(January 4, 2015 at 12:52 am)Kulthenius Wrote: Where I'm originally from has one of the highest percentage of Mormons in the country, nearly 75%. It's worse than Utah. So yeah, I was born into it. One problem with growing up hearing bible stories and being told they are true is the association of magic with god. He says 'make it so' and bamm, it's done.
Add Mormon stories to this and shit, it's holy fucking magic time. From Book of Mormon magic stories, magic fucking underwear that is impenetrable (Though that has been retracted and the Mormon church claims they never claimed that--they didn't claim it, they proclaimed it) as long as you pay 10% of your earnings. This type of shit will confuse a kid, because you know, I accepted the fact that Santa wasn't real, but then was kept being told that all of this other magic shit, which is way more farfetched than a fat dude climbing down a billion chimneys in one night, is in fact true.
WTF moment.
My little kid brain was thinking at the time, if God and Jesus Christ and the legions of angels are real, then devil and his legion of demons are real as well (which is taught in the Mormon church). Fuck me, poltergeist just got a little more scary. And holy fucking shit, if demons are real, then they can be summoned, and since I was taught that impure thoughts and playing with your ding-a-ling will give you a one-way ticket to hell from the 'Loving and forgiving god that is also jealous and unforgiving', and I coincidentally was at an age of discovery where playing with my ding-a-ling was an everyday occurrence (still is), I came to the conclusion that I'm going to hell, so let's summon a fucking demon.
Needless to say it didn't work. Disappointed as I was, this motivated me to research other belief systems and eventually I came to the conclusion: This is batshit crazy. Then I had a religious experience, involving hallucinogens that led me to the idea of something I can't remember, but was way better than anything in church. And like that, I was mentally free from the clutches of the Mormon church, though on paper I'm still a member, it's fucking difficult to civilly be released. But whatever.
I got news for you. Life is batshit crazy and makes no sense, religion is filling people's heads with some kind of cohesive mental jelly that holds all these crazy and disparate thought strands together in a nice simple way.
There is a reason adults grow out of their taste for jelly*.
MM
* Jell-O - for our US cousins.
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions" - Leonardo da Vinci
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
