nomowyrm

[nomowyrm]

so you're telling me that the Catholics have a new mascot that's a cute anime-style blue-eyed teal-haired anime (girl(???) or boy, possibly???) and her name is Luce? As in latin for light, so they're a bearer of light? like... Lucifer? Okay.

[nomowyrm]

Thinking about how I should’ve been more angry at the church…again. Because I should’ve been falling in love and getting my heart broken, not being afraid of what god might do to me, or what will happen to me after I die. Or wanting to die.

[nomowyrm]

Fun Fact: the BYU honor code explicitly forbids “sexual relations outside marriage between a man and a woman” and “same-sex romantic behavior” but not same-sex sexual behavior.

Thus, according to their own rules, you can have gay sex at Mormon school, just so long as the relationship is purely physical.

[nomowyrm]

They cant stop making great and spacious buildings

[nomowyrm]

having friends that are still in the church is such a complicated experience to explain. you help me stay sane; every time you mention religion I die a little more. I enjoy your company; it feels like you make me complacent. I love you; what you worship loves you more than me. I love you more than me.

once upon a time we were in this together, and then i stood up and left and every moment that it hurts reminds me that I'm the betrayer. I'm the one who left. I'm freer than I've ever been.

I refuse to force anybody's religion, because that makes me the same as the people that run this whole shebang. I'm working on myself and I always will be. I try my hardest not to hate you. I try my hardest not to bind you to what your god stands for. I don't know whether or not to see you as a victim. Does it hurt you?

I hope to other gods that it doesn't hurt you, because you don't deserve that. you don't deserve the way it hurt me, and neither did I.

[nomowyrm]

So, God said unto thee...just don't move 🤫

[nomowyrm]

When we leave, our former faith thinks that this is because we either misunderstood what our faith was about, wanted to sin, or we were hurt by bad Christians who didn’t do Christianity correctly.

It’s hard to explain the fault lines we saw, the things that scared us, were built into the premise of our Evangelical faith directly. That what Evangelical Christianity granted true believers were the weapons that fell upon our skin. They weren’t bad Christians who hurt us. They were very, very good.

We watched a faith so bound up in its own sense of morality, it couldn’t judge its own cruelty. It couldn’t self-correct. It was set on a course, and it determined that course to be right, and that meant that there was nothing anyone could do.

Evangelical Christianity has always granted its true believers both the sense that they have arrived at the correct, common sense, reality-based, and morally supreme view of the world, and every other premise is lesser. It shored up its community under the understanding that by simply loving the Lord, it granted you a direct connection to love & empathy of others in a way no one else had. And if you think you have that by default, how can you ever see the harm you’re causing?

I rejected Evangelical Christianity in part because the cruelty I saw wasn’t aberration, wasn’t ‘hurt people hurt people’ (a phrase my pastor loved a lot), it wasn’t sinful humans doing sinful things (another justification that wasn’t often given) it was Evangelical Christians who believed they were doing exactly what Evangelical Christians were supposed to do. It was the cruelty that happened when Evangelical Christianity was working as intended, at the hands of people who were very, very good Christians.

[nomowyrm]

It’s easy to judge and criticize religious families who have a ton of kids for being irresponsible, or make fun of them when they complain about being so overwhelmed (“well, you chose to have that many kids”), but like…many churches promote marital rape. Many religious husbands don’t let their wives use birth control. Almost no churches permit abortion, assuming their state even allows it. To assume these women are choosing their family size is absurd. And I know not only religious women suffer from these kinds of control. But having grown up in the church, I knew many women with 5+ children, no work experience, visible exhaustion and mental health distress, and no access to proper health care, and the best that people on the outside could say was, “Well, she chose this lifestyle.” And like…no! She didn’t! She has no control over her body! She was married off at 20 and her husband believes that he owns her, and her entire community affirms that. How the fuck was having so many children anywhere near her choice?

[nomowyrm]

does anyone have any thoughts or resources they'd like to share about how to mourn your relationship with God after leaving Christianity?

[nomowyrm]

While I'm on the topic, can we talk about how bullshit bishop's interviews are? Like specifically for temple recommends.

Consider: you do something that, in the eyes of the church, is a sin. Say, you share a gay kiss with someone or read smut on your iPad in the dark. Now you're in the bishop's office being interviewed for your recommend. You need this recommend, because if you don't have it, your parents are going to want to know why, and under no circumstances can you tell them what you did to make yourself unworthy.

So you lie. You've been a model Mormon child. You have no interest in homosexuality or pornography or masturbation or fornication, you're sexually pure. And the bishop says Okay and gives you your recommend. Yay! You're safe!

Now I can't help but ask: if the church were true, how would this be possible? Isn't the bishop meant to have a connection to God? Shouldn't he know that I'm lying? I mean, this is the TEMPLE we're talking about! God's special holy place! I feel like he'd be a little more concerned with keeping unworthy people out of it, don't you think? I baptised sooooooooo many dead people before going home and fucking my partner, wouldn't that render all those baptisms invalid? Wouldn't they want to avoid that?

Of course! But what they use to avoid that outcome isn't any sort of genuine divine intervention, it's just plain old-fashioned guilt tripping. They make you feel bad, for sinning and lying about it and falsely baptising all those poor souls in spirit prison. Hopefully if you feel bad enough about it, you'll come clean, and they'll claim that the Holy Spirit must have impressed upon you to tell the truth.

It's all just bullshit.

[nomowyrm]

were you perpetually and exclusively praised for what you could one day become, instead of what you were, leading you to a lifetime of feeling like you were not only never good enough, but that the best thing about you was a future that would never come, that constantly felt like it was slipping away? Did you become so afraid of closing doors, of losing that one good thing, that potential, that you stagnated at the crossroads until your life began to rot around you and the asphalt ground to gravel and the roads grew ever rougher, the doors closing one by one even as you tried in vain to keep them open, instead of choosing a path and committing to a direction for your own progress? Did you watch the best thing about you, the one thing you were praised for, slowly collapse in your arms as you tried desperately and hopelessly to save it, finding yourself kneeling in the ruins of your unexplored promise, looking for a way out, and wondering if there was no where else to go? no way forward? When someone tells you they're proud of you, that they love you for who you are, that what you are is good enough, do you cry? do you struggle to believe them? do you have to try your damnedest just to make yourself hear the words? Do you wonder if, one day, you'll learn to be happy with who you are?

[nomowyrm]

[nomowyrm]

Ngl, the first line from my new story is a banger.

[nomowyrm]

My contribution to the My Favorite Ship Dynamic trend.

[nomowyrm]

this is making me lose it

[nomowyrm]

"Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" absolutely fucking changed me. There is no greater litany for me against the quest for moral perfection than Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.