Twitter's pathetic lack of moderation has empowered conservative Mormons to fully out themselves as terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people. Of course, they don't have a monopoly on being terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people, but it's the hypocrisy and the delusion that really drive me up the wall. These terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people apparently believe in all sincerity that they're doing what Jesus wants, when in reality, he would smack the shit out of them if he were here. These terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people are representing the LDS Church to the world, and as long as it refuses to do anything about their behavior because it doesn't want to alienate its Republican base, it deserves to be represented by them. I like liberal Mormons, though - you know, the ones who don't base their entire identity on bullying others. I don't think their beliefs make a lot of sense - they basically create their own religion that isn't the one being taught by the church they belong to - but I think they're great people, and I respect their right to believe whatever they want. Jim Bennett is a really exceptionally great, open-minded, loving man, which has made him a high-profile target for harassment by the scum of the Earth. As soon as he posted this, a conservative Mormon with the self-awareness of a sea sponge tried to set a world record for proving him right. I know Jim Bennett would never tell anyone to fuck off, becuase he's better than that. But I'll always be willing to step up and tell someone to fuck off on his behalf. And on behalf of others. I was going to stop there to let my words carry their maximum impact, but I couldn't resist adding that the only platform we should be giving Nazis is one that comes with a rope and a long drop. ADDENDUM: I'd like to thank this exceptional waste of oxygen, and whichever of her cult of stalkers is assigned to me, for the sudden spike in traffic to my obscure little website. And I'm not even shocked anymore that conservative Mormons think this is okay: Well, "The land of delusion" is pretty accurate.
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A side effect of my recent month of desperately not wanting to be alive anymore was that I grew closer to some extended family members I rarely talked to. I was surprised to learn how highly my uncle thinks of me. I knew he liked me just fine, but we hadn't talked at all since he stopped using Facebook, and when he was on Facebook, we often disagreed about politics. Some of his kids used to love playing with me, but they outgrew me around the same time they all got iPads. His youngest kids weren't old enough to have personalities the last time I saw them. Anyway, I just had a delightful week at their house. They're such a beautiful, loving family, and it was the first time in fourteen years that I went a whole week without feeling lonely. The youngest ones, now five and three, wanted to be around me all the time. They exhausted me, but I loved them dearly. It broke my heart to leave them, and even more to realize that someday they'll outgrow me too. I had to hold the three-year-old to make him smile because he was crying about my imminent departure. The five-year-old refused to smile. The face she made represented her personality pretty well, though. I want to share some cute quotes. The five-year-old stumbled upon a deck of Book-of-Mormon-themed Go Fish cards and said, "Where's the wicked Laban?" And then I swear to God she said, "The Lord told Nephi to kill the wicked Laban. But the Lord doesn't actually tell people to kill. That's weird." I was amazed. I don't think I had that level of insight at her age. I just hated church because it was boring. The three-year-old, in contrast, raised his plastic sword and said, "KILL THE WICKED LABAN! YEAH!" The morning of the day I left, I was playing with the three-year-old while the five-year-old, to my surprise and disappointment, played with her iPad for at least an hour. I gently inquired whether she intended to do that all day. I was like, "It's just that I'm going to leave today, and I don't want you to be sad and think 'Oh no, I wish I had played with Christopher while he was here...'" Rather curtly, she said, "But I didn't choose that. What I choosed is the iPad." And I was like The three-year-old would never have chosen an iPad over me. The three-year-old worshiped me. The three-year-old said "Hey, watch this!" and did something dumb every time I went two seconds without paying attention to him. But eventually, the five-year-old joined us and explained that she choosed me too. She choosed both. And no, I'm not making fun of her for regularizing irregular verbs, I just think it's cute.
When we had some rare alone time a little later, she said, "You'll miss me so much, you'll forget about your family." Then she wondered about my family's whereabouts, and then she thought it was sad that I didn't live with them anymore. I explained that it's normal to leave your family when you grow up. I told her that when she grows up, she might go to college, she might get married, she might get her own house. I immediately felt guilty for lying to her about the house. She said, "But where's your true love? I know you don't have a true love, but when are you gonna marry one?" I didn't know how to explain to a five-year-old that I have the sex appeal of a road accident. While I was there, I watched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time in twenty-three years. Because I'd read the novelization probably two and a half times before 2010, I forgot what was from where, and the movie, despite being almost universally recognized as one of the greatest of all time, felt incomplete to me. The novelization includes many more scenes and explains so much more. It shares a lot of E.T.'s perspective, Elliott's mom's perspective, and even Michael's friends' perspectives. So in the movie, a lot of things felt underdeveloped and unfinished. I still enjoyed it, but now I really want to read the novelization again. Also, I was in the car with my uncle when it started raining hard, and that reminded him of a massive rainstorm he experienced during his LDS mission to Venezuela, and that led him to talk about how politicians have screwed over the people of Venezuela, and that led him to explain his political philosophy for a long while. He's libertarian. He's not one of the godawful conservatives who's actively trying to build a Christian theocracy and make life worse for everyone who's not a billionaire. He recognizes that Donald Trump is a godawful human being and not the second coming of Jesus. He just believes in freedom. I believe in freedom too. I just disagree about the extent to which certain obligations we have as members of a society should trump our freedom - taking public health precautions during a pandemic, to name a totally random example. He said there are many people on both sides of the political aisle that he'd like to see die long, painful deaths and/or burn in hell for a long time, and I certainly found common ground with him on that point. It was heartwarming. In conclusion, I want to become the kind of person that my little cousins think I am. If you weren't aware already, be advised that International Transgender Day of Visibility is on March 31 every year, so the right-wing Christians who claim that it was a deliberate ploy by Joe Biden to hijack Easter and destroy their "values" are full of crap. I put values in quotation marks because their values are also crap. If anything, Easter is the problem for refusing to pick a day and stick with it. But I have no problem recognizing and appreciating both holidays. I'm having a delightful time staying with my uncle and aunt and their kids. They're all at church as I write this. I talked to my uncle the other day about having left the LDS Church, and he was totally supportive and hopes I'm happy. He shared his own experience and said he has questions he can't answer, but he believes in the church because of experiences he's had and because it makes him happy. And you know what, I'm totally supportive of people believing whatever they want if it makes them happy and doesn't hurt others. That's just not what I want for myself. I want to only believe things that I have sufficient reason to believe are true, even if they make me miserable. As it happens, I have come to a place of happiness with my beliefs because science has proven that consciousness persists after death. If we didn't have that proof, it would still be possible, but I wouldn't be able to make myself believe it just because it would make me happy. I'm also big on informed consent. If people know about all the problems with the LDS Church's behavior and truth claims and still choose to believe in it, that's their business, but they should know. I was not given informed consent when I was raised and indoctrinated in the church, and I would have made different life decisions if I'd known as much then as I do now. Anyway, this being two holidays and me being on vacation, I don't feel like writing a whole lot, so here's a nice Easter song. A week ago, the LDS Church had its Relief Society (women's auxiliary) anniversary broadcast. The announcement was cringe. The women's meeting being led by a man is old news, but this time I also noticed that none of the female leaders have names. Sarcasm aside, I guarantee that most Mormons don't know what they are. I can't believe that the church's PR department or correlation or whomever is still so tonedeaf that it didn't bother to suggest this token of basic respect that could be extended without having to change any of the sexist teachings or policies. I said something less inflammatory to that effect in a nuanced Mormon Facebook group, where dozens of women agreed with me while a man accused me of "white-knighting" and silencing any hypothetical women who may have disagreed with me. And women kept telling him he was wrong, but he just would not shut the hell up. He suggested that I should have let "someone with skin in the game," a woman, post about it instead. I want to go on public record stating that I do have skin in the game because women are people and I'm also a people. If you need something more specific, though, I have nieces being raised in this church, and I don't want them to settle for as little as their mother does. (I'm talking only about church stuff. That wasn't a jab at my brother-in-law.) That was nothing to the controversy that would follow, though, because of course the sexist teachings and policies are still the real problem. The church received one of the biggest social media backlashes I've ever seen after it posted a quote from J. Annette Dennis, one of the female leaders whose name wasn't on the announcement. There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women. There are religions that ordain some women to positions such as priests and pastors, but very few relative to the number of women in their congregations receive that authority that their church gives them. By contrast, all women 18 years and older in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who choose a covenant relationship with God in the house of the Lord are endowed with priesthood power directly from God. And as we serve in whatever calling or assignment, including ministering assignments, we are given priesthood authority to carry out those responsibilities. My dear sisters, you belong to a Church which offers all its women priesthood power and authority from God! First off, she conveniently says "that I know of" so you can't accuse her of being disingenuous if she just doesn't know much about other religions. Even without that caveat, her assertion is unfalsifiable because of circular logic. I'm pretty confident that Mormon priesthood power and authority are imaginary, but to believers, they're the only valid power and authority, so they automatically trump whatever other religions let women do. But even from that perspective, they're largely meaningless in this context. Women objectively don't need priesthood power or authority to do ministering assignments or anything else that they do in the LDS Church outside of the temple. When men perform priesthood ordinances, the belief is that those ordinances aren't valid in God's eyes without the priesthood, and that's reasonable enough on its own. But women don't perform ordinances outside of the temple. They only do things that they and any woman or man in any religion could do without the "priesthood." The women in my little Unitarian Universalist congregation do everything that the men do without any "priesthood." The LDS Church gives its women nothing and tells them that the nothing is something and the something is the most special thing ever. It shouldn't be much of a surprise, then, that this claim that Mormon women have priesthood power and authority is only a decade old. It was a total retcon by Dallin Oaks in response to the Ordain Women movement. "We are not accustomed to speaking of women having the authority of the priesthood in their Church callings," he said in the April 2014 General Conference, "but what other authority can it be?" Hmm, I wonder why they weren't accustomed to speaking of it. Maybe because he just made it up to pacify feminists and dissuade them from demanding actual equality for a few more years. I wonder if he exchanged any tense words behind the scenes with Boyd Packer after his doctrinal innovation almost humorously contradicted what the latter taught in General Conference a few months before I was born: Some members of the Church are now teaching that priesthood is some kind of a free-floating authority which can be assumed by anyone who has had the endowment. They claim this automatically gives one authority to perform priesthood ordinances. They take verses of scripture out of context and misinterpret statements of early leaders—for instance, the Prophet Joseph Smith—to sustain their claims. Well, if this retcon ever worked, it isn't working anymore. The backlash to this quote on Instagram was so big that the church's social media team acknowledged it and promised to share the comments with unnamed church leaders. Then most of the comments disappeared, and the backlash exploded further because people thought the church was deleting them, but the church said it was an Instagram glitch, but the corporation that owns Instagram denied that there was a glitch. I don't know whom to believe. The church has a long history of lying and a long history of squelching dissent, at least as far back as the time its founding prophet ordered the destruction of a printing press because it told the truth about him, but it's not like social media companies are good guys either. Anyway, I have nothing personal against Sister Dennis, who probably believed what she was saying, but the backlash was very satisfying to watch. A lot of my resentment toward the LDS Church is because it indoctrinated me into its "Men and women have different but equal roles" bullshit and intentionally conditioned me not to see obvious sexism right in front of my face. I'm glad I woke up, and I'm glad other people are waking up in increasing numbers, and I'm glad the church is getting held accountable for its bigotry. Mormon women deserve better.
If you only watch one documentary for the rest of your life, make it this one. I cannot recommend it emphatically enough. This documentary falls into two main parts. First, it describes how, from a physical standpoint, the advancement of medical technology has revealed and/or created an increasing gray area between life and death. It's no longer accurate to say that nobody ever comes back from the dead, though of course it only happens under very limited circumstances. This, then, leads into the even more interesting part, which is what people experience while they're dead. As I've mentioned before, I don't know why people aren't shouting from the rooftops that we now know for a fact that consciousness continues after death. This is the discovery of the century. This is why, even though my views on God are all over the place, I'm very confident in an afterlife - not because of wishful thinking or a "spiritual witness," but because of what's been reported and observed. It isn't magic. It follows laws like everything else, even if we don't know what the laws are yet.
Of course, nobody's been dead for very long before coming back, so many mysteries remain. I don't want to commit to any specific beliefs without evidence. Here's what I think right now. Our most basic and true form is consciousness, which inhabits a different plane of existence from the physical universe, a more subjective yet more real one. The physical universe is a pale imitation of it, like Plato's cave. Our brains are like radio sets that harness consciousness. Not only do they not produce it themselves, they severely limit and distort it. We'll see and understand so much more the moment we're freed from physical constraints. But in the meantime, there's some reason we're here, even if it's difficult or impossible to see, which I believe is by design. So I don't advocate for trying to cut short our time on this craptastic planet, tempting though that may be. Here's where I diverge sharply from my Mormon upbringing and hew closer to Eastern religions. I was taught that bodies are super awesome and that every disembodied spirit yearns to have one. I mostly just find them disgusting and inconvenient. Some have suggested that we all derive from one big mass of consciousness, that we're the universe coming to know itself and just pretending to be different people, that we're all one entity in the most literal sense. That's beautiful in a way, but I think it actually cheapens love in the long run. If my love for others ultimately boils down to love for myself in a literal sense, then it doesn't seem special or praiseworthy to me anymore. I also think it's great that the world is populated by people with different personalities, talents, interests, and I was going to say opinions, but that's only true to an extent because a lot of opinions make the world a worse place and don't deserve to exist. I hope that in the next world, we will become more one than we are now, but still retain our indiviidual identities and consequently our interpersonal relationships. But I don't have a belief about that, because my hoping won't make it so. I don't believe in a "traditional" heaven and hell, or in the Mormon three-tiered heaven and outer darkness, but then I wonder what's to become of the truly evil people. Because all this stuff sounds lovely, but if Hitler and I are part of the same mass of consciousness and get unified into the same eternal bliss after our deaths, that doesn't sit right with me. Maybe he'll get reincarnated until he gets it right. Someone from the Unitarian Uniersalists raised this point a while ago. She said she doesn't want anyone to burn in hell, not even Trump, and if she were a loving God, she would send him back to Earth as many times as he needed to qualify him for heaven. I like that idea. I really don't want to be reincarnated myself. Having to suffer on this planet all over again with no memory of the helpful things I already learned in my previous life sounds worse than purgatory. It's supposed to suck, which is why the point of Hihduism is to make it stop. Like the oneness thing, it also would render my concern for others a lot less selfless. I could be reincarnated as a gay black woman, so making the world a better place for those demographics would be in my own best interest. I've read some stuff, but I think this was my first time actually seeing and hearing people describe the experiences they've had while they were dead. They brought warmth to my heart and tears to my eyes. According to my Mormon upbringing, this was the Holy Ghost testifying of truth. I know it wasn't. I would have had the same emotional reaction if this documentary were a fictional movie. I had that reaction because these things are uplifting and beautiful. It's just fortuitous that they also happen to be true. Though many mysteries remain, it seems we've begun to empirically discover that despite all the inexplicable suffering and injustice in this blind, uncaring world, the universe, at least in some dimension, is ultimately uplifting and beautiful, and our existence is a happy thing, not a tragic accident. |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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