Would you like to set your child up to fail?
A proposition to parents from the church.

Would you like to set your child up to fail?--
Not seriously enough to land in jail,
But hard enough that his social perch
Will always be the Mormon church.

Tell him as soon as he can talk:
The light of truth is our holy walk.
Then don't tell him that you define
The church itself as the Truth Divine,
So whatever the Brethren say
Is the only true way,
Even if it differs from yesterday.
Ensure that he gets the impression
You "know it" with such vigor and vim,
That he forms an ideological obsession
That the problem is him.

Teach him to eschew the ways of his friends.
Teach him his teachers have malevolent ends.
Teach him, about any subject he eyes
and then challenges you in,
that it's all elaborate lies
concocted by Sat'n
To lead him away from the heavenly goal
To get him to sin and to destroy his soul.

It may seem cruel,
but it's all for the best--
And you'll do it on autopilot
While the church does the rest.
You just have to leverage your love
Because it leads him back to Heaven Above.

As we round the tenth year of this project,
That's when it starts to get tricky.
Soon he's gonna show interest in... things
You, I mean the Lord, finds icky.
But this is where you can beat the devil back
And put this boy on the torture's rack
If he won't break and bend to the Lord's program,
If he insists in his own lights, he'll be damned.
The bit in his mouth is the eye of your scorn,
Because you and he know what you'll say,
If he rebels against the one true way:
he just wants to look at porn.

Again, it seems harsh, but there's wisdom here
He may, God willing, convince himself.
When given no other options, fear
Has a funny way of reinforcing the Shelf.
The Shelf where the reasons why
And all his questions go to die
Under the false promise that they'll be
Answered someday, but not now, but maybe,
So that he'll have faith somehow.
Hopefully he just forgets his strife
As the church's plan becomes his life
As some beautiful Mormon woman
becomes his wife.

Congratulations,
You robbed your kid of the world
And shoved him, willing or not,
Into a little box
where he'll never leave you
Where he'll always believe you
Where you can be
an eternal family
Of wounded,
know-nothing
co-dependents.
Who needs
pesky independence?
How about instead,
Duty to God pendants?

*******************
The Song of Rebellion
by the son

I've been alone
since I can recall
Surrounded by people
yet not known at all.
I thought we dealt in the only one truth;
I thought that's what it's all for.
I sacrificed my youth
To chase higher ways.

But defending the church
and living devout
Is not the same
As standing for truth,
Turns out...
Yet I'm to blame?
Why?
Is that another question
I'm not supposed to ask?
How long do you insist
I wear this mask?
I've been preparing a very long time
To hear the words
cast chills up my spine:
"Get out"

You gave me every reason to think
You would cast me out or cut me off,
That nobody would be there for me in that day
When I lost my faith.
But then you also always praised my mind
And held me up as a source,
Made me think maybe you'd listen,
because I'm yours.
When I tested your threat to your face,
You evidently hadn't meant it that way,
Which was cruel
Because I was ready, finally,
For the worst to happen
And yet here we are:
Me finally coping with life awkwardly
And you, annoyed that I took you so literally.

I thought it was called "conversion."
It's not like you made it choice.
There was only one way, according to you,
I was gonna use my voice.
As you encouraged me, so I did,
But I was just a kid.
I suffered behind a mask
I made to please you,
your little scriptorian wiz.
We've all learned since then
what an autism spectrum is.

School was harsh for me
enough by itself,
But you built a cultural wall
To keep me all to yourself.

I followed your commandments
to the letter, I thought.
Against the truth of my senses,
I fought and fought.
While listening closely
enough to pass tests,
Couldn't help but wonder
how church factored in
with the rest.

I'm not hard wired to see
The writing on the social wall
and stop the heretical logic cold
Before it costs me it all.
I had no idea you didn't
Mean what you said.
For all I knew, I was better off dead
Than unclean, as they used to teach.
I read those dusty old books
Hoping the heights of
Your conviction to reach;
I didn't know it was so cheap.
I had more respect for you
than to think you were just sheep.

What was it all for?
So you could fit in.
Years I can never
Have back again.
It wasn't for truth,
And that's the part that
Mattered to me.
My conversion
was not formed socially.
It was formed emulating you,
Assuming you knew
Something I didn't,
But you don't.
You are not on my level
when it comes to book smarts,
But you don't care about earth,
only your small part.
The earth I can have now,
But only from books,
Because I'm not made
To twist my life around looks.

I''m a pure heart.
I mean what I say.
I love the truth,
I never lost my way;
The sort of soul
The church wishes it
Still had under its roof,
And they would have kept me
If they but had the truth.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/2023 08:42PM by Cold-Dodger.

Best way to do that is to send them to boarding school at an early age. Not only will it give them psychological issues that they will usually deny into middle age, they will have a harder time forming relationships.

Sure, these children will "succeed" at business and in politics, but they will fail emotionally. Look up "boarding school syndrome". People think because the rich do it, they must be okay.

Boarding schools are also a gift to child abusers. We hand over small children and the elderly to total strangers for months on end and then wonder why problems occur.

This matches my own experience of boarding schools and their after-effects....

Britain would not be what it is without boarding schools. . .





I think I'll leave that ambiguous.

My sisters tell me I was the favorite. I wonder if that is why my older sister picked on me so much?? We are closer in age than anyone else in the family.

I lucked out in the parent department, too, as they weren't extreme mormons. Though I'm the one who bought into the indoctrination more than any of the rest of them.

I will always be damaged by my mormon experiences. I'm 65 and I assume I'll take some things to my grave. At the very least, the baggage I still carry from it all.

All my siblings except the mentally and physically disabled are out of the church. All my nieces and nephews and their children are out. My daughter is the only TBM. I can only hope she will find her way out. She at least found a good husband even if he is also mormon and his parents are mormon, but not your typical mormons. I love him and his family. I've known them for 36 years. I couldn't have picked a better son-in-law.

Thanks to my dad, the freethinker, or I may not have been able to think logically. My dad was surprised I married someone gay as he said I was too intelligent. He wasn't at all pleased to find out the leaders told me I had to save him and told me not to tell my parents the situation. Well, what if I had, my dad would have said, "Gays are born that way." Which is what he told me once I admitted I knew he was gay before I married him.

If I listen to the leaders or the teachings, I failed. After all, he is still gay. I'm over that one at least. I wasn't righteous enough. It was my fault he cheated. Per the leaders. The only way maybe we all failed as his children is we left the church to save ourselves. We have all been very successful in our employment. Not so much in relationships, but it seems all our cousins have had as much success as we have.

My sister is still married in the temple to her husband, but they left the church after COVID. I never thought I'd see that happen. I always say, "Well, I'm still married, too," but I'm temple divorced as I resigned and so did my "husband." My siblings NEVER thought I'd leave and neither did my parents. My mom, who was the active parent, said to me after she knew, "You can be spiritual and not be any religion." When my sister said she wanted to take her son to church, my mom suggested the Methodists, not the mormons. Not like I'd go to organized religion ever again.

When I hear tales of my grandparents on both sides, mormons weren't the same back then. Both of my grandfathers drank and went to the pool hall. My great great grandfather met the missionaries in jail over in Wales I think or somewhere like that. He was a wanderer and left his wife and kids all the time, and then would write home to get his wife to send him money to come home. My great grandfather sent money to him one last time and said NO MORE. He stayed home.

My dad's side has all we heretics. I was one of the devout ones. Some of my cousins who were very much not devout, have found religion since they got older. And me, I'm the shocker. When I went to a lunch with my cousins during COVID actually, they were all shocked about my story, especially that I had had a boyfriend for 15 years and was not going to marry him. Four of my male cousins, who weren't the mormons, had to gather round me and ask me questions as they were so surprised I don't go to church and that I had resigned. My cousin that I got my TR from when I got married (and he treated me poorly) was in shock. I loved watching his reaction.

I've made somewhat of a success of my life. I think that most people look back and wonder just how much of a success they've been. My mother was the oldest child of deaf parents and she took care of them all the rest of their lives. She translated for them by the age of 5. She learned to sign before she talked. She interpreted for her siblings as a child. She had 2 disabled sons, one from birth, one from age 42 when he had a brain bleed. I don't know how she did it. I just read a poem she wrote as my aunt sent some to all the cousins, etc., for my mom's birthday, which was yesterday. She's been gone for 14 years now. She felt she was a failure. She was very antisocial, but she was good to everyone she knew. I've never seen that many women from our home ward at a funeral before. They flocked to my mom's funeral. She only wanted a graveside service, but it snowed that day. December 3, 2008.

You can find peace. You can be successful. It is important to measure yourself by your own internal dialog. I did find some great men I worked with in my 20s who still talk to me, the few who haven't passed away. They treated me as very successful and beautiful and intelligent. They were all scientists and chemists with Ph.D.s. They were mormon, but not your typical mormons. They were GOOD MEN. Knowing they cared and that they saw me that way, improved my self-esteem, and remembering how they felt about me got me through some horrible times in my life. They still do.

No. I'd like it to happen on it's own (if it's going to) if they believed in failure, but they shouldn't- hopefully they'd believe there is no such thing.

Failure happens to all of us at one time or another, whether we like it or not. The big takeaways then must be: 1) learning how to handle failure; and 2) learning from failure on how to make the action you choose work better the next time. If children ar not allowed to fail, then they can never grow and learn from their failures.

That said, I very much agree with the original topic. While children should be allowed to fail and learn from their failures, they should not be set up to fail so that the only lesson they learn will be that doing what the LDS church wants is the only proper way to do anything.

Parents/ TSCC/ systems can be so manipulative

Speaking as a teacher, you would be surprised at how many parents do just that. Honestly, it doesn't take much. Get your child to school (most days,) on time (most days,) with a good night's sleep and food in their stomach (which the school will provide if necessary.) Keep up with their homework and grades.

It's really not a lot to ask, and parents don't need to make a perfect effort. But even then, a shocking number of them can't manage it. I've seen so many kids go down the tubes because the parents just can't be bothered.