13) "When in Rome"

            In March good ol "Rusty" aka Russell M Nelson went to Rome to dedicate the new temple and while he was there he spoke with the youth " 5 things to know and do." I wont go into all of them but the ones that piss me off. 

            The leaders of the church are such hypocrites i cant stand it. The first thing he says is "know the truth and stand for it, even if the truth is not politically popular. “As the world grows more and more secular and less spiritual, your growth should be more and more spiritual and less secular. Strive to stand for principle instead for popularity.”

      The church has lied about so many things, this is not an opinion. This is a fact and they keep telling the members to "stand for the truth"! When they dont do that themselves. They instill this fear of people becoming  educated and less " spiritual". The rising generation has a vast amount of information right at their fingertips and they know it. These warnings about staying away from secular things is calculated and manipulative. The top leaders know they cant stop all the information leaked on the internet, they cant stop the members from finding out that there is a mass apostasy going on right under their nose. They cant stop curious free thinking minds from stumbling across the truth. The only thing they CAN do is create fear, and guilt. 

    Next he said "Know you are accountable for your deeds and for your desires."

Okay so my beef with this one is the control over literally every flippin thing in our lives. Accountable for our desires?!

So when they say its not a sin to have same sex attraction its a sin to " act" on it... thats a lie. They put guilt on you for your effin desires people! doesn't matter if you choose not to act on them, you are responsible for having them. What a load of shit. I had a desire to drink coffee all my life, when i was a receptionist i would get the entire office coffee order and go to Starbucks. on the way there i would tell myself okay today's the day, im going to drink coffee. When i got up there i just couldnt do it, i felt so damn guilty about it. So then i would go back to work and secretly resent the fact that everyone else had coffee but i couldnt, even though there is ZERO reasons to explain why. There are next to no negative or harmful effects from it either. No worse than the millions of Mormons addicted to soda and getting fat from having a million babies. Its just ridiculous, accountable for your desires [ insert eyeroll here] give me a break. What they are really talking about here is sex if we wanna be honest. They want to shame you to feel the guilt of your accountability in wanting sex, thinking about sex, looking at porn or masturbating.  Oh boy this is a whole other post hahaha. ;) moving on...

        Now he is talking about things to "do" number one "Prepare for marriage. “Prepare continually to be a wife or a husband. Prepare now to be a mother or a father.” If marriage doesn’t come immediately, “increase your education, your experience, and your emulation of the Lord so you become more desirable with each passing year.”

Heaven help you if you dont want to get married and have a liter of kids. Make sure you are always making yourself more desirable. Its laughable the "kids" going to BYU or just getting off missions and all they can think about is getting married. They dont even know who they are yet! I for one never went to school and got a degree, it is one of my biggest regrets. I graduated HS and set right off to find myself husband. I spent the next 10 years having kids, now obviously i love my family but i am 33 now and just figuring out what i love and who i am, how sad is that? If i had waited i would have discovered my love and talent for cooking. I would have went to school and maybe opened my own restaurant. If i choose to do that now i am 10 years behind everyone else. 

      Prepare and pursue your education. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “education is a religious responsibility.”

Okay this is just laughable. Again education but ONLY what we approve and in our schools. puke, no thanks.

• Be careful with your time. “Time is important; you can waste a lot of it if you are not careful.”  Control, contol, control. Now you have to feel bad about how you spend your time. They are not even warning about what you spend it on here, just to not "waste" it. HAHAHA Omg i cant even with this crap. 

  President Ballard said the future of the Church rests in the hands of the “rising generation in Italy.”

“If they can just continue to see the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ and live it and strive to do what Heavenly Father wants them do, they will carry on the leadership of the Church. They will build the kingdom of God here in the great country of Italy and other parts of Europe.”

This i find interesting, what ever do they mean? hmmmmmmm plans are in the making. Rusty told us to take our vitamins! we better not waste our time ;)

12) Forgive!!! or the sin be on YOUR head.

It has been a while since i last posted. With the holidays and Flu season and 4 kids well.... we barely made it out alive ;)

               I have been thinking a lot recently about Forgiveness and the way this teaching as it is taught within Mormonism has affected my life. In the Doctrine and Covenants ( D&C) it teaches us “Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin.

“I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.

“And ye ought to say in your hearts—let God judge between me and thee, and reward thee according to thy deeds.” (D&C 64:8–11.) 

           I endured many years with guilt and i felt a lot of pressure to forgive my abuser. There were many times in my life where i saught guidance and help from church leaders with things i was dealing with and it always lead back to my abuse. I was molested by someone i trusted when i was a child, my personal truth was damaged and i was forever changed. Without even realizing the severity of the impact the abuse had on my life, it was always the reason behind every single struggle i had. I was always counseled by leaders that i needed to forgive, forgive, forgive. 

            Forgiveness is a PERSONAL choice, and it is nobody's, i repeat nobody's business how, when, and IF you choose to do so. I didnt ask for the life i was given, i didnt ask to be sexually molested, i didnt have a choice in that. The church's stance that we need to forgive or we commit the greater sin is prosperous! It makes zero sense and i reject that teaching with every fiber of my being. Now im not referring to petty, selfish "offenses" when talking about forgivness, im referring to life altering offenses, things that hurt you and damage your personal truth. Things that destroy relationships and cause a ripple in your day to day life. Forgiveness is not for God, it is not for the offender, it is not for your peers, it is for YOU and you alone. Every single person has their own process, time line, and requirements to be able to forgive in the way that will free them of the burden that the offender put on them. You see, something that i just recently realized, When you hurt someone, you just gave them a job that they didnt ask for. They have to forgive you for that, its not just about forgiving for the offence that rocked their world, they then have to forgive you for the time, and energy that they have to put into healing themselves. For example when i got married and i was intimate with Alan a flood of unexpected emotions, hurt, and pain washed over me and i was pissed off at the work i had to put in to healing myself. I was so angry that my abuser took these experiences from me and ruined them, my first years of marriage were now a job, i had to work to fix me so that i could be a good wife. I didnt ask for that, but i had to do it to be happy and i was angry that i had to work so damn hard at it. So not only did i have to forgive for being abused i had to forgive for the time lost in repairing the damage done.  Forgivness is not a get off the hook free card either. I might forgive someone and never want to see their face again. 

               Mormonism puts all of the offenders responsibility right back on you, to say that if i cant make my life right, i wasnt able to "forgive" someone that tore my soul in two, that i would then "stand condemed before the Lord" is an abusive teaching, I cant tell you how much guilt i have felt over this in my life. 

           Forgiveness doesnt have a start date, you might "forgive" and then one day peel back another layer and say "no, ya know what this really hurt me!" It doesnt mean that all that lead you to the point of forgiving is then undone. Peeling back all the layers and dealing with them is healthy, it is how we truly heal. 

           Now i have also been the offender in my life at some point, we all have. In my case i learned from a front row seat that you dont get to decide when you are forgiven, you dont get to choose how either. I accepted all my responsibility and did what was needed by the person i offended to make them okay again. It very well could have been that i was not ever forgiven and there is nothing i could do about that and it is also not their fault but mine. If someone chooses to forgive it should be to gain control in their own life again and not give their power over, that's it. Guilt and shame and FEAR from God is a religious tactic i will fight against. Do you honestly think that the Lord Jesus Christ as taught in scripture would look into the eyes of his child who he watched be hurt, broken and damaged and say " I condem you because you were not able to forgive, shame on you, depart from me. " ?? 

           When religion gets out of the way, we as humans are more capable of Love and forgiveness all on our own.