Raised conservative christian, took a disgustingly long time to lose some of my shittier takes
I recently saw a shirt for sale online that says, “I’m sorry for everything I said when I was evangelical,” and that really just about sums it up.
Fellow former conservative christian here, and I share that pain. I eventually came around thanks to a LOT of patience from friends who understood my background.
I try to pay it forward by putting myself out there and extending a hand to anyone looking to understand and accept others. I have had decent success with anyone who asks in good faith.
Same. Lost a very good friend because I was too slow to change, lost my family because I did.
I’m sorry friend 🫂
Don’t beat yourself up. Seriously.
I was able to break free early partly due to how absurd the hypocrisy became. My mother was going to hell, not because she’s a cold narcissist, but a Jew and a ‘practitioner’ of new age bullshit. And my father saw nothing at all wrong with this type of belief.
Not to mention he was pretty racist (though in a ‘subtle’ way), while helping raise my adopted Korean sister.
I was lucky that he and my mother were such atrociously bad examples of how to deal with others, that I vowed to never be like them.
I didn’t figure my way out until I was in my 30s. Been out of it for over a decade.
I was brainwashed, my head was full of carefully crafted indoctrination. My extended family will almost certainly never be free of it.
We were subjected to an evil process from an early age. It’s not our fault. Losing the hate and guilt is also a process. Go easy on yourself. Takes a tough person to change their entire worldview. Only a few of us make it out.
That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, “If you play too many video games, they’ll melt your brain like your dad” or “why would anyone pay you that much” when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn’t normal and I didn’t have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.
I haven’t spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.
Some parents forget to support your goals when it’s not in-line with their goals for you; despite probably having the same childhood.
Always be looking for the opportunity to forgive them if it should appear. Not before, but be ready in case they clue-in.
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Being Mormon.
They always told us that people who gave us anti-mormon literature just made stuff up and it was Satan’s way of tempting us. They said to never take any anti-mormon literature and if someone did give it to you then to throw it away without reading.
But at the same time they taught us that the Mormon church was the true church. And they also taught us truth was absolute. Well, i figured if truth is absolute, and if the church was THE true church then it would be able to withstand any criticism. So i read anti mormon literature, like the CES letter. From there i did my own research about various things and found that the Mormon church made up a lot of stuff and did lots of gaslighting.
There was some specific issues that i also had been struggling with, like their treatment of women, gays, and black men/women. That also helped push me to want to make sure if the Mormon church was really true. And it wasn’t. Now i can love my friends unconditionally.
Good on you for challenging beliefs and forming your own opinions. Not easy to pull yourself out of these things.
Good for you because morning Mormons are batshit.
Marshmellow is not correct. It’s marshmallow. I learned by spell checker. Only took nearly 21 years.
Fun fact, it was originally made from the roots of the marsh mallow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althaea_officinalis
Again: Til
Til
I’m still reeling over cemetery not being spelled cementary and it’s been 20 years.
TIL, I guess. I always thought it was spelled with an ‘A’ too.
That misspelling means you’ve been mispronouncing it, too. (Not in a way that would be noticeable.)
The consequences of not growing up with first you take the graham, then you take the mallow!
For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who’s good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.
There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.
For me it was that other people think in the same manner, basically. But it turns out that brain usage is very different for people. So some people use more of their visual cortex for maths, making them see color in numbers.
In this video Richard Feynman explains it better then I could.
Feynman explains most things better than most people can.
This video was really interesting! Thanks!
Yeah that’s his talent, such an amazing man. If you haven’t, read his biographie.
The video is part of a longer series ‘fun to imagine’ is really with it watching them all.
A large majority of that is winning the luck lottery of which family you were born into. Most people who have “trouble staying afloat” are also those who are economically disadvantaged… as in, in the lower-90% of the economic population who are desperately just treading water. Most of the people who “breeze through life” have the intergenerational family wealth that permits this behaviour.
Yes, that has also been my experience. But this also evens out fairly well with age. I’ve come across very well put together people in their 50s and 60s whose childhood all the way through late adulthood has been literal hell. But this might be survivorship bias.
So you’re telling me we can’t just steal a baby from one of those secluded amazon tribes and force them to learn the quadratic formula so I don’t have to? there go my weekend plans :(
As a non American who has never been to the US, but grew up well within its sphere of cultural influence.
I thought that about half of the population was black, maybe 40% minimum. I was surprised to learn that it was just above 10% in reality.
They tend to be concentrated in a few areas. There was one place I lived where none of the dudes living there had ever even seen a white dude in person other than cops and social workers.
I was wrong about who I was for several years. A pretty unexpectedly intense DMT trip set me right
EDIT: This isn’t really the ideal place to elaborate on my experience, but thanks for the interest.
Care to elaborate?
They’ve remembered they are DB Cooper
I knew it!
Details?
That if you weren’t part of “our” religion (my family’s religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are
It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That’s how my parents brought me up, for which I’m still very grateful to them today. It’s good to hear that you’ve found your own path, which certainly wasn’t easy. Respect, my friend.
Three of my cousins are sisters in the same family. All three are vegans, just one of them militant.
While we enjoy the two happy vegans and their great families and their joy at sharing their chosen lifestyle, we get no judgement from them; unlike the militant sister who reminds us we’re all going to a kind of hell on earth of our own making and we deserve to be sick for eating creature-flesh, etc.
Your comment reminds me that beliefs other than religious can be used by over-eager proselytists to judge and belittle people. And yeah, she’s so off my friends list.
I thought I’d live a comfortable stable life pursuing the sciences for the sake of knowledge. I learned in the past year or two through studying political economy and climate science that this is pretty unlikely. These days idk what to do. I want to do something more useful, I want to help people but it all feels quite hopeless. It often feels like revolution is the only option but I fear it may even be too late for that. We are already past the point where hundreds of millions will die and be displaced. We are already past the point of inevitable severe famine and societal collapse in many places. We aren’t even accomplishing damage control and it feels like most people don’t even dare acknowledge it.
If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.
