Craig Paxton wrote:This is a painful subject for me. I'm now in the later half of my life. I could make a very long list of so called truths taught me in my youth by the Mormon church and repeated by me while on my mission and in various church callings that are no longer true. This Fing church made a liar out of me and does it with a smile on their face. Such things as the reality of a universal flood, the credibility of the first vision, the falsehood of evolution and its undermining of the gospel, atonement and need for a savior, the reality of an Adam and Eve as the first humans and no death having taken place prior to 6,000 years ago despite the overwhelming counter evidence. (oh those fossils? they came from other planets),the absoluteness of Brigham Young's succession authority, the seemingly smoothness of the roll out of the restoration of the priesthood, the age of the earth, the divinity of the Word of Wisdom, the translation process for the Book of Mormon, the motivations behind polygamy, the justifications for the priesthood ban...a.k.a. institutional racism, the lies taught as truth regarding the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas and on and on and on.
And if I ever point out the evolution these so called former truths have taken from where they were to where they are now...its me who is the problem, I'm the black and white thinker, the one who took it all too seriously or too literally? Really?
It's my generation who can see all of the changes brought about by the years of gas lighting slowly perpetrated by the church in the last 2-3 decades. Why just last week my wife was taking with my TBM sister when she said..."did you know that we don't believe in a universal flood any more...it evidentially was only a local flood" to which my wife said..."WT-heck? then whey did God have Noah build an ark instead of just a wagon so he could move to higher ground?" And yet if I start a discussion on why it is so problematic for the church to abandon the universal flood doctrine due to it undermining the prophetic utterances of past LDS prophets, my still believing wife just shuts down.
Mormonism is a fundamentalist religion gas lighting its way to a more liberal nuanced church...but to move its membership from the one to the other requires generations of people dying, toxic mental gymnastics for those who attempt to make sense of it, cognitive dissonance or just plain ignorance.
Me I just want to kick Mormonism in the ass for all of the mental anguish its given me over the years in my recovery from its toxic mental games it imposes on those brave enough to question and attempt to make sense of its web of lies passed off as truth and reality.
It really hurts. It hurts to build relationships around dogma, then to feel those relationships suffer once it's no longer shared. I felt pretty close to my parents, even moreso as an adult. Not as much anymore.
I don't want to destroy people's comfort, I just want the harm to stop.
Craig Paxton wrote:This is a painful subject for me.
[SNIP!]
Me I just want to kick Mormonism in the ass for all of the mental anguish its given me over the years in my recovery from its toxic mental games it imposes on those brave enough to question and attempt to make sense of its web of lies passed off as truth and reality.
I so agree..and being in my 60's and was a member for over 40 years...the gaslighting takes a step above the lies..and changes a perception where it is all your fault! They took our lives Craig..made us believe and lie for them..and give us the consequences.
It's a system that has more or less a hold on each person, and it's impossible to tell exactly how deep the hold is on an individual or where the main junctions are located. I really like Clay Christensen's Mormon Stories interview remarks, and how seeing the church is like examining a brick wall with a small flashlight: you can look at one brick and say it is crumbling, but assume the others are strong, you can see another spot where a brick is missing but not critical to the wall, when in fact if you could turn on the light switch, you'd be able to see a destroyed, obsolete wall. Yet the light switch for each individual is different.
Craig Paxton wrote:Me I just want to kick Mormonism in the ass for all of the mental anguish its given me over the years in my recovery from its toxic mental games it imposes on those brave enough to question and attempt to make sense of its web of lies passed off as truth and reality.
As I helplessly watch the indoctrination of my grandchildren, knowing that I am to blame for indoctrinating my children. If only they could wake up and see it for what it really is, a/the beast.
Crazy old man, have you heard his stories about all those doctrines that he believed in, that were only ever in his head and never really existed in the church?
I hope you can preserve relationships despite the differences, because I bet that you will enrich their lives, believers or not, as their grandfather. And, there's a good chance that one or some of them will eventually leave, and you and your example can be there for them when they're struggling with the transition. My 2 cents.
aussieguy55 wrote:Smoot has a review of Gee's book on the Book of Abraham. No mention or Robert Ritner's work or Klaus Baer. This guy is touted as the new Savior for the historicity of the Book of Abraham. One wonders why he does not respond to the work of Ritner.
Craig Paxton wrote:Why just last week my wife was taking with my TBM sister when she said..."did you know that we don't believe in a universal flood any more...it evidentially was only a local flood" to which my wife said..."WT-heck? then whey did God have Noah build an ark instead of just a wagon so he could move to higher ground?" And yet if I start a discussion on why it is so problematic for the church to abandon the universal flood doctrine due to it undermining the prophetic utterances of past LDS prophets, my still believing wife just shuts down.
This is why, since I first started talking about Mormonism on the internet, I have found the story of Noah's Ark to be such a fascinating litmus test for Mormon belief. It's such a stark, clear story, but it is also given massive practical and theological implications, but it also sounds like a fairy tale in its presentation. It's so easy to read it and think "Well, it obviously didn't happen like that," but then we have so much doctrine and official insistence telling us it did happen like that.
And all of this is going on without the slightest indication from any official source that it could have been anything other than a global, literal flood. Common sense tells us it wasn't, but then (as your wife quickly saw), common sense also tells us that the story is stupid if it wasn't a global flood. Noah wasn't a savior of mankind if it was a local flood. He was a raving lunatic.
It will never cease to fascinate me.
I used metaphor for the flood. And I downplayed the importance of prophets insisting on the literal flood. Also, the fog of history makes it hard to make any final judgments, right? And God-working-thought-flawed people creates generous wiggle room. The final, most completely incestual screw in the machine of mental gymnastics was legitimized by Jeffrey Holland in his talk Wrong Roads: God will send you on the wrong path through revelation on purpose so that you can be sure it's the wrong path at some future point.
There is no end to the ability to hold together the dissonance when you're attached to belief. If you grow out of it, however, the obviousness is so painful.
in my opinion, beyond all the varying internal inconsistencies with Mormonism, it comes down to something self-evident: Why would I trust my relationship to a Supreme Being to another person? Wouldn't allowing another person to stand between me and God would be an affront to God?