i love you sin i love you blasphemy i love you heresy i love you apostasy i love you leaning onto your own understanding i love you healing
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@deseretdyke
i love you sin i love you blasphemy i love you heresy i love you apostasy i love you leaning onto your own understanding i love you healing
Me, a former mormon, watching the 100% accurate portrayal of the church I grew up with in Under the Banner of Heaven:
I hate that particular group of people who, when they find out you’re exmormon, start going, “HAHA yeah, Mormonism is so stupid! Jesus came to America? More scriptures? How dumb do people have to be to believe that stuff haha?!”
Me. I believed it.
And lots of people I care about still believe it.
It’s a high control religion, it’s manipulative, and if you’d been born into it and all your friends and your family and most of the adults in your life believed it—yeah, you’d probably believe it too, at least for a good while.
And adult converts aren’t stupid either. A lot of them have recently suffered a serious loss, are isolated, struggling, or in some other way vulnerable to a religion that makes them feel loved and gives them lots of shiny promises about their future.
It’s not about stupid.
Religious trauma will fuck u up bc smth bad will happen to you and youll default to some shit like "...but i was nice today. I did what i was supposed to, i helped my friends. I reached out. I made my own dinner...why do you still want me in pain. I'm doing what you wanted" and you're talking to someone who isn't there. An entity you've been proven doesnt exist and has failed you so many times that you don't even know how to count them. What the fuck.
You start pleading to someone who never listened on the days you feel like you're in danger like some kind of sick pavlovian conditioning. It makes me want to throw up. Choke up the pieces of god left in my body so I can feel peace
THE BITCHES
god actually told me himself not only is gay sex allowed it’s actually required to get into heaven.
Overthrowing God is not enough. We must physically smash apart his throne and all the symbols of his tyranny. We must truly rule ourselves
in the corn maze losing my religion
i don’t normally like to add onto posts but i thought this thread was pretty insightful (link)
(via Jovishark)
Whatever you think of the music Imagine Dragons are exmormon and the lead singer is a huge donor to LGBT groups in Utah. His like sole political cause is like fighting the astronomically high lgbt youth suicide here in Utah. I fucking hate this webbed site
Here's a brief post from 2018 that talks about Dan Reynold's relationship and advocacy for the LGBT community AND here's a link to the LOVELOUD Foundation website.
You know, at this point I think it may be useful to talk about the difference between highly structured religions and high-demand religions, because I realize the terms sound very similar but have very different meanings, which may be confusing for newcomers.
Highly structured religions are exactly that – religions with a lot of internal structure. That structure may take the form of othrodoxy (authorized theory or practice) and/or orthopraxy (correct conduct or action). It may take the form of very formal, highly structured rituals – the Catholic mass is a good example of this type of formal ritual. It may even take the form of a system of authority, such as clergy. None of this is inherently good or bad, and many people find highly structured religions have a deep, positive effect on their lives.
There are several pagan religions that are highly structured, including Traditional Wicca/British Traditional Witchcraft, Thelema, and many forms of Hellenic, Roman, and Kemetic reconstruction. These are all beautiful and meaningful faiths that enrich the lives of their followers. High structure is simply one of many approaches to spirituality, and if that’s how you best connect to the divine, more power to you.
High-demand religions are a subset of high-demand groups, a.k.a. cults. These groups are about control, not structure. Members are asked to give unhealthy amounts of time, energy, and emotion to the group, until they lose touch with their individual identity and become lost in the group identity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) is a modern example of a high-demand religion. So are Jehovah’s Witnesses. So is the Church of Scientology. These groups destroy lives, eat people up, and destroy their senses of individuality and self-sovereignty.
High-demand groups are not always religious, and the actual beliefs of the group are less important than the means used to control members. Some of the most dangerous cults in history have been non-religious – just ask anyone who lives in the United States and has experienced the Cult of Trump. High-demand groups usually do have some sort of shared beliefs, but those beliefs may be religious, political, social, or even fandom-based.
High-demand religions may or may not employ some of the highly structured elements I mentioned earlier, but any belief system can be used as a cult recruitment tool, whether that system is highly-structured or not. Again, the markers of a high-demand group have less to do with belief and more to do with the way they treat members.
Here are some of the warning signs of high-demand groups. If a group checks off all or most of these, stay far away:
The group has a living leader whose authority is beyond question, and whom members are expected to give unquestioning commitment
The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members, often through recruitment or missionary work
The group is preoccupied with making money, or demands money beyond the basic cost of running the group (tithing is a good example of this)
Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or punished
Mind-numbing techniques such as meditation, trance, chanting, speaking in tongues, debilitating work routines, or lack of sleep are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders
The leadership dictates how members should think, act, and feel, including controlling dress, behavior, language, and interactions with those outside the group.
The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leaders, and/or its members that makes them “above” others
The group has a black and white, us vs. them mentality
The group’s leaders are not accountable to any human authority
The group induces feelings of guilt or shame in members in order to better control them
Members are expected to limit contact with those outside the group, possibly even cutting ties with family and friends
Members are expected to give up personal goals such as education and career goals
Members are expected to devote an inordinate amount of time to the group
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but hopefully you get the idea of what these groups are like. Stay safe out there, y’all.
Resources:
“Checklist of HDG Characteristics” from the Cult Awareness Network
Steven Hassan’s BITE model at freedomofmind.com
“The Bite Model: QAnon Analysis” on freedomofmind.com
“1442: Was I Raised in a Cult or High-Demand Religion? A Self-Assement” on mormonstories.org
Recovering Agency by Luna Lindsey
breeding is the most boring kink imaginable its literally just catholicism
oh ur having sex for procreation ?? u wanna make a kid ?? ok pope john paul ii
Oh, you want to have kids with lots of people? Whatever your golden Egyptian plates say, Joseph Smith
there's no god after all...
answer me, o' mighty saint. judge and ye shall be judged in tow. is mpreg catholic.
mormonism is a cult with its own state and good PR
I haven’t seen anyone talk about it on here yet but it’s all over (ex)Mormon twitter. Nelson is apparently trying to slowly retcon the church’s long-held position that the Book of Mormon is a historical document and instead transitioning over to calling the book allegorical.
From Nelson in July 2016:
Nelson in October 2021:
Those of us who grew up in the Mormon church know that this flies directly in the face of the church’s former teachings. Someone on twitter made the excellent point that the church can’t gaslight (ex)members anymore because of the Internet. It’s sort of entertaining to watch them try.
InFallible 45 - Girls’ Camp! Mother In Heaven
posts that make you Go insane
(that study is by Brian William Simmons, called Coming Out Mormon, and is available through the university of georgia website btw)
Are those windows in that chapel?
I've been in way too many church buildings to confidently say with 100% accuracy that I've never seen windows in a mormon chapel, but I definitely don't remember any.
ive definitely seen mormon chapels with windows — i think most of them have them, but they are almost always that foggy/pebbled glass so you can’t see anything. and usually they’re covered by curtains. my inner salt lake city ward meeting building was by far the nicest-feeling chapel i’d ever been in , mostly because the windows actually functioned as windows — they were stained glass, but you could actually see out, and they didn’t keep the curtains shut.
but i think it’s true that the majority of mormon chapels, especially ones built in that quintessential 80s-00s lds architecture style, feel windowless even if they technically have windows. the artificial lighting is always so stark and bright, the walls so plain…like they want you to feel hopeless and trapped.
like this one. there’s windows on the right side of the hall, but they might as well not be there. nothing makes me feel more stuck and depressed than the thought of being back here.
yall don’t understand the absolute freedom that i feel now that i don’t think that god is gonna punish me for every bad thought that i have. I didn’t even realized how much control that had over me, how much it actually scared me, until i broke free from that, and it’s crazy how some people find liberation in god and all i ever found was fear, fear of burning in hell, fear of being punished for not acting correctly, fear of something happening to my loved ones in an attempt to hurt me. I didn’t even realized how scared i was, how brain-washed it all seems. Twenty three years it took me, to broke free from that, and im not saying that im completely off from it but my perspective is finally different and now i can recognize when something is coming from that place of profound fear that growing up religious put in me. I don’t really have a conclusion to this, im just glad i finally feel like i’m allowed... allowed to feel i guess.