Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: January 30, 2015 05:16PM
but I don't know what to do. I hear the U in Salt Lake isn't a bad place to transfer.
This pressure has been building, and its clear to me now that I cannot make peace with Mormon culture. It's all I've known, and I thought maybe if I did enough study and criticized it sensitively enough, people would respect me and grant me sacred space.
Silly me.
A friend of mine just became unhinged because I let slip that porn wasn't a big deal to me. He was struggling to keep up with me, but usually ultimately agreed with the criticisms of the church and what it does to people psychologically. But when he heard porn––oh shut the relationship down!––he became angry with me. Because, don't you see, porn is the root of all psychological problems or difficulties! He thought I was just feeling guilty and seeking to justify myself by speaking evil of the church and using him as a tool to make myself feel better.
He is a tool, but not mine.
Our friendship is now imploding. He accuses me of lying to and manipulating him. I felt like he was coming off his high horse and starting to understand me a little bit, but then he caricatured me unto himself.
I've known him for a while, ever since I got here to the Burg. That first semester I was optimistic, but once I realized it was just more of the same Mormon culture as back home, my countenance fell. Then that's when he met me.
I've been reclusive and introverted by nature for a long time, but Rexburg really brings those qualities out of me hard. My social life here is dead. Before, it was because of feelings of unworthiness and fear of rejection. But I finally granted myself permission to research, without bounds, any knowledge I wanted. I found atheism, and I grew confidence in myself that maybe some of the things I had been taught were unfounded.
That was foundational to my recovery to a healthy mental state, something I've never had in all my years of going to church. What?––those feelings of rejection and conditional love I felt since Kintergarten were because I was addicted to porn then too?
I didn't tell him everything, because he didn't deserve to know everything. He's not my wet-nurse, and I don't owe him shit. But he's been reaching after me, instigating conversation, and sympathizing with me. It felt good.
I couldn't connect with him past a certain point though, because he's a tool, he's a tool for the Mormon ideology, and his idea of recovering me to happiness is turning me into a tool as well, that perfectly obedient engine of the Holy Spirit that leads us about to serve others and serve the church forever and pay 10% and get married, even if it does not fulfill you as a person to be married to a woman, and have lots of kids and try to sprout as many people like yourself as possible before you finally die and go to the Celestial Kingdom to enjoy the happiness that Mormon life never gave you and will never give anyone.
There are oases of happiness in the church, but these are the flukes, and the troubled/perfectionist/struggling/self-loathing/insecure/no-boundaries/codependent/conditional-love side of the church is more systematic.
In my opinion, no one can be happy who takes Mormonism text-book seriously, but that's all this university peddles. They teach the secular philosophies of men mingled with scripture, and seek to justify any position the Brethren now currently hold with a cherry-picking of secular knowledge.
My friend has a psych degree. How the F#&% did this converstion of ours even happen? What the hell are they teaching over there in the psych department? It makes me think that they do cover the material in class that is necessary to technically be an accredited university, but then after each point a know-it-all TBM professor single-handedly tells the students why every other scientist out there in the same field doing peer-review can sit on their thumbs and spin, before the students are able to piece the secular principles together into a coherent whole.
I realize a degree with BYU on it isn't worth the paper it's written on! And i don't want one! All it is a degree in Mormon confirmation bias, just pick your emphasis.
I thought it would be worth it to stick out this last 3 semesters and just get my degree and go, but I just can't... This place is poisonous. The degree is only really respected within a Mormon sphere, isn't it? And if I apostatize completely, I've heard that BYU sends you a letter asking for "their" degree back.
Staying here and trying to make something work isn't working. I understand now, that even among the "educated" and the "mature," I will be hated for my views. You can't be an agnostic liberal Mormon. They're just not having it. I will leave, and it will be said of me that Satan stole my heart with pornography. My siblings will teach my nieces and nephews how fucked up their uncle is, My parents won't talk to me, and I will lose all credibility with the entire circle of Mormons I grew up with.
These people... Just... fuck!... Porn must just be the latest in a number of scapegoats they use to discredit anyone who doesn't see the world in exactly the same crazed way they do. My friend sure had much to say about "the world" and how stupid they are, and how they're just trying to justify their sins with science, and that's all modern science is. I've seen this mentality in my therapist, my doctor, my teachers, my friends, etc., and yet I now know just enough of the outside world to realize what a bunch of pompous ignoramuses Mormons really are.
My therapist said, "secular psychology waved goodbye to God over 200 years ago" which he lamented, because "once you say goodbye to God, you lose the ability to be certain of anything beyond what can be known by your 5 senses." He said that. That's exactly why humans developed the philosophy of science, because there's no way –– no way –– to falsify a claim that only exists in the invisible spiritual realm. There's no way of knowing whether you just pulled it out of your ass, or whether your ancestors pulled it out of their ass, or if there's any real dire reason to base your life on it, or to cut contact off with people you love just because they don't agree with it.
How can a group of people like this be granted the autonomy to run an accredited university? Who the hell did the tscc hoodwink into giving Rick's college university status? Or is it because the Idaho state legislature is all Mormon too. You know, I think I understand the frustration of the LGBTs and their allies. This is what an Orwellian theocracy looks like when it hijacks a democratic process. I'm scared shitless to think that it was ever possible to live under a man such as Brigham Young as both Prophet and Governor out in the middle of nowhere. What else do you do when confronted by this totalistic social pressure? You either surrender or leave, and the church makes sure that leaving is the most painful thing you will ever do. I had hoped tscc was only 'cult-like' not a cult.
Mormons say all the time "I know" but how do they know that they know? Well, they don't. And no one's pulling the wool over my eyes with mystery and mysticism anymore, because I know how this works by personal experience. "Because tholy ghost" is not an answer, because it's just another position of faith created to justify another position of faith. Circular reason infinitum. I haven't lost the Spirit because I saw a picture of a naked girl. The twinge of guilt Mormons feel is the regret they feel of letting people down and/or the fear of being rejected by their loved ones, not the Spirit withdrawing because it is grieved.
I didn't get any sense of porn destroying my relationship with my friend. How does a picture end a relationship? It was his idea of porn and how that idea compels him to behave to be at peace with himself that destroyed our relationship. Once he had that detail, his image of me shifted positions in his mind and fell right into that place––that stereotype––that the church had taught him his whole life to save for 'people like me'. Never mind anything else I have to say. Any unpleasant cognitive dissonance he had sympathizing with me is now gone. All he had to do was rip me out of his empathy all at once. The church trains and grooms people to do this their whole lives.
It's the effect couched in the rhetoric that "this is the only true and living church on the face of the earth," "isn't the restoration great," and "how blessed are you to have been born in this time when the gospel and the priesthood are on the earth!"
Get them psyched up, get them just far enough into swallowing the hook, and then you start saying things like "wouldn't it be awful if someone took this from you?" "The world" is demonized and discredited. "Satan goes about to deceive" for "he seeks to have all men to be miserable like unto himself". He's already got "the world" under his power, and you have to work diligently to keep this influence out of your soul, too. When the child learns this line, it's in the form of learning how to "respect and honor the priesthood," or "magnify the priesthood."
Nothing has ever happened that the Brethren couldn't have taken better advantage of, in this sense, then the natural suspicion of what internet pornography would do to our society and what it does to a brain. The Brethren have spoken, and then the faithful are moved to crop up justification for the divine truths. Confirm the bias! because we are right––we have a prophet, and if we begin to doubt that, we have the holy ghost, and if we begin to doubt that, we have a prophet, ad infinitum.
I'm convinced through my readings of the forbidden, like the fields psychology and sexology, that church has no idea what it is doing with regards to the sexuality of their rising generation. This is ever more painfully apparent with the last LGBT press conference. They are hurting their youth, and they can't see it, because their whole foundation is built on certain premises that they will not allow to be criticized.
Maybe that's why the Brethren go after the gays the way they do. To have an open discourse about homosexuality is to pop the cork on all their sexual stupidity. They've taken too hard of a stance on this just admit they are wrong now.
And so the abuse continues.
I don't know why I should have to feel guilty for orgasming alone, outside of marriage, but someone else doesn't have to because "once your married everything is fair game" (my friend's words). I know that jerking off alone is no where near as fulfilling as being intimate with another person. This behavior doesn't turn me into a crazed hulk of sexual appetite bound to fornicate. Maybe that's the effect it has on a TBM sexually-repressed mind when they discover porn suddenly, and all the pavlovian shame and shit kicks in. All the sexual addictive-compulsive downward spiral I was in at one point still –– STILL –– did not drive me to overcome my social anxiety enough to have sex with a partner. Because no matter how much I hated myself at that point, someone walking in the room was a boner-killer. If Porn really did craze me the way the church said it would, wouldn't I have held down the first person to walk in the room and fuck their brains out? I am still a virgin at 26, and that must count for something.
Christ!, this church has mind-fucked me so thoroughly. I think I've finally recovered, but that incident with my friend tried to bring it all back. I realize this environment is poisonous. The gospel of self-forgiveness that my bishops sent me to ARP to learn is not the gospel of works and conditional love practiced by the mainstream church membership. They are fanatics, blind leading the blind, and when reminded of their sandy foundation or when a key credibility-disqualifier (like sex) is touched upon, they redouble their effort or throw anyone under the bus that they have to or carve anyone out of their heart to bring back their false security.
anyway. I'm done. I can't try to live in peace with these people anymore. None of them will have it. The longer I put my coming out, the more they will pretend to take it personally that my paradigm didn't perfectly align with theirs and I didn't immediately tell them.
What an insecure, unhappy lot.
What a cult!