I just watched the first two minutes of the most terrifying movie I have ever seen. I am still shaking.

I have been thinking of religion a lot lately, and I feel that this is the best place to put down my thoughts on the matter, though this blog has followed me through different stages in my search for truth, and what I believe. I am realizing that I need to afford others the same option, to differentiate between "truth" and "what I believe" for themselves, and be free to choose and practice whichever they so desire. The problem is, having taken the 5 minutes required to put myself in the mind of the critic in regards to my beliefs, I have realized the extent to which I am, against my own will, somewhat racist, homophobic, sexist, bigoted, elitist, and malcontent. I feel like I spent years of my life cultivating these attributes within myself, and I regret every day that I spent blindly trudging, seeing and thinking of the world around me in the only mindset I had ever really emulated in regard to my interactions with people, my fathers.

Living on a farm/ranch and building a house means spending lots of time working. We cut our lumber off our own land and had it milled into planks and boards for the frame of our house, we gathered the stones used to face the house out of creek beds on the property surrounding the house. Years of my life went into the construction of that house, and years were taken off my life by the toll of hard labor and a barely-post-pubescent body. I had back problems by the time I was 14 years old. And all that time that we built that house, from staking out the corners to the last window was installed , I spent around adult, many of them mormon, men. Republicans, I believe, every one of them. Obviously I spent a considerable amount of time with my dad. I remember riding around in the back of his little 4x4 toyota pick up, looking for good rocks for the outside of the house, listening to talk radio. Whenever we were in the car, it was usually talk radio. Rush Limbaugh. I didn't know politics, all I ever heard was some guy ranting about what some government entity, or politician had DARED to do, and it was always with such incredulity that he talked about these people. Clearly he detested the people who were doing this. And there was my dad, talking back to the radio like he was in a pew at a revival service. He would yell at the radio when i guest was a "sympathizer", and he would randomly blurt out "Yeah!" when a proverbial "point" was scored by Rush, or one of his callers. I made an attempt to grasp what was being discussed, and trusted that the opinions that Rush espoused were the correct way of thinking. After all, he had books called "See I told you so" and "The Way Things Ought To Be" (I am so confident that these are the titles, that I don't feel a need to fact check and verify, I remember these titles because my dad owned both, i believe  and Rush Limbaugh would plug his books at least two or three times an hour. I was used to going to church, where nobody ever disagreed. There was no shouting in this church, reverence was the word.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was here that we always trusted, where we confided, got aid, felt peace, saw friends, learned, prayed, studied the scriptures, taught, played, worshiped, flirted, this is where we memorized key verses in the bible and Book of Mormon. This is where we learned that Baptists hate us, and we are misunderstood, abused religion whose founding father was a martyr in the cause of restoring The One Church on the Face of the Earth With a Fullness of the Gospel.... This is where we bore testimony of the truthfulness of this, This is where we came to listen to a modern prophet, who told us what we needed to know to navigate the evils of the world. We had the truth, and it was our duty to share it. This was the place where everything good happened. Except that I had always had a dirty little secret that I learned about myself when I was about 7 years old: I didn't have a testimony.  I have learned since a child that people with whom I disagree are imbeciles, and subject to scorn and ridicule, in the manner of Rush Limbaugh, my dad, and his friends. My dad was a newspaper man, he wrote a column that brushed on national politics, Choctaw Nation politics, the good ol' days... He had a strong voice, and it was one that seemed to say that he carried himself above the other characters in the story. it was elitism.

I have kind of made a tangent from the original point for the sake of some background. So you know where I stand, I cannot stand to listen to Rush Limbaugh, or his protege type pundits, like Glenn Beck, or Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, etc. I consider myself to be much more in tune with the real world, and I don't allow myself to get sucked into politics like my father did. I still have hate for the system though, and the way I show it, is very similar to the way my dad did. I have been trying to get "off the grid" for a couple of years, and I think I may succeed, I am realizing that this means I will be back to building chicken coops, gathering rocks, building houses, barns, etc. I am realizing that this means that "by the swear of my brow shalt [I] eat bread" if I am successful in gaining independence. I hated my childhood. I hated being sequestered from society and made to do manual labor, with extremely controlling and even abusive parents. I would NEVER raise my kid like that.... Yet at the same time, I want to travel... I don't think that I will ever settle down. And I certainly don't feel qualified, in this life, to raise a child. But people can have mighty changes. That's what I feel I am on the brink of.

Now, back to the topic, again. The thesis of this little record is that I feel like the way I was reared played a significant part in the way I have gone about leaving the church. As I have said, I realize now that I always doubted. I never felt a sufficient confirmation, because it made no sense to trust an emotion to manifest truth. Factual truth. WAS Joseph Smith a prophet? There was no way to know. And trusting the fuzzy feeling I got in my gut when I thought of my crushes, or listened to beautiful, secular, music was no sure-fire indication.

I had no testimony.
I still tend to consider myself and my opinions to be superior to those who think or worship differently than I.

The second part has come to my attention specifically BECAUSE my own beliefs have changed quite dramatically. I was raised Mormon, and I am now trying to navigate from the outside of Mormon culture, some why of seeing the world around me that allows me to take advantage of community, as well as the shelter from the things I don't want to be a part of my life which i was protected from as a true believing mormon. I still have visceral reactions to things that I am not consciously opposed to. Such as casual sex. Do I have casual sex? No. Do I care if my friends choose to have casual sex? Somehow, I do... I am not consciously opposed: they are adults. Yet it says to me "wrong". I don't know if this is because it is universally wrong, and I am denying a truth that I know in my core, like I was taught was the case in my former relgion, or if it is simply BECAUSE I was taught by my religion that it is wrong. Sometimes they get confused. Usually only for myself. After spending so much of my life in agony over my mortal soul for the curiosities and natural behaviors of an adolescent kid, I want to be free of being ashamed of being a living organism with a sex drive, of being at the peak of my sexuality.. I don't want to feel shame about it. And that's exactly why I take so few risks in regard to it. I know that the less liberal I am in my sexuality, the less I will have to potentially regret. But I don't want to have regrets. Because I don't believe in teaching people to regret answering to their biological functions. Like being taught that hunger is a sin, a sexual appetite is something to repent of if you are not married in the temple. This is the attitude that I grew up surrounded by. I was distressed that I might not ever be temple-worthy, and that I would never be able to have a "forever family" because I was such a "natural man".... an enemy to God. Yet I didn't have a testimony of the church. I couldn't be temple worthy without a testimony of the truthfulness of the church. That's where I drew the line. I got my Patriarchal Blessing, I was ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood office of Elder, but I could not justify the "fake it til you make it" approach to the decision to go to the temple. I wanted answers to my questions of what the covenants i would be making were, I wanted specifics, just like getting baptized. I wanted to know BEFORE I went. And no one could tell me. The "Temple Prep." classes only shared a lot of scriptures, but nothing that described a ceremony, or any outright oaths. It was all just feel good, or doomsday sort of scripture. I especially was bothered by the D&C sections on the necessity of Temple sealings. It seemed bogus. It WAS bogus. These were not the words of God. It was the last straw.

So I left. And recently, I have been wondering about the oaths I might have made, the truths I might have leanred, if I had been "endowed" in the temple. I have wondered what role these covenants have played in my childhood as a result of my parents temple marriage. That marriage is now severed by an excommunication, no more eternal family. I wonder what role the church played in this. I see how sexist the behaviors of men are in the church, and the young men who learn how to behave from their dads, just like I learned from mine, bothers me. Because the fathers all have something in common: Temple Marriages. What is this family philosophy-- these "Truths" that I never learned, that they supposedly did.

Of course, I don't expect to find that they are truths. I expect to learn the root of the machismo strain in mormon marriages. Women are subservient to men, it's all over in the D&C, and throughout church history. Religion is the originator of male domination through psychological means. Withholding affection, exercising "righteous dominion" simply by virtue of be male, and therefore eligible for the power of God, to act as an instrument in the hand of God..... These things are offensive to the modern mind. These things are more damaging to mankind than anything else. It's terrifying. I don't believe in the Mormon idea of a family. I think women should be more empowered to decide what kind of a life they want for themselves, and whether or not it will be traditional, or new age, or completely off the charts is their choice, but they don't realize that they have another option because it is taught to them since birth that they are subjects of priesthood holders. And that they should say yes when guys ask them to dance, or date, or get married. Then they are to answer to their womanly duties and become homemakers... I just don't buy it. And it is far too 19th Century Prick for me to believe that it was revelation from God. It's just not realistic, for a God to give us 70 to 80 years to get our lives figured out, and that there is a blueprint for what one's experience must be to be worthy of taking that knowledge to the next life, with a wife and children to share it with. The idea of procreation is said to be reserved only for the highest level of the celestial kingdom... These are the things that made me leave the church. Yet I am curious. And I believe, for the 20+ years I spent as a sincere member of the church, that I am entitled to know, just exactly what I opted out of. What my parents opted into, which couldn't be dissolved in divorce until, at 22 years, it finally was too much for both of them. Why did I grow up in that family. If they learned truths about family in the temple, where did they go wrong? I want to know. I deserve to know. Even if I don't ascribe to the belief system which is said to be required to be worthy of learning those covenants. Even if I don't believe it for a second. Even if I don't hold it sacred. I have done my time. But at the same time, I have spend my whole life feeling that it is wrong to talk about the temple ceremony outside of the temple. of all my RM room mates, and priesthood leaders, they always spoke in hushed tones about the temple, and only ever referred to the rooms of the temple, and the names of the ordinances they performed (sealings, Endowments, marriages,... annointings.) The only thing I ever did in the temple, was Baptisms for the Dead. And it never felt special. no more so than regular church.

Back to that movie I was talking about at the beginning. The video is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VrsFEiTpsQ&feature=plcp

I made it 1:22 seconds into this video before I was trembling with fear. I was taught that this is an abomination. To watch a temple ceremony is reserved for the endowed... yet this is the endowment ceremony I wanted to see before doing myself. This is the process that I opted out of. This is the ceremony that my parents went through... This is the heritage of the culture I was raised in.

I am terrified, and there's nothing I can do about it. I must watch it. But I have to say, just the lighting changes in this video are eerie and seem very connected with secret societies. I have a dark feeling about the temple. Already the phrasing is made to manipulate the participant to question whether or not they are spiritually in tune or not, and if not, they are asked to leave, so that the others can have the peacefulness required for the ceremony. I can't imagine if I were to have actually gone through this ceremony, I would have absolutely panicked and either run from the room, or simply beat back the voice in my head calling out to me that this is CULT behavior. I still have to watch it.

Thanks for reading.