Current projects
Projects I’m currently working on, when I have the time and energy to do so. What will ultimately come out of these I don’t know, but none of it will come to anything without me giving it a try.
The victims of The Church of Denmark (Folkekirkens ofre)
In the summer of 2017, at the age of 38, under trembling anxiety, I came to the conclusion that I no longer in good conscience could remain a Christian. In April 2018, I left the Church of Denmark. Today, I am an atheist and a secular humanist.
Today, in the English-speaking world, there are a lot of resources on the harm and problems caused by Christian faith and culture. Here in Denmark, where the Church of Denmark still enjoys strong support and where the Christian church and the Danish Bible Society continues to have something close to a monopoly on the stories told here in Denmark about the Bible, Christianity, and the Danish National Church, this is sorely lacking.
“Folkekirkens ofre” (The victims of The Church of Denmark) is my attempt to write a book in Danish about the dark and harmful aspects of Christianity and our Danish National Church, while also collecting the most important things I have written on the subject since I left Christianity. A book about Christian lies, religious trauma, and their human costs.
Christianity hides behind the idea that it is untouchable and irreproachable, too holy for mere mortals to criticize. But anything worth devoting your entire life to is worth scrutinizing intensely, and when toxicity is revealed, it should be shouted from the rooftops as a warning to all who may come across it.
Promise Backlund, Gospel of Lies, p. 113
Among other things, I write about the problematic and unethical reality behind the Evangelical-Lutheran mindset and theology; about the misinformation and factual historical lies the church spreads about the biblical texts; about the harmful, cult-like psychology found in the Evangelical-Lutheran church communities and schools (not at least in those that I grew up in); about Christian purity culture and religious trauma; about why we should pull Evangelical-Lutheran Christianity down from the pedestal on which it has been placed here in Denmark as our national church, so that it instead exists on an equal footing with all other faith communities, as well as why atheism and secular humanism makes much more sense than Christianity does.
I can see the value in creating an English version of this as well, but as mentioned above, given the lack of focus on this topic in Danish, I currently consider it important to do it in Danish first.
What’s good about faith, if it isn’t a reliable path to truth?
Matt Dillahunty (min oversættelse)
https://youtu.be/oQXub4IKTRU
The Danish unemployment system: Russian Roulette with the mental health of the unemployed
The Danish unemployment system continues to be based on psychologically harmful power dynamics and ways of thinking.
One of the biggest causes of bad, even fatal, outcomes is belief in things that are untrue.
Daniel J. Levitin, A field guide to lies
Kindle edition, Loc. 2704
In this project I attempt to write about the often toxic cult-like power dynamics and situations that I have experienced during my periods of unemployment so far, created by a psychologically incompetent and harmful unemployment system. The reason for this shall most likely be found in multiple reasons, including problematic legislation and management, a lack of focus on the rights of the unemployed, and a lack of resources and psychological training and support for employees in the system.
It is a story about the Danish unemployment system’s inability to psychologically care for people and how the system instead ends up playing Russian Roulette with the mental health of the unemployed.
This is a purely Danish writing project.
Any system built on coercion and manipulation is inherently flawed, regardless of the intentions of those in charge. True leadership doesn’t seek to control but to empower—without strings attached.
Daniella Mestyanek Young,
The Culting of America: What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them
For this project, I have purchased a web domain and have played with creating a logo in Adobe Illustrator. The result is the logo shown below, which I’m quite happy with for now.
The question, then, is whether I can successfully create a text that I’m satisfied with and that tells the story as I see it…
Previous writings
I’ve had my own website on my own web domain since 2001. For a number of years, before my indoctrination by the Danish National Church began to crumble and I left Christianity and the Danish National Church, I had a blog where I wrote mainly about how good and true Christianity is. That blog was taken down in February 2018, after which I took a break from blogging.
However, that didn’t mean I stopped writing altogether. I was still active on Twitter and in 2018, less than a year after my Christian faith collapsed, I created a Google slideshow in English titled “My Experience with Toxic Faith – Indoctrination, emotional abuse and purity culture in Evangelical Lutheran Christianity & The Church of Denmark“
In the summer of 2019, I created a new blog here on bjarkeraabjerg.dk.
In 2023, I wrote to the Legal Affairs Committee a couple of times regarding a couple of bills that, unfortunately, ultimately led to Denmark getting a new blasphemy law.