Lapsi vanhoillislestadiolaisperheessä

Kasvoin 10 lapsisen perheen toiseksi nuorimmaisena. Jo murrosikäisenä ihmettelin tämän uskonlahkon toimintaa. 

Ihmisethän manipuloidaan tekemään, mitä nämä ns. ”saarnaajat” käskevät. Sitten kytätään ja seurataan, että onko kaikki tehneet niin kuin saarnaajat opettavat.
Siinä uskossa JUMALA on hyvin ankara ja manipuloiva. Lapsikin on

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Elokuva Armosta osaton – Beyond Grace, a movie on leaving or staying Conservative Laestadian

Beyond Grace

Watch the movie

Two young women are fighting in the cross-pressures  of the religious self and its shadows  after their childhood in the In the Conservative Laestadian Community . The adaptation into the parents’ standard of activity has been the only option for a child but growing up and living as an adult independent person challenge to face the values ​​in a new light.

Elina has seven children. She is as a mother concerned about herself and the family’s coping.  As well known, any family planning and contraceptives are taboo and sin in the Laestadian community.

Elina’s sister, Alina, is single. She is studying literature, even if she personally wanted to become

My body belongs to me

Keep your children informed. Keep yourself informed! Talk in your congregation and emphasize that everyone is responsible to protect children.

The biggest value of this video is in educating and empowering

Children Who Have Limited Right to Learn

Citing European human rights law, a Laestadian family in northern Sweden have managed to overturn a decision by their daughters’ school, which had refused to allow the three girls to skip out on ”sinful” dance class during physical education (PE).

Also  Conservative Laestadian families in Finland have opted to keep children out of school’s dance and theatre education (often also physical education , i.e. gymnastic exercises with music). The National Board of Education had assigned exemption to attend theatre visits and dance lessons, according the require of the Central Committee of Conservative Laestadian Congregations (Suomen rauhanyhdistysten keskusyhdistys ry., SRK).

I was brainwashed into raging Laestadian beliefs

– Never give up to think critically about every ideology. Know that you are worth it.- Anonymous.

A Finnish young woman wrote touching description about her current life situation considering how to deal with the dilemma she is facing with the Laestadian beliefs which her family and friends are believing.

”I’m a 17-year-old female high school student in Finland. When it comes to religion, I’d say that out of all the young finnish people most are atheists (myself included).

However, I was born to a very strict and raging religion called

Stop the Victims of Laestadian Ban of Birth Control – NOW

– There have been these kinds of occasions were the enemy has tempted some with practicing birth control.  It’s not according to God’s word – it’s not according to the teachings of God’s kingdom. – Pastor Eric Jurmu, a Mother’s Day sermon 2012, Phoenix Laestadian Lutheran Church.

CNS NEWS Video

Laestadianism’s rejection of contraception is an important topic, literally a matter of life and death for some women. There is no excuse for an institution to discourage its members from considering all viewpoints on such a grave matter, especially when it claims that those members are accepting life-threatening pregnancies in accordance with their individual consciences.

Laestadian people need to open their eyes and hearts, before any more of women and babies bleed to death on the sacrificial altar of a faith that requires their fertility for its survival. It’s about time.

Speak Up for the Children

A Laestadian woman in Phoenix was arrested Thursday for the suffocation death of her ninth child, a six-day old baby. Let your heart break for all the victims in this tragedy. Let yourself feel righteous anger at the authorities in her life that allowed this to happen, despite all the warning signs. [Tapauksesta uutinen suomeksi tässä.- Toim.huom.]

 

But please, stay angry. Let your anger motivate action. Talk to your relatives. Write to the preachers. Leave a comment on the news article. Write to the court. Do something. 

Laestadian Banning of Contraception Leads a Man to Plight

 A Conservative Laestadian Kari, a man in his thirties, says that he is deeply hurt how the Laestadianist ban of contraceptives is seen generally as a problem only for women.  – Outsiders see the men even as tyrants who oppress their wives. Most fathers are victims just like the mothers, says Kari, a father of five. However, Laestadian women self often doesn’t accept birth control although suffering of the whole family and health dangers would be absolutely obvious. It seems that people does’nt know that there does not exist any biblical nor Christian position against contraception.

The Conservative Laestadians’ (Laestadian Lutheran Church’s) teachings ban

The Power of Nature, the Desire for Understanding

Pekka Luukkola: The Mo[nu]ment (2010)

God, or Nature; Nature, or God

Nature is everything. There is mass, energy, atoms, molecules, life, plants, animals, thought, people, human consciousness, intellectual activities and konwledge, science, violence, religions and entertainment, art, societies, galaxies and perhaps even multiple universes.

There is nothing outside nature, including spiritual visions and other phenomena we don’t yet understand, and science doesn’t give any explanations. If they exist, they are part of nature. Whatever it exists, it is part of nature and under the nature’s law and order. This clear understanding can be reached by the a Jewish-Dutch philosopher Benedictus (Baruch) Spinoza (1632 – 1667).

Spinoza was excommunicated from his

Rebekka Naatus: Laestadian Women Resist Big Family Pressure and Criticize the Ban on Contraception

The women rights have got a important step forward, when the  Finland’s First Conservative Laestadian Female Priest, Mrs. Mari Leppänen, was  secretly ordained as priest in 2012, in order to start her work in Lieto parish, near to Turku. Listen here the detalis of the issues in English (information on womens’ rights and bans in the Conservative Laestadian movement in general, too).

Also Mrs. Rebekka Naatus, a journalist, divorced Laestadian woman is making waves by speaking out against the treatment of women with the movement to which she belongs.

Rebekka Naatus, the PR and information officer of Evangelical Lutheran parishes in Oulu, has published an article about these questions in an  anthology Iloisen talon kellareissa (”In the Cellars of a Merry House”, not translated in English).  She has been interviewed in media on the womens’ situation in the biggest revival movement in the country, Conservative Laestadianism. Are their bodies really their own, or has the religious community colonised them to reproduction where no anyone is allowed to refuse?

The focus is in the problems following from the very tight and strict community of the religious or rather ”ethnic” group. The community has a strong power in the individual’s everyday life and in the choice of personal lifestyle. 

A Stranger Among Them

Hanna Pylväinen is an author of a new debyte novel We sinners, a book that will be published in August 2012. The family portrait drawn from the author’s own life experience tells the story of a family of eleven in the American Midwest, bound together and torn apart by their Laestadian faith and its doctrines.

 

Pylväinen published in April an extract of the novel in The New York Times  where she writes about an eye-opening experience at her family’s church. Hanna Pylväinen is  a former Laestadian, obviously member of LCC. She doesn’t decribe herself by that word, it’s clear from the details within the text.

She made a deal with her parents when she left  the Laestadian congregation that she will return at Christmas and Easter to spend a time in the sermon. One Sunday she encounters a stranger, a black man, who makes her question her outsider status.