The following is from a review of the movie "Witches." Though the film is set in the 1600s, I think this quote can fit a certain religion we know.

<<...beliefs to which its characters hew are as much a source of unease as they are a source of comfort.

<<...damnation lurks around every corner, human existence is a sin for which continual repentance is needed, and the devil is a very real and very active presence.>>

I was scared and miserable as a Mormon. "Man is that he might have joy?" What a cruel joke. Even if you manage to find some morsel of happiness in Mormonism, you're under the constant threat of having it yanked away. "Oops, you're unworthy. No happiness for you." It should be that man is that he might have anxiety and feelings of failure.

A faithful TBM in my family was in the late stages of a terminal illness a few years ago. Instead of being comforted by their Mormon beliefs, they were continually worried that they hadn't been good enough to have eternal life.

I know that most Mormons I have known, including myself when I was TBM, suffer from the same fear that they are never worthy enough.

Is the promise of eternal reward an incentive (carrot), or a threat (stick)?

I've never been Mormon, so this is the perception of an outsider, but...

Over the past maybe three years I have been chauffeuring someone who can't drive anymore to some specific bookstores which have, mostly, used books...and while I'm waiting there, I've kind of already (on previous visits) gone through the books, in the specific subjects, I am most interested in.

So...without actually intending to, what I've gradually changed over to reading while I am there (usually: about four hours, while this other person goes through the new fiction inventory, which I am not interested in), have been self-told, and later, sometimes self-written accounts, by former slaves in the American South, which were written down, and especially earlier, from mostly dictated accounts. It has been an often stunning view "inside" historical American slavery, throughout all of then American territory, by those people who knew that system best.

They had no control over their own lives, or the lives of those they cared about the most (their own children, the partners they loved, their relatives and their most trusted fellow slaves). Any of them could be brutally punished, maimed, tortured, killed, or sold away to someone else at any moment. There was NOTHING they could do to forestall their owners, or frequently, associates of the owners (relatives, friends, etc.) from brutally torturing them at the momentary whim of that (usually) white person. They had no control over their own sexuality or their own bodies or any aspect of their existence...and there were few of them that had anything approaching a normal lifetime. (Once in a while, a very small minority of house slaves became like "honorary relatives" to the white family who owned them, but not often---and they, and their loved ones and children, were STILL under perpetual threat of being maimed, or killed, or sold away without EVEN a moment's notice, most especially when their owner died and the estate was being settled.)

As I have been reading these seemingly endless slave accounts, I have frequently thought of things I have read here on RfM about the Mormon experience. Obviously, the outer realities of life as a slave, and life as a lifelong Mormon, are enormously different in countless ways, but the INNER realities often echo each other quite eerily.

I will be reading the words of someone who lived in actual slavery almost two centuries ago, and those words will chillingly echo poignant words I have read earlier right here on RfM.

This connection between being an actual slave and living as a Mormon isn't a reach. This has happened frequently enough that I now just mentally acknowledge that it is "happening again," and then I continue on, reading whatever slave account it is that I am reading at that moment.

But the inner experiences are frequently the "same."

It is something to think about.

I certainly have.

A lot.

The words slaves and ex-slaves use to describe their inner realities are often the same words ex-Mormons use to describe their inner life realities as a Mormon.

The fear of being cut off from Daddy's secret funds is the only motive for my siblings to remain churchbound. He actually set up a trust for his two TBMest daughters. King Lear has nothing on the man.

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The fear of being cut off from Daddy's secret
> funds is the only motive for my siblings to remain
> churchbound. He actually set up a trust for his
> two TBMest daughters. King Lear has nothing on the
> man.

That is a very big motive.

And, as you point out, this situation is a lot older than Mormonism, and affects people who never were touched by Mormonism, or COULD have been touched by Mormonism.

I am sorry, Don. I wish it were not the way it is in your family...and I wish there was something SOMEONE could "do" about it, but that's not very likely and I know it.