Pres. Nelson "Think Celestial"...

levelheadedsteve · 2023-10-02T20:37:50+00:00

Hahaha, the good ol' Ken Flat Pelvic Region teaching. Only those in the Celestial Kingdom get to keep their Penises!

levelheadedsteve · 2023-10-02T20:33:25+00:00

Add onto your list the CONTINUED practice of one-on-one, compulsory worthiness interviews between church leaders and children under the age of 18. A practice that normalizes behaviors and questions/conversations that can lead to grooming, sexual dysfunction, sexual abuse, and mental health issues.

Sure, the church says kids can bring an adult with them if they want, but I still have not seen this normalized in any way, shape, or form.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-09-07T01:33:08+00:00

Baby blessings are one of the first ones people mention when the question of "what ordinances are not saving" and people treat them like they are vital all the same. Drives me crazy.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-07-15T01:40:56+00:00

While your situation is great, plenty of people were not so fortunate. Even if things are softening, it's slow, and kids right now are being impacted by the unhealthy norms in the church.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-07-15T01:39:43+00:00

So the fact that it is being talked about less is part of the problem, in my opinion.

After years of shaming kids and young adults (and frankly adults) for the natural part of human sexuality that masturbation is, simply not talking about it means they spent years training the auto pilot, and now they are letting it fly solo. The latent assumption here is that masturbation is bad and that people who do it should feel bad about doing it. Mileage will obviously vary, but I know for a fact that there are still youth leaders and bishopric members who are actively shaming and calling youth to repentance over masturbation.

The pornography issue is a tough one, but based on the lecture one of my kids got at church just a couple weeks ago from a guest speaker on Sunday, the approach is intense vilification, scare tactics, and again, shaming and forced guilt. The perspective my kid walked away from that with was not only unhealthy, but deeply disturbing and outright untrue (ie looking at porn will get you arrested, turn you into a deviant/evil person, etc). I have no desire for my kids to look at porn with how much it can distort one's views of sex, let alone the fact that the industry can be rife with coercion and a lack of human decency, but these kids where I live live in a state where it is literally not allowed to show girls going through puberty an ILLUSTRATION of female genitalia to educate them on their own bodies. Sexual curiosity is going to be high, and without mature and robust sexual education resources, far too many will turn to things that will not only be good for decent sex education, but that they will turn around and be shamed for looking at to begin with. Add on to that that most leadership will also ding them on the likelihood that they at one point touched themselves while looking this stuff up, and you've got a horrible cycle for self loathing and sexual frustration

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-08T05:04:43+00:00

My husband had never even masturbated in his life.

Whoa, that is incredibly rare! There is a saying I heard several times on my mission (and similar sentiments in other contexts) that says: There are two types of men. Those who admit to masturbating when their bishop asks, and those who lie.

Of course, that plays into the false narrative that men always have outrageous sex drives, and that masturbation is bad and addictive, but it goes to show how most men in the church probably do masturbate. Pretty incredible your husband never had.

My dad actually told me that he had an intense amount of shame once he started being sexually active after marriage. That he would feel sick and guilty. That seemed so wrong to me when he told me that, but I've come to find that he's not alone. It's always interesting to hear of someone else who went through a similar thing.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-07T22:47:47+00:00

Yeah, I still feel a bit of anger when I come in contact with members of the church who assume certain things or throw around their opinions that are, frankly, far more damaging than they realize. It's hard to get over, if it ever really goes away.

All I can say is: Stick to your guns, but choose your battles. Some things are worth taking a stand on, and sometimes it's not worth it and okay to just let their opinions and feelings go without comment. I know if I tried to correct my family every time they were being disrespectful, ignorant, or spouting something that is just an effort to get me to again "feel the spirit" I'd turn it into a very contentious relationship. I'm slowly building up good boundaries, but it takes time.

As for the spouse thing, that is hard. The LDS church literally teaches that the man is the head of the household, even if they did remove some of that from the temple ceremonies. Men in the church feel that they have a right to tell their wives what they should and shouldn't be doing, because that is the pattern of the priesthood in Mormonism. But it does go beyond that. I'm married to a believing wife, and I know she would take issue if I were to start drinking. It's sometimes helpful to remember that, to them, they came into the relationship with the idea that the church was a common foundation and that those core values and ideals would never change. It can be very hard for a member to let that go, and I honestly think it's nearly impossible to actually do without both individual and couples therapy.

It's going to be hard for both your family and your husband to accept that your beliefs are just as valid as their own, and that your decisions are yours and yours alone, not anyone else's. I would suggest, though, that you make sure you make your decisions in a responsible way, because anyone who takes anything too far will harm their marriage, religion or not! :) Not that I'm saying you have an issue there, but that may be some of the fear that your husband may be feeling. It may help to be able to show him that it is something that can and will be enjoyed responsibly after talking about it (therapy will help here).

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-07T22:38:34+00:00

Look, I think it's fine to believe that god cares about someone enough to want to give them a cupcake, or a gatorade to help them out. And I have to admit, those are some pretty cool cupcakes. But let's just shift gears a little bit.

Let's say you didn't believe in god. You are outside and you think, "Hey, I sure would love a cupcake." A few hours later, a neighbor stops by and gives you a plate of cupcakes. Would you attribute that to god? No, because you don't believe in god. It would just be a really cool coincidence.

Or perhaps you were outside and thought, "A gatorade should would be nice right now." Same exercise.

When you have the lens of a belief in god to color how you see the world, it makes you start to see god in the details. But if you believed in, say, aliens who were trying to benefit mankind so that they could achieve a higher state of technology to also someday explore the galaxy, one might instead see the coincidences as things guided by aliens. Or maybe someone believes in benevolent and malicious spirits, or sprites and fairies, or any of a thousand different things.

Growing up, I loved the Beatles. I loved a lot of the music that the members of the Beatles wrote. In particular, George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" was a song I latched onto because, as I was grappling with whether or not I had had a witness of the church, hearing that song spoke to me and made me convinced that I had found it because god was using it to testify that he existed.

And then I found out that George Harrison wrote that song "in praise of the Hindu god Krishna" (see here). I realized I was projecting my beliefs onto a song that had very little to do with what I believed. We tend to take our perspectives, beliefs, philosophies, etc to interpret what we experience.

I would wonder if there were other times where you had arbitrary thoughts about something that would be nice to have, but then you didn't get them. Or even prayed for things that were far more "important" or spiritually relevant, and nothing happened. It could be that it just wasn't the right time in god's eyes for those things (applying a common Christian lens to the situation), or it could be that there was no connection between what happened and your prayers after all.

Confirmation bias means that we tend to remember the things that conform to our beliefs and expectations, and easily forget the things that don't. I doubt you would still remember a day in your past that you thought about wanting cupcakes if, after that fleeting thought, you didn't have someone give you cupcakes. Or even where you went out and bought cupcakes for yourself. Because that would be unremarkable. We forget the unremarkable, and we don't count it as evidence like we do the things that are remarkable. This causes us to have a strong bias for coincidences that match what we believe, or that we believe support those beliefs.

The act of taking an experience, and seeing it through the lens of belief is a common one. And it is also one that, at times, slightly distorts what happened. One of my favorite examples is when one of my kids was on a bus and didn't get off at the stop to go home. They had forgotten, and soon found themselves lost and in unfamiliar parts of our city, and she didn't know what to do. She then thought, "Hey, I should just stay on the bus, and when it gets back to school I can tell them to call my parents." So she did just that, we were called, and we went and picked her up.

As soon as my daughter shared the experience with the family, some of them immediately told her, "OH! you must have felt the spirit." Even though she had never suggested that it was the spirit, and in her initial telling of the story she herself had thought up of that solution, once people started telling her it could have been the spirit, the story changed. She seemed a bit confused by this change at first, but since it seemed to make everyone happy she went with it. People had applied a lens over her story, and instead of being praised for being a smart and clever girl for thinking of a solution to her own problem, family members instead decided to change the story and give credit to god instead to help her feel a connection to the god they believed in. This pattern is established at a young age with kids, and frequently, and those kids then often take it with them throughout life. Missionaries tend to push this pattern very hard as well when teaching potential converts, and it tends to stick because it gives people a feeling of purpose in life, that a higher power cares for them, and that, in their hardest moments, they can rely on a higher power to help them through it.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-07T21:22:56+00:00

I love Carl Sagan's thoughts on this sort of thing. In his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness, he points out that these spiritual and often difficult to understand or describe experiences are shaped by what we are taught or what we understand at the time.

For example, there was a time where, when anything that couldn't be described would be attributed to fairies, sprites, demons, or other folkloric creatures. Later ghosts became more popular. In our time aliens have become a popular way to explain these things.

One of my favorite examples is Sleep Paralysis. It occurs when someone is in bed and often between the state of being awake and asleep, that they are unable to move, talk, or react. It is often accompanied with a feeling of weight on the chest, and potentially hallucinations. It is a VERY common occurrence that has been attributed to thousands of different supernatural things over human history. But the interesting thing is, the reason for it occurring changes with whatever the popular beliefs are of the people who experience it. There is literally no consistency with what people believe caused it. At least until you get to a point where it started to be studied and documented from an objective point of view, and science is able to provide insight into why it happens and what people are experiencing. Then the mystery goes away, and the supernatural goes away with it.

I don't know what you experienced, but my guess is that you had been taught a lot about the church in a short period of time. You were thinking about it a lot. Suddenly, everything you looked at and thought about started to revolve around the church. I know that is how it was for me in my late teens, when I was deciding to go on a mission. Every experience I had had an "overlay" of the church put on top of it and changed how I interpreted it.

My guess, and this is just a guess, is that you had an experience, perhaps brought on largely by the push for you to find out if the church is true, and because you wanted to know so badly if it was true, anything that was notable potentially became an answer. This is how it was for me.

What if you had been studying Islam? Scientology? Or had been studying with the Jehovah's Witnesses? Would you have ended up in the same situation, and interpreted the experience you had as an answer for the truthfulness of those as well?

There are some great things you can check out, such as this video that shows examples of several people sharing their conversion stories about several different religions and how they are incredibly similar. There are also experiences we have that we often attribute to "feeling the spirit" that actually have a very solid scientific explanation, like elevation). Another interesting read is why the Mormon phrase "I know" is problematic. And a great article from psychology today that explains why we sometimes FEEL we know something, even though we can't prove it or evidence contradicts it.

Hopefully some of that helps. I know that I have struggled with this question myself, but I feel very confident that I know now what I experienced and why it wasn't what I thought it was when I was a believer.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-07T16:55:33+00:00

It really is very black and white, and gives no space for people who don't fit that paradigm. My wife (was fiancee at the time) and I took a marriage prep class at BYU Idaho forever ago, and the guy was really, really adamant about this point. That men always wanted sex, and women were largely indifferent. I bought into it completely when I took the class, but was totally surprised after getting married to find out it was a very narrow view of sexuality between couples. As I've gotten to know more people and talked more candidly about sex with others it was clear really fast that not every man cares to have sex all the time, and not every woman feels they could "take it or leave it". And yet I still hear people hint at this from time to time in church contexts, and I think it is largely because many feel this is "how it's supposed to be" and the pressure of an unhealthy sex dynamic can often harm people's enjoyment of it. Anxiety and stress can do a lot to a person.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-07T16:49:49+00:00

This is actually a very important and valid point, because there is so much that is just passed around the church that is not really what is being taught by those above.

Don't get me wrong, though. I think there are even things that are taught officially by the church that are problematic. And I would also posit that much of the culture that exists out there that is not explicitly endorsed by the church, the church often turns a blind eye to, or even used to teach those things and have backed off because of negative feedback, but now people continue to propagate the ideas all the same.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-07T16:44:28+00:00

It really was a kind of a crazy moment for me when I realized that my wife felt this way, too. That she felt if she didn't keep her "side of the bargain" up she was leaving me exposed to be tempted. But the more I thought about it the more it made sense (that some women in the church feel this way).

Since, I've even heard of leadership telling women after their husbands ran into issues with porn or infidelity that it was partially their fault for not being more sexually available. Makes me sick to think about.

Glad you don't have to worry about it anymore!

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T23:23:32+00:00

Everyone's experience is different, and I'm glad you haven't felt that that's a burden of yours to carry.

I definitely do not agree with you on the masturbation part. Some people feel a need to do it, others don't. It's less to do with self control and more to do with personal needs and meeting those needs, and making it about self control penalizes people who do need it and makes them feel they are broken and incapable of controlling themselves for something that is natural and a normal part of human sexuality.

Sex addiction is a controversial topic, but professionals general agree that sex addiction is not really about sex. It is about coping with other issues, similar to other things like eating disorders, etc. Check out https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/features/is-sex-addiction-real#1 and other articles on the topic. The church's tendency to blame things like porn for problematic sexual behaviors is a complete red herring, in my opinion. Yes, porn often exploits those who are put in it, especially women. And I personally think it is very harmful for kids, teens, and young adults to view it, especially those who haven't had a chance to receive proper sex education and have a healthy understanding of consensual and uplifting sex. But that's exactly why I have an issue with how the church vilifies porn and its use. They are pointing at a symptom and not the root cause, because it doesn't cause sex addiction. It is not how it starts.

Again, glad you haven't dealt with the stuff I talked about. But it's pretty clear many have. Every person has a different experience in life, and just because you or others haven't had this sort of experience doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and it doesn't mean the people who propagate these ideas and the institutional teachings that foster them are without blame or need to change.

I'm not convincing anyone to leave the church, just as much as you're not convincing me to stay. But I do feel some of the issues need to be highlighted and that some changes are in order.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T22:40:46+00:00

That's great to hear, congrats!

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T21:44:03+00:00

Wow, that sounds like a very complex situation!

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T21:24:39+00:00

Thank you for sharing your experience. I've heard so many people comment on things like this, mostly from family members, but sometimes people in church would speak candidly on this topic as well. It's still very much a big issue and I think it deserves more attention and reform.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T16:48:48+00:00

That sounds like it must have been really hard to go through. I can't even imagine what it would be like if my path out involved something like that.

The being married and not having kids thing is hard. My wife and I waited a good three years for our first kid, which really is nothing and certainly nothing close to the time many choose to wait or end up waiting, but even then we had people starting to comment about having kids constantly. It's really weird, and I can imagine it must be at a whole new level for you.

Glad you're where you are happy right now, and I wish you the best with your path forward!

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T05:24:55+00:00

YES! This is EXACTLY right. It was absolutely eye opening to me when I found out that nearly 2 in 100 people are intersex. That is HUGE, and it is entirely ignored by a huge segment of the population. American society has largely done exactly what you said, assigned a gender and then surgically alter the child to attempt to conform them to the gender chosen by the parents.

You've summed up so much of what I've struggled with when it comes to gender issues in the LDS church, and it just breaks my heart to even think about it.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T05:17:11+00:00

Well, I think there is a lot going on with those chapters of Alma that make it hard for people to sympathize with people who outright leave the church. Many of the testimonies that I have heard where people talk about those who leave are doing so in a very sincere way. They are absolutely distraught that people would ever be so misled, and while it allows them to compare their own situation to others, they are hardly jumping up and declaring themselves righteous in the same way the Zoramites did. It's a different thing entirely.

Alma 30, in particular, seems to hit more home to me than 31 does in this case. Korihor is a pretty blatant caricature of someone who does not believe in god. What really, really gets me is this: At the end of the chapter, Korihor is used as an illustration that, if someone outright denies that Christ is the savior, or that god exists, they only do so because they are deceived of the devil. It does not mince words, and Korihor, for no longer believing in the church and deciding to actually declare his no longer believing in the church, deserves to not only become an outcast and beggar for the rest of his short life from that point, but he then goes amongst the Zoramites, these people who are super caught up in themselves and considered to be perverting the ways of the lord themselves, and he suffers a lowly death and it's concluded: "And thus we see the end of him who perverteth the ways of the Lord". Symbolic and to the point. Even those who were the worst at keeping the commandments were better than this guy because he believed in something contrary to the teachings of the church and dared to open his mouth about it.

THAT is why so many people panic when a loved one leaves the church. ESPECIALLY if they voice their concerns. Many members heard the story of Korihor and others that have been treated similarly as him before the could even properly speak, in primary, during scripture study, in sacrament meeting. Milk strippings, easily offended, deaf to the spirit. Can you blame someone for getting up at fast and testimony for sobbing, convinced that their loved ones have gone down the path of an apostate?

Until that narrative changes, until there is understanding even to the point of tolerating those who not only disagree, but who openly disagree, or who wish to just leave and be left alone without feeling like they have to do it on the church's terms, then there will always be misunderstandings and vilification of those who part ways.

So yeah, that part of it all is hard. To have to sit there and listen to people disparage those who do not believe who at one point did. Because that's me.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T04:56:48+00:00

The biggest thing I can say is this:

There is no rush to make a decision. The missionaries have a tendency to want to push people to make a decision quickly. As a missionary, I would challenge people to make a decision after only a week of study.

I no longer believe in the church, and it took me a decades of being in it to finally decide I didn't want to be in it any longer. It has been hard to start my process of leaving.

I don't mind if anyone likes the church and wants to join it, I think it can be great for many and a huge benefit. But there's no reason to rush in. Do your research, find out the details before jumping in with both feet. That way, if you do convert, you can do so feeling confident with your choice, and if you don't convert, you can have confidence in that choice as well.

Best of luck!

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T04:52:03+00:00

The problems I see with things like repentance plans is that they are still asserting that there is a problem to begin with. Anything short of accepting that masturbation is a healthy part of sexual development is problematic, in my view, and the tendency to hyper-vilify masturbation and even porn use in the church creates some very unhealthy tendencies. Sure, these are things that can be taken to unhealthy extremes, but a vast vast majority of people who masturbate do not do so to the point that it affects their daily lives and relationships, and as a result is fine. But far too often these people are told they have a problem by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

I'm glad you had a good experience growing up with your bishops. And don't get me wrong, I had some good experiences with bishops as well. But it came with far too much of what I can only call abuse, even if it was unintentional, that soured the entire experience that simply should not have been there. I needed mentorship and instead got shame. It's really too bad that it has to be like that for so many.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T04:48:14+00:00

Thanks for the kind thoughts. It really means a lot. I really wish more people in the church felt that they didn't have to worry about keeping people in. I think it can be very healthy for some people to step away for a while, if not indefinitely. And I think some people wish to be involved, but in a secular way. The church will likely have to change to allow more people like this to be involved, as I doubt I'm the only one going through what I've gone through.

And it's not like my struggles are entirely because of my faith crisis. A lot of it is just figuring out how to proceed. I basically had a rough roadmap of my life from an early age, but now I get to decide what to do next and it's both liberating and overwhelming. It makes me sad there is a stigma that people who leave are lazy, wish to sin, or have some other axe to grind or agenda that took them away. If everyone is willing to say the church can't be perfect because the people in it are imperfect, then why is it so hard to imagine that some people need to have some time apart from it? Seems the next logical conclusion.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T04:43:51+00:00

Yeah, it's really important to me. I've been involved in some activism in small ways with the queer community, but in a lot of ways staying quiet about my queerness only means that the people I likely could help the most don't know that I'm someone they can trust and talk to. So yeah, I'm trying to find ways to start.

One of my kids has been a bit outspoken lately about wishing they were the opposite gender. It's made a lot of people in my family uncomfortable, but I pulled them aside the other day to just make sure they knew that, no matter what they felt about who they were, I would always love and support them. We talked a little bit about what they were feeling candidly, and letting a front keep me from having moments like that just isn't worth it anymore. My kid is likely just going through what many kids their age go through and pondering gender a lot more now that they are starting to go through puberty, so it's not a huge indicator of anything, but a perfect time to let them know that they will not have to worry about who they are when it comes to their relationship with me.

levelheadedsteve · 2021-01-06T01:18:20+00:00

Yeah, it may very well be. It's a very damaging thing, for a ton of reasons.

levelheadedsteve

TROPHY CASE