Original post on defcon.social

Christianity primed white people to feel guilty when certain Pavlovian bells ring.

Accused? Wrongdoing even subtly implied? Guilt! Shame!

Then, if it's a respected authority doing the implying (be it parent or priest), we're primed to submit.

If we don't respect the authority of the "accuser […]

Original post on defcon.social

In Mormon news, BYU tried to make an indigenous student cut his braids. So fuck them.

Thankfully, they responded to pushback and now will not make him do that, but I'm sure they will continue to get away with all of their other attempts to control the hairstyles and harmless behaviors of […]

Original post on defcon.social

I'm watching a horror movie in a purity culture setting called Pure. It's fairly good, really liking how they're handling the themes. I feel like it's personal for the director, who's a woman.

It's not a perfect movie. Feels like the director doesn't have much experience with the horror genre […]

Original post on defcon.social

[SA within cult contexts, Epstein, Rome]

Further, I recently watched bible scholar Dan McClellan talk about homosexuality in biblical times. It' a subject I have seen him and others talk about before, and I've read about it. (But I am not an expert on ancient history – I'm just repeating.) […]

Original post on defcon.social

[SA within cult contexts, Epstein]

I've recently commented on Epstein probably not being the first of his kind, that his market for sex victims already existed, and that the sexual abuse of minors and the marginalized as a recreational activity for the rich and powerful likely goes way, way […]

Original post on defcon.social

[SA within cult contexts, kink]

New paper on sexual conditioning within cults just dropped. This article sums up the paper for a lay audience.

icsatoday.substack.com/p/dominance-and-submissi...

I am so relieved that highly respected cult researchers are finally backing […]

Christian apologists should be like, "Oh, yeah, we're really sorry about that. That isn't right. We're gonna fix that right away."

#ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie #exvagelical

And another flat-earther, whose kid is so indoctrinated and brainwashed he's insistent a co-op teacher was LYING.

#homeschooling #exvie #exfundie

A homeschool mom that believes in the antisemitic "lizard people" nonsense, and found someone else who agrees with her at a co-op. Also another flat-earther.

#homeschooling #exvie #exfundie

Homeschool parent that is also a flat-earther

#homeschooling #exvie #exfundie

Homeschool parents denying the moon landing and not understanding condensation:

#homeschooling #exvie #exfundie

Inspiring.
#exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma
#exvie #exvangelical #USPol #Antifa #resist #humanism #atheism

#atheist #religion #faith #god

👉 Vote!

🎶freedom's just another word
for nothing left to lose🎶
#solarpunk #exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma #exvie #exvangelical #USPol #Antifa #resist #humanism #atheism
#atheist #religion #faith #god

👉 Vote!

🎶freedom's just another word
for nothing left to lose🎶

#solarpunk #exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma #exvie #exvangelical #USPol #Antifa #resist #humanism #atheism

Original post on defcon.social

There definitely seems to be a vibe shift. From powerlessness and helplessness to empowerment and determination

I'm not the only one. And it's not just here on Mastodon.

Nothing is forever. No trend continues ever upward. We're learning the skills and fortitude we need. We're self-organizing […]

Inspiring.

#exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma
#exvie #exvangelical #USPol #Antifa #resist #humanism #atheism

https://youtu.be/WfM_KhzxAwo

And about a year, (I'll have to do some birthday math) I will have been out of the Mormon church for as long as I was in.

#exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma #exvie #exvangelical

Original post on defcon.social

The International Cultic Studies Association has an article this week with tips to help those who have families in cults, or who are affected by religious trauma over the holidays.

icsatoday.substack.com/p/a-message-for-those-af...

#ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie […]

Original post on defcon.social

The international Cultic Studies Association has added a new service provider directory for helping professionals who work in fields related to cult recovery and religious trauma, worldwide.

It doesn't seem like there are too many providers (that's how it was when I was seeking therapy for cult […]

JAMES DOBSON IS DEAD. AND HE’S GOING TO HELL. _By dying, on August 21 Dr. James Dobson, evangelical thought leader, anti-gay activist, and staunch defender of child abuse, did the only good thing he ever did with his life._ _photo illustration by Evan Urquhart_ Opinion, by Piper Bly **I.** It is fall in the mid-aughts. I was in seventh or eighth grade, and like most LCMS raised kids, my Wednesday evenings were spent in Catechism class. Our pastor had singled me out somewhat early as a potential candidate for pastorhood. I was “gifted”, as they put it; bright, precocious, good with words and quick to grasp concepts and see patterns. At one point, he bribed me with a “top of the line laptop”–I was rather into computers at the time–if I took a year or two at Concordia Seminary. The subject that evening was Christianity’s views on sexuality. I don’t remember much of the class’s lecture, but I do vividly remember the pastor–one of the few non-overtly abusive male figures in my life–talking about how homosexuals were destroying the family, destroying the sanctity of marriage, and were sick in the head. He quoted Dobson a few times and praised the work people like him did to protect the average Christian from the sinful threat of the homosexual’s encroachment upon God’s holy union before smiling and joking that “it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Unbeknownst to him, I had been wrestling with my sexuality and gender since my age was in single digits. My foster parents, encouraged by the Church’s teachings and Dr. James Dobson’s writings, would frequently ransack my room for contraband like home-made dresses and gender-affirming undergarments, and punish me by forcing me to the ground, removing my clothes, and smacking the shit out of my bare hide. I spent nights alternating between pleading that God would not strike me dead for my attraction to men, and praying that he _would_ show mercy and strike me down so I would not have to face another day. I spent the rest of that class with my eyes on the floor, and once again prayed that night for both forgiveness and my own death. In an alternate universe, none of that would have happened. I would have been raised in a church which affirmed my gender and sexuality, as many progressive Christian denominations do today. Perhaps I would have gone to seminary, found a Biblical background for my own queerness, and dedicated my life to preaching of the Good News of Christ Jesus instead of being the storyteller-errant I am in this one. Perhaps, in that alternate universe, I would have known love. That universe would have required Doctor James Dobson to have never existed. In this one, after eighty-nine years of preaching violence, abuse, and hatred, James Dobson is finally fucking dead. **II.** It is worth noting that the “Doctor” in Dobson’s title comes from a degree in child psychology and not theology, despite primarily being known for his work in leading the Evangelical Christian organization _Focus On The Family,_ and despite being utterly unqualified to be around children at all. He was a member of the American Psychological Association until 1973, when he resigned in disgust over the removal of homosexuality’s classification as a mental illness. He left the field to focus on his ministry at _Focus_ in 1976. That so-called ministry claims to promote the nebulous and glorified concept of the “Christian Family”, while the meat of his work destroyed thousands of real life families and childhoods in the process. He is best known for two points of advocacy on behalf of the Christian way of life: defending child-beating and eradicating queer folk from public life. This is not exaggeration or extrapolation. His published works speak for themselves, and they also form a disproportionate portion of the modern Evangelical right-wing canon. His most famous work, 1970’s _Dare To Discipline_ , stands as both his entry into the public consciousness and as an early salvo of his views. It endorses hitting toddlers as young as two and three years old (pg. 40 & 41, et al)*. It praises trauma bonding–which is classified as a form of abuse by many actual practicing psychologists, for the record–as a genuine expression of parental love (ch.1 p.2, pg. 23), bemoans the lack of stick-beatings in the classroom (ch. 3, pg.81) and spends a good deal of a book on raising children decrying the ACLU (pg. 87), the agency of women (pg. 39 & 40, et al), birth control (pg. 146), and most if not all expressions of human sexuality (ch. 5). A follow-up, 1978’s _The Strong Willed Child,_ begins by recounting a time he beat the shit out of his dog (p. 11-14) and goes on to extol the virtues of doing the same to children. Eventually, he turned his and his organization’s focus away from child psychology and towards their new favorite punching bag; gay folk. Dobson and his cohorts at the Council Of National Policy were instrumental in beating the drum of homophobic sentiment that culminated in Reagan’s genocidal handling of the AIDS Crisis in the ’80s. He kept at it from there, publishing _Marriage Under Fire_ in 2004 in which he compared the push towards legalizing gay marriage to appeasing Hitler (p.29-30) and penning an article in 2016 imploring husbands to shoot trans women who try to use the bathroom. Entire novels have been written on the harm Dobson has done; _Focus_ co-founder Gil Alexander-Moegerle’s 1977 tell-all _James Dobson’s War on America_ is one of the better ones. Honestly, though, his Wikipedia page (especially the section on his Ted Bundy interview, where Dobson showed more grace and compassion towards a serial killer than he ever did queer folk) and the Southern Policy Law Center’s page on Focus On The Family are both more damning in their brevity than anything I could pen at length. One irony is, despite what Focus On The Family’s PR agencies would have you believe, his tireless advocacy for the Christian Family may have harmed Christianity’s image and its hold on America as well. It isn’t hard to find evidence that support for Evangelical Christianity in America has been in decline for a while now, with church attendance numbers leveling off recently after a consistent decline.A record number of religious Americans have stated that gay folk should be accepted by society. It is _also_ not particularly difficult to find child abuse victims like myself whose abusers looked to Dobson for justification or guidance, or queer ex Evangelical folk irrevocably harmed by his advocacy for conversion therapy or by his ex-gay organization Love Won Out. Nor is it particularly difficult to find entire threads of people and better-written articles than mine celebrating his death and commiserating about the damage he did in the name of Christian “love”. A name-search for Dobson on Bluesky right now gives thousands of results, including some from my own account. Nearly all of the results are pissing on his grave. Every ounce of piss on that granite gender-neutral urinal is utterly deserved. **III.** I will close this with another personal anecdote. You’ll have to excuse my terrible manners, I’m not above ruining a fascist’s funeral. It is the mid-aughts. I am still in middle school. My adoptive parents have brought me to a Christian counselor, most likely because my previous therapist did such terrible things as “played chess with me to get me to talk”, “told them not to yell at me as much”, and “suggested knocking me around a bit less.” I remember the counselor asking me about my adoptive parents. I remember him listening intently to how much I wished they wouldn’t scream at me, wouldn’t hit me, wouldn’t refuse to let me leave the house. I remember mentioning that the front door of the house deadbolted from the inside, remember mentioning the room raids. I also remember deciding _not_ to mention my growing discomfort with the changes puberty was making on my body, my disgust with my physical form, my struggles with my sexuality. This was probably for the best. He let me talk for a while, listening to me telling him all about these horrible things that went on at home. Then he brought my adoptive mother in. A dark, violent grin spread across her face as he told her everything I had just told him, nearly word for word. He turned to me, and said that everything she did was justified. I was strong willed, you see. Obstinate. I needed to submit to her and my foster father’s authority. It was for my own good. They punished me in this way because they loved me, and because it was the Christian way of teaching me good morals. I needed to be beaten, to learn my place. Re-reading _Dare To Discipline_ for this article, as well as multiple other works of Dobson’s, I am realizing that much of what that counselor said to justify the abuse I endured was ripped straight from the pages of Dobson’s books. I will not tell you what happened later that night. You can probably piece it together. I will, however, tell you this. I do not believe in an afterlife. Certainly not the Christian one; not after the childhood I had, thanks in no small part to the good doctor’s teachings. I do not know what awaits us after death. And frankly, I do not care. But, if the gods _do_ exist, and they are just, James Dobson is in hell. *Page numbers from the 1977 Bantam re-publication, not the later reprints or _The New Dare To Discipline_ in this section. * * * _Piper Bly is a professional illustrator and underground cartoonist. When she’s not busy plowing away at her drawing board, singing dirges in the moonlight, or wandering throughout the United States, she can often be found tending to her ivies, frying up some biscuits, spending unreasonable hours in the gym, or floating above the Mississippi River at midnight, waiting for the tide to wrap her in its loving embrace and take her away. Her whereabouts are currently undisclosed. You, however, can find her at_ _piperbly.com_ _._

More in this article, from the personal perspective of someone who experienced abuse by parents influenced by Dobson. By Piper Bly @piper

www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/james-dobs...

#JamesDobson #AbuseCulture #ReligiousTrauma #exvangelical #exvie #exmo #exmormon

For more information, if you can stomach it, the book Breaking Their Will by Janet Heimlich gets into it. (I was unable to finish it.)

Fuck James Dobson.

#JamesDobson #AbuseCulture #ReligiousTrauma #exvangelical #exvie #exmo #exmormon

Original post on defcon.social

Not hiding this because folks need to see this, but CW for child abuse and the evils of American Christfascism. And speaking ill of the dead, which I will gladly do. I can't speak ill enough of him.

James Dobson is a major reason why *this*. Even his evangelical friends and radio cohosts […]

Original post on defcon.social

Tangent: LDS Makes "Mormon" a Bad Word

Imagine the True Meritocracy and the power of Revelation in which a PR team for an organization with direct access to God and HUNDREDS of billions of dollars faces a massive loss of members and are struggling to get more.

They look at the scene of […]

Life On Earth Snow Patrol · Wildness (Deluxe) · Song · 2018

"The way home
is always the way home,
So you can rip that map to shreds, dear."

— Snow Patrol, Life on Earth

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Cr8sOkVQqYexxiT7xRwRk

#Recovery2025 #exmo #exmormon #ReligiousTrauma #exvie #exvangelical #spirituality

Original post on defcon.social

One category I haven't searched for in all the reaction videos I've watched is "White Evangelicals React to Heilung."

I doubt I'd find any? But if I did...🍿

#Heilung #Music #rewilding #Decolonize #decolonization #AbuseCulture #paganism #ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie #exvangelical […]

As Evangelicalism grows increasingly unhinged, where is Mormonism going? Author and former Mormon Luna Corbden discusses how Latter-Day Saint churches have taught members to think and whether that’s changing

Want to hear my voice?? Just a reminder that I did a podcast recently with @mattsheffield

plus.flux.community/p/as-evangelicalism-grow...

As Evangelicalism grows increasingly unhinged, where is Mormonism going?

#exmo #exomormon #ReligiousTrauma #exvie #exvangelical

Original post on defcon.social

Hey, I did a thing with @mattsheffield! He and I discuss Mormonism in the current political climate, for your ears.

Topics:
- Challenges of free will and information control
- Mormonism created new doctrinal controversies while solving for classical Christian dilemmas
- Centralization and […]

Original post on defcon.social

A lot of typos and errors in this thread. I was fighting with my phone's autocarrot for just about every word the entire thread.

It's readable though.

🧵

#FolkHorror #Heilung #Music #rewilding #Decolonize #decolonization #AbuseCulture #paganism #ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie […]

If you're white, your ancestors lived in a tribe. There's no good in remaining divorced from that.

🧵

#Heilung #Music #rewilding #Decolonize #decolonization #AbuseCulture #paganism #ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvie #exvangelical #genealogy