uncomfortably cold and paranoid

🏵️ Ceramic hummingbird hawk-moth sculpture 🏵️

People will call literally anything a cult.

The LDS church is a high-control, high-control group that explicitly punishes apostasy. They also participate in mainstream society and regularly send members to places that are wildly out of the church's immediate control. They're far less controlling than other groups such as JWs, the Amish, and Mennonites.

If we’re talking about Early LDS, absolutely and unambiguously, not just a cult but a racist, violent, & destructive one (though this cannot be allowed as a deflection of similar racist & religious violence by Christian settlers in the same and earlier periods).

A lot of the most culty doctrines have since been rejected. Sometimes this is genuine progress, but the belief system doesn’t allow for official condemnation of former presidents, so sometimes it’s equally a whitewash.

Regardless of whether official LDS is currently “a cult”, offshoots like FLDS are. LDS gets some credit for distancing themselves from FLDS as heretical, but it’s limited by the fact their path was paved by the historical LDS’s actions & doctrines, and all the ingredients for FLDS’s cultiness were there.

But yes, at the same time, the control is significantly less extreme than something like Scientology. You can get fairly well-adjusted Mormons like Brandon Sanderson or Dan McClellan, and in McClellan’s case I know I’ve heard him acknowledge historical inaccuracies in LDS narratives about the founders, and progress scholarship that doesn’t necessarily align with LDS doctrine, while still being in good standing with the community & church as far as I know. They seem like genuine and wonderful people.

I do think the church still retains culty elements that go beyond walking the line to tipping back into it, but it can be & sometimes is overstated in a way I believe is unhelpful and could even be dangerous and harmful to Mormons who are just going about their lives.

thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.

except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.

Both milk and honey are available in Il Mheg thanks to the local population of sheep and bees; in fact these are both items Urianger prepares as gifts for the pixies in "Courting Cooperation," so he has ready access to them.

However, there's no mention of milk or honey in "Revolting Refreshments," nor does the Dispirited Pixie make any mention of Urianger adding anything to the "foul, brown water" before drinking it.

Therefore Urianger takes his tea black.

It's also an issue that I have with most clown imagery in general, the party types to be specific.

The big hair, the big noses, the big red lips,,,,

The $1 per hour rule. It’s exactly what it says on the tin. If I’m purchasing physical media, I consider it good value if I can expect to get at least one hour of enjoyment for every dollar I spend on it.

I don’t remember what I spent on BG3, but I know it was a good deal because I’ve logged 600 hours in it. Hades II costs $30, and I was more than happy to pay that because I know I’ll play it for at least 30 hours. When I add books to my library, I almost exclusively buy used books that cost under $5 because 5 hours is a good average estimate for how long it takes me to finish a novel.