#you can accept your past without disavowing it i promise you it's better in the long run

[cgspirl]

you all say that you hate your past selves but in truth i think you hate the fact you embraced 'cringe' things with an absolute lack of shame. you were open. you were willing. you wanted to fall in to something that made you feel alive and then when too many people told you it was wrong or that thing got horrible and bad that shame grew in like a kudzu in the vines of your soul.

and now, in your 'old age' (you're fucking 20 not 6-fuckin'-5) you let that kudzu suffocate whatever was left and now all that stands is an untamed, unchecked garden of elitist disapproval that you've made your goal to spread to every single fucking person involved in that thing you once loved and cherished with all your heart.

now, i beg of you the question: are you actually happy? or would you rather keep pretending you are; suffocate in your misery because accepting that you were just a kid that didn't know any better and that you're wrong about your view of your past self and the things they loved to try and kill them ? to stifle that realization, that new growth?

would be too much for your shallow pride to handle?

the kudzu is thick. too thick to cut, to shave, to slice- tear- rip- break- you let it curl and crush you, suffocate the life out of you because living is an admittance of shame and admitting shame isn't something mature people do. mature people deny. they deny wrong was done and condemn those that engage with the horrible thing because they're wrong and deserve it. they die in the kudzu, become apart of it.

in front of you, a single lighter. it's within reach, practically empty, but a slight shake reveals enough fluid for just one last light. and now you have a choice:

drop the lighter. why not let the kudzu take you, become another soul caught in its throng, ready to pull another hapless soul down in with you? misery does love company, after all.

or you could light it. it's never too late to change, even if the voices of those in the kudzu around you say otherwise. the kudzu will burn, along with whatever stifled growths that suffocated under its evertight grip.

but in the charred ashes of it all, you'll be free. not cringe, not based, not basic, not fake, not whatever-other-fuckoff-lingo there is.

you'll be free.

you'll be you, and you'll be free.

but it's your choice.

i just hope you'll make the right one.

[criticalrolo]

Hey Hope you're doing okay It's a really random question (feel free to ignore it) but it just happened and I saw your ex-mormon tag My cousin who grew up in a very strict mormon family and got married at nineteen and had two kids very young Just came out as a lesbian and left her ex husband As someone who was in this religion, do you think she can stay in it and will be accepted? Like is there lgbt space there ? And even if there is what's the general view on the inside ?

Short answer: no

Longer answer: Mormons will talk about how they “love” lgbt people but you have to know that this is pretty much. just a straight up lie when you compare their beliefs and practices to how they want to be perceived as loving Everyone No Matter What. 

In mormonism, it is required that gay people stay completely celibate for their whole lives until they die and God “sorts things out” in heaven, meaning that a gay man would be “given” a wife or a lesbian would be “given” to a husband. And by celibacy, they mean no having any sort of romantic inclinations ever. All gay thoughts must be repressed, no holding hands, no kissing, CERTAINLY no marriage. They are required to just stick out being alone in this life until God can make you straight in the afterlife. Hopefully I don’t have to explain to anyone that telling gay people “everything will be better and God will fix you once you die” is. not great.

The additional problem with this is, Mormons believe in an “Eternal Plan of Happiness” which necessitates marriage in the mormon temple for someone to be truly happy. Other kinds of marriage/living together without being married outside of mormonism (referenced specifically in a gay way lmao) aren’t “real” marriages.

Iconic quote from a church apostle Jeffrey Holland:

“Can you see the moral schizophrenia that comes from pretending you are one [in marriage], pretending you have made solemn promises before God, sharing the physical symbols and the physical intimacy of your counterfeit union but then fleeing, retreating, severing all such other aspects of what was meant to be a total obligation?” (Ensign, 1998, pg. 76-77)

From 2015-2019, it was mormon doctrine that if a gay person got married, they would be automatically excommunicated and their children would not be allowed to join the church until they were 18, no longer lived with their gay parents, and specifically disavowed their parents’ marriage. Making being gay a more heavily punished sin than murder/rape/etc.! If your parent commits a crime in mormonism, then you personally are not judged or restricted at all. If your parents are gay, then you have to take specific steps to distance yourself from them. From a church that thinks that the only way to be truly happy is to be Mormon and take all the necessary steps in mormonism such as baptism and being sealed in marriage you can see why this is such a huge deal to them to deny it to people! (This policy was reversed in 2019, which makes it kind wild to think that god apparently changed his mind about how severely to punish gay people within a span of four years. don’t worry now gay marriage is just equivalent to murder/rape instead of being worse)

The church has been staunchly opposed to every form of progress for lgbt rights for decades. In 2008 they advocated heavily for prop 8 in california, which would deny lgbt people the right to marry. They’ve also been vocally anti-gay marriage in their own sermons and addresses to the mormon population in a service called General Conference. As a lesbian who was mormon until I turned 18, I can tell you without any doubt that an anti-gay message was worked into nearly EVERY lesson/sermon/etc. It’s been their THING for the past 20 years or so, once everyone called them out on being racist and they had to try to stop that. (the insanely racist aspects of mormonism is ANOTHER post for another time)

Let’s go through some of my favorite anti “same sex attracted” quotes from the past couple of years!

“Our knowledge of God’s revealed plan of salvation requires us to oppose many of the current social and legal pressures to retreat from traditional marriage or to make changes that confuse or alter gender or homogenize the differences between men and women,” Oaks said in an address to the church's General Conference in October. Those pressures, he said, come from none other than Satan, who “seeks to confuse gender, to distort marriage, and to discourage childbearing, especially by parents who will raise children in truth.” -Dallan H. Oaks, General Conference Oct. 2018

“There are no homosexual members of the church.” David A. Bednar, Feb. 23, 2016

pretty much anything Boyd K. Packer ever said, fuck this guy for real

more boyd again I hate this man

“There are some men who entice young men to join them in these immoral acts. If you are ever approached to participate in anything like that, it is time to vigorously resist. While I was in a mission on one occasion, a missionary said he had something to confess. I was very worried because he just could not get himself to tell me what he had done. After patient encouragement he finally blurted out, 'I hit my companion.' 'Oh, is that all,' I said in great relief. 'But I floored him,' he said. After learning a little more, my response was 'Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn't be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.' I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.“ - Boyd K. Packer, 1976

There’s about a million more, but a good summary exists here on wikipedia about the church’s changing homophobic stances. Including all the electroshock therapy at BYU! good times.

Here are some good videos that explain why mormons trying to say they’re not homophobic are Complete Bullshit

On a more personal level, I can tell you that my experience with homophobia in the mormon church has been pretty devastatingly awful and I’m still experiencing the repercussions of being raised in an environment that actively told me what a horrible thing I was for Being Gay. Not all experiences are universal of course, but I can pretty much guarantee that any lgbt people still in the church are experiencing some major cognitive dissonance in order to justify their treatment there and keep believing that this is what God wants for them.

The homophobia usually isn’t outwardly violent and obvious -- it’s always couched in “language of love” while still conveying the meaning that gay people are inherently bad and will be better off once they die. Some people are still trying to change the church’s general opinion about this, especially the younger generation. The fact is, though, that the mormon church is inherently homophobic and that its doctrine cannot be separated from that. So, your cousin might know some good people who will do their best to accept her in spite of their mormon beliefs. Just know that those people will also probably be believing all the above things I’ve stated as absolute truth/doctrine at the same time. 

[bethagain]

Ok, um.

I disavow all responsibility for this.

Except that, I did make that New Year’s resolution and...

Well. And somebody out there asked for Luke/reader fluff. You know who you are.

p.s. Yes, it does indeed involve ice cream.

Sparkler rockets are reflecting off the windows of the tall buildings all around you, brightly colored signs of celebration on this planet that’s no longer controlled by the Empire. You’re watching from a balcony high above the laughing, shouting crowds in the city square. Luke’s behind you, arms around your waist, the warmth from his body helping to block out the evening chill.

He’s trying to tell you the plans for a formal ceremony in the morning, where the two of you will be expected to join the other Alliance leaders in turning the government back over to the people. The pain in your ankle is making it hard to focus.

You shift your weight, trying to take the pressure off the injured side.

Luke notices right away.

“What’s wrong?”

You sigh, irritated with yourself. “I must have sprained it worse than I thought.” It was a stupid way to get hurt, not even in battle. You’d landed first, gone running up to Luke as he climbed out of the cockpit of his own X-wing, and tripped over a messenger droid. He’d caught you before you hit the ground and lifted you up to spin you around in a hug--but you’d already twisted your ankle. You were able to keep walking on it, make it through the debriefing, get up to this luxurious loft that the local Senator insisted the two of you accept.

But it hurts, and standing here--even though you want to watch the fireworks--is making it worse.

Luke immediately lets go of your waist and scoops you up into his arms. “Is this better?”

It is, much better. Not only is the weight off your ankle, now you’re snuggled up against him. It’s warmer that way, too. But you know he’s tired. It was a long battle today. And a long month of fighting against the Imperial occupation. It feels like you’ve been awake and on high alert for weeks. And now it’s finally over, and every muscle in your body is calling for sleep.

“How about if we just head for bed?”

“That sounds good,” he says.

“I can walk,” you offer, shifting to hop down to the floor.

“No way,” he says. “I love flying with you, but I’ve hardly seen you on the ground in weeks. I’m not letting go until morning.”

You wake up alone in the huge bed. Soft sheets feel amazing against your skin. For the past month you’ve been sleeping in briefing rooms, on cots in makeshift barracks, in the cockpit of your starfighter. You think about just staying here the rest of the day. But where did Luke get to? He said he wasn’t letting go til morning!

“It’s morning,” he says from the bedroom doorway. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of soft flannel pajama bottoms. He takes a bite out of something in his hand, then stands there smiling at you. “See?” he gestures at the window, and you can see that he’s holding an ice cream treat on a stick. “It’s getting light. Morning.”

“And you’re eating ice cream for breakfast?”

“The conservator’s stocked full of it. Apparently ice cream is a big part of celebrations here. The Senator didn’t want us to go without.” Luke crosses to the end of the bed and climbs onto it, crawling his way up your body and then snuggling in beside you. He offers you a bite of ice cream. It’s cold on your lips and it tastes delicious after weeks of military rations. “How’s the ankle?”

“I don’t know,” you sigh, thinking about the ceremony you’re supposed to go to. “Can I pretend I can’t walk on it? I think I need to stay in bed today.”

Luke’s thoughtful for a moment, biting off a bit of chocolate coating. Then he hands you what’s left of the ice cream, jumps up from the bed, and disappears through the doorway.

He’s back a few minutes later, a new ice cream bar in his hand. “I got the Senator on the radio. I told her you’re injured and we can’t possibly make it to the ceremony.”

“Luke!” You’re mortified. After the Senator’s been so kind to put you up in this lovely apartment, invite you to a celebration, stock the ‘servator with ice cream?

He grins. “She laughed at me. Asked if we needed any more chocolate freezes.”

“Oh. I guess that’s all right then.” Ice cream is starting to drip down your hand. You catch it with your mouth, licking up the sweet vanilla stickiness, before taking the last bite and setting the stick on the table beside the bed. “So, what shall we do today?”

Luke tilts his head, watching you. “Want to practice?”

“Depends on what,” you say. You have a few ideas. Although the thing at the top of your mind, you’re both already pretty good at.

He laughs, catching your thought. “That too,” he says. “Definitely. But you did promise me when we had time…”

He’s right, you did promise. And you do want to learn. As a child, you’d always imagined what it would be like to be in touch with the Force, to be able to do the magical things that the Jedi Knights could do. You never imagined you’d actually be able to do any of it.

But when you and Luke first met, he’d stared at you like you were the answer to a mystery he’d been studying for years. And you’d been astonished to sense his astonishment.  

And now, he’s come over to sit cross-legged beside you in bed, sunbleached hair standing up every which way, blue eyes crinkled with laughter as a half-eaten ice cream bar levitates from his hand to your lips.

“Go ahead,” he says, and you’re laughing too as you try to take a bite. The ice cream bar bobs away from you.

“Stop that!”

“You catch it then,” he says, continuing to float the ice cream slowly toward the end of the bed.

You take a breath, force yourself to stop laughing, to steady your mind. Slowly, the ice cream bar begins to move back toward you, until it’s hovering beside Luke’s head. “Your turn,” you say.

He tries to catch it with his teeth but you don’t have great control yet and it winds up hitting him just below his left eye. He leans back quickly, smiling as he lifts a hand to wipe at his face, and you shakily float the bar after him. It makes a few wobbly darts in the right direction, and then your eyes catch on his mouth, on the way his lips move--and the ice cream drops out of the air, landing on his chest and leaving a line of chocolate down his belly until it lands in his lap.

Luke jumps up with a yelp. “That’s COLD!”

He’s standing beside you, covered in chocolate ice cream, eyes sparkling, and there is no way you’re going to be able to concentrate now.

“Come on,” you say, picking up the melting treat and sucking up some of the soft ice cream from the top. “I’ll warm you back up.”

“I better go get cleaned up first,” he says.

“I’ll take care of that too,” you say, reaching for his hand and pulling him back into bed.

[jewishandmore]

Truth, God, and Community

Truth, God, and Community Erev Yom Kippur - Kol Nidrei 5780 Tuesday, October 8, 2019 Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

A dark moonless night near a small, Jewish village, somewhere in Eastern Europe, sometime in the 1500’s.

The Jewish villagers were restless and worried. They heard from their cousins nearby that a mob in an anti-Semitic fury had been rampaging through the countryside. They had seen this before and worried that their village would be next.

The rabbi from the village, desperate to protect the people, worked on the banks of the river, in the dark. Fashioning a rough statue of person from the mud, turning it into a clay imitation of a person, the rabbi said a prayer and then a mystical formula. In the dim light of dawn, the rabbi inscribed three Hebrew letters into the forehead of the statue, writing the word “EMeT”, truth. Once completed, the word sunk deeply into the clay and transformed the statue into a Golem, a nearly indestructible magical creation that would defend the Jews of the town. The Golem would fight without tiring and would save our ancestors from the mob, from another pogrom.

The word that animated the Golem is “truth”.

Truth brings life. Truth protects us.

What is truth and what is true?

There is the scientific perspective. Truth is measurable and observable. A thing is or is not, it is this thing or that thing. This is Hydrogen and that is Helium. The temperature can be measured and is described as truly seventy degrees, no matter how it feels. A color can be measured as a wavelength, and is thus one thing or another. A fact, is a thing that is observable and measurable, and used to be something that most of us could agree upon. We used to be able to say: this is true, and that is the truth.

Now we can argue about everything.

Remember way back when, four years ago, when we were arguing over the colors of a washed out photo of a dress on the internet? Was it blue and black or white and gold? Turns out that the actual dress was in fact blue and black in a clearer photo, a surprise to me, I could have sworn it was white and gold, but this accelerated the idea that all truth is debatable.

While we may see colors as different based on our eyes and our brains, there are in fact “true” colors. They are measured in wavelengths. They can be described mathematically. There are objective truths to color that we rely upon, just as there are objective truths to everything around us that we must agree upon in order to do anything.

Truth is taking a beating.

Science is no longer accepted as reliable. Statistics are used merely to make a point and seldom to describe anything in a way that we can all agree about. Everything has become a matter of opinion.

We regularly validate our own perspectives as if they cannot be reconciled with someone else’s. Bias, individual brain chemistry, different ways of seeing blue and black and white and gold - we separate ourselves out from each other the more we think we can’t see eye to eye about anything.

We are in total agreement about a number of things that are only true because we agree about them.

Take time. We accept time as a standard that we create and uphold together. It is an agreed upon “fiction”. There is no objective nine o’clock. There is only the one that we say is nine o’clock, whether it is “Verizon Standard Time” or Jewish Standard Time - we have to agree upon when in order to all be there at the same time. I had a running group in Cleveland that met at 5:50 AM. They would say, “if you’re there, you’re there”. If I was late, I would be running fast to catch up. We set 5:50 AM by Verizon’s time on our phones.

Truth is the source of life.

And truth is dangerous.

After the Golem saved the small town, it eventually got out of control. A nearly indestructible protector become trouble-maker. When the rabbi admitted defeat at trying to make the Golem work after the crisis, the rabbi erased one letter from the Hebrew word for “Truth”. Rubbing out the ‘alef’ the word “truth” is transformed from “EMeT” into “MeiT”, “death”, and the Golem fell to dust.

Like the Golem, there can be too much truth. We can say too much, share too much of our feelings, and destroy the people around us by being overly truthful and lacking in compassion and kindness. Revealing things that need to be kept concealed can harm people, communities, and nations. Concealing too much that needs to be out in the open can do the same. Truth is like fire - the right amount warms, too much burns, and without it we are left in the dark, defenseless.

A seventh grade class once argued that all religion is just an opinion. Since it can be argued it can’t be a fact.

I asked them whether or not laws were facts or opinions?

Is “Thou Shall not Kill” only an opinion?

Eventually they were convinced that when we agree to hold something as truth - like a law, or an ethic, or a teaching, then it becomes truth, that is it is more than just an opinion.

That we can agree to make truth as a community means that we can agree to unmake it too.

Truth is fragile. Erasing only one letter erases it entirely.

When we attack the truth, claiming that there is no truth, we begin to destroy the common area that we hold together as a community. When that place between you and me comes under attack we not only stop sharing truth, we stop sharing common cause. We need that “true” place in the middle. This “truth” is not so simple.

In this shared space, we need to be kind and caring and we need to figure out how to tell the truth and how to preserve a relationship at the same time. No relationship can handle everything that we think, every truth that we observe. We must filter our thoughts and emotions so that we can get along, so that our relationships will survive and thrive.

The great Jewish sages Hillel and Shammai argued about truth. They argued about what we should say to a bride at her wedding.

Shammai was a stickler for the truth and insisted that we should describe her as she is - truth must prevail and anything else would be lying.

Hillel countered, that we must always say that the bride is beautiful.

The rabbis almost always agree with Hillel and remind us that we should always be sympathetic - meaning that we should say that a bride is beautiful.

[Babylonian Talmud, 17a-b, adapted]

Judaism teaches that a bride, and a groom, are beautiful because that is what defines them on that day. To get married is to be beautiful and our sympathy for the couple helps determine our presentation of the truth.

Truth is important and getting along with people is as well. We can even create a truth that we all agree on for the sake of getting along better. And yet we can destroy truth so easily that it will also destroy any sense that we have sympathy, that we are connected at all, with other people. We show our love for one another by calling all babies beautiful - it is absolute truth that there are no ugly babies. Who will argue with that?

And here we stand, on the evening of Yom Kippur, baring our souls before God, stripping away all of the filters all of the trappings so that we can be true to ourselves, true to our Creator, and then, hopefully, true to each other.

We declare truth a vital and central Jewish idea every time we recite Sh’ma and V’ahavta.

Most of you are familiar with these paragraphs that start: “Listen up Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One!”

What then follows is the commandment to love God and all the things that will help us behave in ways that show how we love God. We are supposed to make all the teachings of Judaism into everyday parts of our lives, speaking about them in our homes and when we are traveling, teaching them to our children, writing them on the doorposts of our houses. V’ahavta tells us that we do this so that we will always remember the place of God in our lives, to do the things that show that we love God, that elevate our behavior and our thoughts, that remind us that God brought us out of Egypt, and then we conclude with the statement, “Adonai Eloheichem Emet”, three words that we can translate as, “Adonai your God is truth.”

We tie the mandate to behave well with the idea that God and truth are the same. We come together to understand what God asks of us and we come together to declare truth to be a shared idea and value.

Good conduct, ethical behavior, and truth, are linked in our prayers, and linked in reality. We must agree upon truth in order to get along.

When we allow our conversations with each other to devolve into a debate about whether or not something is true we have left behind civil discourse. Without a reasonable agreement to talk about things in an area of agreed upon truth we are competing bullies, yelling at each other because the louder person wins since they must have a stronger feeling about their own sense of truth.

In the heat of the moment, I feel all sorts of things are true. If I give heed to these feelings then I might be both unkind and disrespectful to the shared space in which we decide upon truth together.

I want to be a good person all the time even when I don’t feel that way. I want to be kind and loving even when I am occasionally, admittedly, tired and irritable. So which is true?

I am what I do.

I practice the truth that I want to live.

I try to build habits that create a “me” that is truer to the person I want to be.

This evening, Kol Nidrei, when we disavow the promises that we made to ourselves that we haven’t kept, when we confess our flaws and mistakes out loud, to our selves, to our families, to our community, this is our moment of truth. When we strip away all that we have aimed at over the past year and missed, we find the core of our beings, all those values that we work so hard to uphold, and we return to that place of truth within ourselves. 

In that place of truth we begin again.

From this evening we start again on our true selves.

I must work on my truth, my sense of truth, refine my true self, and try again by putting it out there, better than last year. Both more loyal to the truth and kinder than before.

Remember the truths we share - from time, to wedding couples, to babies. This is easier than we think.

Truth is the source of life for the Golem, and it is the source of life in Jeremiah, who wrote:

Adonai, God is truth, the God of life… [Jeremiah 10:10] 

And truth can burn too brightly, too hot, and destroy as well.

Are we ready for the truth?

We come here tonight to find out.

The true self within each of us longs to evolve, to get better, to be the better person that Judaism and God asks of us, that we ask of ourselves.

Will we hold ourselves to a higher standard, a more truthful and more compassionate standard, a shared standard that lives in the intersection between our inner convictions about right and wrong and the communal lives that we must build together?

Can we set down the burdens of the past year? Can we leave behind the things that we thought were true that turned out not to be? Can we set down our pride in arguments offered in passion, and our self-interest, and admit that there is truth to be found between where we stood then, and where we might go together tomorrow?

The truth is out there and in here, in our hearts and minds and souls, and most importantly in the immense places in between you and me. Between us is something bigger and better than either of us could only do by ourselves. Between us is God who is truth. God who is asking us to love the world by doing with our best selves.

As we do at every Kol Nidrei, we start tonight, united as seekers of what is good and what is kind and what is true, together to uncover truth and build a better tomorrow.