In Which Mormons on Twitter Melt Down Over the LDS Church's New Global Communications Director14/1/2024 Mormons often assert that just because they disagree with LGBTQ lifestyle choices doesn't mean they hate LGBTQ people. Perhaps in theory, that could be true. In practice, it seldom is. I've repeatedly observed that Mormons who think same-sex marriage is sinful are dripping with barely concealed disdain for gay people, while Mormons who love and respect gay people don't give a crap about same-sex marriage, even if they don't vocally support it. The other day the LDS Church shocked the former group by hiring as its global communications director someone who has vocally supported it, as well as transgender rights. I admit that choice is a little confusing, but oh, it's been beautiful to watch the bigots' brains break. People who blindly support and defend almost everything else done by their church draw the line when it contradicts their personal politics or prejudices. Of course this isn't the first time. They had a heyday in 2020 when the church asked them to wear masks, get vaccinated, root out racism, and peacefully accept election results. That was the year when I, still a Mormon, lost respect for my own people. Back then I actively encouraged them to leave the church and stop humiliating me. Now I just laugh. The church loses whether they leave or stay, because Lord knows they're not going to change. Perhaps this will be of little interest to anyone but me, but I've collected several Twitter screenshots to drag back out thirty years from now when Mormons claim that they've always been LGBTQ-affirming. I saved a lot of time by stealing most of them from AntiGaryDages, a fellow apostate, and the last few from StallionCornell, aka Jim Bennett, a liberal Mormon. I actually really like liberal Mormons. I don't think their nuanced approach to the LDS Church makes much sense, but they're good people trying to make their church and the world better, so I don't much care what they believe. Jim has about as much respect as I do for members of his church who make opposition to LGBTQ people the core of their faith. I'm at a loss as to why doubting Thomas thinks the LDS Church is against "climate activism," a topic it has never addressed in its entire history. It's been all but silent on environmental issues altogether. The one time I'm aware of that any of its leaders even publicly acknowledged climate change was in a devotional speech at BYU-Hawaii in 2017 when apostle Dallin Oaks said, "These are challenging times, filled with big worries: wars and rumors of wars, possible epidemics of infectious diseases, droughts, floods, and global warming. Seacoast cities are concerned with the rising level of the ocean, which will bring ocean tides to their doorsteps or over their thresholds. Global warming is also affecting agriculture and wildlife." Dallin Oaks is not one of my favorite people, but I appreciate that he's not a mindless partisan hack. Not because of this particular post, but the person running this account is one of the few that I wholeheartedly believe deserves to burn in hell. I don't think it's humanly possible for him to be stupid or delusional enough to believe that Jesus would approve of his vile behavior. Yes, his profile picture is former New Zealand Prime Minister and ex-Mormon Jacinda Ardern with a Hitler mustache. I guess conservatives think she's a Nazi because her administration's response to the pandemic saved an estimated 80,000 lives. Or maybe it's because she responded to New Zealand's one mass shooting by taking steps to keep it from happening again, and then it didn't happen again. That's not the American way! "iT's StIlL uP tO tHe StAtEs To DeCiDe" No, it isn't, it hasn't been for eight and a half years, and we all know that damn well that conservatives wouldn't complain about "states' rights" if the Supreme Court decided to ban same-sex marriage or abortion nationwide. They're no more sincere with this argument now than they were when they used it to defend slavery and segregation. ^ This. And, again, it doesn't actually seem to be possible to love gay people while opposing their "lifestyle." With the same occasional exceptions you would find among straight people, being in same-sex relationships (against LDS teachings) makes gay people happy, and being alone and celibate for life (in accordance with LDS teachings) makes gay people miserable. If you believe gay people should live in accordance with LDS teachings, you believe they should do that which demonstrably makes them miserable. And that isn't love by any reasonable definition. 1. Mormons have less right than almost anyone else in the world to get on a high horse about "traditional marriage." 2. Same-sex marriage has not erased "traditional marriage." 3. Yeah, this is kind of hypocritical for the LDS Church. Kind of like when it bragged about Michelle Wright Amos, a mission president's wife, being a NASA engineer who helped put the Perseverance rover on Mars, even though she held that position because decades earlier she'd disregarded the prophet's counsel for all married women to be stay-at-home moms. This guy has really internalized the church's manipulative blame-reversal BS. Nothing can ever be God's fault, the prophet's fault, or the church's fault, so any time something doesn't work out the way God or the prophet or the church said it would, it's your fault. Joseph Smith was a master of this. Once you see it throughout the Doctrine and Covenants, you can't unsee it. Also, Brigham Young was a lunatic, and people who admire him should probably be on a domestic terrorist watchlist. Crimson Mamba is clearly unaware of what the First Presidency said in an official statement dated August 17, 1949: "The attitude of the Church with reference to the Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the Priesthood at the present time."
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Even if his remark earlier this year about encouraging white people to stay the hell away from Black people was taken out of context and not racist at all, it's pretty well-established that cartoonist Scott Adams is a massive dick. And that's a shame because his comic strip is one of the greatest ever produced. My dad, a mechanical engineer, had three Dilbert collections - Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy!, Still Pumped from Using the Mouse, and Fugitive from the Cubicle Police - and even as a kid who lacked the breadth and depth of knowledge to understand several of the strips, I found enough hilarity in them to read them several times. Here I share a sampling of the ones I didn't understand. Specifically, I share the edgiest and most shocking ones that I was too innocent to understand because they're the funniest. I can't believe some of these were allowed to run in newspapers. After getting canceled, Scott Adams removed the searchable archive from dilbert.com, so in order to make this post I downloaded all the strips and read them from the beginning. I'm almost finished with the nineties and I've covered the timeframe of my dad's books. As an adult, I find that I appreciate all the more how funny and clever this strip was, especially in the early years before it focused exclusively on workplace humor and showcased Dilbert and Dogbert in all kinds of wacky situations. It covers the spectrum from scathing satire to unapologetically cheap puns, and there were so many off-topic specimens that I wanted to share simply for being brilliant. I also found that, despite very much not being an engineer, I relate a lot to the protagonist. I relate to the way he painstakingly analyzes social situations and fails at them anyway, the way he geeks out over his interests while nobody else gives a shit, the way women treat him, and so on. Not that he isn't also a dick sometimes, but aren't we all? As a kid, I didn't understand why anyone would have a low opinion of law enforcement officers. The kids at Uvalde Elementary School, however, learned very early on that cops are wusses. They're trained to protect their own asses over all else, and the Supreme Court has ruled that it isn't their job to prevent crimes. The myth (or should I say lie) that they're selfless heroes who keep us safe needs to die. In the week since posting just a couple of things about the LDS Church's General Conference, I've become aware of church president Russell Nelson's closing talk, and like those other things, it pissed me off, and I didn't have much else in mind to write about this week. I'm not criticizing his remarks just for the sake of being negative or disrepecting my friends and family members who believe he's a prophet, but because I sincerely believe that these remarks and others like them are toxic and manipulative, and that's a lot easier to recognize from the outside and I wish I had been able to recognize it a lot sooner. So without further ado: "Here is the great news of God’s plan: the very things that will make your mortal life the best it can be are exactly the same things that will make your life throughout all eternity the best it can be!... "The Lord has clearly taught that only men and women who are sealed as husband and wife in the temple, and who keep their covenants, will be together throughout the eternities." These quotes are a few paragraphs apart, but I juxtaposed them to highlight the absurdity of the first one. According to the church's teachings, in order to qualify for the eternities, gay people need to either marry someone of the opposite sex whom they aren't attracted to or remain alone and celibate until they die, at which time God will presumably fix them and let them marry someone of the opposite sex. Both of these options demonstrably make most gay people miserable, even suicidal. They do not make mortal life the best it can be. But I don't think Nelson is being disingenuous here, just thoughtless. "Thus, if we unwisely choose to live telestial laws now, we are choosing to be resurrected with a telestial body. We are choosing not to live with our families forever." The mention of telestial bodies reminded those who are familiar with obscure historical Mormon weirdness of Joseph Fielding Smith's assertion in the January 1962 Improvement Era that men and women who go to the telestial kingdom will probably lose their genitals to prevent them from having sex in defiance of God's eternal marriage requirement. "Is not the sectarian world justified in their doctrine generally proclaimed, that after the resurrection there will be neither male nor female sex? It is a logical conclusion for them to reach and apparently is in full harmony with what the Lord has revealed regarding the kingdoms into which evidently the vast majority of mankind is likely to go." Because of this hypothesis, the phrase "TK Smoothie" has entered the ex-Mormon lexicon. "So, my dear brothers and sisters, how and where and with whom do you want to live forever? You get to choose." I certainly don't want to live with the LDS version of God for any length of time. "As you think celestial, you will find yourself avoiding anything that robs you of your agency. Any addiction - be it gaming, gambling, debt, drugs, alcohol, anger, pornography, sex, or even food - offends God. Why? Because your obsession becomes your god. You look to it rather than to Him for solace." I wonder how many eating disorders this quote exacerbated. I wonder how many addicts now hate themselves even more. I wonder why God is offended by so many things. Maybe he should have listened to David A. Bednar, who taught, "To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else." "When someone you love attacks truth, think celestial, and don’t question your testimony. The Apostle Paul prophesied that 'in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.' "There is no end to the adversary’s deceptions. Please be prepared. Never take counsel from those who do not believe. Seek guidance from voices you can trust - from prophets, seers, and revelators and from the whisperings of the Holy Ghost, who 'will show unto you all things what ye should do.' Please do the spiritual work to increase your capacity to receive personal revelation." So this is the part that I really and truly hate. For the sake of civility and precision, I've tried to refrain from calling the LDS Church a "cult," but quotes like this make it really hard. Anyone not already indoctrinated into the church would see it as a massive red flag. If you went to buy some kind of expensive product, and the company told you to disregard all the negative reviews and lawsuits because those people are deceived by Satan, you would run the other way. If you knew that the directors of the company had made several grievious errors of judgment that called their competence into question and been caught in multiple lies and scandals, and instead of apologizing or making restitution of any kind they just acted like that didn't happen and told you to trust them anyway, you would run even faster. Russell Nelson, with the rest of the First Presidency, knew about and approved the church's dishonest and illegal behavior that got it in trouble with the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year. He's also misrepresented or stretched the truth a few times in his public utterances. Reducing arguments against the LDS Church's truth claims to "the adversary's deceptions" is especially ludicrous to me because the most damning ones are literally just quotes from its own "prophets, seers, and revelators" that we're supposed to trust. Is the adversary the one who inspires them to say those things then? Is the adversary the one who inspired Brigham Young to say on multiple occasions that Black people were cursed by God and unfit to hold political or eclessiastical power, that mixed race couples and their children should be put to death, that Adam was God, and that polygamy was the true order of marriage and a requirement for the celestial kingdom? If God's prophet can't tell the difference between God's voice and Satan's, he's not very trustworthy, even if he's honest. And I want to give Russell Nelson and the other LDS Church leaders the benefit of the doubt that they really believe in it, but now it sure seems like he's aware that it can't hold up under scrutiny. If it could, it would welcome criticism from all sides. This quote is a far cry from J. Reuben Clark saying, "If we have truth truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed." (Though that quote was actually a bluff, because before he made it, Clark had abandoned his intellectual pursuits after they almost turned him into an atheist.) As far as the Holy Ghost, the jury's still out on that as far as I'm concerned. I want to believe that God will direct my life. There have been times when I believed that God directed my life. I now know, however, that people in every religion, including suicide cults, receive "spiritual witnesses" of the correctness of their religion that, to an outside observer, look essentially the same. And I've learned for myself that feelings are not a reliable guide to truth. Russell Nelson isn't a prophet just because some people get powerful emotions when he speaks. He would be a prophet if he ever did anything prophetic. "As you think celestial, your faith will increase. When I was a young intern, my income was $15 a month. One night, my wife Dantzel asked if I was paying tithing on that meager stipend. I was not. I quickly repented and began paying the additional $1.50 in monthly tithing.
"Was the Church any different because we increased our tithing? Of course not. However, becoming a full-tithe payer changed me. That is when I learned that paying tithing is all about faith, not money. As I became a full-tithe payer, the windows of heaven began to open for me. I attribute several subsequent professional opportunities to our faithful payment of tithes." I was taught that the church needed money from American tithepayers to finances its operations in the developing world. That was woefully misinformed at best. I can't imagine why God would prefer, as a matter of principle, that people give a set percentage of their income to one specific organization that doesn't need it and won't use it ethically as opposed to, you know, actually doing good things with their money. And to paraphrase what I said last week, there's a vast disparity in the amount of faith being demanded here. It takes little faith for a millionaire to pay ten percent of their income. In order to really be changed, they should pay at least ninety percent. (I have nothing against millionaires, really. I hope most or all billionaires rot in hell, though.) The best part is this footnote to the quote that most members will never read: "This is not to imply a cause-and-effect relationship. Some who never pay tithing attain professional opportunities, while some who pay tithing do not. The promise is that the windows of heaven will be opened to the tithe payer. The nature of the blessings will vary." So again, the promise is so vague as to be unfalsifiable, and if you can't see the blessings, that's your fault. Just keep giving the church your money, no matter what. Of course Nelson ended his talk by announcing twenty more temples that the church won't be able to fill or staff. At this point I really think he's just showing off and solidifying his legacy over Gordon Hinckley's like he did by turning "Mormon" from a badge of honor into a slur. On the other hand, I am glad that members in developing countries who already sacrifice ten percent of their income to be able to attend the temple won't have to make as many additional sacrifices in travel. So I'll end on that positive note. And you can forget everything else I said because it was just the adversary's deceptions. Six months ago, I didn't watch the LDS Church's semi-annual General Conference for the first time in my life, and I experienced some anxiety over the disruption of routine and loss of comfort. This time I just enjoyed doing other things with those ten hours and almost forgot it was going on. Progress! A friend who had to watch bits and pieces because she hasn't yet told her parents she's an atheist filled me in on what I missed. Pay your tithing, wear your temple garments, use the full name of the church, stay on the covenant path. You know, fresh new revelation to address the real issues that people are facing. The tithing part really pisses me off. My friend sent me this. I testify that this promise, at least the way the LDS Church takes it out of context, is bogus. I received no blessings for paying tithing and I lost no blessings when I stopped. Notice, however, the caveats that Andersen adds to make it unfalsifiable and set up the church's ever-popular blame reversal game: spiritual, subtle, easy to overlook, Lord's timing. In other words, when I paid tithing and nothing happened, the problem was with me for either failing to notice or being impatient. I was supposed to just keep giving my money to the church indefinitely regardless of whether God ever got around to keeping his end of the bargain. That kind of defeats the purpose of the promise in the first place. "[P]rove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." What part of that sounds subtle or easy to overlook? How am I supposed to "prove" God if he's too sneaky for me to notice? But as I said, the LDS Church takes this verse out of context anyway. The preceding chapter begins thus: "And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you." Lacking any indications to the contrary, it would seem that the rest of the book of Malachi is addressed to these priests, and that the verses about tithing are actually a rebuke of religious leaders who hoard wealth. Hmmm. The LDS Church has hundreds of billions of dollars, and was fined by the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year for breaking the law to hide that obscene wealth so its members would keep paying tithing, and of course it hasn't apologized or so much as acknowledged that incident in General Conference. Andersen has a lot of gall to exhort anyone to "be honest in their tithes" when he knows damn well that church leaders up to and including the First Presidency have not. He has a lot of gall to pretend the church still needs any donations when it could fund its operations indefinitely off the interest generated by its obscene wealth. And if tithing was really about personal consecration and putting the Lord first and whatever, it wouldn't be a flat rate for all members. Ten percent of my income was a sacrifice. Ten percent of Jon Huntsman's income is not. This is the other thing I read about that pissed me off. Ex-Mormons on Twitter are not happy about it. I really hope my parents are too smart to buy into this manipulative, emotionally abusive garbage. I left the LDS Church because it's not true and it's not good. I never questioned their faithfulness or their commitment to the principles that it teaches but doesn't live up to. For example, they taught me to be honest. The LDS Church is not honest. I have a problem with that. The problem is not with me or my parents. I don't see eye to eye with them on a lot of things, but they don't deserve to be guilt-tripped over their son making a choice that he has no reason to be sorry for. I won't likely have "a whole chain of descendants," but I kind of want to just so I can not raise them in the LDS Church, especially if they're female and/or LGBTQ. The "covenant path" is hardly worth staying on when the covenants and the supposed authority behind them are based on lies. I'm not interested in perpetuating "a legacy of faith" in a system based on lies. And I'm not interested in living with the monstrous LDS God for five minutes, let alone eternity. I guess my dad's going to be really lonely in the Celestial Kingdom. His dad and his five siblings and another of his kids were already "lost" long before I was. He did everything right to have an eternal family, but as usual, the LDS Church can't and won't keep its end of the bargain.
Due to being tired and stuff I've put off writing about this for a couple weeks, and now it's rather old news and the LDS Church has already moved on to its next controversy, this time pissing off its right-wing members by distancing itself from Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard over alleged predatory sexual misconduct that's no worse than Joseph Smith's. But this news blew up in my circles a couple weeks ago, and I thought I should do my part within my maddeningly limited capacity to spread it further. As I said recently after watching The Last Voyage of the Demeter, how can I possibly be scared of this when real monsters look like this? These women were both arrested and charged with six counts of felony child abuse after an emaciated child with ropes on his wrists and ankles escaped from their secluded house and asked a neighbor for food and water. On the right is Ruby Franke, a Mormon mother of six who ran the YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which I had never heard of until this news came out, but which was apparently very popular among people who have nothing better to do than watch other people's families do normal family things. Granted, they weren't all normal. Ruby has some twisted ideas about discipline. Like a true Republican, she believes that things like food and beds are privileges, and appeared to take a sadistic level of pleasure in withholding them from her children to teach them lessons. She let her six-year-old daughter go hungry at school and took away her teenage son's bed for months. People raised concerns about her over the years and called Child Protective Services multiple times, but nothing happened to her and her channel's popularity continued. So of course many are wondering, is she a terrible person because she's a Mormon, or is she a terrible person who just happens to be a Mormon? The LDS Church covers up child abuse, silences the victims, and protects the abusers, but it doesn't condone child abuse as such. No normal member would think that what she did is okay. Yet the church does condition people to believe that their irrational or delusional thoughts come from the Holy Ghost, so that may have been a significant factor in her justifying her unorthodox methods. And frankly, it often frames trials and deprivations as God intentionally giving us "learning experiences." Heavenly Father, the perfect all-loving parent, allows billions of his children's basic human needs to go unmet every day so they can grow and become more like him. Why is it divine wisdom when he does it but child abuse when Ruby Franke does it? The one on the left, Jodi Hildebrandt, is much worse. If Ruby Franke is Iran, Jodi Hildebrandt is Afghanistan. They entered into a close relationship after Ruby gave up her YouTube channel to join Jodi for a weird pseudo-therapy program called Connexions. A very close connection. There's been a lot of speculation that they're more than business partners and more than friends, and while it is homophobic to assume that raging homophobes like Jodi are closeted, it's hard to avoid that kind of speculation when she sits so close to Ruby and strokes her leg. Anyway, Jodi is a straight-up sociopath, pathological liar, and gaslighter who used her therapy practice to destroy marriages and families. She reminds me of a neighbor I used to have who claimed she could read people's auras and see the future, then drove people apart with lies and manipulation. In this case, her influence undoubtedly made Ruby worse. My understanding is that she was the one who actually carried out the physical abuse of Ruby's children that got her arrested, while Ruby was arrested for living in the same house and knowing about it and not doing anything. Jodi is also Mormon, and in her case, the church has a lot more direct and obvious culpability. She isn't entirely in sync with it either - it's run almost exclusively by men, while she holds all men in contempt - but she worked with apostles such as Richard G. Scott to design its addiction recovery program, she was on its list of approved therapists, and she was recommended by countless bishops to help with so-called pornography addiction. The way she pathologized masturbation and portrayed anyone who did it once a month as an addict in Satan's grip was at odds with legitimate science and therapeutic practices, but very much at home with Mormon teachings. People assert, and I have no reason to doubt, that Mormon therapists throughout Utah, Idaho, and Arizona are still doing the same thing, though they aren't on the same level of pure intentional evil as Jodi Hildebrandt. I don't know who needs to hear this, but masturbation is a normal, healthy, and almost universal activity that evolved in our primate ancestors as much as forty million years ago. I think, too, that Mormon clients were more susceptible to Jodi's psuedoscience because they're taught to base their worldview on feelings. After the arrests, Jodi's niece Jesse (they/them) came forward to share how she physically and emotionally abused them while their family was making them live with her for an extended time. Jesse's family didn't know the extent of what was going on and didn't want to. Jesse's family got upset with them for creating controversy by publicly criticizing Jodi over a decade ago. The LDS Church is not blameless for that. It teaches Mormons that "contention is of the devil" and that negative emotions come from Satan, so many of them are very immature about conflict and treat calling out unacceptable behavior as a bigger sin than the unacceptable behavior. I hope Jesse's parents and siblings have all seen this interview and done some soul-searching. Then a formerly anonymous client, Adam Paul Steed, shared his story in greater detail than before. Jodi got her license suspended for a while in 2012 after she told the BYU Honor Code office things about him that, even if she hadn't made them up, would have been confidential. (Of course, the BYU Honor Code office has its own long history of crossing legal and ethical boundaries to persecute students, which a few years ago resulted in BYU's police department becoming the only one in Utah history to be threatened with decertification.) Jodi destroyed Adam's marriage by convincing his wife that he was a sexual predator and a threat to their children. The best part? She apparently did it on behalf of the late Elder Harold G. Hillam, a high-ranking Mormon and Boy Scout leader who held a grudge against Adam after his role in getting the statute of limitations for child abuse victims in Idaho extended and getting Boy Scout leaders who abused children removed. With the exception of Elder Harold G. Hillam, I wouldn't say that LDS leaders are personally to blame for this abuse. I would say that they actively fostered an environment where it could happen, and they proved themselves yet again to be horrible judges of character and no more "inspired" than anyone else. The LDS Church deserves the negative publicity this story has brought it and will bring it for years to come.
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"Guys. Chris's blog is the stuff of legends. If you’re ever looking for a good read, check this out!"
- 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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