It's RfM related, trust me.

I just figured out why the movie "Inception" was disturbing to me. So disturbing I had to watch it twice in two different cities. It's the idea that what I trusted was the real, material world just wasn't so. I've been in several layers of dreams while in the Mo cult, and now that I'm out, I just can't trust that this "new world" I've awoken in is the "real deal". Does that make sense?

Precisely why so many exmos turn atheist. They can't trust in anything again. They have felt the ultimate betrayal. To place their trust in this church their whole lives only to find out their entire way of being has lies at it's very foundation.

Agreed. When I first woke up I still had residual programming that said "Well, you must subscribe to _some_ sort of belief", so I shopped around. Did the usual Christian-based church attendance but was put off by God, Jesus, and Bible talk. Read all "Conversations with God" books and thought it viable. But in the end after subjecting ideologies to the same scrutiny I applied to Moism, they all failed miserably in my estimation.

Add to that a layer of scientific theories and concepts on quantum physics, string theory, parallel universes, multi-dimensional selves, etc... holy shift in thinking! Our human brains cannot contain the very ideas and survive!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2010 12:27AM by charles, buddhist punk.

Try something more along the lines of "because other religions are about as believable as Mormonism."

We just apply the same logic to other religions.

I just think it is interesting how so many ex mos go to complete disbelief after having strong belief in God. There is some deep and interesting psychology here.

Hmmm.... having a strong belief in god....

Your assumption does not apply in my case. I was simply raised in an organization that taught one way of thinking, with a god as top of the dogma.

Critical thinking is what got me out of it all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/2010 12:56AM by jpt.

the main one being that Inception was about as convoluted, falsely premised, and boring as Mormonism. I fell asleep, woke up twice, and both times the van was still falling into the water.

:-)

munchybotaz Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> the main one being that Inception was about as
> convoluted, falsely premised, and boring as
> Mormonism. I fell asleep, woke up twice, and both
> times the van was still falling into the water.
>
> :-)

LOL, that was the idea. Fall asleep, wake up, things are still going slo-mo in Moism.

Seeing as it was sci-fi (where most premises are, shall we say, loosely based on reality) my focus was on the protagonist's desire to be with his children once more and all the hard work and frustration he goes through to attain that, er, dream. In the end we are left with the idea that it was all, and still is, a dream. Which to me translates as a nightmare. You're trapped in the nightmare and there doesn't seem to be a way out.

Then again I could be having acid flashbacks.

and paid a lot of attention to about the first half, expecting an explanation of how they got these dreams they constructed into people's heads. It never came, and I got bored and fell asleep. Or maybe I was tired from paying so much attention.

In any case, I'm aware of being in the minority. I only know one other person who didn't love Inception.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2010 01:26AM by munchybotaz.

munchybotaz Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In any case, I'm aware of being in the minority. I
> only know one other person who didn't love
> Inception.

Add another to that list...

I thought the character development was rushed and shallow, the action scenes needlessly prolonged and the explanation of the science non-existent. The ending irritated me even more, it, just like the Matrix Trilogy, led to nowhere. A two and a half hour circle-jerk, that's what I thought of the movie. :P

I do see Charles' point though, after discovering the truth behind Mormonism I don't trust anything anymore. Not nobody not nohow.

I think they put a lot of work into the script, and I respect that. But for me it was just another big, unbelievable blockbuster with a lot of special effects. It didn't have any philosophical impact on me, because I couldn't accept the premise.

Exactly! I've really struggled with this since waking up from the mormon nightmare - about three years ago. In fact I said to my OH just this week, 'I don't know what's real anymore'. He looked at me like I was crazy, which I was beginning to wonder myself anyway.

It's not just losing faith in mormonism and then transmogrifying, unintentionally into an atheist (not a big deal here in the UK). I also don't trust myself anymore either.I believed all that crap for all those years. I thought deeply about it, I had doubts, I had pain from the cog diss and still.... thirty years. I can't trust myself now. Really f-ed me up big time.

That's why we call it RECOVERY from mormonism.

From everything I've read on this board and elsewhere on the subject (I was never a Mormon thankfully), the whole trick of recovering from Mormonism is rebuilding your own belief in yourself from the ground up. This includes learning to trust in both yourself and your own judgments, even if you do make mistakes. I wish you luck in your efforts.

Well, the reason I still believe in God (just not Mormonism) is because I am totally convinced that every human who took part in writing religious stories was just that-- a human. Although I think part of them was divinely inspired, I also understand that every founder of a religion has something to gain in founding it-- fame and power. So even if the spirit told them to write the story a certain way, they are still going to add their own perspective and interpretations, in their own interests.

I think god is real, and I think Jesus, even as a man, knew a hell of a lot about the secrets of the universe. He just couldn't relate it to those people. But that's where my beliefs end.

The rest in all the religious books was all a mixture of historical records and man-made tales. People were stupid back when the original stories were written. They didn't even know the world was round, or that the sun was the center of the solar system, or that there were galaxies and universes.

Even if they were divinely inspired, they had absolutely NO WAY of relating that to us. They didn't even have words for universe or planets or galaxies back then. How can they write about them? Even if they SAW it all in a vision, how could they explain it in such a way that people back then could understand?

The seas boiled and the skies fell?
Sounds like a Solar flare like the one in the movie "Knowing", or asteroids.
"I saw something like a giant mountain on fire"-- see above.
"Like the sun at night"-- a bomb? Asteroid?

Other than phrases like that, how could they explain it? It would be like trying to explain to a room full of people who only see in black and white what the color red looks like.

Just because stupid people thousands of years ago didn't know how to explain what they saw, doesn't mean god isn't real. And just because there is a scientific explanation for things, doesn't mean he's not real. We humans are harnessing the power of natural resources. Maybe god is just someone who is so advanced, he has mastered the manipulation of things involving string theory. And that saying "In my father's house, there are many mansions", well, that could count as other galaxies, parallel universes, etc.

Even if Jesus knew all this, there was still no way he could make people back then understand. Maybe if he were born today, WE could understand better. But there are probably still things that even our most intelligent scientists could never comprehend.

I know what string theory is, and I have heard all the arguments on evolution. But like I said, for me, it does not disprove god. All it proves to me, is that people in the past were too lazy and stupid to write out the endless history of the world.

And don't forget-- We ourselves have glorified a lot of the stories, in ways that the original writers never intended. We made Jesus out to be this blond-haired, blue-eyed European (because our ignorant, prejudice ancestors didn't want to think anything different). When really, he probably looked like most modern Egyptians look.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2010 06:18AM by melissa3839.

People thousands of years ago weren't 'stupid', no more stupid than those of us alive today. They were as resourceful and innovative as we are. It's the nature of being human - along with a few more less desirable human tratits. They were ignorant, totally different. We would be as ignorant of the workings of the universe if it wasn't for the work of scientists and others through the centuries.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. All of us.

The problem is that many of the scientific advances humans have made have come at the expense of a belief in a god being and its powers. From what I've observed thus far, we humans use the concept of God to 1) justify our own behaviors; and 2) criticize the behaviors of those we don't like. The only reason I consider myself an agnostic over an atheist is that while I am absolutely convinced that no god has any control on what happens on this planet (that's up to the laws of both humans and physics), there is no way to absolutely prove or disprove what happens, if anything, after death. If there is a god that appears after death (and the belief of the atheist is probably more likely), my guesses are that 1) there will be no judgment of how one lived one's life on Earth; and 2) the world you will enter after death will be completely different from, and unrelated to, anything you experienced while you were alive.