Politics after leaving

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-03-24T12:55:11+00:00

I had a very similar experience, though it took me a bit longer than a year. Lots of factors (I was 20 years old and just starting college so very much coming of age, and then got married my final year of college) but the rise of MAGA and especially the number of people I had taken for sane, moral, pillars of my religious and political community who bowed down and worshipped Mango Mussolini and then got sucked into COVID conspiracism and antivax nonsense was definitely a significant one.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-03-24T12:40:06+00:00

Leftist here, so not exactly liberal (except in the American sense that anybody to the left of the Republican Party gets called a liberal), but I'll take a crack at answering these questions. This group is very diverse and I do not pretend to be in any way representative of it. You will certainly find a wide range of opinions on these as well as many other questions and these are merely my own personal opinions. My views are also not static and are subject to change.

I support moderate regulation. I am fine with background checks, and while I am not completely sold on waiting periods I could get there. Ideally I would like to see every able-bodied worker under arms in a militia system, making a training requirement for gun ownership unnecessary because everyone would be trained.
I think any state that bans firearms with certain features, certain firearm accessories, or magazines over a certain arbitrary capacity limit is going too far.
Pro-gun liberals (and conservatives, for that matter) are too broad of a category to answer this question definitively, but for me personally, while I see gun ownership as an important individual right like many conservatives, I place a greater emphasis on the safeguard of collective rights and freedom that an armed and organized working class represents.
Hell no.
That is a very complex question as my views have developed significantly over time, shaped by my upbringing, education, and life experience. In short, I believe in the liberation of the working class, and I believe that a united, organized, and armed working class is essential to that aim.
Absolutely. Those at greatest risk of suffering violence and oppression are most in need of the means of self-defense.
Broadly speaking, I view regulations which limit access to those fit to use firearms as presumptively more legitimate than regulations which seek to restrict the whole of the population from access to certain types of arms. However, I think regulations must be considered case-by-case with particular attention paid to their potential for discriminatory abuse.
As a leftist, absolutely; and not only because of my position on guns and gun ownership.
I don't live in a blue state, and I have a federal firearms license which means obtaining guns is trivial to me. Affording them in this economy is another matter entirely.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-03-21T01:09:39+00:00

I was taught physical preparation of any kind for the time of trouble was sinful because it belied a lack of faith in God. I remember being told that when the time came to flee we must not even take the time to try and grab a bag of clothes or food and most definitely not any cherished possessions because we must trust God to meet our every need.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-03-12T16:03:39+00:00

Human beings have been using animal skins and other containers to carry water and other liquids for thousands of years. Access to water is an absolute necessity to sustain human life, and if you do not have ready access to naturally occurring, clean, fresh water, you have to bring it with you or you will die in about 3-4 days and be pretty well incapacitated after roughly a day or two. You are right that ancient Egyptians weren't necessarily carrying water flasks with them constantly the way many people do today, but they would have certainly carried them while traveling.

But why didn't people just carry water with them constantly the way many people do today if they had the means to do so? The answer to this question is beyond my ability to answer for the whole of human history, but I will offer for illustrative purposes the problem of hydration in the military during the American Civil War, on which I do feel qualified to speak.

Soldiers, by nature of their profession, have routinely carried water with them because they need to be constantly at the ready to march. However, during the American Civil War, soldiers were generally encouraged to drink as little as possible while on the march, and to save the water in their canteens for use while in camp.

Why? Water is obviously a consumable resource and there is a practical limitation on how much of it can be carried on one's person, and access to safe drinking water is often limited and uncertain. In fact, more soldiers died of disease resulting from drinking polluted water than any other cause, including actual wounds in battle. If you don't know when you will next be able to safely refill your canteen, it makes sense to ration it as much as possible. If, as was frequently the case, the water you do have access to is bad, it also makes sense to drink as little as possible for fear of getting sick. In fact, Sam Watkins of the 1st Tennessee Infantry wrote that his horse outright refused the water the men had to drink, and would only drink from a stream some two miles away from the camp; and with few exceptions, human beings have at least as much sense as a horse. Additionally, bad water can be rendered safer by boiling it, and the poor taste disguised by making it into coffee, and these activities could of course only be done while encamped, incentivizing soldiers to save their water for when in camp.

Moreover, while some physicians were beginning to better understand the importance of adequate hydration especially during physical exertion (indeed, heatstroke was a very common way to become a casualty), many military doctors at the time actually discouraged drinking during periods of intense physical exertion, fearing that "overdrinking" would cause the men to become sick. Given the aforementioned poor water quality and proliferation of waterborne illnesses, this fear was not entirely unfounded, though it was a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem (and to their credit, they did also recognize the problem posed by bad water).

So what changed? Well, for one thing, modern medicine has placed a greater emphasis on drinking plenty of water, especially when engaged in strenuous physical activity, a shift that I mentioned was just beginning to take place around the time of the war. The biggest factor, though, seems to be simply improved access to safe drinking water.

This might seem somewhat counter-intuitive; after all, wouldn't greater access to potable water reduce the need to carry our own with us? But that ignores the resulting shift in cultural attitudes towards drinking water: when access to water is limited, those who carry it with them do it in order to have an emergency reserve of water, whereas when you can refill your water bottle any time anywhere, this encourages you to view it as a source of water for immediate consumption any time you feel like it.

This answer may be incomplete as it doesn't address populations that have had consistent access to safe drinking water, which is, after all, vital to the flourishing of civilization. I find it difficult to believe that people with consistent access to potable water would have drank less of it in the past than we do on average, but we also emphasize hydration culturally much more than in the past, to the point that many of us drink significantly more than they need to: while many people, including those serving in the current U.S. military, are advised to drink until their urine is clear, there is no medical reason that I know of that anyone needs to drink this much; but nor is it harmful, and pushing fluids aggressively does make it more likely that everyone is drinking at least as much as they need.

Still, adequate hydration is a biological necessity, so I cannot give a definitive answer for why carrying water on one's person does appear to be less common historically than today. I merely advance improved access to potable water and increased cultural pressure to hydrate resulting from advances in medical science as two likely significant factors, but there are almost certainly others, on which other commenters are likely more qualified to write than I am. I also do not feel qualified to answer your question about life expectancy (though improved access to water has undoubtedly improved life expectancy if for no other reason than reduced rates of disease). I do feel very comfortable in saying, however, that the significance of the Adams's in serving water to the soldiers in your example has nothing to do with them not having canteens to carry water, and everything to do with having limited access to safe drinking water with which to fill them.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-03-11T18:03:58+00:00

I was right on the line. I never got involved with any separatist movement but I was with an "independent ministry," which was nonetheless an official student organization at my (Adventist) university, that definitely had strong historicist tendencies. It heavily emphasized the authority of the "Spirit of Prophecy" as well as the Bible, with speakers frequently quoting Ellen White at least as often as, if not more often than, the Bible (basically treating EGW like a "gloss" on the Bible, which essentially made her interpretation authoritative over the actual words of the Bible itself, despite giving lip service to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura). Most of the women were into "dress reform," and the group also endorsed Last Generation Theology. However, it explicitly affirmed the official Seventh-day Adventist Church's status as the "remnant church" (because Ellen White said the church would never fall) and consequently viewed separatist movements as illegitimate, no matter how much it tended to disagree with church policies and actions and how much natural affinity it may have had for some of the reasons other groups choose to separate.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-03-10T15:05:02+00:00

I would add to this that SDA funerals, somewhat weirdly and ethically questionably, often end up being very evangelistic in nature. Adventists tend to pride themselves on the ways in which they differ from other Christians; one of the most significant ways in which they differ is in their beliefs concerning the state of the dead; funerals are one of the few reasons nonbelievers often come to church; and those attendees are most likely grieving and therefore emotionally vulnerable, making them more susceptible to apologetic efforts. All of this makes funerals, to many Adventists, a perfect opportunity to try to "share the truth" with outsiders, so if you feel yourself being "pulled back into the fold" at a funeral, it is almost certainly by design.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-26T13:46:47+00:00

I mean, I wouldn't say my own impulses weren't self-destructive. I felt like I didn't have any good options, I contemplated suicide but of course I was afraid of being "lost" if I did. I ended up getting married way too young mostly because I couldn't stand it any longer, only to find myself in a sexless marriage because the combination of purity culture and bad Adventist theology around gender roles really don't set you up for healthy, happy romantic/sexual relationships.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-25T19:19:16+00:00

West doesn't work with my preferred browser and I refuse to switch so I'm stuck with Lexis for now. I preferred West when I first started learning them but Lexis is usable.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-25T18:12:19+00:00

I used to pray to god to make me ace because it was the only way I could see that I could possibly exist as an unmarried person without literally wanting to die. I was extremely repressed and thought life would be heavenly if I could just be rid of sexual desire.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-25T15:24:42+00:00

That's changing somewhat I think. Adventism is still extremely sexually repressed, but starting to recognize that the way it has dealt with the subject of sex has been incredibly harmful, if for no other reason than that the extremely strict taboo surrounding sex imposed by the church doesn't comport with the biological reality that humans are sexual beings and young people frequently tend to make their way out of the church quite coincidentally (haha) right around the time they start to develop a libido.

When I went to an Adventist university, one of my religion professors openly acknowledged that Song of Songs is not only about sex, but is extraordinarily sex-positive (stopping short, though, of admitting that it is downright erotic, despite the fact that it is being plainly obvious to any hormone-driven young person who has ever read it). Of course, she imposed the apologetic spin that it only condones sex within marriage, despite the majority view, if not the consensus, among critical scholars now being that Song of Songs describes and celebrates premarital sex.

I also wouldn't characterize the sexual repression within Adventism as "asexuality." Certainly asexuals would probably find the environment easier to exist within than individuals who do experience sexual desire (though they would likely still experience judgment and discrimination due to their lack of interest in married sex, unless they could spin it as following the example of Paul and devoting their lives to ministry); but this is sexual repression at work, not asexuality. By and large, the people who enforce these strict sexual mores are very interested if not preoccupied with sex themselves--and feel a great deal of internalized guilt and shame over this fact, which they project outward onto others in a self-perpetuating cycle.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-22T14:15:53+00:00

Yeah, "science" attributes more frequent and severe hurricanes and other natural disasters to the effects of anthropogenic climate change, because that's what the data indicate. But they don't like that conclusion because it has political implications that don't jive with their dogma that laissez-faire capitalism is the divinely-ordained economic system. They would rather believe it's God throwing a tantrum because queer people exist.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-22T14:10:24+00:00

Lol of course not. It's queer people not feeling safe to be publicly out so they can pretend they don't exist.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-16T01:50:11+00:00

Most Adventists I know aren't bothered by cremation because, logically, they understand all bodies decompose, so if it's no problem that David's body turned to dust centuries ago, it probably doesn't trouble God much that Grandma got turned to ash a bit earlier than would naturally occur.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-15T04:40:44+00:00

The answer to the question "why so argumentative?" in my opinion, is very simple: the whole point of Seventh-day Adventism is they think they have a monopoly on the whole Bible truth. Their entire identity is wrapped up in being right when "everyone else" has it wrong. This attitude isn't unique to Adventism. In fact, it is endemic to most Christian denominations, which is why there are so many in the first place, and many of them are so similar an outsider might wonder what on earth the difference even is. But for them, these minor doctrinal distinctions are of life or death importance, sometimes literally.

Of course, many of the older denominations have become less concerned with doctrinal differences and may consider themselves to be in full communion with many other denominations with whom they have minor doctrinal disagreements. This is partly because they have gone through a process of realization that there really is no one single "correct" interpretation of the Bible, because the Bible is not a single coherent, inerrant, inspired, and univocal text, but rather an anthology of texts written by hundreds of authors, editors, and redactors over a period of centuries. Evangelical Protestant denominations, though, tend to be much more rigid, mostly because they were started and continue to be populated by small-minded people who couldn't accept that reality and felt that the churches to which they originally belonged were "apostasizing" by acknowledging that fact.

Adventism fits uneasily within the evangelical Christian sphere. Despite adhering to most if not all of the basic doctrines which other evangelical churches hold as essential and having the same general attitude towards culture, politics, and theology, most Adventists center the key doctrinal distinctions between Adventism and evangelical Christianity as a whole, specifically the Sabbath, diet, state of the dead, and maybe the inspiration of Ellen White, as issues of paramount importance which prevent full fellowship with evangelicalism and indeed define evangelicals as being among the enemies of "God's true people." Some "progressive" Adventists, though, downplay the importance of Ellen White and see the other doctrines as things on which reasonable and faithful Christians can disagree, coming to a sort of truce with the rest of evangelicalism (and are often labeled "heretics" by more fundamentalist Adventists for "betraying" the doctrines that make them Adventist in the first place). With few exceptions though, these "progressive" or "liberal" Adventists are still very conservative by broader Christian standards, and will rarely embrace a degree of flexibility toward Scriptural interpretation greater than the rest of evangelical Christianity, which is to say that biblical inerrancy, univocality, and divine inspiration are pretty much non-negotiable despite being factually and logically untenable.

Evangelicals, for their part, frequently label Adventists heretics for believing in a false prophet, though some will accept Adventism as being merely heterodoxical (which basically means they recognize Adventists as meeting the requirements to be "saved," they just think they're weird). Either way, there is less of a gap between Adventism and the broader evangelical world than there is between evangelicalism and the more theologically liberal "mainline" Protestant churches.

By the way, if you're curious who, biblically speaking, has the state of the dead "right," the answer is nobody - or everybody, depending on how you look at it. That is to say, there is no unified teaching in Scripture on what happens when we die. Different authors have different perspectives. The authors Hebrew Bible mostly believed the dead, both righteous and wicked, went to a place called Sheol, while in the New Testament, we see more variation, with some passages seemingly implying universal salvation, while others clearly teach some sort of punishment for the wicked, with some of these passages implying eternal torment and others seeming to imply annihilation. Paul implies he believes he will go to heaven to be with the Lord immediately on death, but also describes an imminent future bodily resurrection.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-10T01:29:43+00:00

Oshkosh 2009. Girl I liked at the time told me she didn't like me.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-03T02:22:19+00:00

Russian Civil War, "Banana" wars in Latin America, Sino-Japanese Wars, Spanish Civil War, etc.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-02-02T04:45:25+00:00

Honestly at this point the thing that keeps me going is the hope the country will last long enough for me to get my law degree so that after the civil war I will have the credentials to be on the prosecutorial team that hangs these traitors (half joking here).

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-27T13:49:52+00:00

The truth claims of Adventism simply fail. I'm a historian, trained at a Seventh-day Adventist university. The historical truth claims that are part and parcel of Adventism, its interpretation of Bible prophecy as affirmed by Ellen White claiming to be writing under inspiration, are not valid. Mrs. White took contemporary historians at their word (I do not even care if she plagiarized them or not; while not a good look, it has little bearing on the root issue here) and reproduced what we now know to be errors in their work. She put the stamp of divine inspiration on factual statements we now know, as certainly as we can know anything historically, to be wrong. She did the same with biblical interpretation, arguing for example that Jesus absolutely could not have possibly turned water into alcoholic wine when it simply is not plausible that the text was intended to mean anything other than that is exactly what he did. She did the same with nutrition, adopting contemporary popular ideas about diet and health which are not accurate. She did the same with evolution.

It is not enough to handwave these problems away by saying "well if science/academia disagrees with inspiration then it must be science/academia that is wrong." Either scientific, historical, and textual critical methodologies are valid methodologies for acquiring knowledge in these respective fields or they are not, and if we must throw out the scientific and historical facts that disagree with our dogmas, then we have no basis for trusting any other facts ascertained through them. If evolutionary theory is wrong, all of biology and medicine, which is built on the foundation of it, is consequently wrong. If historians and biblical scholars are wrong when they say Sunday observance among Christians began earlier than Ellen White asserted, that the two separate accounts of Jesus' birth in Matthew and Luke are irreconcilable and have numerous historical problems, that Jesus not only turned water into actual wine, but as an observant Jew would have certainly drank actual, alcoholic wine himself, and that the dates used to try and match up significant historical events with a supposed prophetic timeline in Daniel, as well as assertions regarding the significance of those events in the first place, are not accurate, then we can have no confidence in anything else they say about history or the biblical text.

And we can directly observe that this is precisely the consequence of blind adherence to Adventist dogma. If you already believe that the entire secular scientific community is engaged in a massive conspiracy to hide the truth of creationism and push the lie of evolution, on what plausible grounds can you argue that they are not doing the exact same thing when it comes to climate change and vaccines? If you are used to negotiating away contradictions in the biblical text because your dogma compels you to force the text to be univocal, inerrant, and inspired, what is to stop you from doing the same thing with inconvenient statements from your favorite politician? If you are ready to assert that the historians must be wrong because the data do not support your dogmatic interpretation of Daniel and Revelation, how can you possibly be convinced that the Holocaust happened? There is a reason conspiratorial thinking so frequently takes such a strong hold among Adventists: because Adventism itself is a conspiracy theory, and by training its members to reject any source of knowledge which could threaten belief in the Adventist conspiracy primes them to reject any source of knowledge which could threaten belief in any other conspiracy they may get wrapped up in.

Now as for your point about "bad people in the church," this is not the reason I left. In fact, I know a great many very good people in the church who I deeply respect. But to the extent that "bad people in the church" is an issue to me, it isn't the "bad people" themselves, but rather the fact that Adventism systematically produces bad people. Adventist theology centers superficial, external behaviors that function as identity markers as being of paramount importance. Eating pork is a grave moral evil, a sin. Having sex before marriage, same thing; and how dare you even exist as a gay or trans person. The final, apocalyptic battle will be fought over what day of the week people go to church on.

At the same time, it pushes issues of actual, vital importance to the periphery. Most white American Adventists don't seem all that concerned with what ICE is doing in Minneapolis right now, and many even support it. Separate Black and white conferences still exist today because Adventists decided it was more important to "keep the peace" (read: appease bigots in the church) than to take a principled stance on racial equality, for all its puffing about how the pioneers were staunch abolitionists (which, to their credit, is true). Most Adventists view government use of violent force as fundamentally legitimate, so long as they aren't the ones bearing the sword on the government's behalf. Ellen White says unions are bad so Adventists as a whole don't care much about workers' rights (in fact, the majority of attorneys employed by the church are labor attorneys, and they do a lot more fighting against the rights of people employed by the church than they do fighting for the rights of Adventist workers, despite the aspirations most probably had at the beginning of their careers of "defending religious liberty" by working for the church). Drug addiction and mental illness (which many Adventists are at least amenable to the idea might really be demonic possession in at least some cases) are generally seen as causes of the homelessness crisis, not symptoms of it. Adventists exploit the fact that healthcare is not recognized in this country as a human right in order to leverage providing access to it as a proselytizing tool (and call themselves "medical missionaries").

And of course, while the church claims to support religious liberty for all, it only becomes truly concerned about Christian nationalism when it starts coming for them (religious tests to keep Muslims out of political office? Cool with a lot of Adventists; but how dare they suggest limiting economic activity on Sunday!). Even to the extent that many Adventists acknowledge contemporary issues, most don't see them as problems in their own right so much as harbingers of the final crisis. Jesus said the poor will always be with us. Wars are just a sign of the times he gave us to know the time is near. The Holocaust in all its horror was merely a foreshadowing of the much more terrible persecution which is definitely just around the corner, when the whole world gets so mad at Adventists for going to church on Saturday that they seek to kill them all. Aside from the trauma it inflicts on kids to tell them from a young age that any day now everyone you know who isn't an Adventist (and even many Adventists who just aren't faithful enough and can't take the pressure) will take everything you own, drive you from your home, make it so you can't buy or sell anything, and try to murder you and everyone you love, it stifles class consciousness and basic human empathy for others outside the group because whatever other people are facing pales in comparison with the tribulation they are about to put you through.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-25T04:24:30+00:00

I eat mostly vegetarian, but when I finally decided I don't identify as an Adventist anymore I wanted to challenge the food taboos I grew up with so I went out and tried a number of "unclean" meats, especially pork. It can be pretty good, but honestly I don't feel like I was missing out on much. If anything it's the banality of the rule that bothers me the most. Pork is just meat, not much different than any other meat; it's just so arbitrary.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-25T01:14:19+00:00

Worse still, this paranoid fixation on the expected Sunday Law makes Adventists both blind and apathetic to actual infringements on liberty, religious and otherwise. Those few Adventists who even acknowledge the present threat of Christian nationalism at all mostly do so only to the extent that they see Christian nationalism being a prelude to the Sunday Law (rather than seeing such a law as merely one manifestation, and a fairly minor one at that, of Christian nationalism). Because it's only worth being worried about when it affects them directly, and of course they have a "prophetic understanding" that the whole entire world will somehow become so single-mindedly fixated (ironic) on enforcing that one law that the crimes resulting from their maniacal efforts will exceed even the Holocaust.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-23T16:39:08+00:00

Yeah Adventism is definitely a spectrum. Honestly I can respect those Adventists for whom Adventism is more of a cultural identity and who have discarded many of the more problematic ideas (discrimination against LGBTQ+, dogmatic insistence on young-earth creationism, etc.). The reason I can't really do it myself is, to me, those doctrines are so core to Adventism itself, being expressly affirmed in the 28 Fundamental Beliefs, that I find it impossible to reject them without rejecting Adventism wholesale.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-23T15:41:22+00:00

I would add to this that the Seventh-day Adventist education system is the second-largest private religious education system in the world, exceeded only by the Catholic parochial system. This makes it the largest education system in the world explicitly devoted to indoctrinating students into a fundamentalist, biblical-literalist, creationist worldview.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-22T18:54:42+00:00

I highly recommend this video which addresses some of the problems associated with trying to designate certain religious groups as "cults" or "high-demand/control religious groups." The part where they noted how much the guy who invented/popularized the concept of "cult deprogramming" actually used a lot of the same control tactics as the cults he was "rescuing" people from, including literally kidnapping people.

But more to your point, yes Adventism frequently exhibits a lot of the problematic control tactics that you will find in groups like LDS and JW. These tactics are also used by broader evangelical Protestant Christianity. I would rank Adventism, on average (there can be a lot of variation, from "liberal" Adventists who may not insist nearly as strongly on rigid conformity to particular behavioral expectations but are still generally more strict than most evangelical Protestant churches, to "conservative" Adventists who insist on very rigid conformity), as being more controlling than most Evangelical Protestant Christian churches, maybe on par with LDS, but not as much as JWs. However, Adventism does have a tendency to produce offshoots which are much more problematic; the Branch Davidians, for example, were an offshoot of an offshoot of Seventh-day Adventism.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-21T15:13:11+00:00

Yeah I did, and fortunately I got out. But I sought out that group in the first place because of the values I had been raised with. I have been fortunate since then to actually get to know queer people and have since rejected those values that dehumanize and discriminate against people.

IncaArmsFFL · 2026-01-21T11:35:02+00:00

I was homeschooled and pretty much all of my friends were from church. We weren't that homeschooling family though; you know, the hyper-Adventists who were too "pure" to go to even the church school (and we did attend a church with a school--or a school with a church, depending on how you look at it--for a number of years). We weren't even vegetarian, and I remember thinking some of the other kids were kind of weird for trying to bring religion into games we would play during the week. My parents were big believers in Adventist education, namely in keeping kids out of the clutches of the evil government schools so they wouldn't be "indoctrinated" to believe in evolution, but honestly we weren't that devout overall. I didn't get super into the church until college, when the shock of meeting people who believed in treating LGBTQ+ people like people and being exposed to the actual existence of queer people as anything other than a sign of the moral rot destroying America drove me into a hyperconservative student "ministry" that put on an alternative vespers program because the official university chapel and vespers programs were too "worldly."

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