Religion and insanity

[TaraJo]

So, I'll try to do this, even though I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this post.

I talked to my boyfriend and he wanted to see what the people here think of his story. I've talked about him a lot, I know, but this was something that has really had a big impact on him on a psychological level.

To start with, I need to give you a little background on him. His parents are divorced. That's actually pretty common nowadays, but what makes it unusual is that the Mormon church, the church he was raised with, they're perfectly ok with the divorce. Usually, the Mormons look at divorce about the same way Catholics do and divorced members are pretty much shunned. However, in this case, they were perfectly understanding. You see, his biological father has paranoid schizophrenia. I guess it wasn't too bad at first, but as time went by he got more and more violent and unstable and just plain crazy. Things finally came to a head when he got arrested for posting some really crazy shit online. You can read about part of it in this article on him:

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/2483/uta...b-hinckley

While the church excommunicated him for threatening their leadership, the government was more worred about other stuff. Lee tells me he had other violent tendancies. He had built up a small arsenal of weapons and he had written a bit of a manifesto explaining how he was going t blow up the state of Missouri and drive to Canada on a bulldozer. There's also the neglect of his family; he made his wife stay home, barefoot and pregnant most the time, but he wouldn't work either. They were in pretty extreme poverty and if not for the generocity of the LDS church, they probably would have had to move into a homeless shelter or something along those lines. It got even worse after the divorce was legal; he claimed that his youngest son wasn't biologically his and was the love child of an affair between his wife and an alien. Then he claimed that the government killed his whole family and because of that he doesn't have to pay child support.

Well, he went to jail but when he went to trail, things got complicated. They couldn't try him because he wasn't mentally competent to stand trial unless he was medicated. The last he had heard, the lawyers wanted to force him to take the medication, but weren't making much progress.

So, imagine growing up in that environment, ok? In fact, for Lee it was even worse, because he had all that garbage on top of the fact that he's trans and dealing with a lot of the same angsty feelings a lot of us have at young age. It's hurt him a lot and I feel like I'm doing all I can just to let him know that there are good people out in the world who will unconditionally love him, and assure him that he won't be anything like his bio did (we call him FF).

Well, a few days ago, we found him. Lee's brother found him on facebook and it also looks like he's running some kind of Mormon group on google. Yep, he's still as crazy as ever, still determined that the LDS church is delusional and evil and that they're the pawns of Satan. And, yep, sure enough, he's claiming he's the real profit of God. Fortunately, Lee has reached a point in his life where he can look at this stuff and not really feel a connection to him anymore. Still, I can't help but think, how much of this pain and suffering that he and his family endured, how much would have been avoided if not for some of these religious beliefs?

EDIT-No, it doesn't look like he was running the group, but he made a post on it that indicates he's still a crazy as ever:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgro...y87et29ZPw