a whole dork

The world (a not-earth fantasy modern setting) isn’t exactly developed yet, so offhand jokes have become in-world canon. 

Within 10 minutes of starting, the players have established that a restaurant chain called YcMaldos exists. It’s extra-dimensional and only one truly exists (that or there’s tunnels connecting every YcMaldos, we don’t know yet). 

Two of the PCs are juvenile delinquents and their friend-in-crime (”Arbys, who has the meat”) is the YcMaldos drive-thru guy. No one can arrest him because of the “Rest and Digest YcMaldos Safe Zone Act of 2000″. Law enforcement isn’t allowed in YcMaldos. It’s been 10 minutes and this campaign setting is so, so weird. 

BOLD OF YOU TO ASSUME I WOULDNT MAKE IT WORK

Also:

I think we really, really, really, really need to talk about how, like...the fact that medical procedures or examinations, especially physically invasive or violating ones, are normalized in this culture doesn’t mean they aren’t difficult and potentially absolutely terrifying and traumatic for certain people, especially autistic people.

And I have been told that routine medical procedures aren’t traumatic because the patient gives consent, but let’s PLEASE talk about how much pressure there is to be “compliant,” how you can be labeled “non compliant” and how regularly that consent is violated by medical professionals, the extreme sense of entitlement medical professionals have over patients’ bodies, and the fact that it’s not seen as important for minors to know what is happening to them or why, and that it’s not seen as important to even tell people that they CAN refuse something. Let’s talk about how so many doctors expect to be treated as authority figures that you have no right to set boundaries with.

Let’s talk about how fear of going to the doctor is mocked and minimized and invalidated constantly, how everyone will jump down your throat with “EVERYONE feels that” when you try to talk about it. how medical trauma isn’t ever Real Trauma, and when it is, it has to be some wildly life-threatening event, how people will belittle you anyway for it because it was “necessary” or “important,” how people are regarded as irresponsible, lazy, and neglectful of their health if they avoid important routine checkups, how articles about “what to expect” from different medical visits are condescending and minimizing about fear, how medical professionals themselves are condescending and minimizing about fear.

You want faith? You’re trying to follow the commandments and praying, even while you don’t have perfect knowledge when it comes to those things you want to believe? Congratulations: you’ve had faith the entire time, even if all you can do with that faith may be “no more than desire to believe” (Alma 32:27). 

I think we Mormons are really unhelpful to ourselves when we go on with our big talk about how we “know” all sorts of different things when our most basic statement of what we’re about as a church only ever talks about how “we believe.” It was Socrates who supposedly said that “true wisdom is knowing you know nothing”; if he walked into a Mormon fast and testimony meeting, Socrates would walk away thinking we were all as dense as a bag of bricks!

So, if I’m reading you right, it sounds like you really love, have an affinity for, and find comfort in a set of beliefs but aren’t confident that they’re absolutely the truth. That’s probably a smart and canny place to start from and a good reminder to always hold in the back of your mind, because in many ways you’re probably right: it would be really surprising if your tiny limited human versions of what have to be some really big ideas hit the exact bullseye on whatever this “absolute truth” is. In other words: you don’t know, not when your rubric for knowing is “absolute truth.” What that not knowing doesn’t mean is that your version of those ideas is useless or invaluable–after all, that’s all we have to work with as human beings. Things don’t need to be 100% accurate to be good and helpful for us; you might have made a spelling mistake or written out a date wrong in some notes for a history class, but that doesn’t mean you need to burn the entire notebook because of that, right?

So maybe where you could start is giving yourself the time to really think through some of these ideas and beliefs of yours and determine why you want to believe them. Do they help you be a better person–more confident, more kind, more understanding, more humble? When you go about your life as if they were accurate, does it cause harm in any way to yourself/others or, on the other hand, does it improve conditions in even a minor way? There are good and bad reasons for wanting to believe in all anything and I think it’s good to make sure that a) you know what your reasons are and b) you sort out which ones are good reasons and which ones are not.

Once you’ve decided what you truly feel is worth wanting to believe–well, that’s the only step left: believing it. At the very least, you can now say you believe you want to believe x and if that’s as far as you get with that belief in your entire life? That’s fine. As Mormons we believe God grades us based on what we do and what the desire of our hearts is, not how close we get to figuring out what absolute truth is (D&C 137:9). Which means, as long as we end up being right enough about that, what really matters is what you honestly want to believe and–really, much more importantly–how you decide to live because of that. All of that counts way more than knowing if this-and-such thing is “real” (which of course gets in the question of how you even define what is and isn’t “real,” but that’s a whole different basket of worms).