I'll premise this with a warning that I'm atheist, so if you believe in god, no offense to you. If he's real, my beef is with him, not you. Also, I hope it's obvious, but pretty much all of this is sarcastic AF.TW: Rape, abuse, murder, suicide.I had a conversation with TBM friend a few months back who works as a cognitive therapist about the nature of god. I've been through my fair share of therapy so we talked a lot about emotional management and how the mind works. They mentioned how their kids sometimes tested their patience and how this was preparing them to be more like god because of his "infinite patience". That started me thinking about my own experience with emotional regulation (particularly patience) and what "perfect" emotional regulation would look like (because god is "perfect" and stuff /s). I also honestly wanted to understand what the end goal of mormonism was at the time as I was still on the fence. Needless to say, thinking about my own experience and the experiences of others did a real number on any positive feelings I had toward "god".Here's my take on god's emotional state as an armchair psychologist:God is so good at regulating his emotions that he is able to both fully detach himself from his children and "love" them in a way only he can. This detachment is pretty easy to achieve if they're doing something he doesn't like because he's hypersensitive and extremely easily offended. However, despite this hypersensitivity, he's able to turn his emotions off sometimes when his children need his help. Sometimes that means mass murder, other times it means just leaving a guy in the belly of a fish (because god magic) for a while so he can rethink his life. He know himself (and by extension, the human psyche) so well that he can craft his interaction with his children to push them to their limits so they can "grow".These limits include things like self-harm, harming others, and suicide. But he understands how temporary mortality is and that even if his children feel utterly alone and dejected for years, they'll thank him later for not helping them because that's when they can super-grow like a currant bush! He's neat like that.He watches with disdain as some of his children enslave, murder, torture, rape, mutilate, and abuse others. Those things are bad. But he loves the children who are suffering so much that he "allows" them to experience these "trails" because that will make them better. They're just like toddlers to him, after all. He also loves the perpetrators so much that he allows them to "exercise their agency" in such deplorable ways because once they cross a line, his love turns to hate and their continued behavior gives him even more ammo to take them down later. It might not be in this life, but by golly, he's gonna get 'em (unless they repent at the 11th hour in which case, it's fine and the victim needs to figure that out or he'll condemn them for feeling bad about being victimized).He rushes to the aid of the distraught suburban mom who can't find her keys because that's what she needs for testimony meeting that week, but also recognizes how much the 11 year-old girl down the street "needs" to be left to herself as her friend's older brother rapes her in silence for the eighth time in his basement. He needs to be strong because he loves this girl, but he also loves the boy and can't override his agency. In fact, the girl needs to look at how she probably contributed to the situation so she can learn the true mode of repentance to become more like her heavenly mother.He cries when he so desperately wants to help the 12 year-old boy who just learned from his bishop that the thing he discovered six months ago was masturbation and "self-abuse" of his "temple". This boy prays for help and god would love to help him, but this sin is so bad that the very laws of nature prohibit him from being near someone so unclean. Once he repents enough, god will be back. It's really hard for god to watch this and to be so powerless. But he has to be strong because he's just a pawn in the system, too. He just happens to be a pawn with the ability to watch this kid jack off because of his god powers. He just watches him and cries. Poor god.He loves it when his children go to places where no one else can see him perform miracles. Mountain tops, temples, snowy Wyoming plains, it doesn't really matter. He's just so humble and great that he hates making a show of helping people. The more remote and isolated, the cooler the miracles can be! He really appreciates when there's physical suffering involved. The more painful, exhausting, or otherwise self-depreciating the experience is, the more power he has! This is of course because these people are decreasing the power of their carnal body and empowering their spiritual one. It's absolutely not because of any chemical imbalances created by these situations that make people more suggestable and open to hallucinatory experiences. He's just taken the time to understand how the body works and wants people to be in their most emotionally suggestive state as often as possible so he can work with them.He understands the importance of structure and so does his wife (wives?). He knows he has a great responsibility to keep his children safe, so when one of them incites a rebellion by simply disagreeing with what he says, he engages in all-out war and sets up a system so those unruly children not only are never happy, but that after suffering for thousands of years, they'll eventually give way to entropy and cease to exist. He only does this because he loves them and love is tough sometimes. I mean, he is also hypersensitive but he's not being impulsive. He'd NEVER do that.He respects women, for sure. Women are created with a womb and breasts because they're made to have babies. He created them to this ultimate end, after all. He, through his church leaders, teaches them that those pesky brains of theirs are to be controlled and subdued. Seeing them rise to the fulness of their potential in getting married and getting pregnant over and over again fills him with joy. After all, that's all his wives do.Just a side note on heavenly mother(s): Their emotional role is pretty easy. They have to learn how to entirely emotionally detach themselves from their children and give up any aspiration outside of baby-making. Of course, they experience time differently, but it must be painful to never hear from or be able to speak to your children while they're being tested during their mortal life (I've always thought mom contact on missions was supposed to be a precursor to this isolation). They have to be content with sex, pregnancy, and loss. Sex is good in the correct context, right? And pregnancy is supposed to be joyful. If it isn't on earth, it super will be when you're having a googolplex babies. I mean, there isn't time in the eternities, but if there was, they'd be pregnant for all of it. Hooray for the apotheosis of womanhood!Female gods are perfectly happy with this eternal existence and have learned to manage themselves in a way that will allow them to not only crank out babies for eternity as one of possibly numberless wives of their husband, but also to find joy in knowing that this is the ultimate goal of each daughter they bear.Back to dude god (because there are no other god genders, of course). He's very sensitive to the state of things on each of his planets. So much so that he changes eternal truths to match societal pressures. This is of course because he's super compassionate. How terrible would it be if the leaders of his church that he took the effort to pre-ordain had to do things that went against societal norms for very long? That would definitely be harder to deal with than the PTSD of the little boy who's still being raped because god has directed his bishop not to tell the police because the rapist is a stake president. The rough stone must keep rolling!He has a special place in his heart for people who are victims of heinous crimes or those who "die before their time". The child whose skin slowly melts from his body crying out in pain for weeks before finally dying in Nagasaki Japan, the disabled adult who is repeatedly beaten and sexually assaulted by their caregiver being fully conscious yet unable to cry out because of their god-given malady, the wife who subjects herself to beating after beating before her husband finally goes too far, all because she has covenanted in the temple that she will honor and obey him, and even the boy who realizes on his mission that he's gay and determines that he is better off dead than returning without "honor".God stands with all of these and watches as they suffer. Of course, he knows them personally so he either helps them through their trial or completely abandons them as he feels is appropriate. Either way, if they don't make it, it's a really compassionate thing on his part because he's giving the the opportunity to preach the gospel in the spirit world or something and receive even more blessings! It's great!I could go on and on with all of the messed up stuff that I've realized about the "nature" of god, but I'm just here to say that as a parent myself, either my perception of unconditional love for my kids is entirely warped and needs to change to something strictly arbitrary and abusive, or the mormon god is an asshole (because he's super made up by assholes).I'm going to stick with the latter.TL;DR: God is an asshole and a horrible parent. via /r/exmormon https://ift.tt/36lrDNT
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