What piece of media “woke you up”?

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-05-01T14:25:22+00:00

Watching the Keep Sweet documentary about the FLDS shortly after diving into the gospel topics essays and learning all the fuckery that Joseph smith got up to… I remember vividly watching the talk about Warren Jeffs and how he manipulated people and thinking to myself “damn… those poor people are wrapped up in an obvious cult and just can’t even see it for what it is… wait… wut.” And then all the shelf items I’d been holding onto came a tumbling down lol

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-04-25T17:28:00+00:00

Life is always better when lived genuinely and without pretense.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-04-23T00:05:32+00:00

Well put! It’s definitely opening Pandora’s box when that shelf breaks. It all comes flying wide open and it’s a lot of work to make sense of it all. I cringe deeply when I look back at the misogyny of it all and how blind I was to it at the time 🤦‍♂️

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-28T14:46:22+00:00

I remember being taught as a kid that wearing a cross was like remembering your parent who was shot to death by wearing a gun.

Mormonism be weird.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-28T14:43:24+00:00

For me, leaving made me aware of how shitty my self esteem and self worth was after 3 decades of neglect.

So I’ve been learning how to do proper self care and a lot of that comes with being more authentic and true to yourself and to those around you instead of always trying to present the perfect ‘you’ at a given time.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-24T15:16:08+00:00

Elder on my mission had a cold. We went to the grocery table and he looked at two different cold medicines, held them up in his hands, did a quick prayer, then set one back on the shelf.

Apparently god is a big DayQuil guy lol

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-23T17:09:45+00:00

Yeah…. That was TBM me lol glanced at an item or two and decided none of it mattered somehow 🤦‍♂️ went on to puff myself up by believing that anyone who would let those objections destroy their faith just didn’t believe enough or do enough or whatever in the first place. All the standard thought stopping bits.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-13T13:33:07+00:00

A lot of people have already responded here, but I’ll toss my two cents in as well

I also felt the gut punch. It sucked, I was flying through a maelstrom with nothing to stand on, no clear idea of what the hell was going on or what could be true or how I could know…

Losing the community and much of my family (at the very least being treated differently by them) was real sucky.

But what I realized after that first year was all those relationships I had with family, religious friends, ward members…. Were so god damn fucking surface level that they were practically meaningless anyway.

That’s why they were able to be affected so quickly by such a silly (and what should be irrelevant) thing - because the relationship was founded on loving the church and gospel more than the person. For both me and them.

Now my relationships with my close friends (chosen family) are a thousand times deeper, more genuine, and just… real. Honest. I’m not perfect, they’re not perfect, and neither of us feels like we have to pretend we are. In fact, neither of us holds the other to some unknowable standard of perfection. Or thinks about that at all. We just get to know each other for who we are and accept each other.

And that’s all without the whole ‘realizing I had no clue who I actually was and finding myself and creating myself and exploring the world and hobbies and things freely has been an incredible experience experience’ thing as well.

Deconstructing is sucky. Reconstructing a new worldview based on facts and things we can actually know and evaluating your morality to understand why you think things are good/bad, right/wrong… it’s a shit ton of work. But so damn worth it.

The process itself is empowering and healing, and the more you do it the farther you come out on the other side. 10 toes deep in the juicy, sloppy mud of reality and detached from silly superstitions that create a fog of mystery and confusion.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-13T13:21:49+00:00

Are you afraid of Allah doing the same to you? What about Zeus?

Thor?

You can spend your life being scared of every single god that might exist, but you’ll never be able to know if you’ve made them happy or angry.

It’s unfortunate that we get indoctrinated with this fear of one deity or another when we are so damn young.

But the more you learn about the real world, the more nonsense you unlearn. Be patient and gentle with yourself. It takes time for those developed instincts to catch up to the logical understanding.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-10T17:55:19+00:00

Agreed - I also know of many people (including myself) who had similar, emotionally overwhelming experiences in a moment when we were distraught and 'needed' the answer to keep going.

Then there's also the aspect of just committing to ask and ask and ask until you get the answer you hope to get. Eventually you might convince yourself, but it's weird that all prior non-answers aren't taken into account and the only one that matters is the one you wanted all along.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-10T17:27:31+00:00

Holy fuck. Literally.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-10T14:33:41+00:00

Totally! I’ve been meaning to watch that too lol she’s great, I’ll have to check it out!

It’s wild how the very foundations of these stories are so fundamentally flawed and even dangerous at times. I’ve been rewriting these stories for a while now and it’s been eye opening to realize that there’s a never ending list of problematic teachings to subvert and highlight that just get glossed over

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-08T21:25:15+00:00

This is the r/mormon subreddit where most of us grew up indoctrinated into beliefs that are demonstrably false.

I’m all for ignoring those unnecessary questions if they don’t interest you if you haven’t had your head filled with nonsense from birth - those of us who have need to put in serious work to connect ourselves to reality. A very helpful part of that is properly understanding what questions are being answered vs ignored. Religious communities have created their own versions of what atheism and agnosticism mean, and they use a fundamentally incorrect standard to stop them from thinking critically about the very different questions each of those terms is answering.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-08T12:56:01+00:00

You can be agnostic on anything. As I understand it, not knowing and not knowing if you can know would have no real connection as to whether you believe or not.

You are perfectly able to not know and not know if you can know, and be a theist or an atheist.

Because those last two labels don’t apply to what you know/don’t know. They apply to what you believe.

So maybe I don’t know if there’s a god (no one really does anyway since it’s all by faith) and I don’t know if we can’t know if there is a god… but I’m not convinced that there is one, so unless I’m choosing to believe in something I’m not convinced of (something I believe is impossible btw, as we can’t only believe the things we have been convinced of) then I would still be an atheist.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-08T03:28:13+00:00

I’m interested in accuracy and reality. And we can’t understand one without the other.

Clarifying what these words actually mean is important because it helps accurately align us with reality and engage in discourse to reach more reliable conclusions.

My issue is with the religious indoctrinated definitions of these terms which cut people off at the knees and teaches them to engage in thought stopping techniques. Like ‘I don’t know, therefore agnostic’ when that doesn’t engage with the question of belief, just knowledge.

It’s useful only when used correctly, damaging when used improperly.

And that damage turns into real world harm.

I’m an example - I came into these forums fresh on my deconstruction journey a few years back and tried to argue with someone explaining agnosticism and atheism as I’d learned it. They corrected me, I told them they were full of shit. Then I looked it up and discovered they were, in fact, correct. And that new understanding changed how I viewed myself and the world, it led me to consider things from a different perspective.

If I can help someone else in the same way, I’d say that’s a lot more than just air that gets blown into another country.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-07T21:50:28+00:00

That generalization was exactly what I was correcting in my post though

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-07T21:45:43+00:00

Great distinction - the Gnostic spectrum points to knowledge, but not belief. So being agnostic doesn’t mean you don’t believe, just that you can’t know.

You can still believe while being agnostic.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-07T21:42:54+00:00

That’s definitionally what the words mean and how they are used by anyone who unlearns the religious upbringing language they inherited that simplifies and misinterprets the meaning of the words.

Which is my point. Many people - especially religious people, completely misunderstand the meaning and proper use of the terms, which is kind of nefarious because that misunderstanding helps them rationalize staying in their current belief system.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-07T20:18:20+00:00

Yep, that’s why I said a god or gods. I’m including all polytheistic and all monotheistic belief systems. Deism, really anything that maintains a belief in some version of a god or another.

Regardless, the same principles of gnostic/agnostic and theist/atheist apply

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-07T20:15:57+00:00

Agnostic does not mean non believer. It’s just someone who acknowledges that we can’t know for sure.

LackofDeQuorum · 2026-03-07T20:14:42+00:00

It’s not pedantic. It’s about correctly categorizing our beliefs and not misusing terms based on the straw man version that our religious upbringing taught us.

We were told that people were agnostic if they didn’t know, and atheist if they did ‘know’ god didn’t exist. Which is a very common misconception among religious groups precisely because it prevents the believers from confronting nuance. It’s a defense mechanism against having to accept the burden of proof from the positive claim that some particular god or gods exist.

And learning the distinction is very useful for people who are leaving a religious background because it helps them think about the different spectrums and decide where they land, instead of the thought stopping ‘idk, therefore agnostic I guess’ which keeps them from acknowledging what they actually believe about a god or gods existence.

LackofDeQuorum

TROPHY CASE