine, the open mic at Buffa’s, and was featured at the Apple Barrel on Frenchman for the Book Fair in 2011. He is currently working on his first book of poetry, entitled “…till the moon howls back”.

Visit his poetry blog here.

The Bonfire Chorus: A Poem by Adam O’Connor

HA Editorial Team8 Comments

The Bonfire Chorus: A Poem by Adam O’Connor

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I was born

with a mouthful of ash

from all the books

we had not yet burned;

drifted southward

off northern steppes

with the sulphiric taste of sin,

and shame,

and a hopeless hope

landing snowflake

on fiery tongues

shouting hallelujahs;

“hosanah,

“the son has come.”

When my father

took the clot of blood

from my hand,

he gave me a shovel and a torch

and joined the bonfire chorus

to sing blasphemous refrains:

“Follow us down

         “to the swinging trees,

      “and we can show you

          “where the saviors be.

     “And mark where

           “the tapping crow flies,

      “and he can show you

            “where your brother lies.”

So now it is time again,

and again time has come again,

the time to burn and bury–

The Mongols will ride again!

The Mongols will ride again!

and burn all the words again,

and bury the broken images again.

And the dust

shaken from history’s march

will land snowflake

on parched lips,

cracking with their smiles

and singing,

“hallelujah,

“hallelujah,

“let’s do it all again”.

*****

adam
Adam O’Connor.

“The Bonfire Chorus,” about O’Connor’s experiences with book burning as a child in ATI, was originally published on his poetry blog here. It is reprinted with his permission.

About Adam

Adam O’Connor’s homeschooling was, at first, sprinkled with other forms of education. Homeschooled for preschool, he then went on to attend public school for the first and second grades, private school for third, charter school for the fourth and fifth before finally returning to his homeschooling roots for the remaining years of primary education. His family joined CHEF, where he taught photography and tutored in English for his local chapter. In his sophomore year his family joined NCFCA and IBLP / ATI. He found himself a modest success at speech and debate and competed in the national tournament in his junior year. The year following his graduation he left with a small group as an ATI sponsored initiative to teach English in Yuli, a rural town in Hualien, Taiwan. It was during this year that the accumulated years of indoctrination and his otherwise ultra-conservative, hyper-religious mindset began to unravel and he soon found himself in a crisis of faith. Although it took much longer to fully realize the effects of this year, he lost his faith in Taiwan and came home unrecognized and at odds with the social circles he had spent his entire life thus far building. He spend the next year commuting to Nicholls until transferring to Louisiana Tech for nearly three more years, dropping out one quarter shy of graduation. He is now pursuing his writing, particularly poetry, and hosts the Secret Meetings of the Dinky Tao Poetry Hour, the second oldest reading in New Orleans, currently located at the Neutral Ground Coffee House. He has been seen reading at the 17 Poets at the Goldmine, the open mic at Buffa’s, and was featured at the Apple Barrel on Frenchman for the Book Fair in 2011. He is currently working on his first book of poetry, entitled “…till the moon howls back”.

For the media: Former homeschoolers rally against abuse

HA Editorial Team13 Comments

For the media: 

Former homeschoolers rally against abuse

March 16, 2013

A group of former homeschoolers are joining together to bring awareness to, and healing from, different forms of abuse in extreme homeschooling subcultures. The organization, Homeschoolers Anonymous (HA), is being coordinated by former homeschoolers across the United States, including California, Louisiana, Oregon, and Washington.

According to recent surveys, approximately 2 million children are taught at home in the United States. The total number of home-educated kids doubled between 1999 and 2007. While some are being homeschooled in non-Christian families, the National Home Education Research Institute claims almost three-quarters of those 2 million children have conservative Christian parents who aim to pass on their moral and religious values to their kids through home education. This makes religion the primary motivating factor behind this form of education.

HA’s creator is R.L. Stollar, who was homeschooled from K-12 and currently resides in Eugene, Oregon. He has a Master of Arts in Eastern philosophy and religion and is a freelance writer. Stollar says he came up with the idea for HA after realizing that many of his homeschooled peers suffered from some of the same emotional, mental, and physical problems that he does. Stollar says,

“I started talking last August to someone I knew in junior high and high school about some of the issues we both struggle with today. And it was interesting to see these similarities and that we both attributed them to the same things from our backgrounds.”

Stollar realized that many of his peers had stories like this. He decided to created Homeschoolers Anonymous to bring awareness to these stories and to inspire others to speak out. He intends for HA to give others courage:

“I think, for a lot of us, we are afraid to say what we feel, to say we have changed. A lot of us perceived the message of our world as ‘shut up, get in line, and prepare to take back the culture.’ That makes us, even as adults, timid and maybe even scared of community backlash if we were to say, ‘You know, I’m a different person now. I grew up, I’m an adult, and I have my own life.'”

Stollar connected with old friends on Facebook and made new ones. He found a community of people who shared the same vision. One of those people is Nicholas Ducote, who grew up in a family immersed in Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute (ATI). He has his Master of Arts in History from Louisiana Tech University and is currently working on a book about lumber development in North Louisiana.

Ducote considers his upbringing to be a form of fanaticism. To him, fanaticism is any manifestation of an ideology that knows no compromise and uses children as vehicles of ideological advancement. Ducote says,

“The quaint, happy, innocent life of a child can quickly be replaced by the stark absolutes of fanaticism. Muslim, Christian, and Jew are one in the same monster. Their fanatics take different names, they act in different ways, but they are all the same.”

Stollar, Ducote, and team of others are eager to see the launch of their vision. Homeschoolers Anonymous has partnered with a number of well-known bloggers to help bring greater visibility to their stories of abuse and healing. These blog partners include Libby Anne’s Love Joy Feminism, Heather Doney’s Becoming Worldly, Vyckie Garrison’s No Longer Quivering, and Julie Anne Smith’s Spiritual Sounding Board.

About the blog partners, Stollar says,

“I’m really excited to be partnering with these individuals and groups who write about, among other things, their homeschooling experiences. Honestly, they’ve directly inspired [HA] because of what they do. They’ve really paved the way to speaking out about abuse within certain cultures.”

One of the blog partners, Julie Anne Smith, is a homeschooling parent herself. Smith has over 20 years of experience homeschooling her children. She believes HA will help both current and former homeschool kids, even other parents:

“Homeschool students and their parents have become part of a unique culture yielding a mixed bag of results. The first crop of homeschooled students are now adults, establishing their own lives and families. It’s important to take an honest look at homeschool history by reading personal stories — describing the joys and even disappointments of those who paved the homeschool trail.”

While HA hopes to talk candidly about abuse within homeschooling and provide methods of healing from that abuse, the group is careful to point out they do not oppose homeschooling itself. Stollar notes that,

“This isn’t anti-homeschool in any way. At the end of the day, this isn’t even about conservative politics or Christianity. It is more about anywhere and everywhere that communities and adults use religious or political ideology to deny children their humanity and freedom to be for the sake of advancing that ideology. That’s a cult mentality. And wherever that mentality exists, you create emotional, mental, physical, and even sexual abuse and trauma for children. We want to be a strong voice in opposition to that mentality through our life stories, through education and information.”

Homeschoolers Anonymous will be launching their website tomorrow, Sunday, March 17.

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This news release may be reprinted without permission in part or in entirety for promotional purposes.

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 Media Information / Contacts

Official website: http://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com

Twitter: @HomeschoolAnon

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/HomeschoolersAnonymous

Media contact: R.L. Stollar, homeschoolersanonymous@gmail.com

The Truth About Sheltering Your Kids: Ralph’s Story

HA Editorial Team74 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-03-09 at 11.06.07 PM

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Ralph” is a pseudonym.

I was raised in a family where homeschooling wasn’t just the preferred method of education, but the only right one. Homeschooling was a way of life or a lifestyle if you will and everything revolved around my parents’ opinion of what God’s will was.  Other than AYSO soccer, I had no social contact outside of church, family, and the homeschool umbrella group until I went to community college. This was when I discovered that I was socially retarded (yes that’s a technical term).

The religious sheltering of my childhood was only made more extreme and miserable by the international homeschool conglomerate cult ATI (Advanced Training Institute) aka IBLP (Institute of Basic Life Principles) run by ‘his eminence’ Bill Gothard. I won’t go into too many details of how involved my family was with this group or how many times we went to the IBLP seminars or the national conference in Knoxville Tennessee. But even at a young age I can remember wondering what the point was of all the putting on of shows, the mass gatherings, and the ridiculous dress code which looks nearly identical to that of the Mormons.

Besides the endless hypocrisy of Mr. Gothard’s teachings, the suppression of children’s natural instinct to ask questions of things that don’t make sense, and the plain and simply false teachings that go against recorded history and scientific fact — the most damaging moment of my experience with this group and quite possibly of my childhood (ironic that at the age of 20 both my parents and I still considered me a child) was when I attended the ALERT Academy. ALERT stands for Air Land Emergency Resource Team, but is really nothing more than a glorified boy scout troop; often referred to by some as ‘Gothard’s boy scouts’.

The main point they tried to drive home to their ‘trainees’ (typically 16-18 years old) was that no matter what adversity or difficulty you are facing, either physical, mental, or spiritual, all you need to do is cry out to God and he will get you through it. The way they taught us to do this with the physical aspect was by hiking with 60-80 pound back packs at nothing short of a speed-walk pace which often turned into a jog for miles on end without ever disclosing how far or long we were going.

Again, I won’t go into too many details but the ‘physical training’ done at ALERT made Basic Combat Training feel like a summer camp when I joined the Army years later. During this abusive level of physical training I ended up spraining my back which caused horrible pain during these hikes, but as I was told, “just ask God to make the pain go away and you will make it through.” Needless to say this was not a satisfactory answer to me and I ‘developed an attitude’ according to the leadership there.

I eventually was kicked out with them citing a ‘prideful spirit’ as the root cause of my problems.

This explanation is truly only scratching the surface of my experience at ALERT, but I don’t really want to turn this into an book. A few years later I found myself thinking that being a youth pastor might be a good path for me to take. So I attended a Christian college to begin studying for this purpose. However it didn’t take long from being out of my parents immediate control and having even a tiny taste of independence and freedom to begin rethinking everything I had ever been taught. Of course this did not happen without some outside influence.

After years of hearing my mother rail against psychology as nothing but excuses and philosophy as a way of opening your mind to Satan, I decided to take some classes and ended up majoring in both. She was partially right about something, philosophy does open your mind, but not to an imaginary evil gremlin whose ultimate goal is to enslave humanity. It simply opens the mind to new ideas and not being close minded.

To this day my parents curse my philosophy professor for ‘leading me astray’.

Some may say I’m just another typical example of how the devil can take possesion of people through exposure to worldly things. The truth is if you shelter your kids from ‘the real world’ they are going to wonder what you are keeping from them and many will run at the first chance they get. If philosophy, being the love of knowledge by definition, is so evil, then what are you saying by telling people to stay away from it?

I’m pretty sure there is a word to describe the rejection of knowledge; it is called ignorance.

After years of rebuilding my beliefs and life I have come to clarity. I realize my parents were raising children, and while this is typically what people say, I believe the mentality of child rearing needs to change.

Stop ‘raising children’, start raising responsible and educated adults who will not only be beneficial to society, but understand how to be a part of it.