diabolicflame93

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For the past few years I’ve been untangling all the ways my life and emotional development have been personally affected by an evangelical / religious childhood. Things like purity culture and the doctrine of human depravity. But today I realized that far more harmful than any of those things was the idea that choosing myself and what might make me happy was wrong, that making sacrifices was noble and good, and pursuing what would fulfill you is selfish, self-centered, and shameful.

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#soverigngrace

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Relationships, distance, and family

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Family, children, queer identities, and growth.

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Random loud reminder that trans rights are human rights, trans kids deserve protection, and no amount of legal documents can change the self-evident truth that you deserve to be on this earth, too

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Wow, Tumblr is fuckin' HYPE for the Ides of March this year. I wonder why that could possibly be.

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“love thy neighbor” collage [analog] 2025 - credit to me

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I am good. I am loved.

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Who Is a Wise Man

Mulling over a painful message from my father.

Mulling over painful messages from family Recently my father reached out to me. He felt it wise to send me a message regarding his faith, and indirectly how he felt about me as a person. The photo message was based off a bible commentary about James 3:13. “Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom.”James…

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"When I saw so great an inequity between men, I acknowledged that it was not God who created man, but man who created God." Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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The afterlife was introduced to me as a very real concept way before 1st grade. Hell was a real place as far as my kindergarten self understood. The violence and pain of hell was escalated as I got older. But as a child Hell was described to me as total darkness with no chance to ever see anyone I ever cared about ever again. As I got older the concept of external conscious torment was added in. I certainly know I had vivid descriptions of black hellfire continuously burning ones body (as the main form of punishment in hell) described to me before the age of ten. Imagery of worms or parasites eating your body, skin, and organs was also added in depending on the teacher's personal beliefs.

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"In fact, due to the intentionally deregulated state of homeschool laws in the United States, homeschool parents have nearly absolute power over what they can do to and teach their children. Homeschooling has thus become a tool for what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “totalism.” Totalism is the end goal of authoritarian and totalitarian movements and organizations: it is the total control of human action and belief.  By enabling homeschoolers to use homeschooling totalistically, deregulated homeschooling has created the perfect storm for abuse and neglect to thrive in homeschooling communities." RL Stollar

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Hitler and all the people who followed his orders were raised under religious authoritarian methods similar to those peddled here in the US by James Dobson, Bill Gothard, John Piper, and John MacArthur. German parents too were taught that children are inherently sinful, manipulative, defiant—and that the will of a child must be broken by the parents in order to ensure the continuation of good Christian Germany. If you discipline a child early and often enough, and teach them to fear both God and their parents, then eventually you will have a population that not only complies with authority—but that actually clamors for it. If you focus on the family enough, children will turn into citizens who have no sense of self or will—making them highly susceptible to authority figures who claim to be able to save them from perceived threats to the national identity. 

D.L. Mayfield, “My (Autistic) Grand Unified Theory of How We Got Here”

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In Nazi Germany, women were outlawed from working outside the home and homosexuality was not only a death sentence, but places where the wide spectrum of human sexuality was being studied and researched were demolished early on in the Nazi regime. Men and women were forced into narrow gender roles in childhood and were pushed into heteronormative relationships designed to bear the most number of ‘superior’ Aryan children. Fears of the decline of the white German family were stoked by political and religious leaders, and the solutions to this problem were obvious: focus on creating families that mirror the practices of fascism, and with enough time you will have a constituency that has learned to equate abusive control with parental love. 

D.L. Mayfield, STRONGWILLED, “Chapter 11: Focus on the Fascist Family”