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Disobeying this God of my childhood was related to keeping rules: He was a judge, the Judge. Rules floated around the home community, which included other, even more fundamentalist groups, more strict than ours. Among these rules...
1) No bad talk, also called dirty words or cursing. What about gossip? Gossip was treated more lightly, often ignored as against the rules. I was not even permitted to say "dang" or "gosh," and mom would not let me call children kids, she said kids are little goats. No list of bad words were given us to simplify this matter. Anyway, on my bad list, the first bad word I recall speaking was at age 17. I was very angry and said, "Shit!" I was relieved no one heard me. I was surprised, who would not be after having had a clean mouth for a first 17 years of life? Now "shit," to me, is simply another word for defecation; I, however, am careful to respect others who think differently, not using it in public discourse.
2) Wives obey husbands. Husbands were said to be the head of the house, for that was what the Bible said. No one seemed to care about how that reflected a Middle Eastern culture twenty centuries ago and might not be wise to apply twenty centuries later, and they did not speak of how wives were considered legally the property of dad and, then, husband. No preacher ever pointed out to us that in the Ten Commandments, the commandment against lusting after property of another, placed the wife right there with the jack ass as the property not to be lusted after: "man of the house" was a way persons sometimes spoke of the "head of the house" in my childhood. I think maybe we children were the butt of the house; some said the husband was the head of the house, the wife the neck that turned the head. I heard the husbands laughing in the sanctuary one night after worship, saying that really their wives did, indeed, do the turning head, for the wives were the ones being obeyed by them ~ at least they were being honest, and I had no doubt they were, after observing the true facts of the matter. I found it weird, nevertheless, how they found this apparent failure on their part laughable, while claiming our Bible was inerrant, right from God, and commanded the husband to be the rooster ruling the roost.
3) No dancing. Some thought this sensuous. Dancing could lead to lust. Lust could lead to copulation in the back seat of a vehicle or under a tree on the wet grass, maybe in the loft of a barn cuddled in hay. No one seemed interested in how repressing sexual urges could led to "worse" than respectful, consenting copulation. No, sex, even if one had never been introduced to the bodily repertoire of the opposite gender, suddenly became holy after "I do ... I do," by sanction of church and state (which was, I heard, supposed to be kept separate), so dancing was okay then. It later became clear to me almost everyone physically alive was doing it, in marriage or before marriage or after marriage or with someone someone else was in marriage with while you were married or not to someone also. So, whatever God was said to have said, the urges of nature seemed more powerful than what persons said God said about it. I found that weird, too.
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