@mattsheffield LOL WTAF! Okay, I remember cleaning the building as a member too... but what the actual fuck? They just invited you to clean the building right NOW? Lmfao like seriously ROTFLMFAO! I guess they're going after the freaks who like to clean?!!??? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 #exmo Also LOL about the records keeping for eternity, yes, i agree! It's a joke. It's funny to think of in retrospect!

@CosmicTraveler Yeah I never bothered to do name removal, because I would still be part of the church through my personal and family history. And I don't even acknowledge their pretended authority to keeping records for eternity.

In my case, they didn't invite me to anything fun or useful. No, it was to clean the building. Why would anyone think that cleaning a church you don't attend be some sort of reactivation incentive? Even the Mormons themselves hate doing it!

#exmormon #exmo

@mattsheffield I'm pretty sure as soon as we moved to Vegas, my parents gave the LDS church our new address. The missionaries come by all the time, the relief society president sends me birthday cards. I used to be annoyed by it- but i chose to not remove my name from their records, just in case i ever need help moving, or digging a big hole. #exmo

Christianity primed white people to feel guilty when certain Pavlovian bells ring.

Accused? Wrongdoing even subtly implied? Guilt! Shame!

Then, if it's a respected authority doing the implying (be it parent or priest), we're primed to submit.

If we don't respect the authority of the "accuser," well, were primed to see them as the enemy in the all-or-nothing good vs evil war. "My authorities haven't called that a sin so who is this person anyway??" And we lash out. At women, POC, queers, disabled, and often, even ourselves.

What, you're white but never were Christian? Sorry, but you were programmed this way, too. (If you feel mad at me, that's the programming.)

Christianity's way out from guilt and shame is impossible. It doesn't work. It's designed to make you feel forever ashamed and in debt to Jesus — or rather, the religious authorities who represent him. That's how they get you.

We aren't allowed to emotionally mature to know how to handle our own feelings when we've done wrong. We're forever dependent children on the religion. We go to confession, do the penitence, feel a few days of relief, then go back to feeling guilty. No matter how well-meaning any particular clergy, this is by design.

Now suddenly here's these people I don't respect out of unexamined implicit bias dumping more crap on me.

Aren't I bad enough? Haven't I submitted enough? What am I supposed to do about it?

I'm hamstringed. My white brain has been lobotomized wrt how to handle this. But also, I've been told by trusted authorities that I'm not a racist, so I'm not!!! Out comes the Karen.

Colonialism=Christianity=Corporatism

It's all the same system.

Freeing ourselves from this system means freeing those whose oppression we enable.

Because it's all the same thing.

#AbuseCulture #ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie #exvangelical #antiracism #antifa

I saw a white evangelical basically screaming at the camera yesterday on YouTube about patriarchy, racism, capitalism, and SA, ready to split from every Christian, even the progressive ones, and while I disagreed with some of her minor points and her shouting gave me a headache, I'm emotionally so with her.

Would that even 25% of white women had even a portion of her intensity and self-awareness.

#exmo
#exmormon
#ReligiousTrauma
#antiracism
#deconstruction
#LDS
#Mormon

🎶 Genealogy: Are you "doing" it? 🎶

Or are you just listing names and dates so you can nonconsensually force your dead relatives to conform to some arbitrary standard of perfection in the afterlife?

#exmo
#exmormon
#ReligiousTrauma
#antiracism
#deconstruction
#BYU
#LDS
#Mormon

In Mormon news, BYU tried to make an indigenous student cut his braids. So fuck them.

Thankfully, they responded to pushback and now will not make him do that, but I'm sure they will continue to get away with all of their other attempts to control the hairstyles and harmless behaviors of literally everyone else.

(Which is why this issue is a "white" cause as much as it is anyone else's. My Celtic and Germanic ancestors wore long hair in all sorts of styles, and so did yours. Whiteness restricts all of our freedoms.)

#exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma #exvie #exvangelical #antiracism #deconstruction #BYU #LDS #Mormon

RE: https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/116250786806679193

Well, what do you know? He's #DezNat. Our own weirdo Mormon brand of Christian Nationalism: Deseret Nationalism.

https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/3e6d29e2a6931f40c2293f092337fa03

#utpol #Utah #exmormon #exmo

I'm watching a horror movie in a purity culture setting called Pure. It's fairly good, really liking how they're handling the themes. I feel like it's personal for the director, who's a woman.

It's not a perfect movie. Feels like the director doesn't have much experience with the horror genre. But there's strong talent, just a little raw on the skills, small things that would have made it better.

I still haven't seen the ending. There are some ways I want this to go, and some ways I really hope it doesn't go.

(Previous twoot is not a direct quote, but sums up a speech the pastor is giving.)

[edit: ok that ending was super powerful. We need what happened there to become a recurring motif.]

[Director is Hannah McPherson. She didn't experience purity culture, but is real mad about it. https://deadline.com/2019/09/pure-director-if-youre-not-pissed-off-you-may-be-a-lost-cause-1202742568/ ]

#movieReview #horror #ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie #exvangelical #feminism

‘Pure’ Director: If You’re Not “Pissed Off”, You Might Be A “Lost Cause”

Hannah Macpherson and Blumhouse Productions have a provocative new horror film, "Pure," that delves into father-daughter purity proms.

Deadline

Further, I recently watched bible scholar Dan McClellan talk about homosexuality in biblical times. It' a subject I have seen him and others talk about before, and I've read about it. (But I am not an expert on ancient history – I'm just repeating.)

Fact: In Roman society and before, when Leviticus was being written, they didn't have any concept of "sexual orientation" the way we do today. They didn't have the concept of consent. They centered sexual mores around the hierarchy of power. Anyone up on the chain was expected to take the penetrative role; anyone below them was expected to take the receptive role. Anyone who violated these hierarchies was sexually immoral.

Free men with status? Top of the chain. Boys or men of low status? Below that. Women, at the very, very bottom, always. The sin was in penetrating someone who was supposed to, themselves, be in the penetrative role.

The Sodom and Gomorrah story was about a people who had been taught to care for strangers who instead wanted to rape a (male) guest to death. Which violated two mores: Hospitality and the chain of status wrt to the penetrative role. That's why it was perfectly ok for Lot to offer his daughters, and why the gang didn't want *girls*. They wanted to demonstrate their power by taking on men of station.

What does this mean in this context? It means that sexual domination has long been a part of how power works in human civilizations, at least in these cultures that descend from that place in those times.

We, here today, with our consent norms and our idea of love and equality in relationships, we're the odd ones. We've bucked the norms. (A tremendous accomplishment that took thousands of years.) And those norms *still exist.* They exist within toxic masculinity, pro-patriarchy religions, and abusive relationships.

It is hard for me to believe that the Epstein Class of today is somehow worse than the Fat Cats of the 1920s, or the aristocracy of the Renaissance, or the lords and monks of the Middle Ages.

We're really not that far descended from Rome. The path to liberation has been carved against these longstanding traditions.

We have only to look at the world billionaires are trying to create, to see what their values and expectations are.

And why they admire Rome so much.

🧵

#ReligiousTrauma
#exmo
#exmormon
#PTSD
#cults
#exvie
#exvangelical
#abuseCulture
#SexualAssault