Left A Cult

I don’t really understand how someone can think a religion is true* and not think it’s very important.

Like, I mostly get the live-and-let-live attitude from the atheist side, but I don’t really see how you can think there’s e.g. an omnipotent god who has strong opinions on human behavior and not consider correcting the people who don’t (or who differ on important details) to be worth being a bit rude about.

So… what am I missing? How are there so many people who claim to be [insert religion here]-ists but are fine with the majority of people being fundamentally wrong about the nature of reality?

The free will issue as mentioned.

an intellectual understanding that being socially forceful can push people away, and one should be open and coaxing rather than rude.

A person not believing in their religion quite neatly removes that person from their area of concern. “That guy wants to go to hell that’s his problem.” They can be sanguine about it (”I’ll pray he can work his way through purgatory to join me eventually,”), or—more often—cruel (”Can’t wait to laugh it him for his idiocy from my personal cloud on heaven!”).

On an intuitive level that they probably don’t actually admit to themselves, people understand that while they on-net believe something to be true, they could be wrong, their certainty level isn’t high enough to push them to evangelical action. (One modern theory of autism says that this might be the factor that gives rise to it: an autistic person can’t really “believe” something without a frankly absurd level of internal confidence/precision/dopamine.)

Some people can say they believe things and not feel like they are implying they must believe all its logical implications.

Saying they believe is a social performance, not a fact statement about the world (this usually isn’t even cynical; it’s cognitive dissonance, they use separate parts of their brain for navigating physics and for navigating the social world).

Like, free will (or agency, as they call it) is THE most important thing, even above making sure people make it into heaven. It’s a specific aspect of Satan’s story is that back when he was still Lucifer (an angel, not yet fallen), he proposed a plan to take away people’s agency for their time on earth, in order to ensure that everyone made it into heaven. And this is portrayed as uniquely, dangerously evil, more so than the idea of trillions of people rotting in Outer Darkness (Mormon Hell, where the punishment is permanent solitary isolation rather than fire and brimstone, a fate that is supposed to be kinder but that I actually find much crueler.)

And now I’m trying to think about it, understand what I used to believe about it and where my thoughts used to go or stop. Why is freedom of agency supposedly so important? I genuinely think I would agree with Satan’s plan at this point; If removing people’s ability to choose and puppeting them through a single, perfect life would count (for some reason the Great Test can’t tell if you’re choosing good or only being forced to, so this is supposedly a viable loophole) and ensure that they weren’t going to spend eternity getting tortured, I’d say do it! They can complain about it from their mansions in Heaven, later.

So why is that so bad? I’d say that maybe they just believe deep down that those people who would choose to Sin *deserve* to be punished, that they get some sort of vindication or joy out of it, but while I’m sure there’s more than a few people like that, in my experience the vast majority of people in the church genuinely saw it as a tragedy that not everyone would be saved. They do genuinely want good things for their fellow man, even those who are ‘sinners’ and cause harm to other people, and grace and mercy are the supposed greatest qualities of God (and thus what we as members where supposed to try to emulate).

I think most of the time I just didn’t think about it. But it’s also interesting to me the social tricks used to prevent you from thinking about it—one of the things most highlighted in the story is that Satan was saying he would do this Good Thing (and it is sometimes even portrayed as a good thing! That if he had done it it would have gone alright!) but the problem then comes in where he says he will do it only as long as he is awarded the glory that would rightly go toward God.

And that little sleight of hand trick is the same one pulled in Hollywood, where the supervillain is actually making some preeetty good points but then he kicks a puppy so you know that he’s actually evil and by extension the plan is evil too (and how strange that the Puppy Kick in this case is wanting the credit for saving everyone when that rightly belongs to God… except he IS the one who came up with the plan to save everyone, not God. And why is credit so important, anyway? Why does God care more about glory than the salvation of his children?)

The other trick used is also the idea that The Plan Wouldnt Have Worked Anyway, but whether that’s because the Puppeting Check actually works and so it’s not a loophole or because doing so would defeat the purpose in the first place isnt clear. A large amount of Mormon Heaven is dependent on the idea that people go where they are naturally inclined to go, where they will be happiest, and that means that the highest ranks of Heaven are not happy because they are a reward, Heaven, but rather that Heaven is happy because all the naughty people who couldnt stop ruining things for the rest of us are separated into their own places, and they can just live in a palace of their own filth and squabbling forever while we do Nice Things because we are Nice.

But forever means that they don’t believe people can change and become better, ‘good’ enough to contribute to Best Heaven, (or become worse, either) which means that you were always going to end up wherever you end up because That’s Just Who You Are.

But that means that all this talk of Agency isn’t actually a belief that people can make choices and have free will and they should be allowed to do so, but rather that being allowed to do what we would naturally do would be concealing the truth of the test, and thus compromising the results. Like putting a bunch of lab mice in a cage and seeing if they’re smart enough to solve a maze, and then one of your coworkers comes up and says “Hey, I can make sure that every mouse makes it to the end of the maze.” completely missing the point that the goal isnt to get all the mice to the end, but rather to see if they can or not.

I'm glad that you're here with me.

I don't think you're broken.

I think you are a valuable and irreplaceable part of the world, just as you are.

You deserve to be treated with kindness.

Everyone does.

Even when you fuck up and hurt someone, you are still a human being, and you still deserve to be treated with respect.

You can always start trying to do better, and you might need help, but it doesn't take any blood sacrifices or any supernatural grace.

This earth is a good place to be.

I'm glad I get to share it with you.

I wrote this post in a moment of personal epiphany, never expecting more than a handful of people to see it. It has made me so damn sad to realize that it resonated with so many of you—hundreds, thousands even—that you've all had to live through the same horrible thing that I did. But I'm really grateful to everyone who has shared their thoughts and experiences, and I hope it helps to know that you're not alone in this.

Okay so I have a degree in Catholic theology. I went to a Catholic university that shall remain nameless and took a bunch of classes taught by professors who were, for the most part, genuinely kind, smart, lovely people. Catholicism has a rich intellectual tradition, and the tenured theology professor is uniquely positioned to push the boundaries on Catholic thinking...to a point, anyway. In my experience, the problem isn't that you aren't taught to think critically, it's that you're trained to carve out certain exceptions, to ignore the contradictions and call them a "mystery," to ground all of your thinking in your faith in the Catholic God, and that belief is expected to be absolutely sacred, firm and unassailable.

This leads to a lot of scholarship that I would generously describe as "chickenshit."

Case in point: "Christian freedom."

The problem is this. The Bible and other church traditions have a lot to say about how faith in God will set you free. How Christianity is the only true freedom, how nonbelievers are as but slaves to sin and death, how God rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and remains the great breaker of chains. However. It's pretty clear to anyone with half a brain, looking at the real world, that Christians—and particularly Catholics—have to follow a lot of rules that other people don't. They're beholden to the absolute authority of God over their lives, the Pope and the Magisterium and priests as arbitrars of God's will. They don't really look "free."

My intro to theology professor explained it to me like this (her lips pursed a little like she realized, on some level, how this sounds): Christians have a...different definition of freedom than the rest of the world. Most people would define freedom as an absence of coercion, the possibility of self-determination, the presence of choices and the ability to make those choices for yourself, without the threat of confinement or punishment or interference. But Christians understand that "true" freedom isn't merely the presence of a lot of choices, it's the ability to make the right one. Sin prevents you from being able to make the right choice all the time, so God promises to grant you freedom from your flawed human nature, to empower you to be fully obedient to him.

That, according to Christianity, is what "true freedom" means. Perfect obedience to God.

Because conveniently, "joy" does not mean the same thing in a Christian paradigm as it does in the rest of the world, either. Instead of viewing joy as something like intense happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, lightness, elation, Christians like my theology professors redefine "true" joy as the sense of purpose that you get from following God's will. "True" joy (they claim) is harder, deeper, longer-lasting. It might not be as immediate as Earthly pleasures—it might not even make you happy at all—but it's the only possible way to truly be fulfilled in life. This definition allows them to claim that only Christians have access to true joy, and that all nonbelievers are secretly living empty, miserable lives, because nonbelievers only have access to fleeting pleasures and not the deeper joy that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

Mandi From Papa's Freezeria is Exmormon! (headcanon)

Long answer: "Divinely Inspired" is a very specific phrase within Mormonism, and basically just means "this thing contains some true principles," and doesn't necessarily mean that it offers a window into the mind of god outside of those specific bits. The US Constitution is likely the most famous and explicit example of this terminology in action, but it has also been said about unofficial theological writings by church general authorities, The Apocrypha, and (in less-official capacities) many of the works of C. S. Lewis, many of the church's inherited quaker and shaker hymns, and many revelatory writings produced by church-adjacent figures from before Joseph Smith came on the scene (Solomon Mack most notably).

Now, many of these writings are readily referenced in church educational materials as commentary on LDS scripture, but only insofar as they are deemed relevant, and that's the basic problem that your theoretical is running into: the US Constitution is only ever really considered theologically relevant within political contexts. You might see it used as a point of comparison against, say, Leviticus, where it's brought up to demonstrate similarity or contrast between "divinely inspired" systems of government as is convenient. Alternately, you could also see something like the 1st amendment being held up as an example of the sort of political system that enshrines the paramount importance of Free Agency in accordance with god's perspective as outlined in the Pearl of Great Price.

There's another layer here as well, which is that the US Constitution's divine inspiration is generally not applied to it as a living document, but only the same narrow interpretation of it held by Originalists. Some apply that one similarly "inspired" Pratt(?) quote about how god won't suffer a majority of the church to be led astray to the basic idea of democracy in accordance with that one section of D&C that goes into detail about the church's beliefs regarding government, and therefore DO apply it to the living document status under that same rationale, but that's an entirely separate theological can of worms.

does "God" have a penis?