Having been to a few mormon sermons (i was an exchange student in Nevada with a mormon family) i would say that no one went to her defense because doing so would have landed them excommunication and being ostracized from the community. Or at least that would have been a fear they’d face, so for the sake of being a good mormon family they play their part in the church.
I’m not surprised this happened but then again this kind of treatment and behavior happens in other faiths and in other non-religious settings, especially toward LGBQT+ youths.
My son has a friend who transitioned in the middle of eighth grade, and two years later is addressing crowds at rallies. The girl in this video is standing up in front of a crowd and saying something deeply personal, that goes against the teachings of the church she’s standing in, and she does it standing next to the church leaders. I remember what it was like to be 12-13 years old and the courage these kids are demonstrating leaves me in awe.
Well, it was nicer than the one we live in before, but its main importance is that it’s one of the distinct markers in my youth I can use to place events halfway reliable.
I was never really involved in religion – though some schools I went to included church as part of the routine – and it seemed pretty clear that church didn’t want me any more than I wanted church, so I never lost sleep over that.
If I’m honest, I don’t understand why you’d try to get your religion to change, rather than changing your religion. If you’re going to make up your own mind anyway (and I think you should), then by definition you don’t have faith in your church. Though obviously, at 12, this kid is still figuring it out, and I would guess this is where she will end up.
Ideally faiths need to adapt to the changing needs of their people, otherwise it turns into an ideological battle over antiquated concepts. I’m not surprised that more people now than ever are giving up religion, it can be messy, judgemental, and oftentimes harmful. It doesn’t have to be that way, i see religion can be a force of achieving a lot of social good but that tends to get lost over old rules and old thinking.
Do we need religion? I don’t think so, but there’s a place for it now and in the future if progressive changes are made. Sadly it seems that change is very slow to take.
For born atheists it can be hard to understand, but for many religious people religion is not a separate part of their life distinct and easily disconnected from everything else. Its embedded in their lives in all kinds of different ways. So simply changing your religion isn’t like flipping a switch. Its about losing your community and often your family. For many switching religions means giving up their entire world and starting from scratch. It is difficult to overstate how life-shattering that can be.
Its easier, but never easy, at some ages - late teens and early 20s when you aren’t so dependent on your family and you still haven’t established a life for yourself yet. But outside of that window its really fucking hard. That’s why many religious gay people have opted to stay in the closet and keep their straight marriage and live sexless lives. They make a conscious choice to keep their entire support structure, their friends, their family, their job, etc in exchange for giving up deep and true love. They do it not just because they fear the loss of everything, but also because they have responsibilities - how are they going to feed their kids, pay the mortgage, etc if they have to start all over again?
Come, come now. Southern Baptists just want to put their own interpretation on a collection of Hebrew literature and some first century AD millenarian writings. The Mormons want all that plus the contents of a book written by a confidence fraudster to be regarded as holy. It does take an extra layer of closed mindedness to be a Mormon. Let us award the palms to those that deserve them.
[not you obviously].
Or as the progressives put it “the Bible has to be reinterpreted for every generation”.
Not need, perhaps, but it seems part of our psychology - part of the way we construct the model of the world which we rely on and extend to deal with new experiences.
My first wife who left her church before I met her, described religion as the foundation of her self. When she left the church it pulled the rug out from beneath everything she was and it took her several years to rebuild who she was from the ground up.
True that. Part of the “teachings” is that JC came to the Americas and helped the natives here. All sorts of things happened (supposedly) that have never been found in any archaeological dig. And yet the peoples still believe.
I got out before I got much further in it. I don’t miss it.
When I was five I actively sought to contrive ways of secretly looking under my babysitter’s skirt. My methods were so pathetically obvious that I finally realized my folly in the second grade.
And they just had a huge kerfluffle at their recent annual meeting on whether they should condemn the alt-right (they eventually voted to do so after initially declining).
