I'm going to make you understand the mormon word "accountability" in a new and dark light. Accountability is the thing that makes you susceptible to the temptations of the devil and the punishments of damnation. Without accountability, you are safe: children go to heaven as well as all humans to not attain the mental age of at least 8, or so I was taught. I used to ask my Mormon bishop-dad a lot of questions, and these are the answers he gave me, plus my own answers I gleamed from the scriptures. You have to have intelligence, or the ability to comprehend light and truth, to be capable of offending God, and when you start to go down the broad road that leads to hell, it is not unusual for your Mormon family members to wish that God would take your accountability away from you so that you cannot offend him or break their hearts anymore.

There was a boy in one of the other wards of my childhood home stake who was beginning to get into "party life," and what do you know he had an off-roading accident and suffered brain damage which was hailed later by all the relief society karens as a miracle as they reflected on it in later years. He became so mentally impaired that he was not capable of anything except going to church and doing what his parents told him to do, which is all some Mormon parents care about. He was a sweet spirit, but he had memories of what it was like to be "accountable" and then have it taken away. I wouldn't wish that hell on anyone when I think about it. I think about this guy whenever I hear stories of how the church used to say, pretty commonly, "better dead than unclean." Not that he was better off dead, but because what happened to him was sort of a partial fulfillment of that doctrine. Part of him died in that accident, and his parents couldn't have been happier about it.

It's sad that "that's what it takes" sometimes to "find the lost sheep," but the "ways of the Lord are mysterious,” and there is a silver lining in it that brings some Mormon parents relief. I grew up believing, not just from this, that God was kind of a psycho who would kill you or retard you whenever it figured into his plan, and as members of the true church in the last dispensation of the fullness of times, he tinkers with us more than most. Accountability, or intelligence, takes on a new light when think about like this: "unto whom much is given, much is required, and he who sins against the greater light shall received the greater condemnation." It's horrifying, actually.

I've been a victim of this prejudice. My dad isn't only a quack: he's Mormon. His religion and his quack profession mix together in strangely perfect ways. His anti-vax views compel him to believe that I, his only son who he had partially vaccinated as a baby before he "learned the truth," was neurologically damaged -- and not in the "good way." If the vaccines gave me Asperger's (undiagnosed, but suspected) or ADHD (verified), they enhanced my ability to focus on stuff and things and ideas and obsess about them for long periods of time and also be very uncomfortable with discomforts like cognitive dissonance. My vaccinations "damaged" me by... making me smarter, I guess, at least book-smarts smarter, and look at how it has doomed my soul. He has apologized to me on several occasions for having me vaccinated, which is his way of blaming himself for my loss of the Holy Ghost (even though I still feel those feelings all the time) and also a huge clue as to how he thinks of me. My father will not engage me on any point of discussion I make; the best I ever get from him is an apology for having me vaccinated or his silence or a lecture about how I have my beliefs and he has his and he's sorry he couldn't do more for me. He knows I'm smart, and he resents the fact, because he knows he can't argue with me and have it his way every time so he doesn't bother.

And the whole family takes his cue, creating a vacuum where it comes to a healthy vibe from my family regarding my potential, my worth, my intelligence, and my life decisions. They pat me on my head and tell me they "hope I find my happiness," but I know what that means -- they don't think I'm going to, and to their credit I haven't been acting like I might, but to be fair to me who ever handles this Mormon treatment well? It cuts so deep in the most personal ways. It's subtle and multi-layered at the same time and yet so simple they do it without thinking about it. The only thing that matters to them is being Mormon, which is another way of saying they don't want to talk to an antimormon because they don't care what I have to say -- they want their testimonies, period. And they must often recite that verse to themselves that says "wo unto the learned, for when men are learned, they think they are wise and they hearken not unto the counsels of the lord but they put them away thinking they know of themselves; but to be learned is good if they hearken unto his counsels."

Better dead than unclean. Am I also better off retarded and Mormon than accountable and damned? Considering that my soul is not a ethereal thing that dwells inside my body, a literal ghost in the machine, but the sum of my material parts... I'm watching videos like this today ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TIK9oXc5Wo&ab_channel=Mr.Duncan%27sSocialStudiesChannel) and marveling at what I'm watching. "I" am the way 100 billion of these electrically-chemically active boogers interact with each other. That's amazing. Mormonism demands that these guys be arranged in a particular way and that no two neurons touch in forbidden ways: that's the insanity of DEMANDING orthodoxy. I can barely guess what makes these guys so active: how am I going to forbid them from making connections when they learn something that sounds true to them? I don't control that! All I can do is forbid myself from being exposed to the evidence that tends make people not believe Mormonism and instead believe… what, I didn't used to know, only that it wasn't mormonism, so it scared me. But after a while and despite your best efforts, you start to figure out that you're just ignoring data which probably changes minds because it's self-evidently true and any thinking person once they grasp the data can probably tell for themselves easily enough even though its an answer they don't wanna hear.

Neurons like compatible beliefs. One of the main ways to tell what is true, from what I understand, is to trust that your senses gather accurate enough data and then also trust that they dislike contradiction when stuff is important enough to let you know that things don’t add up right. But when you're immersed in a cult that controls the information that you're exposed to your whole life and spoon feeds you a bunch a bullshit through repetition, encountering raw reality without letting them “correlate” it first also gives you that nasty feeling, which they teach you is Satan among other thought-stopping techniques. But it is a testimony to the fact that they are a man-made cult and not the true church that as long as you are willing to be out there in the world, you will keep learning truths they don't control and getting a feel for what was kept from you. The Book of Mormon accuses the Catholic church of deliberately perverting the Bible by holding back the most relevant parts of it for knowing that the Catholic Church is not true, which they never did, but the LDS church actually does that sort of thing.

Manipulating nature's creatures via a trait that evolved to gain accurate knowledge of their environment so they can survive leaves a bad taste in their mouths once they fully realize what you did. We all loathe the liar, and it's a natural instinct we have -- not something we need the church to teach us. These are our survival instincts, and this is obvious enough when you trigger a faith crisis -- a faith crisis is, I think (although I'm no expert), the disillusion of the mental model of your environment that you were working with to keep yourself secure in the thought that you are safe, secure in the thought that all the threats are accounted for and you have everything you need to be basically satisfied and happy, only to suddenly realize it was false security. It's frustrating enough when this sort of thing happened in paleolithic times on account of your own faulty intelligence or carelessness, because it could cost you your life or the lives of loved ones, but when it's because someone you trusted lied to you, that's the stuff that excommunications from the tribe, inter-tribal wars, or capital crimes are made of. No other way of describing faith crisis feelings adequately does it justice: you have been betrayed in the most existential way, and there is no forgiveness because these are matters of survival as far as our brains evolved to tell. We didn't evolve to be great at telling fact from fiction before trial and error, but we did evolve to be unforgiving after we discern that we've been toyed with on the most important matters. I believe that. I believe that the general unwillingness of the religious fundies to face their fears is only the realization that they must have made on some level that they will grieve and then they don't know what they're going to believe after the grieving is done. Thing is: our brains did not evolve to willfully believe things we have reason to believe are inaccurate: they evolved to map the objective environment around us at least well enough to survive and reproduce successfully. Unfortunately modern civilization has removed the Darwinian rule that stupid behavior gets you removed from the gene pool, but it still isn't wise to hobble your working model of reality and use all of your intelligence to think of reasons to remain deluded rather than thinking of ways you could actually help your material organism navigate its real surroundings/threats/challenges better, especially when the red flags are waving in your face almost every day.

Arguably, Mormon obstinance is a form of social self-preservation, but why have we allowed our tribe to be organized so irrationally to begin with? I used to think this was a thinking man's religion. I have been disabused of this belief in every way imaginable, even having people mourn my soul because I'm too logical for my own good. My own parents have called me insane. Who would actually fight for what's right and let the consequence follow? Who would unfurl the standard of truth and dare to encourage others to come unto it? IDK, the man they raised, for one. That's what they raised me to care about. They raised me to be ok alienating my peers if it was for a cause I believed in: they just assumed I would always be doing it for my Mormon homies. They haven't bothered to get to know me since I declared my unbelief, and it leaves me wondering if they ever cared, really. They say that they love me, but I think it's more accurate to say that they love a certain idea of me more than the actual me. How can you loathe someone's connectome but love their soul? Their connectome is their soul. My folks hate my very soul. What else would you call their attitudes?

They don't care what I believe, because the only thing that matters to them is having your connectome arranged a certain way. So they don't care why I believe what I believe -- it doesn't matter, because it's not the holy dogma. But they know that there is a logic to it and that I'm good at logic, which is why they forbid me to try to "get" them -- God forbid they see the logic of it or become acquainted with evidence they didn't want to see. They intuit very naturally that there is information out there that would probably change their minds, or at least would be very hard to spin doctor away, so they ask me to not share it with them. But then, and this is the kicker, when I'm down in the dumps they explicitly mourn my life decisions to my face and insinuate that I'm an idiot. They question my sanity. I get asked if my anxiety has damaged my ability to feel the spirit. They don't want the reasons why I might be right: but they go through my psychological pockets with or without my permission looking for reasons that I'm wrong or otherwise an unreliable source of information. And the feeling underlying this behavior, I strongly suspect, is that I would have been better off like that kid in the other ward who had his accountability taken away so that he couldn't damn himself or break his mom's heart anymore.

Mormons have this uncanny ability to use Mormon swears and passive-aggressive language and body language that technically avoids saying what they're trying not to say but says it anyway. I cuss at family, but I'm forward with them and I try to lay out my logic, reasons, and evidence when they let me. They feel superior to me because they don't cuss, but they think of a hundred other ways to tell me to get fucked. They cower in fear of me and they also laugh at my humanity which is often on full display and uncovered by the divine grace of a god. They rarely talk to me about anything important anymore, and when they do they don't say how they feel about anything -- only couched in passive aggressive momoisms. The whole experience is a mindfuck. They wish my body health and safety, but not my mind, not me, not my soul. They don't care who I am; I think they wish enough of me -- when I talk about my "authentic self" they scoff at me because I'm obviously just embracing sin -- would die so that they could manipulate what was left of me like they used to so that THEY could feel good about my prospects in the afterlife. It leaves me thinking of myself as some sort of decorative mantle piece. I might as well be the picture of me they literally have on their mantle by the fireplace, because they only want my image around, not me. They don't love me: they love the idea of me that they used to think was true and still selfishly hope will be true again someday or at least loathe me for not letting them think.

Do I love them falsly in a similar way? Or... did I? What are my feelings about them now? I have a genuine desire to know who each of my family members are underneath the Mormon programming. I want to know how they think in part because we're all a mish-mash of the same genetic soup and mental illness has been a major theme of my life. I want to know what their neuroticisms are, how exactly they are fine-tuned, and how they deal with this and that on our similar shared psychological and moral landscapes. I also know from getting to know Chief outside of the cult that having your flesh and blood understand and validate you is one of the most rewarding feelings on this earth. I also know that not having that, but instead having to play make believe every time you wanna be around them while they condescend to you harshly, creates a sort of imposter syndrome or double life or a general feeling that nothing matters which arises out of the way they try to make you feel like you faltered somehow when you know they're just weak and selfish and tripping on intellectual uncertainty snd moral superiority at the same time. I think its accurate to say that I genuinely love myself these days and so I can't help but love the people that my family are naturally underneath the cultiness. I hate the cultiness. I don't have to be nice to it after the abuses I've taken from it. In fact, I don't even have to be around them if they're dead set on being so against my authenticity that I can't even open my mouth to join a discussion about anything without everyone tightening their butt cheeks and either my father or my mother giving me that damned lecture about how I need to learn that it's ok for people to believe different things. Is that something I needed to learn? I've always been the multiculturalist in the family, the one who explains other cultures to them so they can have kinder opinions of nonmormons than the shallow crap they typically think. What they mean by those words is that I don't even have the right to lay out what I believe much less why: if I'm going to be part of the family, if I'm not gonna actively participate in their delusions the least I can do is censor myself utterly on matters everyone else gets to voice their opinions on at the dinner table but not me. So I choose not to be part of the family, then, but I do mourn that this is the one life we have to get to know each other's souls and they choose not to know mine or share much of theirs with me anymore: the real thoughts people have, their bedrock feelings under-girding everything else they think.

We are our connectomes. If it was possible to simulate it perfectly in a computer, that's you -- a copy of you, but you nonetheless. That's not a soulless simulation of you, it is your soul in 1s and 0s. You are information, and when the medium holding it breaks down and decays, you cease to exist except as a memory in someone else's connectome. Souls exist: they're just mortal. Monism is true; dualism is not true. So if you don' try to get to know someone now, does it even matter to you what's on their mind? Cuz there's never another time to find out. I read about the paleolithic life our ancestors had, one of the sweet truths that a literal belief in Adam and Eve kept from me, and I learn about how laid back life used to be. Times got tough which demanded hard work often, but the amount of time you spent foraging or hunting or warring was not 40+ hours a week for the majority of your useful life. It used to be that we lounged about a lot just getting to know one another. Think of the way that other packs of great apes behave most of the time. They work, but most of the time they just hang out and enjoy each other's company. I mourn the loss of that quality time that modern life doesn't let us have anymore, and I doubly mourn spending what time we did have after school and worklife on worthless church meetings. I mourn that I'm in my thirties now and I'm never going to get to connect with my family authentically like I dreamed of since I was a boy. But it's not all me: a significant part of that dysfunction is them and the majority of that is Mormonism. I hate Mormonism. I love truth, and I have a holy respect for those little intelligent boogers called neurons and how if you give them a 23-pair-of-chromosome script they dance in a way that makes the personalities behind the faces that I dream about every night. I don't, however, have the patience for people who delude themselves and externalize all of their cognitive frustration that comes from willfully believing a lie onto others. I've been nothing but straight with these people my whole life, and I don't get dick for it in the end. If you truly love someone, I think you tell them the truth, and if they truly love you back they hear you out when they know you're being real -- at least long enough to hear what you're saying. They may not like what you're saying: they have the right to disagree, sure, but they ought to at least hear you out, right? I mean, after they cause you so much grief concerning this thing and make you feel like if you ever stop bothering with this thing you've betrayed the family somehow, they owe you at least, idk, five minutes to make your own case, don't they? Especially if they're intent on holding this against you. I don't have to forgive them for that shit, and I have nothing to apologize for either. One thing I've never done is unduly influence a fellow mind. I've always been straight: I've laid my biases on the table for that reason. I show people where I'm coming from so that they can't say I withheld information from them or that I'm trying to manipulate them. I have values, and I possess a very intellectual sort of morality -- a morality having to do with respect for other minds, which is why I can't lie without ultimately ratting myself out. I have a great deal of respect with matters of internal world: ethical dilemmas, double binds, guilts, shames, mental health issues, and other sicknesses of the soul. At the core of my personal morality/philosophy is a desire for others to have a better time living in their own skins, which is an attitude I have which was born from the life-long struggle I have had finding a way to live in mine. I don't just treat others the way I wish to be treated: I encourage them to treat themselves in the privacy of their own minds because of that love with which we love ourselves do we love others. You cannot love others and fundamentally hate your own self, and if you love yourself you cannot hate others when you start to notice the similarities between their most difficult life struggles and yours. Love your connectome and care for it and then with that health and vitality love others like yourself because getting to know them will help you out too. We don't have all of eternity to live either, just 100 years at best.