Very well said.
The problem there days is that people have made the terms *Christian* and *moral* synonymous, and while they should be to the extent that all Christians SHOULD BE moral, not everyone who is moral is Christian.
It’s no insult to say a person is not a Christian when their beliefs don’t put them in that category. It’s merely an observation based on their stated belief system.
This is sad...It was written by a young mormon ...
The Mormon Octopus
I’m going to name a list of Mormon tentacles, just to get you all started. Feel free to list more.
1. Callings-When I got home from my mission, I was forced to go on a speaking circuit to different stakes to tell them about my mission. I was lying through my teeth every time, talking about my mission. I hated it and hated the fact that they were just trying to tie more ropes around my neck, like Brigham Young’s cows, AKA, the Mormon people.
2. Financial obligation
3. Peer pressure
4. Lack of validation from others, leading to an individual seeking out the church when his/her basic needs aren’t met as a human being. It’s cheap manipulation, but if there’s anything that makes me want to go back to the church, it’s peer approval, having to currently live among so many Mormons. Sadly, I know that peer approval from a Mormon is even more worthless than I have ever been in a worthiness interview. It’s so shallow.
5. Guilt, and always having to rely on the church for validation of self-esteem, much like number 4, only it comes from leaders who don’t even care about you most of the time. It’s sad I once based so much of my worth off of what some old bald guy told me about how worthy I was or not.
(I’ve been reading a lot lately about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and this is what I base most of this stuff off of. In order to move on in life, we need our lower needs met, and those have to do with love and belongingness). Of course, for a Mormon, the only way to have those needs met is through the church. So, it creates psychological dependence.
6. I read once on this board about how, instead of simply not paying tithing and paying the bills, one should pay tithing first and then come groveling to the bishop for money. It again is another psychological rope where the church is associated with something so simple, like food, that the dependence that comes as a byproduct of such action becomes unbreakable.
7.Using up everything that is precious and personal to you and turning it into something to further the agenda of the church. When the church reaches its slimy tentacle into every aspect of your life, you have the almost impossible task of getting free from it.
8. Mormon underwear, which kind of refers to number 7. When the church goes into the bedroom, which is the only place the church should not be regardless of any explanation, it has fully enveloped every aspect of your life. The last tentacle has reached in and grabbed you and you can no longer get free without being harmed. I once even read a talk or something from Jeffrey R. Holland where he said that sex was actually a sacrament. Now, I’ve never had sex before, but the idea of having the church invade such an aspect of my life in such a way mortified me to death. I already found the church to be abusive in its demands on time and energy on my mission, but that was going too far. When you’re a devout Mormon, you just can’t get a break from the Mormon church. I could never shake the disturbing thought that the Mormon Jesus would be watching me having sex or at least that I would be forced to think about God while having sex. Talk about taking the pleasure out of it! And people in the church wonder why there’s so many sexless and unhappy marriages.