@kerosene Yeah, but these days people will even attack you for being neutral or silent on a subject. Remember during the George Floyd riots and one of the messages that was frequently spouted out is "silence is violence"? Now you can be shunned if you aren't explicitly woke, which is a huge problem for me because I do have far-left family members.

@beardalaxy @xianc78 >when i left the mormon church

How did that go? And any inside stories you could tell? I don’t really know anything about it, aside that they seem a bit insane.

@okabe_rintarou @xianc78 there's definitely quite a lot i could tell you as i made it really far into the religion and my mom has told me some of the crap they told her while she and my dad were having marital issues.

there are "holy vows" they do in the temple when you are 18 before you leave on a mission or when you get married that are exactly like freemason rituals. joseph smith, the founder of the mormon church, was a freemason.

i know there are tunnels underneath salt lake city and there are reportedly ones underneath the missionary training centers. they could expand even farther beyond that. it is for getting church authority from point A to point B without any issues.

there are "secret" parts of the book of mormon that we aren't allowed to see that are supposedly sealed away inside a heavily guarded vault in the mountains.

you get a "true name" when you go into the temple, basically the name you were given in heaven before you came to earth. they tell you not to tell anyone this name except for your spouse. the truth is that they just have a pool of 31 names for males and 31 for females that are assigned to each day of the month, and you get whichever one you showed up on the day for. you probably aren't supposed to tell anyone because it would expose that.

in the same vein, they have patriarchal blessings, which you get when you're 14 years old. you go over to the "patriarch" and he says a prayer that pertains to your future and what blessings you'll have should you follow the word of god and maintain your standing in the church. this gets recorded and then the patriarch listens to the recording, types it up and prints it, then gives it to you. you never get to hear the recording and there are definitely things that get changed between the recording and the writing. you aren't supposed to tell anyone but your spouse what your patriarchal blessing was either, presumably for a similar reason as the "true name."

then you have the same sketchy shit that happens in all churches, like kid diddlers being called to serve in positions dealing with kids. my dad cheated on my mom and was called "by the lord" to deliver a talk to the men of our ward (basically in the church you have branches, then stakes, then wards) about fidelity.

you have temple marriages, which i talked about earlier, that are basically meant to seal you and your spouse, as well as your offspring, to each other for all eternity, so that when you go to heaven you'll be together as a family still. the weird part about this (as if it wasn't weird enough) is that you need a separate temple divorce if you get a legal divorce, and both the man and woman have to sign off on it. so when my parents got divorced, my mom wanted to get the temple divorce, but my dad refused. the catch is that, while a woman can only have one temple marriage at a time, a man can have multiple. if you get a temple divorce, you can't get remarried in the temple for a long time (i was already 7 or 8 years old when my parents got a temple marriage because they had both gotten divorced before they had me and got married). i'm assuming that, instead of doing it the honorable way and actually getting a temple divorce, he wanted to get a temple marriage as soon as possible and that's why he didn't sign off on it. so yeah, they're still sealed in the temple alongside all of us kids and if i have to see that son of a bitch in heaven i hope they send me to hell instead.

there's also baptisms for the dead, where people will get baptized into the mormon church in place of people (age 8 or older) who have died and weren't baptized. this mainly consists of families just writing in names of people they know or are related to that they knew weren't a part of the church. these names actually get cycled through because there are SO many people going to the temple to do baptisms for the dead that they can't keep up with all of them. i wouldn't be surprised if some of the names are made up. there are people that, no lie, get Adolf Hitler. their excuse for cycling names is that the people who they are baptizing aren't yet ready to accept the gospel and become baptized in the afterlife, which plays into the mormon belief of the afterlife:

when you die, you go to either spirit prison or spirit paradise. the people in spirit paradise were the ones who were members of the church that were righteous and did all of their possible rituals. they teach the people in spirit prison "the truth" and try to bring them over to spirit paradise. in addition to baptisms for the dead, there are also endowment and sealings for the dead (basically the freemason ritual stuff and temple marriage). once they get all of those done, then they can come over to spirit paradise. when the rapture comes and there's the second coming, there's what is called the millennium which is 1,000 years of peace on earth, and then everyone living or dead will be judged and sent to 1 of 3 kingdoms of heaven, the telestial, the terrestrial, and the celestial. the telestial is where the traditionally "BAD" people go, you know, murderers and crap that never atoned for their sins. it's basically a worse version of earth but isn't exactly "hell" in the traditional sense. the terrestrial kingdom is where good people go, who were not receptive to the gospel either in life or death. then you have the celestial kingdom, which also has 3 tiers. 1st tier is for people who were baptized in the mormon church, 2nd is for people who did the freemason stuff, and the 3rd is for people who were sealed in the temple and that's where god lives. we're told that people in the higher kingdoms can visit the lower kingdoms but not vice versa, but it's also insinuated that the glory of god will be so great that we won't want to do that.

if you'd like to hear why i personally left the church i'd be happy to tell you :)

@beardalaxy @okabe_rintarou
>if you'd like to hear why i personally left the church i'd be happy to tell you
I could probably already tell. You have way too much expected out of you.

@xianc78 @okabe_rintarou the pressure and expectation is part of what keeps you in. they have SO many things in place to try to get people to stay to the point of straight up telling peoples' fortunes of how great their lives will be if they stay with the church.

you also have kids singing "i hope they call me on a mission" and "i love to see the temple" from the moment they can physically sing. it's super brainwashy.

@beardalaxy @okabe_rintarou Growing up Catholic is nothing compared to what you went through. It seemed like most of the kids at Sunday school didn't care that much and were forced by their parents. I think half of them didn't even go to church and basically did nothing after Confirmation even though you were supposed to "continue your mission with Jesus/God."

I don't know if I could still consider myself Catholic. I haven't been to church in years and my political views go against Catholic teachings (they REALLY hate right-libertarians).