If you cannot see that you are doing EXACTLY to people you don’t like what others have done to us, then there is nothing I can say to convince you that what you are proposing is about as far away from anything remotely resembling science.

And so I will simply close with this final fact: Just because people can write a lot of books and sell them on Amazon.com, that does not a mental diagnosis make. All that proves is that there is a market for psychobabble. There is only one book that matters in that regard, and “Religious addiction” is not in the DSM-IV.

He admits that he struggles although he then claims gayness has no power over him. Clearly one is true and the other not. One does not say “not that I don’t stuggle” if one truly does not struggle. Exgays however are notorious for falsely claiming to have changed.

Alan Chambers has also said “Everyday, I wake up and deny what comes naturally to me”.

There is no doubt that Alan and Randy sacrifice some of their happiness and devote significant energy to suppressing their gayness, this is a negative impact on their life and they do it because they are unable to cease their religious behaviors.

An addiction is a behavior that one no longer has the ability to refrain from which causes negative effects on a person’s health.

One doesn’t need in depth personal interviews or training to see this is the case with both of them. One can as easily see they are addicted to religion just as one can easily see a person one knows little about who admits to constantly missing work due to drinking is addicted to alcohol.

To bring up the error of phrenology as though that has any bearing on the validity of psychology or psychiatry is a non-sequitor.

I read Jim’s last comment and see nothing in it that contradicts anything I’ve said in this comment. We can certainly debate the degree to which their religious addiction harms them but that it does harm them some amount is obvious.

Two words: Terri Shiavo.

I see where I have been a bit lacking in addressing yours and Tim’s concerns, so I will try and fill in the blanks. My apology if I seemed to have arrogantly pass them by.

When an ornithologist plucks a duck from the water to help him with his broken wing, he eventually puts the duck back in the water. When Randy was psycically plucked from the water and thrown on the operating table to deal with his problems, he wanted to be changed from a duck to a pigeon (with big gay drag queen smile). The doc, who Randy fell in love with, (I mean heck who wouldn’t, it was Jesus who I also love), said no, and they have not operated since. Hence Randy is still stuck on the operating table, dazzled by our brother and teachers gorgeous demeanor, not being returned to the water due to stubbornness and camelianizing to religious doctrine. Randy just won’t let the doctor operate.

Like the drunk uncle swerving in his car hitting people on the sidewalk, and like Randy and Alan wielding biblical switchblades at righteous gay people through compulsive escapism via vicious religious doctrine, they take an inordinate amount of the public’s time and energy to deal with. It’s called high maintenance. If our forefathers would have seen this in their crystal ball, I’m sure they would have added a discrimination clause to the separation of church and state. So yes I will be glad to end this conversation.

Before we do, I want to say that I do not find any basis in fact within your last comment. You make claims but do not back them up. You make it sound like I am inventing a square wheel but can’t seem to show me the spokes. I do believe by acknowledging the study of religious addiction, many Christians, not all, are religious addicts, of which Randy and Alan belong due to their compulsion to escape their sexual nature through irrational religious means. I am not diagnosing anyone, but the facts do tell me that they fall into the realm of religious addicts.

Addiction terminology definition and counseling has been around a very long time and is still going strong as a viable medical model of treatment. I have studied psychology and addiction for 25 years and I don’t believe Oprah Dr Phil Dr Drew Dr Oz or any of our greats on the subject would agree with your analysis that I’m trying to start some new wave psyche invention that hasn’t been done before. You and Tim seem to know nothing about the subject of addiction, at least anything you would care to share. If you go to Amazon.com you will find more than 900 books written on religious addiction. I have laid proof to my thoughts at most every corner, yet comment on those from you both are non existent. If you are going to challenge me, at least bring some facts about my comments to the table that disagree with the medical addiction model. It’s not what you say that concerns me, but what you don’t say.

“Armchair diagnosis?” Sherlock Holmes called it deductive reasoning. I call it my thoughts on the subjects mentioned.

Regarding “drug fueled pasts”. It would seem Randy just now lied about his sexual past on your blog in his above comment. He said he had sex “a couple of times”. In a recent article authored by Randy on his own blog dated 10-16-2012,

http://randythomas.co/2012/10/16/does-a-sexually-active-past-dictate-marriage-as-our-only-alternative/

he states “I had plenty of sex with plenty of people before becoming a Christian”. This was when he had “slipped far into the gay lifestyle” quote from video below. Those are the kinds of comments that lead me to believe someone has had a sex fueled past.

In a video interview of Randy dated June 6, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM3JlKmu29g&feature=youtube_gdata_player

he states at 15:30 to 17:00 “the drugs the sex and my gay identity had numbed the void in my heart that “he” (Jesus) wanted to fill”. Same thing, drugs partying the gay lifestyle sex, all lead me to determine he led a sex fueled past. And by his own admission in these two docs, he did. Why he lies about it now is not of my concern. As RandyWells said above, addicts are notorious liars, and this is true, particularly to themselves. But the lie does lead me to believe even more that he was a sex addict and is in denial about it to the public, with both he and Alan afraid they may lose cred.

You can’t call someone a sex addict who is in denial and expect them to tell you the truth. Hiding and not admitting to addictions is what addicts do in the denial stage. And it is very common to trade one addiction for another. An alcoholic may take up smoking as a replacement etc. The addiction model in AA says “once and addict always an addict”. So when you give something up for life, like alcohol sex drugs etc, you have to stay away because to go back to them brings up the addiction again, hence always an addict in practice or waiting.

Randy abandoning sex drugs alcohol etc, this tells me that they were all tied together and that he was a sex addict along with his other addictions and needed to stop. He was just plain confused. He did after all, become gay by reading about gay people in a “pamphlet”, as he describes in the above video 1:30 – 3:00. And as he states in the above article, sexual activity left him “broken hearted”, another term for guilty, which is part and parcel to sexual addiction.

Now I could be totally wrong. Dr. Drew might throw me right off the stage, but when I stack up all the facts and hit “enter”, sex addict with other multiple addictions is what I personally come up with. Celibacy in this instance I see as escapism with mood altering effects, all addictive traits. It is just my personal opinion, but I think I’m accurate.

Anyway guys, sorry again if I seemed like I was not addressing your concerns, but I hope this gives you some completion. As it is with Exodus, they take a lot of time and they love negative attention, so I think I will stop right here.

What we really need is an organization as powerful as Exodus and “the church” to deal with their fallout to help our dead friends’ families and the ones bleeding badly but still alive. Switchblades are both harmful and deadly. Any thoughts on that would be great if you have any. And I am open to giving you any more info here if I have missed anything.

Have a great day gents.

I think it’s time for your armchair, amateurish attempts at long-distance diagnosis to come to an end.

And here’s why. What you have done follows prefectly what a long line of others have done through the centuries. You started with people you don’t like and the things that they do that you don’t like. Then you found a “diagnosis” to explain the things that you saw that you don’t like and attributed it to the people you don’t like. And then you’ve spent the rest of this thread stubbornly clinging to your diagnosis of the people you don’t like and the things that they do that you don’t like. And when it has been pointed out that the basis of your initial diagnosis was false — I’m still looking for the evidence of “highly fueled sexual pasts” — all you did was shift a litle bit, tug and pull at the argument some more, and viola! — it stretches to fit what you wanted it to fit in the first place. Diagnosis complete.

Putting together the history sections of the Daily Agendas has been a real eye-opening experience for me. A lot of sins have been committed in the name of science — but as a trained scientist, I can tell you that if I did just a tenth of what some “scientists” have done, I’ld have been fired long ago. And, frankly, as a trained scientist, I see nothing that you’ve provided that even comes close to meeting the standard. There’s a lot of premise-fitting and backwards re-casting and bias confirmations, but those are the characteristics of orthodoxy, not science.

You’re not at all the first to do this. The problem is that so-called “social scientists,” mental health professionals, and other have done precisely what you’ve done for centuries. I could start at about 1800 when Franz Gall and Johan Spurzheim began studying criminals — people who a lot of people don’t like and who do a lot of very bad things. Something must be wrong with them, Gall and Spurzheim reasoned, and after many years of studying the problem, they came up with phrenology. This new “science” was both ahead of its time — they recognized that different parts of the brain had different functions, something very new and controversial at the time — and at the same time so incredibly primitive as to be useless. But that didn’t stop them. They kept working on the “useless” part. They kept adjusting, fitting, modifying and updating their theories every time they found a fact (or, more precisely, a person) which they couldn’t account for. And so for the next seventy years, people looked at other people they don’t like, measured the shapes of their sculls, and declared diagnosis on those people they didn’t like. Overdeveloped “secretiveness,” insufficient “amativeness”, a “philoprogenitiveness” which was happered by an insufficient “adhesiveness.” And so on.

It was all very scientific. It was also all very wrong.

I can anticipate the objection that phrenology is not a valid comparison. But why not? They thought it was scientific. Just like we think that modern mental health is based in science. Which, it is, isn’t it?

Okay, what about this.

In 1962, Irving Bieber wrote a book about people a lot of people didn’t like who did a lot of things that people didn’t like. The book’s title was “Homosexuality, an Analytical Approach.” Bieber started with a premise: gay people are mentally ill. Then he set about to “prove” that gay people were ill and that a few of them could be cured. And by golly he proved what he wanted to prove, so, ergo, homosexuality is an illness. And whenver someone challeneged him on it, he clung fast to homosexuality being an illness — even when discussing people he had never met and who had never stepped into his office. And whenever he was presented with evidence which challenged his position, his response was to merely shift, tug, and stretch his operating theories until that evidence “proved” once again that homosexuality is an illness. One former patient, Paul Moor, wrote a paper about his experience under Bieber’s ever-shifting theories. He titled it, appropriately, “Heads I win, Tails You Lose.”

Except guess what? Homosexuality isn’t an illness! Hooray science! Science was wrong, but now science is right. Science even took a vote on it in 1974, because those who wanted homosexuality to be an illness argued that that’s how science is supposed to work. By a vote, and not data. (They lost the vote. Hooray, science!)

Again, I would refer you to many of the observations of Dr. Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who decried the medicalization of behaviors. He recognized clearly how behaviors that we don’t like, when they are defined as pathological, end up being pathological by definition rather than by evidence:

The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.

Szasz sometimes went overboard with his arguments. He famously called mental illness a “myth,” but we now know that some forms of mental illness actually have biological components — bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, some forms of depression, for example. But his larger point stands. Too often throughout history, the “illness” model was used as a substitute for moral opprobrium. The only reason some things got defined as an illness is that someone got to the definition first, and then began using it indiscriminately.

Sort of like what you’re doing. Many of Freud’s acolytes would be very proud. But if I ever encountered a doctor who tried to do what you’re doing, I’d run as fast and as far as I can. Or I’d laugh in his face. I’m actually not sure which. But I do know that I would report him to the licensing board.

Randy is not at the segment of his emotional curve to be able to truly help himself. Nor is he at a curve to have Christ help him with his sexual / emotional dysfunction. Christ can only help the willing. His shame is too deep too strong and too stuck and he needs Christ’s non-homophobic personal help to prevail. To accept Christ into your heart is one thing. To use Christ’s name to shame guilt and cause suicide of gay kids BY A GAY MAN nonetheless, is not just pathetic, it’s demonic.

And it all has to do with his childhood. Yep another “adult/child” still stuck in his four year old, never emotionally maturing enough to have an adult intimate relationship.

The shame of being betrayed/rejected by his father, a relationship of which he has spoken of more than once, is so sick so stuck so prevalent and unwavering that all of his capacity for rational thought has been redirected to escaping a childhood of unresolved lack of loving emotional parental care. Hence the attraction to invisible father figures since he struck out on physical ones i.e. Jesus/god etc.

Sexual addiction in this case may not be the obvious equivalent of running from man to man trying to find his father’s love and acceptance through the highly addictive state called Co-dependency, but the celibacy result of tossing out sex love and intimacy due to losing every time, is. Not only is sexual celibacy in this case a sexual addiction, it is the obvious basic addiction for which he now lives.

Addictions are mood altering. Sexual celibacy is mood altering. It is refreshing. It means not having to deal with a multitude of problems. That’s what addictions do, they give a false of security. Hence sexual addiction is part of all the other addictions he still has tucked away, with celibacy now being the addiction of the day.

If he breaks celibacy, he’s screwed, because all the level one addictions, the obsessive compulsive mental tapes of unresolved problems, come flooding back that he doesn’t feel he can heal. It’s an awful state.

Exodus International and religious addiction are both mood altering, and is the perfect addiction for Randy because it fulfills all his answers of not having to deal with healing his issues with his father/male lover problem or having to deal with sex love and relationships because “homosexuality is broken”. Easy peasy. He’s sing’in in the rain. It’s his perfect meal ticket out. Why would anyone want to deal with sexual dysfunction and boyfriends that don’t give him the love he wants when his religion tells him he doesn’t have to? It’s so much easier to buy the meal ticket, be humorous pray and hide. Sex love and relationships are down the toilet in his mind anyway, so the religious set-up is perfect, as it agrees with his beliefs i.e. “gay life is awful!” …… with a betraying non loving non accepting father at the root of the entire problem.

God forbid all those corrupt lines in the Bible about gay sex turn out to be aimed only at hetero males and/or homosexual rape or a homophobic religious writer of which there is no background, all obvious upon sincere research and deduction. No talk of gays in the Bible? That’s a yes but Randy won’t hear of it. That would really break the bank of protection from his homo/family addiction problems. He’d have to find the next new life addiction, or buck up and be a man, the strong real man he was always trying to find. I see a lot of softness and flamboyance, a lot of estrogen but very little ‘man” in both Alan and Randy. They seem like weak males. They just can’t face life head on so their authenticity is compromised, which give the effect of weak and demure.

Unfortunately, Randy has been taught shame and betrayal on such a deep level by his family (migrane headaches included) that he now teaches it in the Great Sexual Hall of Shame called Exodus International. He loves “the church” because betrayal and shame are Randy consume’, a perfect match.
Randy currently upholds over 90% of the attributes ascribed to religious addicts ….

http://www.lexpages.com/SGN/paschal/religious_addiction.html

Randy won’t answer the question above about kids committing suicide because underneath his addict rhetoric he really doesn’t care, though he knows he should. If he did he would drop all his addictions, leave Exodus and help them. But in his confused state, dead gay kids are just necessary contraband, necessary fallout ….. “for the Lord”. Randy has been living a dead sex love and relationship model his whole life and in his mind, so should kids and all gay people. Go celibate, or die.

It’s quite unfortunate because it’s so easy to heal all this stuff …. but Randy doesn’t know how. So he betrays and shames gay kids and the gay community in general (a lighter blurry glossed over though just as deadly form of ‘Phelps’ demonization) and refuses helping them with their real problems of self acceptance, holding up all his shame based addictions saying, “look how hard I worked”! But he along with Alan, who Randy probably has an addictive co-dependent relationship with, have never worked on anything in their entire lives regarding healthy gay romance sex love and relationships ……. except….. escapism.

So to all of you that get angry upset or consider suicide by watching Randy or Alan’s Exodus model of how they live sex love and relationships, take a closer look at their pasts. It’s an unhealed massive mess of painful contradictions. As you might now notice, Christianity is a hot bed of corrupt sexual data playing host to sexual addiction. Both Randy and Alan are the hosts and are riddled with addictions, shaming themselves and the public via Exodus International because, well, that is what ma and pa and their corrupt “religion” taught them to do.

Alan’s childhood addiction; escapism. Randy’s; authentic intimate love from a male. Later in life addictions; all in the comments above, Randy adding substance addiction, both having addictive personalities on which they thrive surrounded by enablers and enablees.

I do have to hand it to Randy and
Alan though, they teach well what they know best. Sexual shame and shame in general. Shame in childhood, shame in adulthood, hence the adage adult/child. And they just keep pack’in ‘em in the Exodus palace of shame. T’would seem shame sells.

One thing’s for damn sure.

Misery loves company.

A. Convincing some poor soul into a lifetime of sexual anorexia through guilt, called celibacy, some resulting in suicide …..

or

B. Saving 10 naturally gay kids lives who are contemplating suicide, and the tens of family members who would be affected, by telling the kids they are ok and supporting them into a strong loving model of relationship.

Jesus would certainly not do A, yet you find that is his guidance?

Do you really believe Jesus Christ is guiding you to have gay people keep it unnaturally and unlovingly stuffed in their pants for life, avoiding intimacy sex and love at all costs? That may be your answer to an unloving life, but that is only you.

Not every kid gay or straight will be a messed up drug addicted and co-dependent gay life styler like you were. Many will never see the inside of a bar or do a drug.

Your anti gay message kills gay kids. And you are gay. How do you rationalize, not religiousize, how do you as a person rationalize that?