Long story short, I have been out for several years now. DW knows better, but took the blue pill and has doubled down on Mormonism. We have young kids and we split weekends regarding religion. Since they spend some time going to the Mormon church, they get LDS magazines like the Friend.

Tonight I was putting DD to bed and she wanted to read The Friend, which was just fine by me. She found a cute story called "The Lost Purse" which looked fairly harmless to me. It is the basic honesty story . . . little kid finds stolen purse and decided to do the right thing rather than loot the bag. He and his mother contact the owner and return the bag. So far so good . . . basic honesty story. How can even the Morg manage to screw this up?

Why, in several ways. The kid in the story gets crazy Mormon at the end. After doing the kind deed for the non-member, he has to give her a pass-a-long card so the missionaries can give the lady a movie Jesus. The lady also tries to give him a $20 reward. At first he refuses, but the lady is insistent and he takes the reward so that he can use it for Jesus. The boy decide that using it for Jesus means using it for the church. He then decides that he will pay $2 in tithing donate some to the PEF, the Church Humanitarian Fund, while putting the rest in his mission fund.

Seriously . . . this was the basic little kid honesty story that nobody but the church could manage to screw up. The article had to eventually become a "church comes first" article which made me sick to my stomach. Seriously, Mormons, WTF? Why do you need to warp the kids in obedient little Morgobots so early?

Anyway, fuming a bit now and just wanted to share.

hahaha wtf!! They must have gotten even more mormon with the friend- I don't remember it being that bad!! Mind you, this was like 12 years ago when I was actually young enough to enjoy the Friend...which I did! I don't remember it as being very religious at all actually...it mentioned kids who were stoked for their baptism a lot but most of the stories were how you described it until the crazy kid at the end. Yeesh!

Uhhhh... the uber-TBM daughter of an uber-turbo-TBM, self-righteous ex-friend of mine probably had her fingers dipped in that story.

And they all probably think "Oh how cute!"

Now you've brought back a nightmarish story from my METHODIST upbringing!

The story was of a little girl whose Mother asked her to go through her toy box and get rid of toys that she didn't play with anymore to give to the poor who had none.
So the little girl, being a typical 6-7 year old takes out the broken ones and puts them in the box for her Mother to 'give to the poor'.
Her Mother explains that you give away something still useful.

So the little girl when she sleeps at night, she sees her self in ragged clothes and goes to her toy box and only finds a broken doll in a torn dress. She is so upset by this nightmare she wakes up, goes to her toy box, selects her BEST doll and gives it to her Mother. She doesn't want Jesus mad at her and herself with nothing good to play with because "what goes around comes around" in her 7 year old mind.

Talk about manipulation! I was afraid to give anything away for years because it might not be good enough. Then I felt guilty for not giving things away! Then sometimes when I was forced to give something away I missed it terribly. This all happened before I was 10..... so part of manipulation might have been in the basic culture of the 50s and 60s for raising kids.

I don't like horrible stories like that because they are made up to manipulate vulnerable children, who will be more generous than most adults if given half a chance.

(of course children are naturally generous with other peoples things... like my friend who caught her four-year-old daughter handing out slices of American sandwich cheese to all the neighborhood kids one morning! LOL!)

They had to stretch and twist, and distort to mess up that story! : (

But they don't brainwash kids. No....