#ex fundie posting

[nolanhattrick]

if you want to go more into the utah thing, pls do

okay, so i feel the need to preface all of this with

tij iginla deserved to be drafted high in the first round. i'm glad he went high in the first round. he worked hard to earn the place he was drafted. that being said, i do not think his technical ability is the only reason utah drafted him.

let's take a look at utah's owners.

the smiths are mormon, and follow most standard hypocritical mormon doctrine. they have five children and live in provo. can't find much on ashley but ryan went to business school at BYU provo because his dad worked there before he got cancer and also that's what good little mormon boys are expected to do after they go on their colonizer missions to brown countries.

link to the archived deseret interview, written by the mormon church

he often speaks to church officials about money and tech, since he owns multiple businesses in the tech space and owns four sports franchises. the above link is an interview he did with a mormon elder about allocation of church funds. from the horse's mouth, they admit to hoarding billions of dollars and wanting to convert essentially the entire african continent to mormonism for clout.

now. this is where we get into tij's selection.

if you aren't as autistic about mormon history as i am, tl;dr up until about like pshhh iirc it was like 10 or 15 years ago it was literally like not possible for black mormons to hold positions of power in the church. mormon children were taught that dark skin was a sign of being "cut off from god" (lamanites) and depending on where you lived, that if you weren't white, you wouldn't be able to reach the highest level of heaven (in mormonism there are different tiers of the afterlife - three levels of heaven [celestial, terrestrial, and telestial] and then "outer darkness" which is basically just hell. you can only reach the celestial kingdom if you're the perfect mormon and pretty much anyone goes to the telestial kingdom, even like. rapists and murderers. you go to outer darkness if you defy god to his face basically. mormons are wild. yes i am judging you) which is like beaten into you from birth to be the worst fucking thing in the world because if you don't reach the highest level of glory you're separated from your family in the afterlife, and that would suck! that's what you spent your entire life trying to do! so by default getting denied that simply because you produce more melanin is. rancid!

so. career mormons, as i call them - or mormons that come from long lineages of pre-established mormons, especially utah or texas or idaho mormons (like ryan's family, and i'm going to assume ashley's family) - they very very very often have deep racism beat into them practically since birth. they might not think so, but it's there, and it comes out at the wildest times in the wildest ways. like, i grew up in an area with a LARGE mormon minority. a group of mormons tried to lynch one of my friends as a "joke". they literally tried to fucking lynch him. one of the only black kids in the area. because they thought it was funny, and couldn't conceptualize why that was wrong or why that action - committed by that specific religion, too - carried immense weight.

moving onto the hockey part of the ask.

i stared at coyotes stats for way too long last night.

tij iginla is a left shot forward.

we all know arizona was uhh. not the greatest when they made their exit from the league. tij put up some gorgeous numbers when he finished out this year in the w, and if he does well at development camp i think he does have a very good chance at being a name on the roster. i do.

i don't think he was the smartest choice for them technically, though.

like, come the fuck on.

and like i get that they're. they still have all summer. it's whatever. but out of their thirteen forwards, nine are left shots. they are not hurting for him!!

and like. okay. you could argue like. of those, bh and bo38 are rfa at the end of this season, mc53 and ak15 and mm63 and jm22 are ufa next season, they're practically bled dry for RWs.

and they have signed defensemen since day one of the draft. unsure how td33 is going to do with his injury over the summer, but if he comes back they'll be at the numbers they need.

i still don't think he was the pick utah needed technically. i don't think he was the perfect fit. i think the owners decided for the franchise and were able to justify it well enough with his numbers to themselves and everyone else to make it work, but i really truly deep down think that part of it was "look at us we are a brand new team. we are two perfect people that wear cool youth pastor clothes to fancy pants events. we're so hip and chill, we're going to make this black kid's dreams come true by drafting him higher than his dad. we're going to make him the face of the Utah Hockey Club" and then IMMEDIATELY put him in a fucking jersey that says property of. like that is deranged.

i know from an outsider's perspective this all can seem very reach-y but when you have lived with these people and been inside their minds and been raised inside the culture it is all very very thought out. it's deliberate. everything these people do is intentional. so i really honestly can't see these people doing this for any other reason than to make themselves look good. yes, i think tij is a very talented hockey player that deserved to be drafted high in the first round. but i think he belongs somewhere else, somewhere that will treat him well and somewhere he will be safe. because i guarantee you, he is not safe on that team. not when ryan and ashley smith own it.

[nolanhattrick]

the mormon church is almost single handedly running the troubled teen industry. jodi hildebrand raped hundreds of people of varying ages

and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so by the mormon church.

the modern protestant and southern baptist churches have created some of the largest megachurches in america.

christians are lying to you when they say catholics are the only problem.

it feels like various denominations of christians are all running a psyop to make sure everyone associates sex abuse in the church with catholics and only catholics. i mean we all know the catholics are fucked up but that’s only because there was a huge public investigation about it. if the FBI started looking at baptists n shit we would see the exact same patterns but hey at least you’re not a catholic right

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

Can I just say how much I adore Good Omens’ portrayals of falling? I especially appreciate Gabriel’s weird abrupt turn in s2, because sometimes it really is like that.

My own loss of faith took years. It also took about 10 minutes.

If you had asked me that afternoon how I felt about [pick any controversial topic], I would have been 100% on the party line. And that wasn’t a performance or a mask, that was what I genuinely believed. Ask me about those same topics the next morning, and my positions on ALL OF THEM had completely changed.

Because: beliefs are related to each other! They support each other! You can’t always change one belief without changing dozens of others that are connected to it. So that final switch was turning a hundred different switches on the switchboard. In the years leading up to it, I was collecting those switches. I was installing the switches. But they stayed firmly in the Off position. These were things other people believed. They could only flip (becoming things I believed) once they had ALL been installed, because they ALL had to flip at the same time.

To people who haven’t experienced that (or who lost their faith in a different order / for different reasons), a gradual, piece-by-piece process probably looks more realistic. It’s way, way more common in fiction. But I personally find those portrayals to be so alienating. It often feels like storytellers can’t put themselves in a believer’s shoes at all. Like they’re writing a character that never really believed any of that stuff, deep down. So it’s very easy for that character to shed bits and pieces of those beliefs over time, because they were never actually integrated into their concept of reality.

Compared to that, Gabriel feels so much more real.

Because there won’t always be a nice, gradual Questioning Phase in between “archangel fucking Gabriel” and “what about no armageddon”. Sometimes it’s a long, invisible process of data gathering — all while 100% on heaven’s team — punctuated by a very very sudden freestyle dive.

[hulahoopsoupgroup]

last night i reached a real turning point with my views on evangelical christianity.

i overheard my mother whispering to my father from the other room, telling him that i ruined her life by being gay. that i ruined everything for her and i had the "audacity" to ask for therapy to help my mental health (which i cant afford).

and i just kinda snapped internally. it was like this rockslide came crashing down on the road behind me and prevented me from ever turning back.

before, i was fed up with christianity, but that kind of sealed the deal that im never going to put up with anything to do with evangelical christianity, not holidays, not a single worship song, nothing.

it just felt like, idk, like a became a new person. it felt like the old me just fuckin, died. i renamed myself. i just, dont feel like my old self anymore. and idk how to feel about that

[silverjirachi]

I went to do the stations of the cross with my family this past weekend for good friday/easter not because i’m religious but because they are and i enjoy latently existing in religious spaces. However this time around I realized something that I think really got to the heart of why I stopped wanting to follow Catholicism.

During the stations there was this repeated phrase (I dont think this is universal but it might be) that says “Let me die than ever sin again” and I got to thinking about that and.

In its kindest, most gentle interpretation, sin is simply an action that brings us away from god. It’s the root of suffering because we aren’t one with god. The implications here are that sin makes god sad because he wants to be close to us absolutely and that for us to stop sinning makes us one with him, stops our suffering, and allows us to live as our most true, authentic selves. There’s a lot to unpack with that as it pertains to free will but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

What struck me today was how this must sound from god’s perspective. Or at least, from the perspective of a god who is truly omnipotent and unconditionally loving.

Now, I’m no theologian and I am just one guy but if I was a god, or ANYONE with any relationship with another human being, I don’t think that is… something I would want said about me? We are encouraged to view the relationship with god as a parent-child, close friend, and even in some CERTAIN, SPECIFIC, VERY TENUOUS contexts even as romantic. (Beware the blapshemy on that last one lest you be burned at the stake). I wouldn’t want someone I loved thinking that every time they fucked up they should just die. That’s horrible. I’d want them to get help for that. Even if they were trying, or even not trying, or not trying very hard, I wouldnt want them to feel like their closeness to me was contingent on them never screwing up ever. To the point where they’d rather die than mess up again. I’d look at them and say ‘girl get help.’

It also doesn’t sound like true love to me. It doesn’t sound like the words of someone who is trying their best but knows they are fallible and will be loved no matter what. It just sounds like self flagellation for the sake of self flagellation which I guess if you’re into that, cool.

That’s just me though. Maybe i’m a kinder god than most.

[theshoesofatiredman]

"do not lean on your own understanding; lean on God's understanding"

I actually am not capable of escaping my own consciousness. Any and all understandings that are not my own end up getting filtered through my own ability to understand.

"oh but God can just make you understand"

HMMM convenient that he can make me understand something now in order to justify this proverb, but when it comes to explaining suffering it's all "the Lord works in mysterious ways that we can never hope to understand."

I only have my own understanding to lean on.

"Your heart is deceitful. Your emotions fluctuate and you can't trust them."

This is like saying that if you're reading updates to a news article throughout the day, the article can't be trusted because it's changing. Just because things fluctuate, doesn't mean they aren't trustworthy. Emotions provide you information about your body and its needs. Just like the updated news article, some of it is going to be useful for making decisions and some of it won't be. Robust, emotionally intelligent education about managing our emotions and knowing what to do with them is necessary here. Our emotions aren't inherently false, nor should they be discarded wholecloth. Teaching people they can't trust their emotions is worse than not teaching people anything at all about how to deal with their emotions, because it comes with actively harmful practices.

Telling people they cannot trust their emotions, and that they can only truly trust a being outside themselves, hinders the development of healthy emotional regulation skills and increases susceptibility to abuse and manipulation.

[ardent-apostasy]

fun things to discover as an apostate, in no particular order:

pop music. yes, that includes artists like taylor swift and sam smith, and even songs like imagine (!!)

costumes. cute ones, scary ones, pop culture ones, historical ones, skimpy ones, modest ones. all of them.

clothing. you get to dress how you want to, irrespective of who might "stumble" or whether you fit binary gender stereotypes.

the human body. the skeletal system, the reproductive system, all of it.

october. enjoy the pumpkins. go out in public, go out shopping, and do it all without the fear of halloween.

colors. red is more than hell. orange and black are more than halloween. (rainbows are more than lgbtq+ or noah.)

boundaries. you don't have to tell every stranger your life story. you don't have to prepare to tell the truth (profess jesus) at gunpoint.

yoga. that's right, you can stretch and meditate and do all these things, and it won't get you possessed or sent to hell.

(i say "fun" because there are plenty of not-fun things.)

((if you see this and have other recs for fun things to discover as an apostate, pls share!))

[atjsgf]

Hey ex-fundamentalists, is it true fundamentalists think babies are capable of sin? Not original sin but like a two year old throwing a tantrum, would they be violating the fifth commandment?

I grew up Mormon and they like to scaremonger about other religions so I basically just assume that anything they said about other religions was false to some degree or another but someone said something that implied that fundamentalists do actually think that? And now I'm curious and I need to know.

(For comparison, Mormons believe that people are not capable of sin until they are eight years old specifically.)

[ponderosa-canopy111]

"𝘚𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘥, 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘮𝘦

𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘮𝘦."

Day 6 of making designs for therapy.

"If It's Not God" by @maddiezahm encapsulates much of how I feel as a queer exmormon. I highly recommend listening to it and watching the music video.

In my darkest moments, I'd cry out in prayer and feel answered with the peace and strength I needed to get through. If God isn't real, I find comfort in the fact that all that peace, strength, guidance, and love I felt when praying actually came from me.

This collage is inspired by how we would decorate our planners on my mission with pictures cut out from the Ensigns.

[audhdnight]

Anyone else really fucking sick of the whole edgelord “we don’t need school it’s all bullshit when will I even need to know any of this” crowd who will also immediately turn around and violently shame and attack anyone who says something misinformed or asks a question that they deem to be “common knowledge”???

Like yeah, I remember highschool. It sucked, but not because of what I was learning. It sucked because teachers are overworked and underpaid/under supported, and the school system doesn’t give half a shit about disabled kids or kids with different neurological conditions or really any of the kids.

We do need schools. Whatever issues the system as a whole has, it needs to be reformed, not done away with. You cannot sit and gripe about how we don’t need any of these history classes because it’s all stuff you don’t want to know anyway, and then go absolutely batshit insane when someone doesn’t know about Pearl Harbor.

Because those people aren’t stupid. They are being intentionally misled, neglected, misinformed, or all three. They are ignorant, not because they chose it but because someone else chose it to further their own desires.

Ignorance leads to harm. Ignorance leads to manipulation. Ignorance is why we have slews of people in the US who are so scared of autism (which IS NOT SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF) that they refuse to vaccinate their children, which is a form of medical neglect. They are actively endangering people they care about because they have been lied to by political parties and religious leaders who benefit from uneducated mobs.

Ignorance is how you get cults. Ignorance is how people get taken advantage of. Ignorance is how you get genocide. ONE person decides they want power and they use the lack of education to amass followers who will support them blindly because they don’t know any better.

Everyone is appalled when ex-Mormons get on the internet and talk about all the things they had to learn as adults, who by all accounts should have known those things by the time they were fifteen. People lose their fucking minds when ex-Mormons mention they didn’t know how babies were made until after they got married at like thirty. I saw someone make an entire six minute video about how he’s pretty sure all these deconstructers are lying for clout online, because how could they possibly not know?

They don’t know because they were intentionally kept in the dark. That is how high-control religions and cults operate. That is how you keep people under your thumb.

You ask how Christians could possibly think that evolution isn’t real? As someone who was raised that way, I’ll tell you.

From the moment my education started, I was fed misinformation. In kindergarten I learned about how God made dinosaurs, but they all died in the flood and the earth was too damaged afterward to support such big species even after they came off the ark. In middle school I watched Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos about how carbon-dating is all bogus and if any scientist tries to use it to debate you, you can say “Aha! I knew you were wrong!” and end the discussion there. In highschool I took apologetics, where we learned how to “defend our faith” by constantly moving the goalposts when we spoke to atheists. We were taught that “What happened to the Missing Link?” is a gotcha that no scientist would ever be able to dispute, and so obviously we were the ones in the right. I was told at every possible opportunity that Bill Nye is literally the antichrist, that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and that any Creationist (Christian “scientists”) could debate him into the ground because he’s so stupid.

I didn’t question any of it because that wasn’t an option. It was *literally* all I knew. I had such a fundamental misunderstanding of science as a whole that when I was exposed to true scientific facts and processes and studies for the first time, I could scoff and say “Don’t they know that’s not even a real thing? How ridiculous that they’d think I would believe it!”

I’m doing the work now to re-educate myself. I have learned so much in just two years that I genuinely can’t speak to half of my family because it makes them so angry. And when I hear people talk about anything happening or existing “billions of years ago”, my knee-jerk reaction is still “The earth is nowhere near that old! That’s how I know they’re lying!” I have to intentionally reprogram my thinking every. single. time. that I engage with scientific literature or media.

It’s hard. It’s frustrating. And it all could’ve been avoided if my own parents hadn’t also been misled their whole lives. I’m not going to make excuses for them as adults, because learning and doing better is your own responsibility once you’re not a kid. But I will say that if their parents hadn’t also been misinformed, they wouldn’t have learned the same lies that they later went on to teach me and my siblings. It’s a vicious cycle, one that is designed to keep people ignorant. It is purposely designed not to have an out.

So yeah, I don’t really know how to end this post but please for the love of god, have some empathy for people who don’t know “common knowledge” facts about science or history. Most likely, it’s not their fault. And the way they push back at you with nothing but misinformation and a dream has been programmed into them probably since birth. This is why we need education, why we need schools, and why it is so vitally important that we as a society do the work to reform our education system.

[nolanhattrick]

six and a half minutes into the ZOTS/bethany beal collab and i'm already sobbing. i have so much hope for this woman. i really truly do think her full deconstruction is going to happen. she's so close.

[lawlightautismtruther]

All I ever hear when talking with the girls (am I 100% girl? No, and that might be why I feel the disconnect here) is the following

- he’s so tall and big and muscular and deep voiced and UHHHH I WANT HIM TO RAIL MEEEEE

And I’m just like “good for you. Where’s my 5’5” 110 angel of a male, whom I want to carry around princess style to our king sized bed” and they all just look at me like

😨

Like are yall not aware that not EVERYONE is like you??!!!

Like I have no problem with how other people experience sexual attraction, obviously I don’t. That would be hypocritical as hell because people tend to have a problem with how I experience it (note I live in the evangelical American south and the internet is the only place that gets me) but I wish (and I’m the 10000000th person to express this, which goes to show how behind we still are) that women/women-adjacent people were ALLOWED to be masculine and be attracted to femininity without being ostracized and made to feel embarrassed. Especially for lesbians, but also for people like me. I feel like people around here can actually conceptualize a sapphic relationship better than the type of relationship I seek (but they accept neither, unfortunately).

I fear what would happen if they learned I was bi 😩

I’m not emotionally attracted to women (it’s a sexual thing), so I’d end up with a man anyway, but the JUDGEMENT I would still receive from these prehistoric brained people is CRAZY. I feel especially for lesbians and gay people because I know it’s 1000000x harder on them, even if people can conceptualize them better, they hate them even more.

Like, I constantly receive the “well if you’re so attracted to “sissy-boys” why aren’t you just a lesbian?” Which is SO stupid because it implies two really fucking idiotic ideas

1. Sexuality is a choice (specifically, gay people choose to be gay)

2. Being attracted exclusively to femininity = (or at least should equal) being attracted exclusively to women (and the inverse, which is often used to invalidate masc attracted lesbians as jaded straight women or something stupid like that)

WHEN WILL THESE PEOPLE GRASP NUANCE AND VARIANCE IN SEX/GENDER EXPRESSION AND EXPERIENCE.

I know a lot of it is the Bible and Christian culture (which is barely even in the Bible at all), but they break the rules and conventions of it EVERYDAY and find a way to justify it. Yet they can never justify people like me who aren’t harming ANYBODY

Which is proof it’s not 100% about religion, even if they’re consciously convinced it is. It’s about prejudice and ignorance.

what I’ll never understand is the motivation a lot of these people give me for being so obsessed with gender essentialism and policing others “the death of masculinity and femininity in men and women respectively will lead to the downfall of society”

LIKE BROTHER SOURCE PLEASE?!! WHATS YOUR SOURCE HELP

And for the love of God, don’t say the Bible. I’m a Christian myself, actually. But I am fully aware that the Bible was never supposed to be a source for ANYTHING. It’s simply a collection of relevant  documents to the history of our faith. That’s it.

GIVE ME A SCIENTIFIC STUDY AND MAYBE I’LL TAKE YOU A LITTLE MORE SERIOUSLY FOR ONCE (but that will never happen, so by default I will never take these people seriously. Also because if gender variance were an issue, God wouldn’t have made me (and millions of others) the way I am. There are actual problems in this world to worry about, so stop trying to convince me that by “acting like a man” and preferring men who “act like women” I’m contributing to the destruction of society. To be honest, I hope I’m contributing to the downfall of society, because this one stinks). Instead, target the rapists, the murderers, the pedos, the human traffickers, the child exploiters, the money hoarding ultra-rich, the fascists, the racists, the sexists, the homophobes, the supremacists, the nazis, the liars, the cheaters, and the media that promotes them. But most of these people are too far gone to see what’s wrong with the above. So I’m ranting about it all here in this echo chamber. I have no choice.

[only1lorrie]

[imaginarylungfish]

nothing is good or bad (or how i realized god still lives in my brain)

I grew up pretty Catholic. I don't know if my experience was extreme or not by others' standards, but to me, it felt pretty all-encompassing. My sister, mom, and I went to church every Sunday and prayed every day. I whole-heartedly believed I was born sinful, Jesus sacrificed his life for an unworthy lowlife like me, and I would go to Hell if I didn't behave in accordance with the Catholic teachings.

Looking back, it's all so absurd. How is there an imaginary man in the sky looking down at me and punishing me for being born? How did a man who lived thousands of years ago die on a cross and magically wash away the fact that I lied one day in 3rd grade? How is there a creature with horns tempting me to commit sins and lure me to a magically place with eternal fire? Like what?

It's funny because the thing that made me start to stop believing in "God" was sort of up to semantics. When my great grandpa was dying from cancer while I was in middle school, I had this prayer card from the Catholic store that said if I prayed it for 11 days straight, anything I prayed for would be granted by God. I, of course, didn't want my great grandpa to die, so I religiously prayed for those 11 days. A month later he died. I was crushed. I genuinely thought I could save him. I asked my mom why my prayers didn't work. She said it was because it wasn't God's Will. That broke my brain. What's the point of praying for something if this guy can just flip the script because that's just how he wants it? How was that fair?

Throughout high school, I still went through the motions of being Catholic (and even was confirmed), but I was skeptical. It wasn't until college that I cut ties with Catholicism and their "God" entirely.

It's been almost a decade since I've first questioned "God," yet I still have him in my brain. I thought by now, in 2023, his hold on me was gone entirely. But a conversation with my (now ex) partner nearly 6 months ago made it clear that isn't the case.

I was having trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that what I thought to be the "best" in a situation was not objective. As in, it is no better to play video games all day than to go outside on a hike. Or delving deep into yourself and healing your traumas is really no better than just letting them be. It just depends on what you value and what you need in that moment. "There is no good or bad," my partner said, "it just is."

Yes, living is just living. Good and bad mean nothing other than what an individual person thinks. This made sense in my brain, but it didn't feel like a fully solidified understanding to me. I know I still unintentionally and unnecessarily assign morality to things based on my Catholic upbringing. Sex is bad. Tattoos are bad. Eating past when you're full is bad. Not being productive is bad. But why? By whose standards? Mine or the "God" that still lives in my brain?

After this conversation, I Googled some (secular) articles to analyze my thought processes. I knew I needed to expand my perspective if I wanted to integrate this new idea of neutrality into my way of thinking.

I came across a few articles written by William L. Mace Ph.D. on Psychology Today. The first was called "There is Nothing Either Good or Bad But Thinking Makes It So." In this article, Mace was asserting that everyone believes their way of thinking is the best, but it's not. It's just a way of thinking.

He talks about how people tend to gather evidence for our own way of thinking. When people don't align with our values, "we can always console ourselves [by saying], 'I may have lost to that deceitful so-and-so, but at least I came out ahead by holding to a higher ethical standard.'"

While reading this, I couldn't help but find my own self being reflected back to me. When I interact with someone who does something that doesn't make sense with my worldview, my knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss them. I rationalize to myself that they must just be morally inferior, right? I've done more self-work than them and they must just be ignorant. But on further reflection, isn't that just my ego trying to assert itself? Isn't that just the Catholic judgement I received as a child being spit back out as my own thoughts? There is no good or bad, no superior or inferior--things just are.

But realizing that is groundless. It's scary. I think, as humans, we want retribution for wrongdoing and reward for righteousness. We want punishment for sin and exaltation for virtue. (Hmm, sounds like a good basis to start a religion...) But that's just not reality.

In another article by Mace called "The Difficulty of Accepting Reality" he talks about how cognitive dissonance plays a role in our everyday lives. When we run into something (a person, a situation, etc.) that doesn't align with our beliefs, we have a choice to disregard the facts, re-adjust our own thinking, or blame something else entirely.

For example, when you're watching a movie that's hard to follow, you do your best to piece together the plot with the clues given and come up with your own interpretation of what's going on. In the end when everything is revealed, if you realize you were wrong, you can either dig in and assert you are actually right, admit you were wrong and re-adjust to the new reality, or blame the screenwriters for not making it clear enough. And there is no right answer. It's just your choice.

I was given these choices when I first broke away from Catholicism as well. After being exposed to more secular life, I realized there were some things that did not fit with my worldview of believing in God and following Catholic beliefs. I chose to re-adjust my views instead of insisting God is real. (This did not, by any means, happen overnight--it was a multi-year process of letting go and trusting my own beliefs over the arbitrary rules of the Catholic Church. Plus, it's an ongoing process.) Coming to terms with the idea that God does not exist is viewed as a lack of faith by believers and therefore I am labeled as "bad." But in my view, I am good. I escaped.

So, does that make those who still believe in God wrong? Is anyone right? My ego wants to think so, but I guess no one wins because there are no winners and losers. It's just life.

I am coming to my own conclusion that there is no better belief or way of thinking. Sure, there are codes of ethics enacted by societies. But those aren't facts. They're just collective agreements of conduct. Nothing is inherently better than anything else. Not everyone will think this way and that feels more okay to me than earlier in my life. I feel like through learning that nothing is superior or inferior, I can start chipping away at those old, deeply held beliefs from Catholicism in my mind. I, personally, don't want them there. I don't want a "God" living in my head anymore. I want more of me and my thoughts that I've cultivated through my own work, not some scripture shoved down my throat when I was 5.

Before wrapping this up, I do want to say, yes, for me, real damage was done by growing up in the Catholic Church. However, I don't blame my parents or guardians for raising me as Catholic. Nor do I think Catholicism is all-out bad (we literally spent an entire post on trying to eradicate that black-and-white type of thinking). I believe this runs deeper than mere individual fault. I know my parents thought being raised Catholic would be good for me and my sister. Even though I didn't ask for any of these negative consequences of my upbringing, here they are, and I want to do something about them, so I am not controlled by them any longer.

I want to internalize the belief that life is just life. Things are just things. There is no good or bad, no superior or inferior. There isn't much rhyme or reason to the events in my life or anyone else's. I am the one who can assign meaning to things. I don't want to follow an external set of rules, much less ones made by institutions that feed off of shame, fear, and ignorance.

If you agree or disagree or just want to see where this takes me, stick around. Thank you for your curiosity about my inner thoughts and reading this far.

-L

resources that have helped me process my Catholic trauma:

Leaving the Fold by Marlene Winell: this really opened my eyes to the distorted reality the Catholic Church puts forth as "truth"

Ex-Catholic Subreddit: it's reddit, so keep your expectations low. but there are some solid posts on there that help me remember it's okay that i'm still struggling and i am not alone. plus, the "sheep no more" motto makes me smile.

We're Having Gay Sex podcast: this has helped me learn sex and pleasure, especially queer sex and pleasure, is not wrong and is okay to talk about

Queer Sex Therapy: this has also helped me normalize queer sex and queer joy

exvangelical and non-religious friends: honestly, just talking with others who have been through the same shit as you have or see how ludicrous what you learned as a child was is super affirming

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

This is well-trodden ground by this point, but man is Good Omens cathartic for former evangelicals (hi, it’s me, a former evangelical).

One facet I personally love: heaven is also trying to end the world. Because for me, that’s not just a fun hypothetical. I’m not just imagining how the world would be different if the Bible was real. Heaven is actually, literally trying to end the world IRL.

Ok, let me give some context to that statement. Right now, there are multiple mainstream denominations of Christianity that are low-key or high-key trying to bring about the end times. They don’t usually talk about this around non-Christians or more progressive Christians because it’s, um, let’s call it “mildly offputting”. But behind closed doors, here’s some of the stuff that gets discussed in “heaven”:

Constantly sending missionaries to places they’re not wanted. There are biblical prophecies that say the word of God will reach every nation and people before the world ends. So that’s why missionaries keep throwing themselves at the Sentinel Islands, for example. This constant proselytization ranges from obnoxious to violent (ex: residential schools), but I regret to inform you that it’s the mildest entry on the “trying to speed up the end times” scale.

Geopolitical shit-stirring, especially in the Middle East. There are also prophecies about which nations are supposed to be controlling which pieces of land when the end times start. These do not match where the borders are currently. Evangelicals really want to “fix” those borders, and work very hard to gain the political power to make that happen. We are now getting into the territory of “trying to fulfill end-times prophecies makes it more likely for the world to end in real life,” because it’s actively inflaming conflict.

General apathy about life on earth. If God’s going to end the world, the humans can’t do it by accident, right? Also, what happens on earth is barely a footnote anyway. To evangelicals, the vast, vast majority of our eternal lives will be spent in Heaven or Hell. Our time on earth just decides which eternity we go to. So fears of climate change (or really any strong attempt to reduce suffering “on earth”, e.g. ending poverty) are viewed with suspicion. If someone is so worried about what happens on/to earth, they must not be a Christian… where else is their judgment clouded?

But ok, you might ask, “even if they don’t care about what happens to the world, why are they trying to speed up the end times????”

The best explanation I can give you is that the evangelicals’ god is extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily shitty, and they sort of know that last part.

If you had asked me when I was an evangelical, I would of course have said that God was loving and benevolent. I even believed that internally.

But that’s also the way you would describe a dictator, if you lived under them. And this is an all-powerful, all-knowing dictator who can see even the contents of your own mind. Who has the power to punish you and everyone you know for eternity. Who might be as merciful as the progressive Christians believe, but you really can’t count on that when the stakes are so high. Besides, when you read the entire Bible — not just the popular bits — it doesn’t really paint a picture of a merciful god.

So you call God loving, even internally, and you do the things God wants to happen, even if you’re setting up the end of the world.

You try to save as many people as you can, smuggle as many people into Heaven as you can. Even if it makes life miserable “on earth”, even if it risks all life “on earth”, because “earthly” lives are temporary anyway, and you’d never forgive yourself if any of them got thrown into Hell.

You sometimes lose hours of sleep feverishly praying for God to soften the hearts of your nonbeliever friends.

You live under an evil, inescapable, lovecraftian deity who demands to be described as good instead, insists that it will all make sense in the end.

You know all this subconsciously, that God is a monster. But this is the world you’re stuck with, not the world you want it to be. So this analysis never, ever bubbles up into conscious thought… except when you’re imagining what nonbelievers think your god is like.

You’ve been doing that a lot lately, more and more. After all, you have to understand their point of view in order to reach them!

You would never actually agree with them, of course. It’s not safe. It’s not true.

But you can imagine what it would be like if you did.

This is the best you can do.

[theshoesofatiredman]

I'm revisiting a part of The High School Survival Guide: Making the Most of the Best Time of Your Life (so far) by Adam Palmer. It's a Christian book despite the fact that the title makes it seem totally areligious, and I read parts of it when I was in high school. It was the first time I ever read about being gay in a book. I found a free version online and while I didn't think the Bible could shock me anymore my mouth dropped open at this:

Apparently the MSG version of this passage really says the quiet part out loud. Gay people aren't even human / lose the knowledge of how to be human. Not sure how that works. There's such a dissonance between the tone of this verse and the tone of the text in the book too.

GEE I WONDER WHY??? How strange that Christians, who believe their sacred text claims that homosexual acts strip people of God, love, and their humanity, view homosexuality as 'icky' and 'gross.' In fact, I would think they'd think much worse in that scenario and treat gay people far worse. In fact, it kinda seems like you're downplaying the absolutely brutal treatment and systemic discrimination of gay people that was carried out in the name of Jesus.

And all of this is being aimed at (presumably Christian) teenagers who think they might be gay. There's no real advice here other than to surrender to god and to seek accountability.

I was keenly aware as a gay Christian that I was at the center of a culture war I did not want to be a part of. People out beyond my religious community were fighting for an acceptance and celebration of homosexuality that I thought was harmful and sinful. People inside my religious community had all kinds of incorrect ideas about gay people and I didn't think there was much space for me to be "out of the closet" even if I stayed single, celibate, and god-fearing. And I had no idea what to do about any of it.

I didn't come out to anyone until after high school. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed, and the weight was still heavy. God did not make it easier, did not lift the burden of homosexuality from me. I had plenty of accountability in my life, constantly watched by helicopter parents with Internet filters, confessing sin regularly in men's groups (both before and after I started to tell people I 'struggled with same-sex attraction). 'Accountability' only served to intensify my shame.

The only time things got easier was when I started to take God out of the equation, when I started to see my sexuality as a part of myself to embrace rather than excise. Christians will drone on and on about how Christ sets people free from their sins. In my experience, to be free of my sin I had to first be free of Christ.