missionaries are an active tool of colonization

butch apostate ◇ left after high school ◇ main is @brokenribs

[evcentric-posts]

Me, after growing up in a cult: damn why am I so weird and unstable and don’t know how to interact with the world

[glass-delusion]

[snowdens]

[semitaconcafe]

[busty-shackleford]

[bong-bing-bongus]

The penis greater than the sword...!!

[motherfucker-unlimited]

Did you hear? They're reworking how catholic god is to be depicted. It's now a 30 something anime woman with E cup tits and puffy nipples visible through her robes. And when she's depicted performing miracles they are to lactate a bit seeping through the cloth. What? Oh no the doctrine is completely unchanged. You'll go to hell if you jerk of to her.

[motherfucker-unlimited]

Pope Francis has also stated Ex Cathedra that Jesus had a "really soft boytummy"

[easel-eisel]

[thesentdowngirl-deactivated]

[tinypancakee]

[the-jesus-pill]

You did the right thing by leaving. 

Even if it feels scary or wrong, your life is ultimately going to be better for it. They made you afraid of practicing your free will because they want to keep controlling you. 

But they can’t touch you now. 

You’re free. You belong only to yourself. You can rest now. 

Your life is only just starting..

[lesbi-enby-exmo]

im so pissed sometimes that i was Mormon instead of like, Catholic or Orthodox because Mormonism is like your insane uncles conspiracy theories about catholicism. its just so lacking in rizz.

[vinnfeyntheinsane-deactivated20]

Walking through the mormon church running your hands along the sackcloth walls is so not rizz. Catholicism has saint candles, stained glass, beautiful murals. Mormonism has scratchy walls, fake flowers on the stand, and slightly yellowed baptismal fonts. When do they clean those things? WHO CLEANS THE BAPTISMAL FONTS GUYS. DID Y'ALL EVER SEE ANYONE SCRUBBING THOSE HOES?

[sallymew4]

catholic churches have the scratchy sacky walls too yall don worry

[vinnfeyntheinsane-deactivated20]

do you guys have baptismal fonts? who cleans them.

in mormonism, the members come in on saturdays to clean the church and i have never cleaned out the baptismal font on my rotation because they are always locked!

AND I GOT BAPTIZED IN AN OLD ASS DINGY FONT BRO- WAS THAT THING EVER CLEANED?

[sallymew4]

i havent gone to church in years but yeah the one i did go to had a lil water thang

i assume someone would just volunteer to clean it

volunteering seems very religiony

[lesbi-enby-exmo]

at my church the fonts were only cleaned immediately before and after a baptism, but also they definitely always smelled like chemicals

also though like, i really wish we at *least* had candles, not *only* fluorescent lights.

[lesbi-enby-exmo]

im so pissed sometimes that i was Mormon instead of like, Catholic or Orthodox because Mormonism is like your insane uncles conspiracy theories about catholicism. its just so lacking in rizz.

[memeclassheroes]

[kesterite]

i live in a small rural town. i've learned how to accept that my neighbors are liars.

[toskarin]

"none of these words are in the bible" you're not even reading the secret part of the bible. with all my posts in it

[yaoist]

-- Joseph Smith

[dukeofankh]

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

[dukeofankh]

@kisstheashes

Oh don't worry, I didn't make it out of Evangelical Purity Culture thinking that girls had it peachy or anything. Our experiences are different, but both bad.

I have seen a lot of content about E.P.C. that very firmly centers the ways that purity culture dovetails with rape culture, the ways that women and women's bodies were held responsible for the actions of men, and the ways that their own sexuality was erased under the burden of being cast as the pure, moral, oppositional force to the depredations of male sexuality. This is in no way meant to diminish that.

It is meant to focus on a part of this dynamic I don't see commented on nearly as much though. In purity culture, men are perpetrators. A good man doesn't radiate goodness, it's more that he's managed to contain the inherently evil toxicity that is his sexuality and hasn't let it harm everyone around him as it naturally will if unchecked. When I look for other stories like mine, I already see stories by and for women, and a lot of them... haven't really challenged those core assumptions about men. Which means that I can't really find comfort and solidarity there.

The narrative I've run into a fair bit is "I was taught women were responsible for managing men's horrible, evil sexuality, but I've learned that we're not. Men are responsible for managing their own horrible, evil sexuality." I very rarely run into specific positivity for masculine sexuality when I'm in circles discussing purity culture, because frankly, there are plenty of people who feel that masculine sexuality isn't stigmatized enough.

So yeah. I was specific about gender for a reason. Not because I don't understand other people's positions, but because while I do, I don't see so much stuff addressing my specific situation. So I figured I'd make some of the positivity I myself need.

In short: Not dismissing the harm done to women by Evangelical Purity Culture, this one was just more about my experience as a dude.

[neshamama]

abraham joshua heschel, god in search of man: a philosophy of judaism, 1976

[cryptotheism]

There’s a Yaoi about side wound boypussy

Yeah yeah we've all read Matthew

[memecucker]

I saw people on twitter asking what’s up with all the radfems supporting Russel Brand over there and the answer is that Brand believes porn addiction is real and is linked with religious front orgs focused on popularizing the pseudoscientific idea of porn use being the same thing as drug addiction. It’s common for abusers like Brand (or Weinstein) to popularize pseudoscience about “porn addiction” and “sex addiction” because they don’t want to accept blame for their abuse and instead shift it off to things already seen as immoral vices.

Also mandatory linking of articles about research into “porn addiction” bc being the most successful rightwing pseudoscientific propaganda push means a lot of people just don’t question it being a thing and when you just mention it’s not real you get a flood of people going “urrm akshully anything can be an addiction”

There's No Such Thing As Porn Addiction, Says New Research

Authors claim that the pornography industry and the sex rehab industry are behind flawed research.

“Porn” problems unlike any known addiction in largest neuroscience study

“Porn” problems unlike any known addiction in largest neuroscience study. When studying addictions, there are known relationships between ce

Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too

What does it mean that religion, not porn use, predicts porn-related problems?

[memecucker]

Check out the notes if you want some good examples of what I’m talking about. “Hmm OP posts anime tiddies therefore this research should be ignored” just like all roundabout ways to ignore the arguments being made in favor of anecdotalism to obscure the fact that “porn addiction” is literally not supported by major scientific organizations but it is supported by groups connected to Church of Scientology, Mormonism etc which is why people actually give it a deliberately vague conception. At one minute “porn addiction” is something exactly like a drug addiction and in another minute “porn addiction” is demonstrated by simply lacking disgust at something. By focusing the issue of “porn addiction” on these pseudo-diagnostics they want to keep the discussion in the area they want- emotional appeals to disgust to avoid you from actually critically thinking about the topic.

Now what exactly do my posting habits have to do with the studies and research papers in question? Not sure but that anime girl with big tiddies means they get to ignore things like how symptoms of “porn addiction” correlates more with religiosity and negative feelings towards porn than actual rate of consumption which is unlike anything considered an addiction. Don’t think about the Mormons bankrolling so much of this shit. Don’t think about the neuroscience studies that see so-called “porn addicts” have the opposite response than actual addicts to drugs or gambling. Pay no heed to the text of the actual articles which say treating people who are troubled by their porn use as addicts can be counter productive and it’s better to use a framework other than addiction. Are the scientists all porn addicts also? Is the porn industry bribing scientists and only scientists bc clearly they aren’t very good at lobbying politicians or payment processors. Remember that horniness is evil I mean biased

Vague emotional appeals and anti-scientific thinking that totally doesn’t go down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole yeah uh huh

[humphreybogie]

Hope OP doesnt mind if I add my 2 cents.

I worked in Utah as a DV/SA Advocate for 6 years and heard the term "porn addiction" at least 1x a day every single day of my life. I'm also a survivor of a DV situation myself, wherein porn was used to abuse me. So believe me of all people when I say: It's a complete dogwhistle term that I've seen used to describe every behavior you can imagine.

Utah, a state run by the Mormon Church making it an effective theocracy, has declared Porn and Porn Addiction a "public health crisis" for almost a decade (2015), but they have considered it one for more than two decades. They even appointed a "porn czar" in 2001, but they became so inundated with dumb requests that the position was almost immediately killed (here's a hilarious, on-the-nose quote from the Salt Lake Tribune abt that:)

Despite spouting off this dogshit for decades, Utahs Department of Health has never recieved a single cent of taxpayer funds to RESEARCH porn addiction.

And people want to do it. I was friends with a major player at the Health Department for years, who begged them every SINGLE fiscal year to let his people conduct research on this so called "addiction", and its impact on Utah society, BEFORE they implemented anti-porn policy. He never recieved a single dollar to do it. Meanwhile, a group called UCAP recieved public funds to host a million useless conferences talking about how porn is evil. Without the evidence to back it up.

(I went to a few dozen of these as an SA advocate (bc you guessed it- "porn addiction" is mostly pathologized as an abuse behavior) so if youre wondering what that even looks like: It's just someone going "look how young kids are when they are first seeing porn!!! Doesn't that scare you???" In a million different ways.)

The Utah Coalition Against Pornography was created almost entirely by the Eccles and Sorenson foundations. These are "nonprofits" run by two of the largest, richest, and most influential Mormon families in the state. You can find their names splattered across businesses, news outlets, banks, schools, and most importantly, our theocratic politicians spanning back more than a century. It should alarm you that Utah is willing to spend money preaching something before they research it. It should straight up freak you out that a so-called "public health crisis" is being handled by a right-wing church that notoriously spends billions trying to turn church doctrine (like their long term opposition to same sex marriage) into law- not just in Utah but at a national level too.

Most importantly- if you find that you've been parroting this weird, unresearched nonsense that these groups have fabricated to abuse obscenity laws- you should take a second to reconsider the impact of propaganda on your life.

[imsoglitter]

Something that's kind of funny to me in retrospect is that I'm a leftist BECAUSE I was raised Mormon, not in spite of it. The interesting thing about the church and my parents only wanting to sugar-coat the bible/book of Mormon and not apply it to the conservative politics that they clearly wanted me to adopt is that it backfired horribly. the feel good stories about Jesus helping the poor and the ill and the whores and the tax collectors were my pretty steady theological diet which made it so confusing when my parents who refused to talk politics to me as a child told me that "we don't give money to bums" or when the church decided it was okay to theologically exclude the children of gay parents from membership. As far as I can tell the most Christian thing I've ever done is become agnostic because I'm pretty sure Jesus warned against hanging out with religious hypocrites

[pimo-and-sad-about-it]

Just experienced an emotion that I can't put a name to but certainly did not like when I suddenly remembered how much time in my life I have put into not just memorizing the 13 articles of faith and various youth themes and scriptures, but also the entire document "The Living Christ."