Just needing to vent.

[SophieHirschfeld]

So as I type this, I'm pretty tired. I woke up far too early this morning after only five hours of sleep due to a dream that upset me at the time (but was later quite amusing) and then failed to get back to sleep due to my sister calling me. The conversation with my sister did not go well, in fact, only about half of the conversations I have with her are ever really peaceful (most of them are very tense).

In this particular conversation, my sister again encouraged me to return to church and become a better person. Clearly, by this she means a 'better person' like her because I try really hard all the time to be the best person that I can possibly be and while I make mistakes, I don't think I am even remotely close to a failure. Conversations with my sister are often charged with both direct and indirect statements about the quality of person that I am and I generally leave those conversations with an acceptance that it is more about her dogma than it really is about me and I can easily move along throughout my life with this acknowledgment as long as her criticism remains in the realm of things that are easily over looked and ambiguous. Today was not such a conversation. Today, she felt the need to be open about her thoughts of me and even mentioned my brother's thoughts of me along side them. Not my brother whom I love and cherish and see as one of my dearest friends; my other brother, the religious one.

It may be the stress from trying to relocate again, it may be the sudden realization that I now have an opportunity to distance myself from my family and it may be that my sister is just being a bitch today and I had to bear the brunt of her wrath. But today, I'm reflecting on how my personal history has led me to where I am now.

I get told all the time by people how I break stereotypes. I manage to make walls crumble where people have tried to divide people in my profession from people with my activist tendencies and from people with my views. I manage to rip apart preconceived notions of what a 'pretty' girl is and how intelligent she should or should not be. Where most people who learn just about my work are willing to assume I'm a crack-addicted stripper with an undercover prostitution tendency and a seductive, manipulating, malicious code that feeds my belly with diet pills, fast food and an edgy rooster in a cocktail of behaviors that makes a binge-eating disorder look like Harvard framed health mantra - I tend to be rather skilled at showing them exactly how they're wrong and how my work is an important and healthy aspect of my life and that the rest of my life is rather healthy, even if it is unique. There is one stereotype, though, that I fail to break down and that does apply to me (even though I know many people in my industry for whom this does not seem to apply). I'm a sexual entertainer and I have a really dysfunctional family. This dysfunctional family seems to have been highlighted in my mind this morning as if the nuclear attack sirens decided to call it out at the instant of impact.

I have a really huge family. By 'really huge,' I mean that I have an estimated 21 biological siblings (only 3 full siblings and only 4 of whom I was raised with); I have around 15 more informally 'adopted' siblings (most of whom spent some time living with me as a child) and a background of a range of 9-14 people living in the two bedroom house I grew up in at any given moment. That being said, there's far more than being a Redneck-Mormon as a child that makes my family really ********** up. I grew up in a desert amongst people who were so deeply rooted into their ingroup/outgroup thinking that my pale skin was a family joke. It did not matter that one of my brothers was almost as pale as me (he actually tanned in the summer, though, which I could rarely do), it also didn't matter that most of the family had blue eyes and I had green and nobody had brown eyes. The small fraction of native american heritage that we had (only 1/8 for my fully genetic siblings) was so important that my skin tone, being some measure paler and very sensitive to the sun, set me apart. Alongside this already strange position on appearances, my body shape was also a matter of jest in my family. In particular, I had a big ass, and my fat distribution on my body was not like that of my siblings. To further jam this into what seemed like insanity, my family expressed mild bigoted sentiments toward native american people, misunderstanding issues presented in our area and making broad claims about native religions and belief systems that I would eventually learn were untrue. The very same fraction of their heritage that they valued on one hand, they misunderstood and even disliked on the other. All of this juxtaposed with a religion that was designed, as they said, to let us be "in the world but not of the world."

An already festering boil of of lava was further agitated by the problem of me being stupid. I was not just stupid, my mother told me, I was seen as retarded by other people and my behavior was generally inappropriate and I wasn't as pretty as the other girls. There was something wrong with me. In fact, there was something wrong with me from the time I was born. That same something will always be wrong with me. Only one of my siblings other than me ever questioned my mother and only one of my siblings ever looked at my mother through a critical lens. The rest have their own versions of our childhood, each one being vastly different from the next in some places, but being exactly the same in their conclusions: Mother was a good person and mother wasn't wrong. Two of my siblings constantly echo things that my mother said about me and what she would have said if she had known where my life has gone. One sibling only echoes those things when around the other two. I am stupid, naive and evil. I have committed the unforgivable sin and I have done things that God does not like.

I should, perhaps, clarify something here. I loved my mother very much and I always wanted (very desperately) for her to love me to the same measure, for her to be proud of me and for her to acknowledge my input on things as valid. I do know, even now, that she did love me but that the love she had for me was different than what she had for my siblings. She even admitted to it, telling me that the turbulent state of her relationship with my biological father, combined with her initially thinking I was dead right after I was born (she didn't know I was alive until over 24 hours had passed after my birth) had prevented her from ever having a healthy bonding experience with me. The rift caused by this, or caused by whatever invisible thing that factored in that she retroactively explained by this, contributes significantly to who I am. My mother wasn't entirely a bad person. Before she was sick, she was more kind. After she got sick, she was emotional and sometimes kinda crazy. For some reason, that craziness was amplified when I was around.

It is an odd thing that we automatically cherish our parents. It is evolutionarily and socially beneficial for us to do so but (contrary to popular belief) it is not their *********** and forgetting the condom that makes them worthy of note to us. It is, instead, the building of our world that makes them worthy of cherishing. It is the product of their efforts that determines if they are successful or not. My world as a child was carefully constructed by my mother and reinforced by my (step)father even if only by his support of her (my father didn't/doesn't think I'm stupid and only said I was ugly in the context of his favorite joke, "you sure are an ugly boy ... [long pause] ... but you make a darling, cute little girl"). My childhood was was also accented by my grandmothers (one of whom I was shipped away to every summer from the time I was 8 until I was 18) and the sudden necessity to help raise my sister when I was 13, after my mother became ill. Of the five children that consistently stayed in our home when I was a child (myself included), my parents raised one very loyal and dogmatic, but educated, Mormon woman who is extreme enough to switch social roles with her husband, being the main breadwinner, but not so extreme as to view any doctrine of the Mormon faith in a negative light. There is also a dogmatic and well stereotyped church leader, teacher, returned missionary and high school coach, ready with a sermon at any given moment, a homophobic, self-righteous bigot who happens to be my brother. Next in line is me, a camgirl, stripper, model, phone sex actress, writer and activist who happens to have lots of allergies, including an allergy to the sun - all other qualities, I leave to the reader to determine as I do not feel qualified to describe them. Another brother is a deist, a hard worker, a great father and just as poor and redneck as he was raised, but more awesomely presented even though the first two siblings see him as some degree of dysfunctional somewhere between them and myself. The last of the main brood is a meth addict, a crackhead, has borderline personality disorder, a chronic liar, has occasionally prostituted herself out for drugs, has stolen from everybody in the family more than once and happens to also be the one that I helped raise from the time I was 13 and she was 5 (right after mother got sick). Apparently, I'm no better than my parents at this whole life-building thing.

I'm looking forward to moving in less than a week. Opportunities abound that were not previously available to me. I'm no longer stuck in this tiny little dying town that I've been anchored to for years and I'm able to leave behind some of my family's dependence on me. Good things are happening to me. No, GREAT things are happening to me. Still, today, carefully painted over the glaze of my excitement over moving, just like a craftsman painting lead-enriched gold paint onto the edge of some Chinese pottery, my sister again echoed what my mother said and what she thinks my mother would have said about me and my life. I'm a sad person, I'm different and nobody views the world the way I do so I must be wrong. There is no other possible explanation for anything I do or say other than I'm wrong and she is right. Not only is she right, she is morally superior, she's better, smarter, stronger. She is irrefutably flawless and I am a mere shard of insignificance, soaking in an acidic bath of evil.

My sister knows nothing of my work or my sexual preferences. My undefined fraction of gayness is a carefully guarded secret that I only discuss within the bounds of the illusion of safety on the internet and with a couple very close friends. My move marks the beginning of my opportunities to be out and open about being bisexual. It marks the beginning of me being able to explore that. It also marks the beginning of me being open about my work in my regular life instead of pretending my life is boring and dull as I toy with websites all day. My sister, though, only knows that I stripped in the past for a few months and that I'm an atheist. That's what she bases her judgments on.

My sister's brief speech to me today represents more than just what she said to me, though. It represents a chapter in my life that I feel like I'm closing (even if I still have a long way to go). It represents me losing all of my friends over leaving my religion 6 years ago. It represents me leaving my ex husband and all the related ordeals that tied into my divorce. I also represents a chance for me to get over a time when nightmarish things just happened, things that I can't talk about even here.

This isn't really a post about religion itself or philosophy so much as a fragment of consequences that are related to dogma. I don't blame religion itself for the nonsense that exists in my life. Dogma is the real problem and is a better explanation for things like the blind adherence to my mother's words that my siblings display. I think I only posted it here because I was going to go on a tirade about all the obnoxious things my sister believes in while simultaneously highlighting my allegedly evil and stupid nature, but I wound up just complaining about life.

To take this story into a different direction, and perhaps to bring it back to where I had intended, I suddenly remember this conversation I had with someone not long ago. This person was confused at how someone who claims to be rational and who is perhaps a member of the scientific community can reconcile that aspect of themselves with being a religious person. I've seen this problem presented by people before and I have even seen people claim that because of their religious views, the individual's role in science is somehow a lesser thing. I don't really think this is true.

I think that there is a common misunderstanding amongst the non religious that the religious are always irrational and that there's nothing that makes their decisions within religion rational. This stance is not entirely accurate. Most religious people have been that way their whole life. Their religion is a part of them. Imagine, for a moment, a common meal that you remember from your childhood, served by the person you most admired from that time. Take that sensation and amplify it by however many times you need to to make it saturate your life to the extent that a religion will saturate a believer's life. Imagine that it is a part of your daily routines. Your food is served to you in commemoration of this memory; you spend one day a week focusing on it and applying it to any life situation you may be facing; you're encouraged to acknowledge it several times a day and even perform daily rituals for it. Your career choices may be influenced by it and your life opportunities may be facilitated by the social network you've built around it. As bizarre and unlikely as it sounds, if, at any moment, this memory was suddenly false; if the illusion of the memory being linked to your life was ever made clear ... you stand to lose everything. People who defend their dogma have a twisted, but not entirely irrational, reason to do so. Because if they don't, it is often the case that a part of their life breaks.

I don't say this to defend religion. It is not my place to do so and I still feel that religion plays a major role in damaging people and society, but it isn't *just* religion alone that does it. You can abolish religion and still have dogmas that continue to do their own damage. You can abolish religion and still have herbalists and homeopaths and AIDS deniers and clowns. The same things that I mention above as being reasons people cling to a religion are the things that make people cling to these other dogmas, even if it is on a smaller scale. If your income is based entirely on homeopathic drugs, then you're unlikely to want to give up that support. If you think that denying AIDS means that you're spending a lifetime with your children that you otherwise would not have, then you're likely to deny the disease's existence. The dogma is understandable, but the dogma still does harm.

If that is the case, my friend has asked, how do we deal with the problem for those people? I told him that the answer was to find something else to replace the dogma for them. If all your social ties are within a religion and you need to leave it, you have to have new social ties or leaving it will either fail or leave you suffering. If you know that, you won't leave religion, but if you have support outside of religion, it is easier to leave. The same applies to people who believe in various forms of woo. A 9/11 truther may need a new cause; a homeopath needs a new job and a psychic needs a new way to attention whore.

I'm leaving this town. I'm still escaping the people in my family who hurt me. I'm finally getting the things I needed to replace the void left behind when I realized I wasn't stupid or ugly or deserving of someone's wrath. While my sister's absurd diatribe this morning was stupid itself, I'm still very glad that I'm getting the **** out of here and it isn't going to tarnish my day anymore.

Thanks for letting me vent, I needed that and had no other place that I felt I could properly do so without interrupting my best friend's day at work.

[Nogbad]

This Be The Verse

They **** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were ********** up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


Philip Larkin

[godless dave]

If you don't already have it, it's time to get Caller ID and only answer the phone for people you actually want to talk to.

[Kthulhut Fhtagn]

If you don't already have it, it's time to get Caller ID and only answer the phone for people you actually want to talk to.

Not always that easy to just cut family off you know.

[shadron]

That is quite a statement, Ma'm. Quite a statement.

The one thing that strikes me is that you must have a tremendous amount of ego/self-confidence in order to have pursued your path and still remained living in the same small town in which you were brought up, even more especially as it is (possibly) majority Mormon, with all the social pressures that brings on a person. It is rare for anyone to withstand that sort of pressure, and I'm sure it must be very wearing. So I, too, applaud your moving to elsewhere.

You might be interested in reading about Nate Phelps, the son of the monomaniac Fred Phelps, and how his family was torn apart by religion and his father's peculiar interpretation of it (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=140821).

Writing about the issues you face can be cathartic, especially if you can find a receptive audience. I hope we are of that kind of assistance to you.

[The Atheist]

Thanks for letting me vent, I needed that and had no other place that I felt I could properly do so without interrupting my best friend's day at work.

Please feel free to rant like that anytime!

You're among friends in here.

I'd say you've already earned the respect of 96.3% of people who will ever read your post.

[hallon]

It sounds like you're a very brave and strong person. I'm sure you will create a great new life for yourself. Good luck on your journey!

[godless dave]

Not always that easy to just cut family off you know.

I didn't even mention cutting off family. I'm just advocating not answering the phone when certain people call, especially when you're trying to get back to sleep. Having a phone in your house does not obligate you to answer it every time it rings.

[Kthulhut Fhtagn]

I didn't even mention cutting off family. I'm just advocating not answering the phone when certain people call, especially when you're trying to get back to sleep. Having a phone in your house does not obligate you to answer it every time it rings.

Fair enough. Just thought it was worth pointing out that despite my and my family's best efforts we still haven't completely cut one another off.

[Safe-Keeper]

All the best to you. Never, ever underestimate the power of a Fresh Start. Moving to a place with no rumors, stigma or bad expectations towards you as a person can make a huge difference.

[bickerer]

Wow, what an eloquent and moving post! Best of luck and happiness in your new (hopefully) angst free life. You can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself, as some songwriter once sang, and it sounds like that may be what you're going to have to do.

[thull]

Good luck and enjoy.

"a dream that upset me at the time (but was later quite amusing)"
Seems the only advice you'll need to take from this thread is within Post #1.
It is surprising how time and some thought can cast emotional experiences into a completely different light.

[MG1962]

I appreciate posts like this. For some us it makes us realise how lucky we are not to face the obstacles you do.

For others who are facing the same challenges, it is comforting to know we are not alone, and there can be solutions

[Nogbad]

Good luck and enjoy.

"a dream that upset me at the time (but was later quite amusing)"
Seems the only advice you'll need to take from this thread is within Post #1.
It is surprising how time and some thought can cast emotional experiences into a completely different light.

I would agree completely with that. My earlier post was much less advice and more something that I hoped might give you a wry smile - although it may well be a poem you already know.

[Fireshadow]

Wow, I don't know that I have the words to express my admiration for your eloquence and strength. I know from watching other people (my wife, mainly--I, luckily, didn't have that to go through) deal with the closed-mindedness and religious fervor of their family how tough it is to make that escape. Don't beat yourself up over your younger sister's shortcomings--there's a reason 13 year olds are discouraged to become parents. And don't ever let anyone make you believe that you are worthless--it's clear from how you express yourself that this is not the case.

[Ron_Tomkins]

So as I type this, I'm pretty tired. I woke up far too early this morning after only five hours of sleep due to a dream that upset me at the time (but was later quite amusing) and then failed to get back to sleep due to my sister calling me. The conversation with my sister did not go well, in fact, only about half of the conversations I have with her are ever really peaceful (most of them are very tense).

In this particular conversation, my sister again encouraged me to return to church and become a better person. Clearly, by this she means a 'better person' like her because I try really hard all the time to be the best person that I can possibly be and while I make mistakes, I don't think I am even remotely close to a failure. Conversations with my sister are often charged with both direct and indirect statements about the quality of person that I am and I generally leave those conversations with an acceptance that it is more about her dogma than it really is about me and I can easily move along throughout my life with this acknowledgment as long as her criticism remains in the realm of things that are easily over looked and ambiguous. Today was not such a conversation. Today, she felt the need to be open about her thoughts of me and even mentioned my brother's thoughts of me along side them. Not my brother whom I love and cherish and see as one of my dearest friends; my other brother, the religious one.

It may be the stress from trying to relocate again, it may be the sudden realization that I now have an opportunity to distance myself from my family and it may be that my sister is just being a bitch today and I had to bear the brunt of her wrath. But today, I'm reflecting on how my personal history has led me to where I am now.

I get told all the time by people how I break stereotypes. I manage to make walls crumble where people have tried to divide people in my profession from people with my activist tendencies and from people with my views. I manage to rip apart preconceived notions of what a 'pretty' girl is and how intelligent she should or should not be. Where most people who learn just about my work are willing to assume I'm a crack-addicted stripper with an undercover prostitution tendency and a seductive, manipulating, malicious code that feeds my belly with diet pills, fast food and an edgy rooster in a cocktail of behaviors that makes a binge-eating disorder look like Harvard framed health mantra - I tend to be rather skilled at showing them exactly how they're wrong and how my work is an important and healthy aspect of my life and that the rest of my life is rather healthy, even if it is unique. There is one stereotype, though, that I fail to break down and that does apply to me (even though I know many people in my industry for whom this does not seem to apply). I'm a sexual entertainer and I have a really dysfunctional family. This dysfunctional family seems to have been highlighted in my mind this morning as if the nuclear attack sirens decided to call it out at the instant of impact.

I have a really huge family. By 'really huge,' I mean that I have an estimated 21 biological siblings (only 3 full siblings and only 4 of whom I was raised with); I have around 15 more informally 'adopted' siblings (most of whom spent some time living with me as a child) and a background of a range of 9-14 people living in the two bedroom house I grew up in at any given moment. That being said, there's far more than being a Redneck-Mormon as a child that makes my family really ********** up. I grew up in a desert amongst people who were so deeply rooted into their ingroup/outgroup thinking that my pale skin was a family joke. It did not matter that one of my brothers was almost as pale as me (he actually tanned in the summer, though, which I could rarely do), it also didn't matter that most of the family had blue eyes and I had green and nobody had brown eyes. The small fraction of native american heritage that we had (only 1/8 for my fully genetic siblings) was so important that my skin tone, being some measure paler and very sensitive to the sun, set me apart. Alongside this already strange position on appearances, my body shape was also a matter of jest in my family. In particular, I had a big ass, and my fat distribution on my body was not like that of my siblings. To further jam this into what seemed like insanity, my family expressed mild bigoted sentiments toward native american people, misunderstanding issues presented in our area and making broad claims about native religions and belief systems that I would eventually learn were untrue. The very same fraction of their heritage that they valued on one hand, they misunderstood and even disliked on the other. All of this juxtaposed with a religion that was designed, as they said, to let us be "in the world but not of the world."

An already festering boil of of lava was further agitated by the problem of me being stupid. I was not just stupid, my mother told me, I was seen as retarded by other people and my behavior was generally inappropriate and I wasn't as pretty as the other girls. There was something wrong with me. In fact, there was something wrong with me from the time I was born. That same something will always be wrong with me. Only one of my siblings other than me ever questioned my mother and only one of my siblings ever looked at my mother through a critical lens. The rest have their own versions of our childhood, each one being vastly different from the next in some places, but being exactly the same in their conclusions: Mother was a good person and mother wasn't wrong. Two of my siblings constantly echo things that my mother said about me and what she would have said if she had known where my life has gone. One sibling only echoes those things when around the other two. I am stupid, naive and evil. I have committed the unforgivable sin and I have done things that God does not like.

I should, perhaps, clarify something here. I loved my mother very much and I always wanted (very desperately) for her to love me to the same measure, for her to be proud of me and for her to acknowledge my input on things as valid. I do know, even now, that she did love me but that the love she had for me was different than what she had for my siblings. She even admitted to it, telling me that the turbulent state of her relationship with my biological father, combined with her initially thinking I was dead right after I was born (she didn't know I was alive until over 24 hours had passed after my birth) had prevented her from ever having a healthy bonding experience with me. The rift caused by this, or caused by whatever invisible thing that factored in that she retroactively explained by this, contributes significantly to who I am. My mother wasn't entirely a bad person. Before she was sick, she was more kind. After she got sick, she was emotional and sometimes kinda crazy. For some reason, that craziness was amplified when I was around.

It is an odd thing that we automatically cherish our parents. It is evolutionarily and socially beneficial for us to do so but (contrary to popular belief) it is not their *********** and forgetting the condom that makes them worthy of note to us. It is, instead, the building of our world that makes them worthy of cherishing. It is the product of their efforts that determines if they are successful or not. My world as a child was carefully constructed by my mother and reinforced by my (step)father even if only by his support of her (my father didn't/doesn't think I'm stupid and only said I was ugly in the context of his favorite joke, "you sure are an ugly boy ... [long pause] ... but you make a darling, cute little girl"). My childhood was was also accented by my grandmothers (one of whom I was shipped away to every summer from the time I was 8 until I was 18) and the sudden necessity to help raise my sister when I was 13, after my mother became ill. Of the five children that consistently stayed in our home when I was a child (myself included), my parents raised one very loyal and dogmatic, but educated, Mormon woman who is extreme enough to switch social roles with her husband, being the main breadwinner, but not so extreme as to view any doctrine of the Mormon faith in a negative light. There is also a dogmatic and well stereotyped church leader, teacher, returned missionary and high school coach, ready with a sermon at any given moment, a homophobic, self-righteous bigot who happens to be my brother. Next in line is me, a camgirl, stripper, model, phone sex actress, writer and activist who happens to have lots of allergies, including an allergy to the sun - all other qualities, I leave to the reader to determine as I do not feel qualified to describe them. Another brother is a deist, a hard worker, a great father and just as poor and redneck as he was raised, but more awesomely presented even though the first two siblings see him as some degree of dysfunctional somewhere between them and myself. The last of the main brood is a meth addict, a crackhead, has borderline personality disorder, a chronic liar, has occasionally prostituted herself out for drugs, has stolen from everybody in the family more than once and happens to also be the one that I helped raise from the time I was 13 and she was 5 (right after mother got sick). Apparently, I'm no better than my parents at this whole life-building thing.

I'm looking forward to moving in less than a week. Opportunities abound that were not previously available to me. I'm no longer stuck in this tiny little dying town that I've been anchored to for years and I'm able to leave behind some of my family's dependence on me. Good things are happening to me. No, GREAT things are happening to me. Still, today, carefully painted over the glaze of my excitement over moving, just like a craftsman painting lead-enriched gold paint onto the edge of some Chinese pottery, my sister again echoed what my mother said and what she thinks my mother would have said about me and my life. I'm a sad person, I'm different and nobody views the world the way I do so I must be wrong. There is no other possible explanation for anything I do or say other than I'm wrong and she is right. Not only is she right, she is morally superior, she's better, smarter, stronger. She is irrefutably flawless and I am a mere shard of insignificance, soaking in an acidic bath of evil.

My sister knows nothing of my work or my sexual preferences. My undefined fraction of gayness is a carefully guarded secret that I only discuss within the bounds of the illusion of safety on the internet and with a couple very close friends. My move marks the beginning of my opportunities to be out and open about being bisexual. It marks the beginning of me being able to explore that. It also marks the beginning of me being open about my work in my regular life instead of pretending my life is boring and dull as I toy with websites all day. My sister, though, only knows that I stripped in the past for a few months and that I'm an atheist. That's what she bases her judgments on.

My sister's brief speech to me today represents more than just what she said to me, though. It represents a chapter in my life that I feel like I'm closing (even if I still have a long way to go). It represents me losing all of my friends over leaving my religion 6 years ago. It represents me leaving my ex husband and all the related ordeals that tied into my divorce. I also represents a chance for me to get over a time when nightmarish things just happened, things that I can't talk about even here.

This isn't really a post about religion itself or philosophy so much as a fragment of consequences that are related to dogma. I don't blame religion itself for the nonsense that exists in my life. Dogma is the real problem and is a better explanation for things like the blind adherence to my mother's words that my siblings display. I think I only posted it here because I was going to go on a tirade about all the obnoxious things my sister believes in while simultaneously highlighting my allegedly evil and stupid nature, but I wound up just complaining about life.

To take this story into a different direction, and perhaps to bring it back to where I had intended, I suddenly remember this conversation I had with someone not long ago. This person was confused at how someone who claims to be rational and who is perhaps a member of the scientific community can reconcile that aspect of themselves with being a religious person. I've seen this problem presented by people before and I have even seen people claim that because of their religious views, the individual's role in science is somehow a lesser thing. I don't really think this is true.

I think that there is a common misunderstanding amongst the non religious that the religious are always irrational and that there's nothing that makes their decisions within religion rational. This stance is not entirely accurate. Most religious people have been that way their whole life. Their religion is a part of them. Imagine, for a moment, a common meal that you remember from your childhood, served by the person you most admired from that time. Take that sensation and amplify it by however many times you need to to make it saturate your life to the extent that a religion will saturate a believer's life. Imagine that it is a part of your daily routines. Your food is served to you in commemoration of this memory; you spend one day a week focusing on it and applying it to any life situation you may be facing; you're encouraged to acknowledge it several times a day and even perform daily rituals for it. Your career choices may be influenced by it and your life opportunities may be facilitated by the social network you've built around it. As bizarre and unlikely as it sounds, if, at any moment, this memory was suddenly false; if the illusion of the memory being linked to your life was ever made clear ... you stand to lose everything. People who defend their dogma have a twisted, but not entirely irrational, reason to do so. Because if they don't, it is often the case that a part of their life breaks.

I don't say this to defend religion. It is not my place to do so and I still feel that religion plays a major role in damaging people and society, but it isn't *just* religion alone that does it. You can abolish religion and still have dogmas that continue to do their own damage. You can abolish religion and still have herbalists and homeopaths and AIDS deniers and clowns. The same things that I mention above as being reasons people cling to a religion are the things that make people cling to these other dogmas, even if it is on a smaller scale. If your income is based entirely on homeopathic drugs, then you're unlikely to want to give up that support. If you think that denying AIDS means that you're spending a lifetime with your children that you otherwise would not have, then you're likely to deny the disease's existence. The dogma is understandable, but the dogma still does harm.

If that is the case, my friend has asked, how do we deal with the problem for those people? I told him that the answer was to find something else to replace the dogma for them. If all your social ties are within a religion and you need to leave it, you have to have new social ties or leaving it will either fail or leave you suffering. If you know that, you won't leave religion, but if you have support outside of religion, it is easier to leave. The same applies to people who believe in various forms of woo. A 9/11 truther may need a new cause; a homeopath needs a new job and a psychic needs a new way to attention whore.

I'm leaving this town. I'm still escaping the people in my family who hurt me. I'm finally getting the things I needed to replace the void left behind when I realized I wasn't stupid or ugly or deserving of someone's wrath. While my sister's absurd diatribe this morning was stupid itself, I'm still very glad that I'm getting the **** out of here and it isn't going to tarnish my day anymore.

Thanks for letting me vent, I needed that and had no other place that I felt I could properly do so without interrupting my best friend's day at work.

Hi

I just wanna say that I believe every family is in a way dysfunctional. No, I haven't run the poll, but there seems to be at least a major tendency. I've always felt that my family on my dad's side is completely insane (in the good sense, though) and now just recently, after visiting my hometown, I got to know the not-so stable side of my mother's side of the family

I don't wanna run a cheap amateur psychoanalysis here and it is really not up to me to get involved, but I just thought I'd give you a general friendly advice: Try not to make your whole "moving out" project something motivated on the premise of "getting away from your family". I say that because of the following: You're not really getting away in the sense that, when we have this kind of issue, it affects us from inside, so wherever we are located geographically, that doesn't change. Your life projects should be about you, not about other people. If you move to escape the people who hurt you, you're only moving away from them distance-wise and yes, you're technically not seeing them nor talking to them, but you can't escape the pain they generated. If, on the other hand, you found a way to find peace with yourself and reach a state of mind in which you can forgive them and yourself, then your moving can be about your current plans, projects and ambitions and everything can move forward

Sincerely


Ron

[The Nimble Pianist]

That is a really large post, so I'm going to respond in real time as I read, so please pardon me if I ask questions or make comments that seem premature. I haven't read the entire thing and then responded...

So as I type this, I'm pretty tired. I woke up far too early this morning after only five hours of sleep due to a dream that upset me at the time (but was later quite amusing) and then failed to get back to sleep due to my sister calling me. The conversation with my sister did not go well, in fact, only about half of the conversations I have with her are ever really peaceful (most of them are very tense).

In this particular conversation, my sister again encouraged me to return to church and become a better person.

Sounds like every conversation I have with two of my older brothers. To save me the agrivation, I no longer speak to them on the phone, only simple chatting at thanksgiving is about all I can stand.

Clearly, by this she means a 'better person' like her because I try really hard all the time to be the best person that I can possibly be and while I make mistakes, I don't think I am even remotely close to a failure.

I've formulated a little hypothesis as to why my own family members do this (as well as many of my former friends from my former church). It seems that they are of the belief that nobody in their right mind would ever leave, defect from, or even slow their activity in the church. "The church is just so obviously true!" When confronted with a person who has indeed defected from the church (me), they can only rationalize it with their preexisting "the church is true" paradigm by marginalizing the former members and essentially making up things about their "worthiness" or affinity to "immoral things".

I was raised in a very devoutly Mormon household. When I confided in one of my older brother's that I no longer believed, he responded by asking "So what immoral thing are you doing? Smoking? Drinking? Having sex with your girlfriend?"

This isn't to say that this is necessarily the reason why your sister acts in such a way. Merely an observation about my own family.

Conversations with my sister are often charged with both direct and indirect statements about the quality of person that I am and I generally leave those conversations with an acceptance that it is more about her dogma than it really is about me and I can easily move along throughout my life with this acknowledgment as long as her criticism remains in the realm of things that are easily over looked and ambiguous. Today was not such a conversation. Today, she felt the need to be open about her thoughts of me and even mentioned my brother's thoughts of me along side them. Not my brother whom I love and cherish and see as one of my dearest friends; my other brother, the religious one.

It may be the stress from trying to relocate again, it may be the sudden realization that I now have an opportunity to distance myself from my family and it may be that my sister is just being a bitch today and I had to bear the brunt of her wrath. But today, I'm reflecting on how my personal history has led me to where I am now.

I get told all the time by people how I break stereotypes. I manage to make walls crumble where people have tried to divide people in my profession from people with my activist tendencies and from people with my views. I manage to rip apart preconceived notions of what a 'pretty' girl is and how intelligent she should or should not be. Where most people who learn just about my work are willing to assume I'm a crack-addicted stripper with an undercover prostitution tendency and a seductive, manipulating, malicious code that feeds my belly with diet pills, fast food and an edgy rooster in a cocktail of behaviors that makes a binge-eating disorder look like Harvard framed health mantra - I tend to be rather skilled at showing them exactly how they're wrong and how my work is an important and healthy aspect of my life and that the rest of my life is rather healthy, even if it is unique. There is one stereotype, though, that I fail to break down and that does apply to me (even though I know many people in my industry for whom this does not seem to apply). I'm a sexual entertainer and I have a really dysfunctional family.

Ah, so does your sister know about this choice of occupation? Is this where her chastisement resides?

This dysfunctional family seems to have been highlighted in my mind this morning as if the nuclear attack sirens decided to call it out at the instant of impact.

I have a really huge family. By 'really huge,' I mean that I have an estimated 21 biological siblings (only 3 full siblings and only 4 of whom I was raised with); I have around 15 more informally 'adopted' siblings (most of whom spent some time living with me as a child) and a background of a range of 9-14 people living in the two bedroom house I grew up in at any given moment.

Oh my God, and I thought my childhood of 8 siblings was "huge". Please, I mean no disrespect by this, but in my experience as a former Mormon with extensive Utahn and Arizonan family (some of which are even Fundamentalist Mormons) I must ask.... Is your family Fundie Mormon? Mormons are infamous for their larger than average families, but 21 siblings!? I've only seen that kind of family in southwestern Utah; and there was always more than one mommy involved.

That being said, there's far more than being a Redneck-Mormon as a child that makes my family really ********** up. I grew up in a desert amongst people who were so deeply rooted into their ingroup/outgroup thinking that my pale skin was a family joke. It did not matter that one of my brothers was almost as pale as me (he actually tanned in the summer, though, which I could rarely do), it also didn't matter that most of the family had blue eyes and I had green and nobody had brown eyes. The small fraction of native american heritage that we had (only 1/8 for my fully genetic siblings) was so important that my skin tone, being some measure paler and very sensitive to the sun, set me apart. Alongside this already strange position on appearances, my body shape was also a matter of jest in my family. In particular, I had a big ass, and my fat distribution on my body was not like that of my siblings. To further jam this into what seemed like insanity, my family expressed mild bigoted sentiments toward native american people, misunderstanding issues presented in our area and making broad claims about native religions and belief systems that I would eventually learn were untrue.

Like "Those poor Lamanite fools don't even realize how much they've perverted the gospel of Jesus Christ."

I understand exactly where you're coming from.

The very same fraction of their heritage that they valued on one hand, they misunderstood and even disliked on the other. All of this juxtaposed with a religion that was designed, as they said, to let us be "in the world but not of the world."

An already festering boil of of lava was further agitated by the problem of me being stupid. I was not just stupid, my mother told me, I was seen as retarded by other people and my behavior was generally inappropriate and I wasn't as pretty as the other girls. There was something wrong with me. In fact, there was something wrong with me from the time I was born. That same something will always be wrong with me. Only one of my siblings other than me ever questioned my mother and only one of my siblings ever looked at my mother through a critical lens. The rest have their own versions of our childhood, each one being vastly different from the next in some places, but being exactly the same in their conclusions: Mother was a good person and mother wasn't wrong. Two of my siblings constantly echo things that my mother said about me and what she would have said if she had known where my life has gone. One sibling only echoes those things when around the other two. I am stupid, naive and evil. I have committed the unforgivable sin and I have done things that God does not like.

I should, perhaps, clarify something here. I loved my mother very much and I always wanted (very desperately) for her to love me to the same measure, for her to be proud of me and for her to acknowledge my input on things as valid. I do know, even now, that she did love me but that the love she had for me was different than what she had for my siblings. She even admitted to it, telling me that the turbulent state of her relationship with my biological father, combined with her initially thinking I was dead right after I was born (she didn't know I was alive until over 24 hours had passed after my birth) had prevented her from ever having a healthy bonding experience with me. The rift caused by this, or caused by whatever invisible thing that factored in that she retroactively explained by this, contributes significantly to who I am. My mother wasn't entirely a bad person. Before she was sick, she was more kind. After she got sick, she was emotional and sometimes kinda crazy. For some reason, that craziness was amplified when I was around.

It is an odd thing that we automatically cherish our parents. It is evolutionarily and socially beneficial for us to do so but (contrary to popular belief) it is not their *********** and forgetting the condom that makes them worthy of note to us. It is, instead, the building of our world that makes them worthy of cherishing. It is the product of their efforts that determines if they are successful or not.

Absolutely!

My world as a child was carefully constructed by my mother and reinforced by my (step)father even if only by his support of her (my father didn't/doesn't think I'm stupid and only said I was ugly in the context of his favorite joke, "you sure are an ugly boy ... [long pause] ... but you make a darling, cute little girl"). My childhood was was also accented by my grandmothers (one of whom I was shipped away to every summer from the time I was 8 until I was 18) and the sudden necessity to help raise my sister when I was 13, after my mother became ill. Of the five children that consistently stayed in our home when I was a child (myself included), my parents raised one very loyal and dogmatic, but educated, Mormon woman who is extreme enough to switch social roles with her husband, being the main breadwinner, but not so extreme as to view any doctrine of the Mormon faith in a negative light.

Wow. Can't believe I missed this earlier in your "vent". Sorry for even more curiosity. Is your family LDS or Mormon of some other, fundamentalist variety. I understand (from earlier in your post) that your 21 siblings are related biologically, most of whom by only one parent. Was your family practicing secret polygamy while members of the LDS church? You don't need to answer this question, I'm just really intrigued by this.

There is also a dogmatic and well stereotyped church leader, teacher, returned missionary and high school coach, ready with a sermon at any given moment, a homophobic, self-righteous bigot who happens to be my brother. Next in line is me, a camgirl, stripper, model, phone sex actress, writer and activist who happens to have lots of allergies, including an allergy to the sun - all other qualities, I leave to the reader to determine as I do not feel qualified to describe them. Another brother is a deist, a hard worker, a great father and just as poor and redneck as he was raised, but more awesomely presented even though the first two siblings see him as some degree of dysfunctional somewhere between them and myself. The last of the main brood is a meth addict, a crackhead, has borderline personality disorder, a chronic liar, has occasionally prostituted herself out for drugs, has stolen from everybody in the family more than once and happens to also be the one that I helped raise from the time I was 13 and she was 5 (right after mother got sick). Apparently, I'm no better than my parents at this whole life-building thing.

I know it's probably of little condolence, but you cannot accurately compare you with your parents. You were 13! They were grown adults. Not to mention, your youngest sibling was raised by other allegedly dysfunctional people and dealt with the same parents you've dealt with. There's no reason to assume you had ANYTHING to do with how your sister has "come out".

I'm looking forward to moving in less than a week. Opportunities abound that were not previously available to me. I'm no longer stuck in this tiny little dying town that I've been anchored to for years and I'm able to leave behind some of my family's dependence on me. Good things are happening to me. No, GREAT things are happening to me.

Congratulations!!!!

Still, today, carefully painted over the glaze of my excitement over moving, just like a craftsman painting lead-enriched gold paint onto the edge of some Chinese pottery, my sister again echoed what my mother said and what she thinks my mother would have said about me and my life. I'm a sad person, I'm different and nobody views the world the way I do so I must be wrong. There is no other possible explanation for anything I do or say other than I'm wrong and she is right. Not only is she right, she is morally superior, she's better, smarter, stronger. She is irrefutably flawless and I am a mere shard of insignificance, soaking in an acidic bath of evil.

Now that I know your holier-than-thou sister is Mormon, I can confidently say to ignore anything and everything she says concerning morality and religion. I don't want to say I've had the exact same experiences as you, but as I shared early on in this reply my experience of the moral castigation was almost identical, and it hinged on the Mormonism of my family members. Your sister is brainwashed into believe that you are inherently evil. There is no changing her mind unless you can get her to change her religion, so either tolerate it or leave her and never look back. It's really the only two choices we have.


My sister knows nothing of my work or my sexual preferences.

In light of this, please forgive my earlier question about your sister's knowledge of your profession. Again, I'm responding to each part of this in real time as I read it.

My undefined fraction of gayness is a carefully guarded secret that I only discuss within the bounds of the illusion of safety on the internet and with a couple very close friends. My move marks the beginning of my opportunities to be out and open about being bisexual. It marks the beginning of me being able to explore that.

Very smart! I still haven't come out to ANY of my family members, and likely never will. I'm sure there must be a Mormon out there in a church of 13 million members that isn't homophobic; likely one of the INACTIVE ones. My family being entirely practicing (some of whom hold very high callings in the church) would never ever accept a gay or bisexual family member.

Moreover, coming out to your Mormon family while you live in UTAH, ESPECIALLY OUTSIDE OF AND URBAN AREAS LIKE THE DESERT, is social suicide. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that.

It also marks the beginning of me being open about my work in my regular life instead of pretending my life is boring and dull as I toy with websites all day. My sister, though, only knows that I stripped in the past for a few months and that I'm an atheist. That's what she bases her judgments on.

My sister's brief speech to me today represents more than just what she said to me, though. It represents a chapter in my life that I feel like I'm closing (even if I still have a long way to go). It represents me losing all of my friends over leaving my religion 6 years ago. It represents me leaving my ex husband and all the related ordeals that tied into my divorce. I also represents a chance for me to get over a time when nightmarish things just happened, things that I can't talk about even here.

Reminds me a bit of when I first left Utah to come here to San Francisco. Very anxious, and very scary, but without a doubt the best move I've ever made.

This isn't really a post about religion itself or philosophy so much as a fragment of consequences that are related to dogma. I don't blame religion itself for the nonsense that exists in my life. Dogma is the real problem and is a better explanation for things like the blind adherence to my mother's words that my siblings display. I think I only posted it here because I was going to go on a tirade about all the obnoxious things my sister believes in while simultaneously highlighting my allegedly evil and stupid nature, but I wound up just complaining about life.

I don't even know if we can pit the blame on dogma, unless every decision you and those around you made were all made in light of some Mormon dogma.

To take this story into a different direction, and perhaps to bring it back to where I had intended, I suddenly remember this conversation I had with someone not long ago. This person was confused at how someone who claims to be rational and who is perhaps a member of the scientific community can reconcile that aspect of themselves with being a religious person. I've seen this problem presented by people before and I have even seen people claim that because of their religious views, the individual's role in science is somehow a lesser thing. I don't really think this is true.

Really? Since I'm responding in real time, I'll wait on this point and see what you say....

I think that there is a common misunderstanding amongst the non religious that the religious are always irrational and that there's nothing that makes their decisions within religion rational. This stance is not entirely accurate. Most religious people have been that way their whole life. Their religion is a part of them. Imagine, for a moment, a common meal that you remember from your childhood, served by the person you most admired from that time. Take that sensation and amplify it by however many times you need to to make it saturate your life to the extent that a religion will saturate a believer's life. Imagine that it is a part of your daily routines. Your food is served to you in commemoration of this memory; you spend one day a week focusing on it and applying it to any life situation you may be facing; you're encouraged to acknowledge it several times a day and even perform daily rituals for it. Your career choices may be influenced by it and your life opportunities may be facilitated by the social network you've built around it. As bizarre and unlikely as it sounds, if, at any moment, this memory was suddenly false; if the illusion of the memory being linked to your life was ever made clear ... you stand to lose everything. People who defend their dogma have a twisted, but not entirely irrational, reason to do so. Because if they don't, it is often the case that a part of their life breaks.

Ah I see where you went with this. I'm inclined to agree.

I don't say this to defend religion. It is not my place to do so and I still feel that religion plays a major role in damaging people and society, but it isn't *just* religion alone that does it. You can abolish religion and still have dogmas that continue to do their own damage. You can abolish religion and still have herbalists and homeopaths and AIDS deniers and clowns.

Yes, all those are equally irrational, but do they have an equal effect?

When was the last time you saw a partially illiterate farm boy start an organization with only 6 people, convince these 6 people to believe in the existence of a set of "gold plates" which none of them had ever physically seen, give up their livelihoods, move all around the eastern United States, in spite of mobs and state governments, have this organization increase to a couple dozen thousand people, convince these people to trek across the great plains of North America from Missouri to Utah, lose many family members to the trek itself yet continue to persevere, and to "pass the legacy onto our decendents" resulting in an organization nearly 200 years old with 13 million members worldwide; all in the name of homeopathy or anti-vaccination?

I've only seen this with religion (namely the one you and I were raised with).

The same things that I mention above as being reasons people cling to a religion are the things that make people cling to these other dogmas, even if it is on a smaller scale. If your income is based entirely on homeopathic drugs, then you're unlikely to want to give up that support. If you think that denying AIDS means that you're spending a lifetime with your children that you otherwise would not have, then you're likely to deny the disease's existence. The dogma is understandable, but the dogma still does harm.

I guess the distinction lies in the propagation of the dogma. It's very probable that you will practice the religion of your parents and this form of dogma will last for centuries if not millennia. It's much less likely that any person will necessarily share their parent's anti-vaccination, homeopathic, anti-AGW beliefs.

If that is the case, my friend has asked, how do we deal with the problem for those people? I told him that the answer was to find something else to replace the dogma for them. If all your social ties are within a religion and you need to leave it, you have to have new social ties or leaving it will either fail or leave you suffering. If you know that, you won't leave religion, but if you have support outside of religion, it is easier to leave. The same applies to people who believe in various forms of woo. A 9/11 truther may need a new cause; a homeopath needs a new job and a psychic needs a new way to attention whore.

Good idea, just don't supplant your Mormonism with other nonsense. Supplant it with the mere acquisition of knowledge if you must supplant it with anything.

I'm leaving this town. I'm still escaping the people in my family who hurt me. I'm finally getting the things I needed to replace the void left behind when I realized I wasn't stupid or ugly or deserving of someone's wrath. While my sister's absurd diatribe this morning was stupid itself, I'm still very glad that I'm getting the **** out of here and it isn't going to tarnish my day anymore.

Thanks for letting me vent, I needed that and had no other place that I felt I could properly do so without interrupting my best friend's day at work.

Thanks for sharing :)

[SophieHirschfeld]

Don't beat yourself up over your younger sister's shortcomings--there's a reason 13 year olds are discouraged to become parents. And don't ever let anyone make you believe that you are worthless--it's clear from how you express yourself that this is not the case.

Thanks. Most of the time, I don't obsess over my possible role in my sister's behavior. She ended up worse off than I did by far. I realise that it was unlikely that I could have made the proper choices for her at that age, but I also recognize that there were times that I was the only person around to make choices for her. So whilst it was impossible for me to make an informed decision, I'm still the one who made it. What I mourn is not really what blame I must take upon myself so much as the hopelessness of the situation that was bound to fail. With that said, the experience does speak to some extent about how difficult child rearing is, even if I was too young to have been doing it.

Try not to make your whole "moving out" project something motivated on the premise of "getting away from your family". I say that because of the following: You're not really getting away in the sense that, when we have this kind of issue, it affects us from inside, so wherever we are located geographically, that doesn't change. Your life projects should be about you, not about other people.

Sincerely


Ron

Thank you for the concern. My moving away is more about improved working environment, income and better living conditions. I'm moving so I can be closer to an employer and have a better place to live with better rent. The opportunity, though, just so happens to have an added bonus of removing me from a town that I dislike (with good reason) and some measure of family drama. The sister that I talked to this morning will still be in contact with me, but being in a different location makes it less of a problem.

I've formulated a little hypothesis as to why my own family members do this (as well as many of my former friends from my former church). It seems that they are of the belief that nobody in their right mind would ever leave, defect from, or even slow their activity in the church. "The church is just so obviously true!" When confronted with a person who has indeed defected from the church (me), they can only rationalize it with their preexisting "the church is true" paradigm by marginalizing the former members and essentially making up things about their "worthiness" or affinity to "immoral things".

That's what they are taught to do. They are taught in nearly every message of sin and 'falling away' that they give to people that people fall away in the name of sin.

I was raised in a very devoutly Mormon household. When I confided in one of my older brother's that I no longer believed, he responded by asking "So what immoral thing are you doing? Smoking? Drinking? Having sex with your girlfriend?"

I 'came out' as an atheist at around the same time that I left my ex husband in 2003. My alleged sins were obvious in their eyes, though the two were unrelated. (I had actually been an atheist for years, I just didn't know the words for it and I pretty much knew of nobody else in the same mental boat).

This isn't to say that this is necessarily the reason why your sister acts in such a way. Merely an observation about my own family.

Many things that I do are looked at in that light. That's one reason why she's so critical and why she thinks she's so wonderful.

Oh my God, and I thought my childhood of 8 siblings was "huge". Please, I mean no disrespect by this, but in my experience as a former Mormon with extensive Utahn and Arizonan family (some of which are even Fundamentalist Mormons) I must ask.... Is your family Fundie Mormon?

I was raised within my mother's second marriage. The three siblings of mine that are genetically full siblings were from her first marriage. She sought a divorce from him due to him being abusive and then later remarried the guy that I call 'dad'. My father, technically a step father, and her later had a child together of their own and that is my younger sister that I helped raise. When my mother was married to her first husband, he already had two children, my half-siblings. When he was married to my mother, he had two affairs which led to two more half siblings. In case you're trying to count, that made 6. He married one of his affairs and they had 2 more children. However, he was having other affairs. I don't think I need to elaborate on this much more than that, because I think you can see the trend. Essentially, my biological father is on his sixth marriage and the result of his existence is around 20 children. We're not entirely sure of the precise number, but we know it is around 21, give or take one or two. My family learned of this during his fight with my mother to reduce child support when I was in my teens. The evidence comes with documentation of his other payees and there were unnamed children on the records. The estimation provided, given that there was not the benefit of full disclosure, was that he had about 21 children, give or take a few. My biological father was just a slut.

Like "Those poor Lamanite fools don't even realize how much they've perverted the gospel of Jesus Christ."

Actually, it went beyond that. My mother was raised on a Navajo indian reservation in Flagstaff, AZ. Her and her mother were once a part of bringing the church to the reservation as a matter of convenience (my mother was actually 1/4 Lakota Sioux). During her stay with the natives, my mother tried to link the traditions as much as they could to stories from the Book of Mormon, using mostly confirmation bias as her favorite tool. Along with that, she generalized her experiences, thinking that all native american people must be like the one she encountered. Some of this is due to naivete. Some of my siblings still believe that Native American cultures can be classified under the same umbrella, not realising that they are very unique when compared to each other and as diverse as any other continent in how their cultures are structured. Consequently, whenever an issue arises that involves Native Americans, that's the knowledge that my family draws upon to arrive at their conclusions. We have some local tribes in this area and their biases are often quite clear to me whenever we have discussions about them. I should probably note, though, this area still has a lot of tension between the 'cowboys" and the "indians" as well as some conflict with Mexicans. Conflicts between the groups are not unheard of and one even led to a stabbing near a bar about a year ago.

I understand exactly where you're coming from.

It is nice to know people who have been there. It is tough to explain to people who haven't experienced the mormon culture exactly what the problem is because of the outward projection of perfection. People always say, "but all the Mormons I know are really nice." It is difficult for them to reconcile my stories with the experiences they've had with Mormons so that my experiences appear unreal.

Wow. Can't believe I missed this earlier in your "vent". Sorry for even more curiosity. Is your family LDS or Mormon of some other, fundamentalist variety. I understand (from earlier in your post) that your 21 siblings are related biologically, most of whom by only one parent. Was your family practicing secret polygamy while members of the LDS church? You don't need to answer this question, I'm just really intrigued by this.

Mainstream LDS. The 21 genetic siblings are due to my biological father being promiscuous. The other 15 that I mentioned are children my parents took in on an unofficial level that just happened to be around off and on throughout my childhood making a whopping 36 'sibling'-like relationships, but only around 20 that I directly experienced as a sibling relationship. I'm sorry that is so confusing. My second coolest brother is one of the latter, someone my parents randomly took in but who I wasn't genetically related to. He also happens to be my coolest brother's best friend. Both are deists.

My dad has remarried since my mom died, so I actually have one more brother that I forgot to mention. On another note: We reached a new level of redneck recently when the child of my aforementioned brother's wife (the non genetic one) was his or my new step-brother's. My new step brother was acquired when my sister was dating him a couple years ago and my dad fell in love with his mother. So then, my sister broke up with the step-brother who then became enamored with my brother's wife. they had an affair and I'm even uncertain now as to who is the father, though, it does appear to be my non-related brother's offspring.

I know it's probably of little condolence, but you cannot accurately compare you with your parents. You were 13! They were grown adults. Not to mention, your youngest sibling was raised by other allegedly dysfunctional people and dealt with the same parents you've dealt with. There's no reason to assume you had ANYTHING to do with how your sister has "come out".

Yes, I was young. However, I did probably play a role in not making the situation any better and probably contributing to it being worse. This does not mean that I was responsible. I couldn't have been at that age. However, it is unlikely that with all the time I spent taking care of her, that my sister was immune to my influence and that my influence did not play some role in her becoming dysfunctional. It is merely irrational for the blame to fall on me because I simply didn't have the neurological capacity to raise a child under the circumstances.

There is no changing her mind unless you can get her to change her religion, so either tolerate it or leave her and never look back. It's really the only two choices we have.

In the past, I've taken another approach and tried to reason with her. The result is that she feels threatened by me. I'm more likely to continue to interact with her and do as I have done before and view her behavior in light of her religious views and realise that her behavior is not really about me.

Very smart! I still haven't come out to ANY of my family members, and likely never will.

As my writing becomes more popular, the risk of them discovering my sexuality increases. I am going to enjoy where my career goes and when the problem arises, I will deal with it. In light of how my life has been going recently, I think that by the time my family learns about my sexuality, I will have a good enough social network that I will be able to deal with the consequences readily. I also think that my work will have progressed far enough that their response may necessarily be minimized. If you earn notoriety, Mormons can be less venomous. I have some hope that they will give me a little wiggle room for that.

I'm sure there must be a Mormon out there in a church of 13 million members that isn't homophobic; likely one of the INACTIVE ones. My family being entirely practicing (some of whom hold very high callings in the church) would never ever accept a gay or bisexual family member.

My younger sister, the meth addict, is openly bisexual now. My dad accepts her, but it took some time and it didn't really happen before he chased away my sister's lover (at the time). My dad has shown that he is teachable. He has changed some of his views about people because we talk about things a lot and he even changed his views about sexuality partly because of my sister and our conversations. My siblings, though, would be completely unforgiving of my sexuality. The trouble of them knowing is just not worth the benefits of them knowing at this point. Thus, I tell nobody because I can't trust my dad or other people in my family not to tell my other siblings.

Moreover, coming out to your Mormon family while you live in UTAH, ESPECIALLY OUTSIDE OF AND URBAN AREAS LIKE THE DESERT, is social suicide. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that.

I'm in eastern oregon, which is a part of the 'Mormon belt'. I'm right in line with the strip of mormon population that extends from Utah and arizona into Eastern Oregon and Washington and taking over Southern Idaho. So I totally and completely understand.

Reminds me a bit of when I first left Utah to come here to San Francisco. Very anxious, and very scary, but without a doubt the best move I've ever made.

What I have experienced of San Francisco has been completely and totally awesome.

Yes, all those are equally irrational, but do they have an equal effect?

I'm not really claiming they have an equal effect, I'm just pointing out the parallels so people can get a glimpse as to why some of those things happen. I think that an understanding of those links is a key element that we can use in trying to combat any of those things.

When was the last time you saw ... 200 years old with 13 million members worldwide; all in the name of homeopathy or anti-vaccination?

Well, that's actually the Mormon version of the history, but, yeah, I know what you're saying. I'm not claiming they are equally damaging. I'm just saying they are damaging and need to be addressed. I would not try to put them on a scale and rank them in this context because I think that would be a fruitless endeavor.

I've only seen this with religion (namely the one you and I were raised with).

That level of damage can happen with other forms of dogma. Forgive me for refering to the most popular of them, but Nazis are probably the best example.

It's much less likely that any person will necessarily share their parent's anti-vaccination, homeopathic, anti-AGW beliefs.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't even know if we have enough data on the susceptibility that children have to other forms of dogma. My guess would be that the numbers are at least correlated somehow.

Good idea, just don't supplant your Mormonism with other nonsense. Supplant it with the mere acquisition of knowledge if you must supplant it with anything.

I managed to do well in replacing anything that needed replaced. Knowledge was not a side-effect, but may have been a cause of my departure.

[kittynh]

Sophie you aren't messed up in any way.

Indeed, you are reflective, sharing and well special to those that know you now.

Here is a little story, and why I hope moving will be good for you.

My dear girlfriend I met while I was living in Navy Housing and pregnant with Kitten. It was her first time besides college living far far far away from the little town she grew up in. She was also a twin. Her sister was the "Brave outgoing" twin. She was the "shy quiet" twin. Let's just say when she got away from her family (and a dear wonderful family they are) she got a LOT louder. Get this... she and her sister were college room mates!

So, her sister and parents come to visit. I tell them that as my husband will be out at sea when my baby is due, their daughter Mary has agreed to be my partner in the delivery.

They all just LOOK at me. I then tell them Mary has been going to all the classes with me and we're doing a natural childbirth. The LOOK even harder.

Then all heck breaks loose as they tell me that dear Mary "can not stand the sight of blood!" Mary is delicate! She can't do this! I must pick someone else! NOW!!!

This is odd as Mary has seen all the birthing films. Mary had no qualms about being my partner in this. Mary just laughs. She informs me that in second grade she cut open her knee and fainted when she looked at it. Since that time she has been the "delicate" one that "can't stand the sight of blood". She honestly said that she never felt squeemish since and was fine through all her biology classes at college that required dissection.

Needless to say she was FINE! She was a great partner. But she did point out she would never have even offered if she had stayed in her hometown. The best part about living away from your family is you can really be yourself. You dont' have to define yourself by committee. It's YOU looking at who you REALLY are without all that baggage of who you were or who your family thinks you are...and just being yourself.

I think you will be more understanding of your family and even have a better relationship and be even more fanatastic than you are now when you move. Really!

[MIKILLINI]

Thanks for letting me vent, I needed that and had no other place that I felt I could properly do so without interrupting my best friend's day at work.

However you feel about your family, do express to them the way you have done in this forum. If you love them, tell them and that your door of forgiveness is always available (If that's what you would like to do before leaving, just so they don't get the impression you're "abandoning" them).

These are just suggestions, but what you do is your choice and I hope things turn out fabulous for you.

[RedSeaRoadkill]

I have been struggling with lesser versions of these issues for a while. When I talk about this with former-Christians of various stripes who say they had similar issues they inevitably say I have it tougher, as I'm trying to extricate my family from my Orthodox Jewish background.

But you win, no question.

I'm thinking about organizing a meeting at TAM for people struggling with religious families. Kind of a support group, but much more fun (that's the plan, anyway). At least people like us can meet others who really, really get it.