tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-336822922024-03-21T10:12:59.844-06:00The Adventures of Melody YellowvanBecca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.comBlogger2089125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-32829821454728258472022-06-02T19:52:00.001-06:002022-06-02T19:52:39.842-06:00Falsehoods that Trip us up<p> There are a lot of falsehoods that float around modern thought, and sometimes they embed themselves as the foundations of ideas that lead people down really strange and sometimes damaging paths. Often the idea is never questioned, and the direction it sends you is not good.</p><p>Some of these ideas I've noticed:<br /><br />*People are born perfect, just the way God intended them to be. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">While this is appealing, saying we need to embrace exactly what we are and never change, it's not true. We're born mortal. This is not our final condition or state. What's more, this idea is really hurtful to disabled people. What it says is that God intended us to be in pain all the time, and that our perfection includes pain. It's important to accept who you are and what condition you are in, but it's also important to understand that mortality is temporary, imperfect, and designed to include flaws. If this was perfection, we would not need resurrection.</p></blockquote><p>*People are the best judges of what is good and right for themselves.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">This is flattery of the kind Korihor uses. People are notoriously bad at judging what is good and right for themselves. That's why we need commandments. And prophets. And prayer and revelation and inspiration. And laws, including basic traffic laws. We are inherently selfish and driven by base urges. Left to ourselves, people tend to be selfish, addicted, lazy, etc. We are easily motivated by immediate, temporary pleasure for ourselves. Easily motivated to cover pain instead of remove the source or heal the wound. Easily driven to never learning, never changing our ideas. Left to ourselves, we judge that we should eat sugar, drink alcohol, do drugs, sit around and be entertained, go with the crowd, avoid education, waste time in silly frivolous hedonistic vain pursuits. We fight, we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. We cannot take ourselves as the best authority on what's good, right, and best for us. We are woefully inadequate judges of what's good for us. We need someone who knows more and who has our best interests in mind, like God.</p></blockquote><p>*God doesn't actually know what will make certain groups of people happy.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">God made ALL of us. We're all His children. He has greater vision and understanding of who we are collectively and individually. He knows us personally. He really does know what can make every single person the most happy--way better than we do, and with an eye toward an eternity that we do not comprehend.</p></blockquote><p>*Living "right" is supposed to be easy and comfortable. We shouldn't have to give up anything or change.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In fact, God requires sacrifices from all of us. Living is not easy and not comfortable because growth requires stretching and working hard. Easy and comfortable is not the way to grow and become. And to get the greatest blessings, God requires great sacrifices from people. All people. We all have hard things. We all have to do hard things in order to get the best that God has to offer. The way it not strict and difficult just for some people, but for everyone. Stricter than we want, but the blessings are greater than we can imagine. But we get to choose. Maybe we don't want to sacrifice for those blessings--or don't want to sacrifice what's being asked. Maybe it's not worth it to us. God respects our right to choose that.</p></blockquote><p>*Marriage is primarily about fairytale falling in love, romance, chemistry, and magical kisses (and especially about great sex).</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">This corruption of the idea of marriage is appealing, but not real. Marriage is about partnering with a best friend to go through life together, solving problems, facing challenges, being a family with each other. It's about respect, and love of a deeper kind, profound devotion, friendship. Flirting and falling in love and kisses are all choices to make and skills we cultivate to make marriage more fun. They are not the foundation of marriage. Marriage is not something that happens to us, swept off our feet and love and happily ever after just magically. It's something we do, something we choose. It's incredibly valuable, satisfying, important, and wonderful. But if you're looking for a fairytale, you're looking at the wrong things. (And yes, sex is part of marriage, but sex is a skill and a choice as much as anything--it's not something that you can't control or change, and it's not magic, either.)</p></blockquote><p>*We understand the afterlife, exaltation, resurrection, and even what we are.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Really, we have no clue. No clue at all. We're trusting God on this one. We like to say that certain characteristics we have are immutable and will never change, even in resurrection. But we don't even know what manner of beings we are! We have no idea what resurrection actually consists of, or what exaltation looks like. We can't even comprehend eternity. Like, at all. We really don't know what we're talking about on this one. We just take it on faith, trusting God can work it all out. </p></blockquote><p>*Disagreement means hatred, and hatred is a good reason to kill yourself (but don't because I will love you).</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">This is outlandish, but I see it all around. Ironically, usually it's coming from the people who are supposedly your "friends" saying things like, "You don't have to kill yourself because they disagree with you/dislike you. I will love you as you are." This actually plants the idea of suicide in someone's mind, and suggests to them that it's an option while simultaneously deflecting the blame for the idea from your "friend" to the person they are anxious to define as your enemy. This is especially dangerous because planting the idea of suicide is the first step toward suicide. This kind of "helpful" language is profoundly unhelpful. Additionally, it's a wormy way of getting in to define your thinking for you. When they say "I will love you as you are," they usually proceed to engage in flattery ("You are perfect and don't need to change ever"), and then to define what lifestyles and behaviors to need to engage in to be accepted by them. ("Don't kill yourself if they hurt your feelings by telling you how to live to be happy--I love you; let me tell you how you should live to be happy instead, with a heavy dose of flattery.")</p></blockquote><p><br />I'm sure there are many, many, many more falsehoods that we base actions and ideologies on. That seems to be the name of the game! </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> </p></blockquote>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-12924961357427467772022-02-07T03:42:00.003-07:002022-02-07T04:18:33.911-07:00Most common concern I hear from abuse victims is "What is normal? Am I being abused?" Thus....<span id="docs-internal-guid-df786a17-7fff-a412-5f0e-b0303451ef27"><div align="left" dir="ltr" style="margin-left: 15.75pt;"><table style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none;"><colgroup><col width="326"></col><col width="367"></col></colgroup><tbody><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td colspan="2" style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a relationship....</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Normal</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-left: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not normal</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner wanting to know where you are</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #000000 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Being tracked by your partner (is through your phone or a hired person)</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Telling your partner what you're doing; coordinating schedules and plans</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having to ask permission to do things; your partner controlling all schedules and plans; having to get approval to do things</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Taking care of your personal needs (showers, eating, bathroom, health care, medication, etc) yourself; supporting your partner if they need it, and asking for help if you need it</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having to get permission to take care of personal needs (like shower or eat), your partner criticizing or demanding how you care for yourself; your partner denying you access to care, medication, etc., or interfering with care</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Giving gentle, loving feedback--given and received pretty equally by both partners</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Criticism, nitpicking, harping, frequent "correction" from your partner; explosive behavior, anger, blaming you, or tantrums if you give feedback to them</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saying or doing something mean or stupid on occasion, followed by apologies and sincere and largely successful attempts to do better (both partners do this sometimes, but not super often)</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner frequently doing mean things, apologizing only that you're angry (never for what was done), and making no sincere or long-lasting attempts to change even if there is lip service to the idea or a few days of better behavior; you never being allowed to make a mistake or do something stupid or mean without dire consequences; your partner mocking or punishing you for feeling sad when they are mean</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Disagreeing or feeling angry at your partner on occasion (both partners, but not super often)</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Being yelled at, shouted at, insulted; violence in language, demeanor, or behavior; frequent or constant disagreeing with you (but you not allowed to disagree with them);your partner always having to "win" the argument; feeling compelled to let your partner have their way out of fear, exhaustion, threat, or coercion</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><br /></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Feeling afraid of your partner</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><br /></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consistently feeling deflated or sad or smaller after interacting with your partner</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Asking questions to further understanding (both partners, as often as needed)</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gaslighting; frequently or repeatedly being made to question your own impressions, ideas, perceptions, understandings or made to feel you are just plain wrong on a regular basis; not being allowed to question your partner on anything without negative consequences</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having friends outside the marriage</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner controlling or demanding to know all the details about your interactions with people; not being allowed to have certain friends; having to report every detail of conversations or activities</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deciding for yourself what relationships you want to have with your own family</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner defining or pressuring you to have a certain (having more or having less) relationship with your family.</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pet names that both people enjoy that are loving; lightweight, mutually enjoyed teasing</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name Calling, demeaning, mocking, little "put downs" as pet names that sting or hurt; cruel teasing; saying or doing mean things under the guise of "teasing"</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Discussing why things went wrong</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consistently being blamed for everything that goes wrong, your partner never accepting any responsibility. Everything is always your fault</span></p><br /></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Supporting your partner in changes, accepting their support, making suggestions</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner demanding you change or defining exactly how you must change</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consensual intimate behavior that both people enjoy and consent to</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Non-consensual physical touch of any kind, coerced physical intimacy, intimate behavior that you are not comfortable with, not feeling like you can say no</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Discussing money and using money wisely</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner denying you access to money, giving an "allowance," or controlling what every penny is spent on.</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sharing the workload</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Being forced to do all the work (paid or unpaid); getting frequent criticism or strict instruction about how the work is done</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Occasionally doing something stupid that makes your partner cry, have hurt feelings, etc (followed by apologies)</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your partner saying or doing things that make you cry on a regular basis</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Learning together and solving problems together</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lecturing, demanding, controlling, manipulating, mandating, etc.; alternately, refusing to communicate about problems or engage in mutual problem solving; demanding you solve all the problems; criticizing how the problems are solved</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Physical contact that is mutually desired and pleasant for both partners</span></p></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hitting, pushing, throwing things, other violent contact; alternately, withholding physical contact in order to punish or control the other person</span></p></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><br /></td><td style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2pt; vertical-align: middle;"><br /></td></tr><tr style="height: 0pt;"><td colspan="2" style="border-bottom: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-right: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-style: solid; border-top: solid #cccccc 0.75pt; border-width: 0.75pt; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 2.016pt; vertical-align: middle;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Generally speaking, relationships should be between two independent adults who have mutual respect and mutual freedom within the relationship. Everything is cooperative, supportive, on equal footing, honest, kind, and loving. It is NOT NORMAL or HEALTHY for one person to be dominant in a relationship. One person should never have control or be in charge of the other person. No partner should ever feel afraid of the other. No couple is perfect all the time--feelings get hurt, anger gets expressed, people do stupid things and need to be corrected in errors. But when there is a pattern of controlling, demeaning, demanding, or fear-inducing behavior, that is NOT NORMAL. That is abuse.</span></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div></span><p> </p>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-28402960873392315662022-01-14T01:22:00.007-07:002022-01-15T02:29:13.054-07:00Encanto and Metaphors for Abuse and Healing<p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So many people in my newsfeed in the last 24 hours have complained that "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Encanto is stuck in their head.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That one is a super heartbreaker as soon as you realize that Bruno was there listening to them sing about how they don't talk about him because he ruins everything--listening to them while he patched the cracks in their house to keep it standing, and loving them and wishing he could be part of the family still, even while they sang that song. It just kills me. The poor kid.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It's kinda dark, as my 14 yo said.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Actually, the whole movie is kind of dark. It’s a movie about abuse.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In fact, I can't get one particular scene from Encanto out of my mind.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>First a little background so you can understand why. In Encanto, the magical house that helps everyone with everything represents family--family love especially, but family stability in general. And the house gets cracks in it, which are abuse. Each cruel word or behavior, each abusive attitude or action, causes a crack in the building. Enough abuse builds up that the house crumbles.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This is actually a really great metaphor. And it's true. Every person is sometimes mean or cruel to other people. That's part of being human. Each of us causes cracks, but increases of real love, apologies, fixing our mistakes, etc., erase those cracks and we can stay stable as a house/family. But an abuser causes so many cracks that eventually the house falls--and the individuals left have to decide if and how to rebuild.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In the movie, the victims can see the cracks, but the abuser makes them invisible to the outside world and even sometimes to the victims. Everything looks stable, and the message that the abuser deliberately projects to the public is that we are stable and perfect and beautiful, even as things are crumbling. The abuser doesn't even let the people in the family see how badly things are crumbling if they can manage that. And the abuser often won't acknowledge even to themselves that the cracks exist because that would entail acknowledging to themselves and others that the fault was their own--that they made the cracks.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And then when the building comes down, the abuser inevitably blames the victims, not themself--most abusers do not take personal responsibility ever. And most of the victims blame themselves for the collapse, even though it wasn’t their fault. But they’re trained by the abuser to always see pain as their own fault, so they see the collapse as their fault, too.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Okay, with that all in mind, here is the scene that is haunting me and hurting my heart:</p><p>In the movie, there is one family member (Bruno) who knows the abuse is happening because it hurt him so badly that he had to stop interacting with everyone else. He can see the cracks. He, the abuse victim, is working furiously to make his own mortar and patch all the cracks inside the walls, trying to keep the house from falling down on the other victims (for which he is demonized by the abuser and, because of that, the other victims as well).</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This happens SO Often. The injured child (and the hurt child inside the adult they grow into) loves their family and frantically tries to make all the cracks better as if it is their fault or within their power to fix the breaks and make things okay. But they are just a child. They can't fix these things. They didn't cause these things, and their attempts to repair the damage don't do anything because the abuser keeps abusing. And it's not their job or within their abilities to fix each little crack. But they feel like it must be, and they give their all to trying to address every little break.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That's the picture that haunts me. A poor hurt child, rejected by everyone at the abuser's insistence, frantically trying to invent mortar and fill the cracks to save everyone else in the family and maintain the existence of the family--to fix the brokenness as if they can and as if it's their job to do so. This is deeply painful to think about.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The image seared in my mind of that scene has driven me to tears, and I woke up multiple times last night thinking of it and all the abuse victims trying to patch the cracks to save something that is trying to break them. This is every abused child who is hit (verbally or physically) and says, "I'm sorry I'm sorry" as if that will fix things, when they have nothing to be sorry for. This hurts.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It hurts because I know this child.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In fact, Bruno is not the only character in Encanto who is a perfect avatar of a defensive adaptation to abuse. The characters in Encanto are mostly actually adaptive identities that abused people take on to protect themselves. Each of the "gifts" is actually something people do to survive abuse in real life, and each of them is highly effective in an abuse situation but it maladaptive in a healed, healthy life.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>You have:</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The character who feeds everyone and tries to heal their wounds, but still can't escape. They bury themselves in taking care of people's bodies.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The character who has to modulate and deny their own feelings in order to try to control the "weather" in the home.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The guy who can see what's going to happen and tries to warn others, but also feels like they are hurting everyone else and people would be better off without them "causing trouble" and so they become "invisible" to protect everyone else from raising the ire of the abuser.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The person who is hyper-sensitive to things going on around them so they can know as quickly as possible what everyone is thinking and saying and judge what to do--but can't really be heard for themselves even while they hear everything.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The person who is a chameleon, who becomes everyone else around them and never can be comfortable as themself.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The person who is perfect all the time so that wrath never falls on them, but at the expense of their being free to be human, make mistakes, or even have desires and thoughts of their own.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The person who is extra strong, not for themselves but to protect the littler ones--the one who takes the beating to protect the smaller kids, or who feels like they have to guard and protect everyone and never get a chance to be vulnerable, sad, or even relax. This one is also the one in the story who feels like their worth comes exclusively for how they can serve others or what they do for others.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*The one who loses themself in communicating with animals instead of people because animals are safer.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And you have the one who is pretty much normal and not so maladaptive (has no gift) and so they just get the brunt of the emotional abuse.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Interesting, no?</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These are all very common reactions. The less common reaction is Mirabel’s eventual confrontation of her abuser.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I think it needs to be made very very clear that most children subjected to emotional or other abuse (like literally every child in this family, even the adult children) will never and probably should never confront their abuser because 90+% of the time, those abusers will not humbly turn and change, but will double down and abuse more often and more viciously. And when the family breaks from the abuse, they will blame the victim, not take responsibility. </p><p><span> </span><span> </span>It's a false narrative (and potentially a dangerous one) that abused children do and should confront their abusers. Sometimes a confrontation is important, but not always, and it often makes things worse—and it rarely makes things better. The work Mirabel did freeing her siblings and starting them on the path toward healing was much more realistic (although sometimes trauma must be healed in separation, even of sibling victims).</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Also, it needs to be stated clearly that children are not responsible for healing the trauma of their parents. Parental trauma can and often does lead to abuse of children--but the children are not supposed to be the ones who shoulder the burden of healing. We are each responsible for our own healing and for our own behavior toward our children. If we need help, we turn to professionals or to Jesus (or both! Yay for both!); we don't put that responsibility on our kids or grandkids to fix us.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It’s also important to remember that someone going through something traumatic might explain but it does not justify or excuse abusive behavior. Past trauma does not erase the consequences for the abuser or the victim. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Now, I'm not a professional therapist, but I have supported a lot of people through healing from abuse. So I've been around the subject a lot and have done a lot of research in trying to help loved ones and navigate complicated landscapes.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>One of the things I've learned is summed up perfectly by Encanto: Every abused person has to move from "I love my family and we're great" (Mirabel's first song in the movie—promoting and embracing the abuser’s version of “family”) through "Actually, Wow that hurts" (sitting in her room acknowledging her reality) to "This is actually not okay" (cracks that she can see and she realizes others are feeling, too) to "it's not what she does--it's what you do" (what Bruno says to Mirabel to tell her she has to act if she wants to change things; she can't wait for someone else to change) to "build a new house on a better foundation" (last song in the movie). The movie is actually really brilliant in a way that it gives us the words and metaphors that are needed to talk about this and help people understand it.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This doesn’t mean, by the way, that the person no longer loves their family at the end of the process. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. That outcome is very much an individual thing, but the journey itself is remarkably similar in all the people I’ve interacted with who need to heal from abuse. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Healing from abuse isn't a moment--it's a journey. And it's a consistent journey that includes those steps every time, for every person, usually in that order, although in their own ways. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sometimes the last part, building a new house, includes members of the broken family, but sometimes it doesn't--at least not in the same way with the same relationships and dynamics as before because of the realities of what it means to build a new foundation and a new structure that works better and protects you. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Bruno got a good way through that journey, but he tried to repair the old house instead of building a new one--and the building of a new house is vital to healing. You can't keep living in the old abuse and still heal. You have to build a house on a new foundation if the old foundation is broken, and in abuse situations, it absolutely is (no matter how much the abuser denies this). This is not to say there is no contact ever again with family members; it's just to say the person healing gets to define how their new house is built and on what foundation--the broken family, and especially the abuser, has no say in this. Even other victims of the same abuser don’t get to define how this works or what it looks like: Healing is individual.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What I've seen consistently in the journeys of the people around me is that people cannot heal from abuse—they can’t move from living in the abuse to building a new house--until they go through the middle three steps. And, even though that’s an individual journey that looks different for every person, certain things are consistent among all the journeys.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1. To heal, people have to acknowledge that things are broken. Usually they have to be able to say the word "abuse" in context of their situation before any change can happen. As long as they are denying the reality or hiding in the illusion that all is well, they can't heal. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2. They have to start to allow themselves to have and recognize their own feelings, and specifically to feel sad (about the way they were treated, about the broken relationships, about the mess and pain, etc.). </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and 3. They have to get angry (about how they were treated, about being hurt, etc.). </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In Encanto, we see Mirabel go through all three of these. She not only notices the cracks in the house, but tries to alert the others (remember, the cracks symbolize abuse). She feels sad. She gets angry.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ideally, eventually people also get to a point where they can forgive and move on, as Mirabel did, because this gives victims the ultimate freedom from their abusers. Forgiving does not mean things go back to the way they were, though. Unlike in Encanto, this often (maybe even usually) happens without retaining an actual familial relationship with the abuser--sometimes a relationship can be fixed or rebuilt, but only if the abuser is repentant, and most are not. (I do actually know people who were informed or realized they were being abusive, and they changed and worked toward healing and growth and fixing their mistakes and problems. So it IS possible. I've seen it happen. Not as often as I've seen people double down, but it really does happen sometimes.)</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Forgiving often includes acknowledging the challenges their abuser faced; it does not include denial, though. Denial is a sign someone isn't ready to heal yet.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Healing from abuse can't be imposed on someone. They have to be ready, and being ready often happens in fits and starts, here a little and there a little as a person processes what their experience was like and realizes it wasn't okay. It's hard for a lot of people to work from "But I love my family and it will break if I don't pretend nothing was wrong" to get to "It was wrong. I should not have been treated this way." (As Kate Bishop says in Hawkeye, "It's not okay. It was never okay." And, like Kate Bishop, sometimes love remains, but on new, different terms that include what is right and what is wrong. And sometimes people just move on entirely, no love remaining.)</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In Encanto, Mirabel is not only on this journey--she enables others to take the journey, too. She takes time to approach her siblings as people. She makes them feel safe, and they open up to her and acknowledge that all is not well, express fear and anger, and then she helps them find a path toward healing, in part because she helps them see that she values them separate from their adaptive behavior/identity they are hiding in (their "gift"). She helps them feel sincerely loved and understood and safe, and also human, and supports them as they process and change and begin healing.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Mirabel helps her siblings do this, and she also has to do this. You watch her feel sad, acknowledge things are broken (the cracks she can finally see), get angry, and eventually come to a place where she can forgive (and her abuser is repentant, so they have a healing journey together for a happy ending).</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Still, despite Abuela being repentant, you’ll notice that the house, at the end, recognizes the source of the love—the magic—is Mirabel, not Abuela. Mirabel has replaced Abuela as the one who can open the door to family—she is the new head of the family. Even though Abuela changed, there are still consequences, and the family cannot be rebuilt on her terms or under her control and guidance. The family can only heal with someone else in charge.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What can you do to help someone going through all this?</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don't be afraid of their abuse. Don't shy away from their reality. Don't flinch when they need to tell you what they've been through. Let them talk.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Listen listen listen, and don't judge them for feeling sad, angry, or needing to build a new foundation without their abuser.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Love them for who they are, outside their adaptive behaviors/identities. Everyone needs to feel valued and loved. Love is very healing.</p><div><br /></div>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-11946349950665190252021-12-28T01:13:00.000-07:002021-12-28T01:13:34.312-07:00On How Christmas is uncomfortable and what I'm going to do about it.<div style="text-align: left;"> <span> </span>I used to love Christmas. I loved it because lights are beautiful and because there is something magical about snow before you get bored with it, and about presents magically appearing, and about the house being cozy and full of good smells. I loved the music and the ambiance and the everyone being warm toward each other.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> And then somehow I ended up being in charge of putting up the lights, and the snow became more of an impediment than a beauty, and suddenly<i> </i><b>I</b> was the person who had to make presents magically appear (usually with no budget except what others generously donated), and if the house was going to be cozy and full of good smells, that was on me. I had to make that happen.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I realized that Christmas had been magical because of my mother. SHE was magical, not Christmas. (She still is, actually.) And now I am the mother, and I have no idea how she did that. The entire season, until after the presents appear, is one long stressful imposition on my time and health. And because Tim is making Christmas magical for everyone else's families (using his voice), I'm usually making the magic at home all by myself for the great majority of it. And I'm not very good at it. I'm terrible at decorating. I can't bake cookies and shop for presents at the same time and I don't have energy to do them sequentially. I don't do Christmas cards. I can't find our stockings....And at the best of times I can barely keep on top of the most important of the household work for keeping ten people alive without a holiday interfering.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">On top of the practical difficulties of making Christmas worthwhile, I have also grown increasingly uncomfortable with the jarring mismatch between how we celebrate Jesus's birth and who He is and what He taught. Despite overly energetic and unconvincing attempts to justify these things and connect them to the Savior, there is nothing about Jesus in Christmas trees, Christmas lights, candy canes, gingerbread houses, stockings, Santa, elves, glass ball ornaments, tinsel, holly, ivy, mistletoe, wassail, turkey or ham dinners, candles, presents, colorful wrapping paper, decorating literally everything, snowmen, jingle bells, sleighs, snow, fireplaces, hot cocoa, snowflakes, penguins, the Grinch, Scrooge, pajamas, reindeer, glowing noses, magical hats, cookies.....shall I go on? You get the picture.<br /><br />In fact, the most-quoted texts of the season are "A Christmas Carol" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," which are both texts about repentance without Jesus. The most common pictures I saw this year celebrating "Jesus's birth" on social media were new jammies, with a handful of new assault weapons thrown in to "own the libs" and deliberately offend "our enemies" and increase division. Commercialism and stuff-worship are rampant. And the more I listened to Christmas music radio, the more strange it was that we sing "O Holy Night" as a screaming rock song (is -that- what Holy means?) and put "Silent Night" in a playlist with "All I Want for Christmas is You." It was literally mixing the sacred with the profane and then celebrating it and claiming it meant Jesus. "Last Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you gave it away" is an awful way to honor the birth of our Savior. Not sure how Jesus feels about us singing about cheating lovers or holding up assault weapons to celebrate His birthday. <br /><br />Plus mixing a bunch of fake magical stuff in with scripture makes me worry: If we teach children that Santa is real--just kidding no he's not, and we pair Jesus with the same holiday, are we teaching the same message?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I tried to address this years ago by inventing a new holiday that we use to celebrate Jesus's birthday: White Cake Day. April 6 every year we have a simple birthday party for Jesus that parallels the birthday parties we have for our children. It's lovely. One of my favorite days of the year.<br /><br />But it didn't solve the problem. Christmas is still entangled with Jesus for me, and not in a healthy, appropriate way. So we do celebrate Jesus's birth in an appropriate way, but what about the mess in December? I can't just cancel it and say we don't do that without harming my children. And I loved Christmas once upon a time.<br /><br />Pondering this problem, I realized that we, as a culture, have seasonal festivals for every season. Often we paint these with religious or patriotic themes, but really our actions show we're primarily celebrating the season, not the excuse for having the celebration. Easter is our Spring festival (which I have successfully separated into a dual festival: Saturday is celebrating spring, Sunday is celebrating Jesus's resurrection), Fourth of July is a Summer fest (we say it's about patriotism, but we are celebrating all things summery), Halloween is a Fall Festival (and most of us don't even pretend it's religious anymore--we just use the religious name), and Christmas is a month-long Winter Festival. <br /><br />Halloween is an interesting case study, actually. It's very parallel to Christmas: the name has religious origins, there is a strong imaginary magical beings component, and we engage in it as a culture for the joy of it without pretending it's religious at all.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I also realized that we, culturally, embrace celebrating ideas, often with non-religious festivals connected to religious origins. We celebrate romance with a holiday named after St. Valentine, but it's not about him at all. We celebrate Irish lore (and drinking) with a holiday named after St. Patrick, even though it's not about him at all. We celebrate Fall and scary things with Halloween, even though it's no longer about celebrating Saints. We also celebrate being thankful for Thanksgiving. They've all become pretty arbitrary and culturally defined, but void of actual religious meaning--and that has not made them less valuable. They are still things that help define us as a people, that bring us together as communities, that give us chances to do fun things and make good memories with our families. Not all valuable, useful, important things need to be overtly religious in nature.<br /><br />And I realized that most of the things we use to celebrate Christmas are not necessarily bad in and of themselves. Having the whole family gather and wear matching pajamas is fun. Christmas trees are beautiful, and the ornaments in many families prompt discussions of family history. Giving gifts is a wonderful, joyous thing. Making cookies together and sharing them with neighbors is fantastic. Grinch and Scrooge teach good lessons. Snowmen are fun. Most of those things on my list above are wonderful ways to make good memories and bond with your family. They are largely harmless or even good. I don't want to remove those from my children's lives. <br /><br />And if we're okay laughing and talking about vampires and enjoying that lore for Halloween, what's wrong with enjoying the lore about Santa and elves for Christmas? They're the same amount of real. And it's the same amount of fun to talk about pretend things. I'm not opposed to playing pretend--so long as it's clear that we're playing pretend and that Jesus is not pretend. <br /><br />I don't want to take the fun away. And I don't want my children to be isolated from their own cultural traditions. These are part of who we are. And they're not wrong or bad things. It's okay to embrace them. (Although I think the commercialism and money money money and things things things and me me me parts of Christmas are absolutely wrong and damaging.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">But I don't want to just completely abandon the Jesus parts of Christmas, just like I didn't want to abandon the Jesus parts of Easter. Those are the most important parts, and I don't want to leave those behind in favor of the less important but more prominent things. I don't want to give up on the nativity to embrace the winter festival. Seems like throwing out the precious things because they got mixed with the silly things--and that seems counterproductive.<br /><br />I actually do love the Nativity story. I do love the creche exhibits. I love looking at a nativity scene and pondering the reality of it. I love the clumsy live re-enactments of Jesus's birth story (and I think Jesus probably loves them, too, with all their poor costumes and mishaps). I love reading Luke 2. I love watching the Church videos about the nativity. I love the Christmas messages about the Savior. I love the family time. I love the sacred Christmas hymns and carols. I love the awkward Christmas sacrament meetings where people present to Jesus and to us their talents, doing their best to offer whatever they have. The deeper meaning in that is so profound to me, even (especially) when the violin is slightly out of tune or the narration is read haltingly and with hesitation. This, to me, is what Jesus would love for his birthday. The service and the generosity and the giving are about Jesus. The families being together making happy memories are what Jesus would want. <br /><br />There are sacred things scattered among the profane, and I don't want to lose those things. And I don't want my children to lose those things. But I can't bear to have them mixed with all the other things anymore. It doesn't work. It stresses me out, makes me feel dirty, prevents me from embracing the fun because it's inappropriate to pair and associate those things, harmless as they may be, with Jesus. We host dances, but we don't host dances on the temple grounds, you know?<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So my new attempt to make Christmas okay...my new plan:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">We're going to separate them. We are going to sift the whole lot of things into two different celebrations that happen close to each other: Celebrating the Birth of Jesus, and Having a Winter Festival.<br /><br />We'll have a Nativity holiday that's all about the birth of Jesus where we do all the sacred things. My plan is to do this from the Sunday after Thanksgiving for a few days. We will decorate the house with nativities and other reminders of Jesus's birth during this time. We won't put up a tree or holly or mistletoe or any of the trappings of the winter festival until AFTER the nativity celebrations are done.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Then we'll have Christmas, which I'm going to think of as our culture's Winter Festival despite the religious origins of the name (just like Halloween isn't about saints and Valentine's day isn't about St Valentine). It's going to include all the "things"--presents, jammies, candycanes, grinches and scrooges, santa and elves, reindeer, silly Christmas movies, Christmas trees and trimmings and decorations, lights, decorating the house, etc. We're just going to embrace that we're celebrating winter the way our culture celebrates winter. <br /><br />And if you take the superficial "oh we're celebrating Jesus" out of the picture, you start to see that we're doing <i>other</i> good things with Christmas and our winter festival. While we are not really celebrating Jesus (let's be honest--we're not and it's become gross to me to pretend that we are), we <i>are</i> celebrating hope in the darkness of winter, and family, and making beauty in the midst of desolation, and bringing light and warmth into a time of darkness and cold. We are celebrating choosing kindness, choosing family, choosing generosity. We're celebrating that light will come and that we can choose to not let our circumstances overpower and freeze our souls. We're taking time to notice people who are in need in the darkest, coldest days of the year and working to relieve suffering. We're adding beautiful things to our world when it's mostly dead and covered in snow. And we're having fun with magical beings and fun treats, same as we do for Halloween. We're making the effort to reconnect with family despite difficulty, and to be together with other people on purpose and with the goal of deliberately building, maintaining, and improving relationships and connections. We are bringing what nature is still green into our lives.<br /><br />Christmas is a time to celebrate being good and adding good to the world. It's a time to remind ourselves that in the winters of our lives, there are things we can do to bring joy and hope. And those lessons really do apply to the hard times (to the winters of our lives)--when things are hard, we can choose to deliberately notice or surround ourselves with beauty, we can serve others, we can get closer in touch with nature, we can turn on the lights, we can add music, we can turn to family and other valuable relationships, we can rely on good traditions, we can make fun, we can eat treats--and all of these things help carry us through the difficulties. (And yes, I know that Jesus carries us through the difficulties even better. But the little things we do can have a major impact as well, and remembering what we do for Christmas, which is pretty well ingrained in our beings, can help us remember the list of things that help us through the winters of our lives.)<br /><br />Oh, and, while we'll decorate at the beginning of the month, we're going to really celebrate our Christmas--our Winter Festival--from winter solstice (because that is a tangible, easily predicted date) to about January 5 because then the presents stuff will be over with at the beginning of the "season", so that I can enjoy it, too, and the performing season will have settled down, so that Tim can enjoy the holidays with us. It takes the pressure (and guilt) off me for not doing more before Christmas day. <br /><br />The kids heard me explaining all these ideas to Tim, and I got zero pushback. In fact, the kids were delighted with the idea of having a Winter Festival. They were even more delighted with the idea that both Anda and Tim both separately proposed that if we're embracing this as a Winter Festival, we are not bound by our own religious tradition. We can explore and embrace the good Winter traditions from many cultures (respectfully!) and time periods. We can enjoy cookies from Tim's ancestral homelands, and mythologies from mine, and traditional meals from his mission, and songs from medieval winter celebrations. <br /><br />We can explore winter festivities and ideas and music and really just party and have fun because we don't need to try to keep it holy (and fail). The holy part is clearly defined and distinct, and that makes it okay for the rest of it to just be fun. <br /><br />And that is a huge relief to me.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-4437269654400305132021-11-10T17:00:00.010-07:002021-11-10T17:06:45.175-07:00AntiChrists in the Book of Mormon<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> I have been working on a research project trying to find similarities in the rhetoric and techniques of AntiChrists in the Book of Mormon off and on for over a year, and finally decided to write up what I've learned. It was going to be a blog post, but it came out 27 pages long. I wrote it all and then set it aside, but recently read a few chapters of the book my brother is writing and I was inspired by that to finish this.<br /><br />Since it's not practical to paste 27 pages of text here, I'll drop a link to the .pdf instead. Feel free to read or download. Or you can read it in the embedded copy below.</span></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BOUo6SkByS4ZdqgLi1ZL8OWb9nrrKljO/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BOUo6SkByS4ZdqgLi1ZL8OWb9nrrKljO/view?usp=sharing </span></a></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>
<iframe allow="autoplay" height="480" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BOUo6SkByS4ZdqgLi1ZL8OWb9nrrKljO/preview" width="640"></iframe>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-88190609394967736732021-08-09T03:42:00.001-06:002021-08-09T03:51:51.111-06:00Thoughts on Temples<div style="text-align: left;"> There was a lovely lesson on Temples in Relief Society Sunday, and I was too tired to comment. But I had some thoughts, so I'm going to share them here so my kids can have them (and whoever else).<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The first thing I remembered during the lesson was in response to the teacher asking, "Why do we go back to the temple? What makes us go?" And I remembered a very vivid dream I had years ago while I was a missionary at a Temple Visitor's Center. I dreamed that masses of people were standing in front of a huge set of ornate doors. An angel was there giving them instructions, and the last thing he said was, "And when you go through these doors, you will no longer be families." The vast majority of the people shrugged and said to each other, "I never really liked you anyway," and when the doors opened, they thronged through into a new world, sort of dimly lit. But a small family looked at each other in fear, and pulled themselves out of the throng--Mom, Dad, and two small children. They pushed to a room on the side of the doors, out of the masses, and found the angel standing there. They said, "But we want to stay a family! Please." And the angel replied, "Wait here," and gestured at a couch. And I woke up understanding that <i>that</i> is why we go to the temple again and again. Because amidst all the millions of people who don't care, there are little families like that, sitting and waiting so they don't have to stop being a family forever. In the temple, we help those people (as well as ourselves) be with the ones they love forever.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span> </span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span>I also thought ho</span>w we often wish that we could be closer to Jesus, But He seems so very far away and unreachable. But, in fact, we can go hang out at his house, like we hang out at friend’s houses. Like, that’s super super cool! But we say “The Lord’s House” so often that it stops meaning, “Hey, come hang out at my house” and starts meaning “edifice of straight faces and whispering.” But we need to not forget that the temple is Jesus’s house and we’re invited to come hang out there–in the grounds or inside. That’s so amazing! Even if he’s not always at home, we’re still welcome. His servants are there and will let us in, show us around, help us enjoy the activities. If we let it become a building of stone and lovely furniture, or a quiet spot to be alone with our thoughts, we're missing a major (and amazing!) aspect of the Temple: It's Jesus's and Heavenly Fathers house, and we're invited to come on over and be there. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I also remembered the day I did some research on the actual coronation ceremonies of Queen Elizabeth as part of an online class I was taking on the clothing of royal Brits through history. There was a unit on coronation regalia, and that led me to reading more details about actual British coronations. Like, what's the actual ceremony that turns a person from being a person into being a queen? Turns out the very public crown-placed-on-head bit is only a tiny part of the ceremony, and not the most important part.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In fact, the girl becomes the Queen through a series of private (and they consider sacred) and public ceremonies that endow her with power and authority to lead England. During the ceremony, the queen takes an oath (which included multiple separate covenants), prays at an altar, and she's ritually washed with clean water and then anointed with sacred oil (on forehead, hands, and breast while wearing a white dress), to symbolically cleanse her and to give her power and authority to run the kingdom, and she’s made a queen of the kingdom and a leader of the church, and she has different items and clothings added to her at different parts of the ceremony--and also before and after--to represent things (The Order of the Garter, for example, worn by royalty represented by a blue sash on the left shoulder, across the chest, fastened at the opposite hip, and the Royal Victorian Order, which sash is worn on the right shoulder; the sash of highest ranking is worn in the ceremony so there are not sashes crossing the chest in every which way, but one, worn on the shoulder that represents the highest Order). Some of it happens in a very small, intimate setting and some happens in a more public ceremony that includes language that is supposed to help everyone--Queen especially--understand the change in status, role, responsibility, and behavior expected. Bible scriptures are read. The Bible is placed on the altar after reminding the new queen that she is to follow the law of the Gospel in her life and decisions. There are tokens of various aspects of her new life as Queen exchanged with the priests who have authority over those things in ritualized actions and words, explained and then given to the queen, who sometimes accepts them (like putting on rings) and sometimes gives them back after receiving them. There's a lot there--you can read up on it. <br /><br />All of this helped me understand the temple better. The purpose of the temple is, in part, to endow us with power and authority in God's kingdom and Church. The ceremony educates us and also provides covenants that help direct our outlook and behavior--help us understand and succeed in our roles. Like the queen at her coronation, we are symbolically washed, we are literally anointed with oil--for the same reasons the Queen is. We have symbolic clothing, action, and education. And the point is to make us leaders in the kingdom (which, of course, means servants, not bosses, in God's kingdom). The priesthood is, in fact, called the Order of the Son of God. <br /><br />And, like the girl becoming the Queen, the ceremony ought to give us a different view of ourselves and our place in the universe and the Church, and a sense of gravitas and focus in our daily activities and in our bearing and behavior, because we emerge different than we went in, just like the queen emerges different than she went in. Of course, one major difference is England wants but one queen, and God wants all queens. (And kings, of course.) Another is that God's power is real; the Queen's is mostly symbolic. <br /><br />Anyway, thinking about all those things during the lesson, and it was lovely to ponder. <br /><br />And I just finally got an appointment to go back. YAY!</div>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-63985639975574516112021-05-02T05:12:00.002-06:002021-05-02T05:12:33.253-06:00Feedburner Died!<p> Google finally killed feedburner.</p><div style="text-align: left;">If you want to keep getting emails of my blog when it is updated, please re-subscribe in the box on the sidebar of the blog.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Thank you!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">--Becca</div>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-59224334916710427972021-01-18T07:33:00.006-07:002021-01-18T10:17:02.118-07:00Yikes! The Connection between Nazis and QAnon<p> In researching QAnon, I became intrigued by a connection some academics and reporters were making between QAnon and the old Nazi propaganda text "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."<br /><br />I tried to read it, but that is one evil book. Also incredibly badly written.</p><p>So I found a summary and only read a few sections. <br /><br />But what I found was concerning--not because these teaching have been used for centuries in various societies to work people toward genocide (interestingly, and according to researchers other than me), and not just because they seem to have been compiled and plagiarized by someone (possibly Russian Intelligence, who also apparently are being increasingly connected to QAnon), and not just because the stuff is nonsense and dangerous. I found it concerning in part because in all my infiltrating far-right groups over the summer to see what they were thinking and turn them in, I found these things taught on a daily basis. I did not know they were old Nazi propaganda, repackaged to target Democrats, BLM, and antifa. <br /><br />So here's the summary of the contents of the Protocols, with the words "Jews," "Elders," "Masons," and "Zion" replaced with "Democrats," "BLM," and "antifa." See if it sounds familiar to you. It did to me. Sadly and scarily familiar. <br /><br />Now that I know where these teachings came from, I'm going to be taking them with an even bigger grain of salt. <br /></p><p>PLEASE NOTE: This is the most horrible propaganda, and it is not true. This the stuff that made genocide possible, and the Holocaust possible, and if we find ourselves defending any of these beliefs, we MUST remember where they came from and reject them for more correct, true, nuanced, and loving ideas.</p><p>Protocol I: Democrats are deceptive and evil. Democrats believe that non-Democrats are "alcoholised animals" who have been indoctrinated by conspiracies. Democrats don't care about what is good and moral and are willing to participate in bribery and deceit. Democrats and the Deep State are liberal by design--it's part of the plot--and are anti-autocratic, again, as part of the plot to take over the world. Liberalism is the philosophy that enables them to take over the world. Kings and dictators are the only defense against the Democrats and liberals taking over the world. The Democrats have created a new aristocracy made up of the elites, the educated elites, and the wealthy. </p><p>Protocol II: The Deep state are working toward financial control of the world. The Democrats control education and have filled public education with Marxist philosophy, which is inherently and eternally dangerous for the rest of us. The Democrats control the media and exploit violence and tragedy to increase their viewers in the media.</p><p>Protocol III: Democrats use socialism to their advantage. They use socialism as a promise and a recruiting tool to get people to join them. Ultimately, they turn them into antifa fighting soldiers who they can sacrifice for their wars to gain power. They also recruit people to communism and anarchy for the same reasons.</p><p>Protocol IV: Democrats want to destroy religion and all religious people. They will take our religion from us and refuse to let us practice it. They will replace religion with science, math, and materialism. Destroying religion will increase their power over education and business.</p><p>Protocol V: The Deep State (Democrats and liberals) have already infiltrated our government and most of the world governments. They are controlling the media all over to hide their rise to power.</p><p>Protocol VI: Democrats have created large monopolies (like Big Pharma and Big Tech) in order to exert control over the rest of us. They are also destroying our credit and savings. They are also raising wages to convince people they are helping everyone, but quietly also raising the cost of necessary goods as a trick.</p><p>Protocol VII: Democrats have used the press to create public opinion and also to move governments in a progressive, liberal direction. They will fight a big war to keep this control</p><p>Protocol VIII: Democrats get to know what the rest of us live like just so they can manipulate us. They surround themselves with so-called experts, economic powerbrokers, and millionaires.</p><p>Protocol IX: Democrats and Antifa orchestrate protests and acts of violence against THEMSELVES to increase compassion for them so that nobody will realize who they really are. In reality, they want to control every aspect of our lives--especially our own children. Their primary motivation (and weapons) are hatred, malice, vengeance, greed, and ambition.</p><p>Protocol X: Democrats want to increase access to voting and help everyone have a greater chance of voting. They want to increase access to voting just to make sure they win elections so that their world domination will appear to be political. Liberalism destroys the safeguards of the non-Democrats, so they push liberal ideology. The Deep State will install puppet presidents who have shady histories. Democrats use blackmail to further their purposes.</p><p>Protocol XI: Once in power, Democrats will remove our rights, including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and access to voting. Democrats believe the rest of us are sheep. Democrats are wolves who will destroy us if we let them get power. Democrats are using outside organizations (they cite Freemasonry) to recruit an army of faithful followers who will go along with their plots without questioning.</p><p>Protocol XII: The media is so under control of the Democrats and the Deep State that no single announcement will reach people without their input and control over the content and messaging. Democrats and the Deep State control practically every form of media, so you can't trust any of them. They tailor the message to the audience to keep them fully involved, and all messages are designed to subtly further their nefarious goals.</p><p>Protocol XIII: The Deep State has introduced all kinds of gaming and entertainment--they control the entertainment and gaming industries in order to keep people calm and distracted. They promote progress to obscure truth. </p><p>Protocol XIV: Democrats do not want most religions to exist. They will constantly point out the flaws of Christianity and other religions, but only speak positively and never accept criticism of their chosen religions.</p><p>Protocol XV: The Russians and Catholics are the main aristocrats that are stopping the Democrats. BLM is creating chapters worldwide to spread their message and recruit followers, but the leadership is centralized and controlled by a few. They are planning to recruit all the most powerful and influential people into their organization, which will legitimize them but also give advantages and acceptance to BLM. If anyone tries to stop BLM, Antifa, or the Democrats, there will be clandestine executions. </p><p>Protocol XVI: Democrats must infiltrate and take over Universities, re-educating people in a new direction. There, they will teach revisionist history and not teach civics, politics, or the constitution so as to keep people unaware of their rights and unable to fight back against their schemes.</p><p>Protocol XVII: Democrats are going to destroy religion in part by discrediting religious leaders. They will also create chaos and schisms in religious organizations so they will destroy themselves from the inside. Democrats will keep order by encouraging thought police to spy on and turn in their neighbors. One third of the people will keep the other two-thirds in check, and nobody trusting their neighbors will distract them from noticing what the Democrats are doing.</p><p>Protocol XVIII: The Democrats have convinced Antifa members to assassinate political leaders they want out of the way. This is easy as antifa are sheep doing the Democrats bidding. Nobody would ever want to assassinate the Democrat leaders, though, because everyone will love them. The rank and file will be so caught up in the cult of personality that they can't see what the leader is actually doing.</p><p>Protocol XIX: The Democrats have re-interpreted history in order to control us and bring thousands of liberals onto their side to help them.</p><p>Protocol XX: Democrats are in favor of a progressive tax so that the lowly people will not feel the sting of taxation and so won't be oppose to the things they are plotting, and the rich people won't feel the sting of taxation because they can afford to lose the money. They will then redistribute the money to fund public works projects and an extensive welfare state. The Democrats have been responsible for every economic crash in world history, and every economic crisis. They do it to try to get governments to take money out of the system and move more money to their own elites. The Democrats do this because they are trying to keep the poor, poor and slaves to them.</p><p>Protocol XXI: The Democrats are in favor of over-regulating industry so they can control it.</p><p>Protocol XXII: The Democrats have stockpiled much of the world's gold and can use it whenever and however they want. Their greatest weapon is economic power.</p><p>Protocol XXIII: Democrats want to reduce access of the rest of us to luxuries. They also want to legislate morality so that we feel like they are benevolent and good and then we won't fight against them. Democrats fight to abolish unemployment so they can control people. They want to destroy big business because business has too much influence on people. Their modus operandi is to replace all existing leaders with Democrats, and then demoralize the people so that they feel like the Democrat leaders are a godsend.</p><p>Protocol XXIV: The Deep State selects the new leaders and inducts them into their secrets. The Democrats believe that nobody can be entrusted to run a government unless they are first inducted into the secret society of the Deep State. The people they choose are hard, controlling leaders with no mercy. They will control the education and therefore the thoughts of all the people.</p><p>Conclusion of the Protocols: The Democrats are filling education with materialism and removing God from schools. They control everything secretly. A quote from the 1905 English edition's conclusion: "The end of national liberty is near; therefore personal freedom is approaching its close; for true liberty cannot exist where [the Democrats] use [their] lever of gold to rule the masses and dominate the most respectable and enlightened class of society. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."</p><p><br /></p><p>This is CRAZY stuff, and totally not true. If we believe any of it, we should at least be aware of where it came from and also where it leads. </p><p>(If you want to read more, I found summaries of most of the sections here: <a href="https://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/32311/VickersThesis2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y " target="_blank">https://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/32311/VickersThesis2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y </a> The original is a super hard text to read--badly written and full of horribleness I couldn't puke my way through most of, so the summaries were brilliantly helpful.)</p><p>That said, there are quotes from the intro and conclusion of the 1905 edition that have made their way into QAnon and other far right literature and propaganda surrounding Trump. It's spooky. </p><p>I have concluded that we are not fighting Trump or Trump supporters for the soul of the nation like some people say. We are fighting literally the same thing that motivated and informed Nazis. And that is scary and sad.<br /><br /></p><p>So what did I find, overarching theme-wise-in the Protocols?</p><p>I found that if you believe them, that they really are what Jews/Democrats are doing and believe, then you will have been led to:</p><p>1. Not trust your education, but instead rely on gut reactions even against all the history and science you had learned. Also not trust anyone else's evidence based on history or science because they were "corrupted" by "marxism" and therefore not trustworthy.</p><p>2. Not react emotionally or by acting to stop bad things or harms to your fellow men--especially Democrats/Jews--because they were probably attacking themselves in order to get sympathy, and the horrors aren't actually real or are self-inflicted and you wouldn't want to fall for the trick. </p><p>3. Not trust government, big business, or any large organization for fear they are trying to trick you and take away your freedoms (big tech, big pharma, banks, etc.)</p><p>4. Distrust your neighbors for fear they are spying on you. This breaks down social norms and community cohesion, which makes things like war possible.</p><p>5. Begin to find "proof" of the Protocols (which are 100% fake, and propaganda also) everywhere. The Democrats want to help people by increasing the social safety net? Nope--part of their plot. The curriculum changed at school? Must be Marxist and part of the plot. Democrats want to make it easier for people to vote? Part of the plot. Democrats want to raise taxes on the rich? Part of the plot. Democrats want to help immigrants become citizens? Nope, they're really building their army of sheep. The media shares something that makes you uncomfortable or question something you heard? No worries--they're part of the plot, too. Consequently, nothing can be understood by it's true, not-connected, simpler explanation, and nobody can have pure ideological reasons for things. Everything must be connected, must be nefarious, must be evil-influenced except the people who are ACTUALLY lying to you. This makes it Very Very Very hard to identify truth and cling to it, and it also makes it so you start living your life in fear and in a false state of finding fake connections between unconnected things that feeds the fear, distrust, and inability to distinguish falsehood from truth.</p><p>6. Unashamedly "other" people, demean people, and increase tribalism in your life and in the lives of those around you.</p><p>Guess what things we're seeing rampant in our society right now? </p><p>Sigh. </p><p>We got played. Same as the Germans before WWII. Hopefully we can pull away and have a different outcome, though, despite the extreme right wing, neo-nazi, QAnon attempts to start a war.</p>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-1985873121590143322021-01-12T09:47:00.025-07:002021-01-13T09:19:14.639-07:00A Warning about Conspiracy and Manipulation, part 2 (QAnon vs Conservatives in particular)<p> One of the big conspiracy theories out there that are targeting conservatives especially right now is QAnon.</p><p>People hear about QAnon all the time as a "lizard people and pedophile-ring-fighting" thing. But QAnon is actually a very sophisticated manipulation and conspiracy theory that is rising quickly to the level of a cult. They even have church services! </p><p>QAnon is run by someone--nobody knows who, but theories range from a pig farmer to Russian Intelligence--who is bent on dividing America so severely that it tears itself apart. <br /><br />I do not know why they targeted conservatives. Conservatives are no more gullible or prone to falling for conspiracies than liberals. In fact, everyone is susceptible and at risk. Regardless of why it is happening, it's happening.</p><p>And one of the things I've learned in doing research on this is that QAnon is highly skilled and incredibly adept at their game. They are smart and powerful. </p><p>QAnon's basic core belief is not lizard people and killing humans to drink their blood, despite that being part of it (I gather. I'm not joining up to find out because of that susceptibility thing.) This is one description of their actual core belief by Steven Hassan, a cult and conspiracy expert. </p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>The world is run by a global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and child sex traffickers who are plotting against President Donald Trump and his supporters and that only Trump can save us.</i></p></blockquote><p>Here is another explanation, by Marc-André Argentino, a researcher studying "how extremist religious and political organizations create propaganda and recruit new members to ideological causes":</p><blockquote><p><i>QAnon followers believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.”</i></p></blockquote><p>Here is a more lengthy explanation, published by my favorite investigative journalism source, <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/07/the-making-of-qanon-a-crowdsourced-conspiracy/" target="_blank">Bellingcat</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i> Here is the core of the QAnon myth: with the aid of a small group of military intelligence officers called the Q team (one or more of whom is supposedly responsible for writing the drops), President Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-eating pedophiles who are conspiring to obstruct and overthrow him. The military will arrest them en masse in an event called “the Storm.” The cabal’s membership has grown in the telling (at first, it was “many in our government;” within a month, any “celebs” who had “supported HRC” might very well be in on it; a few months later, there were too many to fit into Guantanamo Bay; later still, three other “detention centers [were] being prepped”), but it would be fair to say that virtually anyone who’s angered or defied President Trump is considered part of the cabal, along with the usual suspects like financier and philanthropist George Soros.</i></p><p><i>After the Storm, military tribunals will ensure that these baby-eating traitors are executed or sentenced to life in prison. Faced with overwhelming proof of the cabal’s existence, a stunned public will mourn; rage; and ultimately unite behind President Trump, ushering in a golden age of patriotism and prosperity.</i> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i>Remarkably, this description covers none of the most bizarre corners of QAnon (for instance, in QAnon lore, North Korea was controlled by the CIA but has now been liberated by Trump and the Q team). It also omits a key aspect of the QAnon worldview: that every public act or utterance of President Trump or a suspected cabal member might contain “comms,” or secret messages, which QAnon believers can decode. And it leaves out one of the most important QAnon slogans: “disinformation is necessary,” which some might call a wonderful excuse for Q’s failed predictions, also allowing believers to pick and choose which parts of the theory they embrace.</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>...</i></p><p><i> True justice and “good government” can only exist after the Storm, when Trump — and Trump alone — rules the country, with all his opposition dead or imprisoned.</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>I recently watched a propaganda video that laid out QAnon's plans as if they were a speech from Mr. Trump (it was a very convincing fake, and very slick and emotionally impactful). The video stated that it is God's will that Mr. Trump be President of the US for at least another 4 years in order to accomplish God's work at rooting out the evil global elites who are trying to overthrow the US government and instead force us all into socialism that will remove our religions and our freedom. It is God's will that we fight back, with armed uprisings, to put Trump in power one more time so he can return the rule of the country to the people and to God, and God will support and make successful anyone who fights, and it ended with the Lord's prayer and map turning red one state at a time as the narrator intoned "thy will be done, thy kingdom come on earth..." </p><p>You can see clearly that QAnon and Trump are inextricably tied together. And Q (what people call the puppetmaster pulling the strings, whoever it is) has spent a good deal of time flattering Mr. Trump and getting into his head, too, which has led to the philosophies and ideas of QAnon becoming somewhat mainstream in Republican circles. This is distressing. Especially since most people do not realize that things they are being told are normal Republican ideas and talking points are actually related to Q or have been hijacked and manipulated by Q. Remember, Q is a genius at twisting normal things into threads of his/her conspiracy and propaganda machine.</p><p>QAnon's apparent goal is to lead people into the conspiracy theory one tiny step at a time in order to create a divide in American culture and life, and then, once the followers are sufficient in number and sufficiently sucked into the false, manipulated beliefs, incite violence using them as pawns, or cannonballs, or expendables. The goal, apparently, is civil war. </p><p>And it has become shocking how successful Q has been at this. The events at the Capitol on January 6, now that we're getting more information, show how successful Q has been. The fact that the FBI issued a warning to all people that there were going to be armed protests at all 50 state capitols and the US capitol between January 16 and January 22 is another indicator of Q's success at their awful goal.</p><p>Q wants to tear us apart from the inside. To destroy our nation <i>and</i> our souls. To make us feel fear and hate for even family members. To make us pray that everyone joins them because everyone who doesn't join will be destroyed for the good of the rest of us, and that is God's will. And Trump is God's chosen vessel to lead us through this destruction and rebirth. </p><p>Q's methods are partially outlined in the article I linked to in Part 1. The red flags that you might be dealing with Q are the same as the red flags for other conspiracy and manipulation groups, so they are outlined in <a href="https://beccajones.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-warning-about-conspiracy-and.html" target="_blank">Part 1 </a>as well. To sum it up, Q leads people to slowly, one little step at a time, begin to believe normal but Q-adjacent things, and to use Q's catchphrases and thinking patterns as their "talking points" to discuss political ideas. Any baby step that leads to Q's ideas becoming more mainstream is taken by Q willingly and eagerly, so that millions of otherwise good people are helping Q by using Q-related or Q-adjacent hash tags, catchphrases, explanations for things. Q has taught millions of good people to never criticize Trump on any level for any reason. Q has taught millions of people that sexual trafficking is something it is not. Q has taught millions of people that Democrats' primary (or sole) goal is to overthrow the government and put in a socialist government instead.<br /><br />Q is a genius as hijacking things that already exist, and twisting them, or changing the words, or corrupting them just a <i>tiny</i> little bit at a time in order to teach people and prime people to accept more and more and more QAnon doctrine, until people are willing to storm the Capitol and think they are doing "the right thing" at the moment, as Josiah Colt, one of the stormers, said when he apologized for doing it. And Q convinces people that they have been enlightened when they have been sucked in and blinded. It's brilliant. They call it "redpilling" in reference to the movie <i>The Matrix</i>, where a character is offered a red pill that will make him "see reality" and "be free." </p><p>I've had so many of their friends complain to me that it's like talking to a wall somehow to communicate with someone who has been redpilled. The friends try to engage with the ideas, try to communicate facts, try to discuss and find out what their friends think, and they are just shut out and shut down and belittled and demeaned. Suddenly, communication is no longer possible, and the person who is redpilled loses respect (even basic human respect) for all their friends who have not been redpilled, even while accusing others of that exact same thing. It's heartbreaking for the friends who disagree but do not feel any disrespect, and it further pulls the redpilled one into QAnon because they are trained to dismiss and hurt their friends and then see the insult as being pushed against them, not by them. <br /><br />Of course, not everyone who is believing or spreading Q or Q-adjacent (stepping stones to Q) ideas are redpilled. Most are relatively innocently going about their lives, believing seemingly reasonable things taught to them by the media and their redpilled friends, without ever realizing it's wrong. Q's ideas have spread far and wide in conservative circles and in conservative media sources--especially since Q managed to convince almost all conservatives to not engage with any other than the "approved" news sources--the ones that are Q-influenced and spreading Q ideas, or even just Q language and Q-appropriate talking points.</p><p>Q has successfully hijacked things that seem unrelated to his/her goal. For example, child trafficking. This is a real problem. And who wouldn't be against child trafficking? So Q jumped in there and has manipulated and corrupted the information being spread in a way that tells the wrong story. And, nefariously, in a way that makes normal people feel fear every single day, and makes them look at their own neighbors and fellow citizens as possible threats instead of as humans. Consequently, millions of white suburban housewives are now passionate about anti-child sex trafficking, but the thing they are fighting against is the made-up, mostly false narrative about it that was pushed by Q (that, for example, children are being kidnapped by foreign-looking men out of schools and grocery stores by the millions on a daily basis and sold into prostitution). </p><p>The result of this has been that conservative white women now almost-universally fear "foreign-looking men" and were completely willing to not just go along with Stephen Miller's cruel and horrible immigration policies as a result, but to push them and promote them against common sense and their own religious beliefs, and against the wishes of actual anti-trafficking experts (Miller's immigration policies actually increase trafficking). It drove a wedge into society and did absolutely <i>nothing</i> to help the actual anti-child trafficking work going on. It also made anti-child-trafficking work a partisan issue, giving all credit to Trump as if this has never existed before he came along (despite all evidence to the contrary). </p><p>I had a discussion with a really good person who I care about on social media who had been so blinded by the "talking points" that Q was pushing that she was advocating literally executing--without due process--anyone even suspected of being a pedophile, and accused me of being a horrible person who was beyond help when I suggested it might be a good idea to identify who is at risk of pedophilia and get them help before they commit any crimes against children. Zero victims was my goal. Death to pedophiles was hers. And there was absolutely no way to discuss it because the idea had been planted, and it was final. No nuance. No discussion. And no ability to comprehend other options or analyze it (this is a normally smart woman, too!). She had been infected by a virus and there was no way to get through to <i>her, </i>past the virus. </p><p>One horrible thing about this is, once Q had successfully pushed their corrupted ideas into enough heads, they then pushed the idea that child trafficking would increase because of covid-related mask wearing, and so if we cooperated with health agencies as the Church asked us to do, we would be sacrificing our children to traffickers, who would get away with it because of masks. It was insane, but it drew a lot of people into behavior that was against the Church teachings, against their normal nature, against brotherly love, and into greater fear. They started seeing all the people who were wearing masks as people who were trying to help the "bad guys" steal their children.</p><p>And, in the mix, Q has been pushing the idea that the pedophiles are all Democrats. And all Democrats are either pedophiles or love pedophiles or are helping pedophiles.</p><p>Q took a normal, good idea, and corrupted it and corrupted it until it led many people to have more fear, less love, and the idea that the Democrats, liberals, or, in fact, anyone who did not support Tump was worthy of death. Sneaky. One little step at a time. Almost imperceptible. </p><p>That's just one example of ideas that have been hijacked or introduced and then twisted and manipulated and used to lead people slowly but steadily into a corrupted reality created by Q to destroy them and all of us.<br /></p><p>And we are all susceptible! And Q is targeting conservatives. Hard. Brilliantly. Liberals a bit, but conservatives hard.</p><p>There are hashtags that can be warnings for you of Q-corrupted ideas and Q-influenced people (who you should love but who you should be very wary of being used to suck you into the conspiracy). They include, among others, SaveOurChildren, wwg1wga (QAnon's motto is Where We Go 1, We Go All), thestormiscoming, patriots, qanon, wwg, wga, trump, maga, thegreatawakening, q, kag, darktolight, obamagate, pizzagate, draintheswamp, covid, qarmy, pedogate, deepstate, savethechildren, donaldtrump, conservative, redpill, fakenews, pedowood, adrenochrome, makeamericagreatagain, a, truth, thesepeoplearesick, usa, walkaway, bhfyp, wgaworldwide, coronavirus, republican, wakeup, thestorm, america, greatawakening, trumptrain, wethepeople, trusttheplan, epsteindidntkillhimself, followthewhiterabbit, sheepnomore, digitalsoldiers, americafirst, clintonbodycount, pizzagateisreal, wearethenewsnow, chan, newworldorder, qanonarmy, painiscoming, freedom, godwins, hisnamewassethrich, wakeupamerica, unitednotdivided, pro. nwo, thebaqery, maga2020. (You can find more Q-related hashtags in this article: <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/05/how-the-insurgent-and-maga-right-are-being-welded-together-on-the-streets-of-washington-d-c/" target="_blank">https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/05/how-the-insurgent-and-maga-right-are-being-welded-together-on-the-streets-of-washington-d-c/ </a>)</p><p>You can easily see that many of these look inocuous, and many have been outright hijacked. Despite how innocent they look, you have to be extremely wary whenever you see these hashtags because they indicate the person posting the information, whether knowingly or unknowingly, has been influenced by Q and is spreading Q's goals and Q's doctrines. Do not use these hashtags, even if you mean them in innocent ways, because they are calling cards inviting people to engage with you and spread Q's ideas and goals in and through you.</p><div>It is astonishing to me that Q has been so successful at the goals that people who spent their whole lives fearing a New World Order are now using that as a hashtag and advocating for it. People who spent their whole lives fearing an authoritarian leader would rise up and use the government against the people (and they would need to arm themselves against the uprising) are flocking to the aid of the very authoritarian government they feared, using their own weapons as the guns they spent their lives planning to defend their family against. <br /><br />It should not be a surprise that religious hashtags are included. The worst terrorist regimes in history all used religious language to manipulate the people and religious fervor to get them to commit atrocities. Q is not different--why not use something that has been incredibly successful in the past? Q kidnaps our faith and uses it to work against God and against our nation. In the name of following God and saving our nation, Q gets people to work against both, without ever realizing what they are doing. <br /><br />I have no words for it but astonishing. <br /><br />And yet, we are all susceptible to this influence and we are all at risk of joining, and all conservatives have targets on their heads right now.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, here's the really uncomfortable bit to post. I have compiled a list of ideas, talking points, etc., that are created by Q, stepping-stones to Q (influenced by and opening doors to greater influence by Q), hijacked by Q, or otherwise being used to spread Q's ideas and goals. All of these things are partially or completely false, but most are widely accepted as true by conservatives (and a few by liberals) thanks to Q and QAnon in general. This list is not comprehensive. But these are some of the ideas we've been fed, tricked into believing, have had hijacked, or have been spread by Q-influenced politicians, including the President (who appears to have been tricked into believing that going along with Q is doing good in the world.)</div><div><br /></div><div>PLEASE please please please do not be offended if things you believe are on this list. We have all been tricked by Q. Q is targeting us to trick us. Being tricked by a master trickster is not something to be ashamed of. Clinging to it and diving deeper once you know better is concerning, though. I was tricked by Q about antifa and didn't even know until I prayed to know what things I believed were true that were not true. You were probably tricked by Q about something else. We all have been. But we don't need to cling to it. We can reject Q. </div><div><br /></div><div>Just like all the things Q does many of these are not all false, but only partially false. Finding the bit that's false can help us integrate nuance and critical thinking into all our ideas, and that is an excellent way to combat Q.</div><div><br /></div><div>You will notice that Q did not invent a lot of these ideas. Some have been around for literally decades. Way longer than Q has been around. But, like the hashtags above that Q did not invent, Q has hijacked all these ideas, and they serve Q's purpose now. </div><p style="text-align: center;"><u><b>Ideas probably originating with Q or that help spread Q's message that should be checked</b></u></p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;">The election was stolen</div><div style="text-align: center;">There was a massive amount of fraud in the 2020 election</div><div style="text-align: center;">Fake voters exist and voted in huge numbers</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump won the election</div><div style="text-align: center;">There were thousands of dead voters voting</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump won by a landslide</div><div style="text-align: center;">There is a ton of proof that the election was rigged</div><div style="text-align: center;">Antifa is nationwide, organized, violent, and coming to get you</div><div style="text-align: center;">All violence is rooted in and committed by Antifa</div><div style="text-align: center;">You need to be very, very scared of Antifa</div><div style="text-align: center;">Antifa doesn't actually exist</div><div style="text-align: center;">Antifa is an ideology with no organization and adherents never show up and do violence</div><div style="text-align: center;">Children are at risk of kidnapping and being sold into sex slavery at every moment</div><div style="text-align: center;">Children are regularly kidnapped by foreign men and used for sex slavery by them</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats love pedophiles and push pedophilia and want to make it legal</div><div style="text-align: center;">Masks do more harm than good</div><div style="text-align: center;">Covid is not real</div><div style="text-align: center;">Covid is the flu</div><div style="text-align: center;">Covid cannot hurt you</div><div style="text-align: center;">The best way to end covid is to open the economy and have zero restrictions</div><div style="text-align: center;">Doctors are making money for diagnosing covid and so do it without any covid</div><div style="text-align: center;">Anything about Trump Derangement Syndrome (both the liberal and conservative meanings)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats are going to institute socialism and take away your religion</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats are going to institute socialism immediately in an effort to destroy the government</div><div style="text-align: center;">Big-S Socialism and small-s socialism are the same thing</div><div style="text-align: center;">All socialism is the same as '60's socialism and communism</div><div style="text-align: center;">The Church wants members to fight all forms of socialism everywhere in the world always</div><div style="text-align: center;">All Black Lives Matter protests were violent</div><div style="text-align: center;">BLM is a terrorist organization</div><div style="text-align: center;">BLM is trying to institute marxism all through the nation</div><div style="text-align: center;">Jeffrey Epstein isn't dead</div><div style="text-align: center;">Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself</div><div style="text-align: center;">The Clintons have had a bunch of people executed</div><div style="text-align: center;">Whole cities were burned by black people rioting in the name of protesting</div><div style="text-align: center;">Black people are thugs</div><div style="text-align: center;">There was no russian collusion (and don't say anything bad about Russia at all)</div><div style="text-align: center;">The Mueller Report reported that Trump did nothing and it found nothing</div><div style="text-align: center;">Mueller was investigating a hoax</div><div style="text-align: center;">All Democrats hate Trump</div><div style="text-align: center;">Anyone who doesn't love Trump hates him</div><div style="text-align: center;">Anyone who doesn't support Trump does so from being full of hatred</div><div style="text-align: center;">Anyone who doesn't support Trump 100% hates me personally</div><div style="text-align: center;">Anyone who doesn't support Trump 100% is brainwashed by the media</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats have been trying to stop Trump from day one because of politics and politics alone (not because he's doing something wrong or dangerous)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump never lies</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump has never done anything wrong</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump is a godly man who is a prophet</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump is all evil all the time and has never done anything good</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats are full of hatred</div><div style="text-align: center;">Republicans are all blind and brainwashed</div><div style="text-align: center;">There is an organized fascist Democrat movement trying to take over and destroy the country, and all Democrats are part of it--every single one, including family members and friends (alas)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Plandemic (all of Plandemic)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats all lie; Republicans never do</div><div style="text-align: center;">Anyone who doesn't love Trump is a Democrat</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump is called of God to save our country</div><div style="text-align: center;">Trump was called to have an 8-year term and since he didn't get re-elected, God wants us to overthrow the government all together and return the power to the people (and make Trump "First Citizen")</div><div style="text-align: center;">Patriots take up arms to defend themselves</div><div style="text-align: center;">The only good Democrat is a dead democrat</div><div style="text-align: center;">All Democrats are baby killers</div><div style="text-align: center;">If you vote for Democrats, you are voting to kill babies</div><div style="text-align: center;">All Democrats are in favor of using abortion as birth control and like abortions</div><div style="text-align: center;">Democrats hate babies</div><div style="text-align: center;">All Democrats want full up-to-birth abortions legalized and paid for by the government</div><div style="text-align: center;">There are zero exception to abortion prohibitions that are okay with the Church or any good people</div><div style="text-align: center;">All righteous people are Republicans</div><div style="text-align: center;">There are no righteous Democrats</div><div style="text-align: center;">You can tell a person's righteousness by how they vote</div><div style="text-align: center;">All Republicans worship Trump</div><div style="text-align: center;">If a guy is on our side, it means he's good no matter what he's done</div><div style="text-align: center;">We're the good guys and nobody else can be</div><div style="text-align: center;">The mainstream media is biased and therefore wrong</div><div style="text-align: center;">The conservative mainstream media is not biased</div><div style="text-align: center;">You cannot trust the Mainstream Media in any way in any realm and should never read or listen to anything they have touched</div><div style="text-align: center;">Non mainstream media are more reliable than anyone else and we don't have to check their bias or where the money comes from or even their facts--especially the "approved" sources of information</div><div style="text-align: center;">Non mainstream media has no agenda and would never lie</div><div style="text-align: center;">If you are not one of us, you are a liar or mistaken and I would be wrong to listen to you or consider your ideas</div><div style="text-align: center;">If a source uses a single loaded word or ever makes a single mistake (even if they retract it), everything they produce is wrong and unreliable and manipulating you</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: left;">There are more. Many many more. I couldn't catalog them all and I wouldn't want to. Since this is a post of warning to conservatives, I focused most heavily on those, but there are liberal Q lies as well, and I included a few of those. I'm sure you could think of a lot more. We're always more attuned to the lies others believe than we are to the lies we believe. And nobody wants to think that something they believe is actually wrong. Nobody wants to think they were misled. Nobody wants to think their ideas are actually simplistic black-and-white thinking that is a stepping stone to something awful like Q, or that things they've believed for a long time have been hijacked by Q. <br /><br />I might even be wrong about some of these. Hard to tell when you're wrong. <br /><br />The only thing I've found that consistently works to help me see what I believe that is wrong is to pray and ask Heavenly Father to help me "know the things I know that just ain't so," as my dad once said to me. I learn one bit at a time. I think it would work for everyone. God loves us all. He helps us all shed our false or incorrect beliefs and the vain traditions we've learned one piece at a time, helping us replace them with true things. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I have also found it helps immensely to take my brother's advice to give people the benefit of the doubt. Surely they have come to conclusions through some thought process. Surely they are not all evil simply because they believe something different from me. We can continue to remind ourselves that we are all humans and children of God, and that we don't want to us-vs-them or "other" people, but let them be human and learn and grow and evolve together. We especially don't want to make people dig in their heels and defend themselves in a falsehood because of how we behave (I am still working on this--it is an definite fault of mine.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">In the meantime be aware of the spreading lies and keep your compassion and critical thinking skills at the forefront.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Read more here:<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-qanon-followers-are-dangerous-cult-how-save-someone-ncna1239828" target="_blank"> https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-qanon-followers-are-dangerous-cult-how-save-someone-ncna1239828</a></p><p style="text-align: left;">and here: <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-church-of-qanon-will-conspiracy-theories-form-the-basis-of-a-new-religious-movement-137859">https://theconversation.com/the-church-of-qanon-will-conspiracy-theories-form-the-basis-of-a-new-religious-movement-137859</a></p></div>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-41724725760141937722021-01-12T07:44:00.025-07:002021-01-13T07:30:08.410-07:00A Warning About Conspiracy and Manipulation, Part 1 (Conspiracy, Manipulation, and Red Flags in General)<p> I recently read an excellent article on Games and Conspiracies. (<a href="https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5">https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5</a>)</p><p>This was a paradigm-shifting article for me to find. Profoundly so. <br /><br />I have been baffled for 5 years how people I respect, who are intelligent humans, could be led into believing wildly cruel, untrue, or inappropriate things that are against their core beliefs. Some of them have even fallen into a conspiracy theory named by its believers "QAnon."<br /><br />It turns out the surest hint that you are susceptible to these wildly led-astray beliefs is to be sure that you are not susceptible. Apparently everyone is susceptible to falling into and believing conspiracies and wildly untrue but logically satisfying things--and the more you think you, personally, are not, the more likely you are to be led astray.</p><p>And it's all done in a clever, well-documented, structured way that consistently works.</p><p>For example, from the article: <br /><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game#Unique_terminology">puppet masters</a> are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.</i></p><p><i>There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at...</i></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p><i> ...It’s easy for people to forget that they are not discovering the story, but creating it from random data.</i></p></blockquote><p> You should read the whole article. VERY eye opening.</p><p>There are things you can watch out for that are signs that something you are engaging with are potentially conspiracy-related, false, or dangerously manipulative.</p><p> Some of the <b>red flags:</b><br /></p><p><span><b><span> 1. They use the phrase "Do Your Own Research."</span><br /></b></span></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">You hear this from anti-vaxxers, anti-Mormons, and QAnon supporters all the time. It's almost cliche. Why do they say this? Telling people what to believe makes them resist. Leading them along and planting thoughts in their heads while convincing them the thoughts are their own is way more effective. Making them think they came to the conclusion you planted is the surest way to convince them to continue with what you want them to believe. They call this "following a trail of breadcrumbs." The breadcrumbs are hints that make you <i>think</i> you are doing your own research, but actually the research prompts, questions, and suggested resources are 100% designed to lead you to a particular conclusion. This often includes refusing to answer questions outright, but instead giving dodgy answers or respond with questions. (This is a legitimate educational technique also, but if they <i>never</i> give a straight answer, that's a red flag.)</p></blockquote><p><b>2. They tell you that you can only trust their sources of information. </b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">The manipulators here, the puppetmasters, don't just go cold-turkey. They rely on real situations that are problematic, like that media is biased and that the majority of media organizations appear to lean left instead of right. Then they take that concern and magnify it, convincing people to not trust or listen to <i>any</i> other sources of information. If someone or some belief system is insisting you cannot get accurate information from anyone but them, or that you should never trust experts in the fields involved or even the people actually involved in the work at hand (like elections officials or epidemiologists) that should be a <i>huge</i> red flag that there is conspiracy and manipulation going on, and you should absolutely turn away.</p><p></p></blockquote><p><b>3. They convince people that evidence against something is actually evidence FOR it. </b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The fact, for example, that nobody has heard of a particular thing is reinterpreted as a vast conspiracy to keep it secret rather than as evidence that it's not real or true. </p></blockquote><p><b>4. The explanations for things are complicated, convoluted, and winding, but they tie up every loose end and use every piece of the puzzle, leaving every single fact accounted for and explained in one beautiful, complex thread that winds here and there but catches everything. </b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b> </b>As my brother recently noted: real life is messy. It leaves thing unexplained. There is no unifying theory that ties every single observation into one lovely whole.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Real life is also not as complicated as these theories are. Occam's Razor does fall short in trying to insist that the simplest explanation is most likely the real one, but it is a useful tool for protecting us from conspiracy theories and manipulation. If there is a simpler explanation, we should at least consider it seriously, even if it does not give the heady satisfaction of understanding (or creating) a wonderfully complicated theory of everything. </p></blockquote><p><b>5. The ideas require whole masses of people to think, believe, and act the same way consistently and over time. </b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In real life, people are not as smart as they are in conspiracy theories. They can't think through and implement all the myriad pieces and threads required for a conspiracy theory to happen. It's actually more likely that we have coincidence than that all the threads could possibly be tied together by all the people required all the time with no mistakes and nobody spilling the beans. People can't actually conceive of and implement things like massive, large-scale frauds because it's nearly impossible to get everyone on the same page, agreeing, competent, and consistently cooperative. Think about how hard it is just to get family pictures taken! Is it at all reasonable that someone somewhere could implement the kinds of complex frauds or theories being proposed? Usually not. Humans are not that adept, or smart, or cooperative in real life. This goes from massive election fraud all the way to the media all believing and acting in sync to accomplish some goal. Real humans just don't function that way. They're just not cooperative enough.</p></blockquote><p><b> 6. The majority of the people explaining the ideas appear only on certain websites or YouTube and nowhere else</b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> If the information can't be found anywhere outside the circle that promotes it, look critically at it. Truth gets spread far and wide and picked up by all kind of sources and people. Conspiracy tends to stay limited in scope and distribution.</p></blockquote><p><b>7. They insist the "truth," once you've come to the conclusion they desire, is so self-evident that it does not need to be questioned or tested (as by scientists or data analysis) or even confirmed. </b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">If someone's main argument is "it's obvious," that would be a red flag. True things can be analyzed, explored, and confirmed. You can find evidence from myriad sources. It can be questioned and stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't have to remain only self-evident.</p></blockquote><p><b>8. They insist that whole classes of people en masse (and also anyone who disagrees with them) are evil. </b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Anyone who tries to convince you that other humans as a class (other political parties, other races, other religions, other nations, etc.) are inherently and irredeemably always wrong or evil is <i>not</i> working for God. God wants us to love one another, not despise, belittle, demean, or mock others (including such small things as name calling). He also does not want us to consider an entire class of our brothers and sisters to be so morally or intellectually bankrupt that they become lesser or even worthy of destruction. The puppetmasters or manipulators also encourage people to cut off communication with those who refuse to accept the ideas or who change their minds or leave the ideas behind. But we should not be cutting off all communication with family and loved ones. That makes this a big red flag. Anything that encourages us vs them thinking should be suspect. This includes anything that reduces other people's motives or beliefs to some simple and oft-repeated negative catchphrase (like "you just hate ____.") rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt, a chance to explain or even believe something, or the respect that humans deserve as humans.</p></blockquote><p><b>9. They encourage simplistic black vs white, good vs evil thinking.</b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In real life, there is complexity in every situation. There is nuance and exception and depth and information we didn't know or didn't consider that changes the way things are interpreted. There is good vs evil in the world (truly, Jesus is good and Satan is evil). But the vast majority of situations are not easily classed. The nuance and detail gets in the way, so that there is not one single, simple right and one single wrong answer. Most things are not just black or white. There are all kinds of colors. There are all kinds of shades of gray. You can see this reflected in Church statements and policies on things like abortion, surrogacy, and immigration. Thank goodness for modern prophets to help us see where the lines and pictures are in the sea of colors and shades that fill the world! If someone is encouraging this kind of simplistic black vs white thinking, that's a red flag.</p></blockquote><p><b>10. Everyone involved tends to use the same phrases but declines to engage in complex, nuanced discussion. </b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">If the whole group that believes the things you are looking at discourage critical and complex thinking and reduce most ideas to a few seemingly-quoted catchphrases, that would be a red flag. When real people are thinking and discussing, they do use phrases they've heard before, but they usually can expand on them and explain them and talk around them. If everything seems to be reduced to catchphrase-y "reasons" that everyone quotes but nobody talks about in depth, that is a red flag that this is a conspiracy or a manipulation. This was explained by a cult expert as "Use of loaded language and clichés which constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzz words." I think that sums up what happens with non-cult conspiracy clusters as well. In fact, you can sometimes see believers shut down discussions that challenge the buzzwords. They use things like denial, justification, flat out rejection of rational analysis without engaging with it or seeming to hear it at all, or say the words "agree to disagree" or "I'm out" to end the discussion rather than have their conspiracy-related or manipulated ideas challenged in a way that might set them free from the ideas. As with number 8, this includes using simplistic, dismissive phrases to explain away ideas that threaten the belief.</p></blockquote><p><b> 11. They forbid criticism of some key thing (the leader, the text, the ideology, etc.)</b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">If a group or a teacher completely forbids criticism at all of a key focus of their ideas, this is a red flag. Do they only say positive things and never allow or acknowledge or even process <i>any</i> criticism of someone or something? That's a problem. In real life, we see mistakes and errors even in things we love (like the Bible, for example). We acknowledge freely that the president we admire is not perfect and did something we disagree with. If criticism is not allowed, this is a red flag.</p></blockquote><p><b>12. They make their ideas or their people the <i>only way</i> to accomplish the desired outcome</b></p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">In real life, there are usually many ways to a desired end. One leader can accomplish things just as successfully as another. We recognize that different approaches appeal to different people or succeed better with different groups. If there is a one way or one man only thinking involved, that would be a red flag.</p><p></p></blockquote><p><b>13. They instill fear and promote fear or motivate with fear or justify their actions using fear.</b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Jesus does not want us to fear. God did not put a spirit of fear in our souls. Fear is not a tool of good. If someone or some group is working or pushing an agenda by encouraging fear, that's not of God. If they make you fear your neighbors, or immigrants, or gay people, or poor people, or rich people, or things that are very different from you, or a set of ideas, or a source of information, that is a red flag that you might be dealing with conspiracy or manipulation. </p></blockquote><p><b>14. They want more personal information from you that you normally would give. Or they ask for money in order for you to learn more "truth."</b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Do they need photos of your drivers license, front and back, to join their organization? Do you have to pay a fee to hear the rest of the vital truths they think everyone should know? Do they tell you some parts, promising this can change your life or answer all your questions, and then tell you if you come to their workshop or seminar, you'll learn more? And then there's another seminar? And another workshop? And you have a chance to "level up" like it's a game? (Energy work practitioners, Multi-level Marketers, and Self Help Organizations do this often!) If they want your money or your identity in order to share "truth" or ideas with you, or let you join, this is a huge huge huge red flag that you are being led into a conspiracy or into a manipulation. As with phone and email scams, if they want your ID or ask for any money at all, walk away and tell someone else to get back up and to clear your mind and get another perspective.</p></blockquote><p> No doubt there are more warning signs that something or someone you are engaging with might lead you into believing something that is not true, is a conspiracy, or is a big old manipulation. I'd love to hear the ones I've missed here.</p><p><b>Unfortunately, at the moment, the "puppetmasters" who are getting a lot of traction from this are targeting conservatives hardcore, so we have to be especially careful.</b> That is <i>not</i> to say that liberals are too smart or immune. It just so happens that at this moment in history, conservatives have a target on their backs for this kind of stuff, so we have to be extra careful to watch for the red flags because they abound.<br /><br />Check out<a href="https://beccajones.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-warning-about-conspiracy-and_12.html" target="_blank"> Part 2 </a>for more information on specifically QAnon and their work to hijack conservative ideas and conservatives themselves,</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><i></i></p></blockquote></blockquote>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-17828943152349654692020-09-26T08:25:00.001-06:002020-09-26T17:50:40.884-06:00God vs the Democrats<div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">(note: this is the thinking that guides MY way of voting and supporting government. I recognize there are other ways of thinking about those topics that are valid.)</span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br /></span></div><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="db6eg-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Having many thoughts about D&C 98. Jesus says, "it is my will that my people should observe to do all things whatsoever I command them." And he says, "when the </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">wicked</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-2-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">rule</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-4-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> the people mourn. Wherefore, </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">honest</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-6-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil. And I give unto you a commandment, that ye shall forsake all evil and cleave unto all </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">good</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-8-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">, that ye shall live by every </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">word</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-10-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> which proceedeth forth out of the mouth of God." And this: "Therefore, be not </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">afraid</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-12-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> of your enemies" and this: "if ye observe to </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">do</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-14-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> whatsoever I command you, I, the Lord, will turn away all </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">wrath</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-16-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> and indignation from you, and the </span><span class="py34i1dx" color="var(--blue-link)" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">gates</span><span data-offset-key="db6eg-18-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"> of hell shall not prevail against you."</span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="bg7sl-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="bg7sl-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="bg7sl-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="av4uf-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="av4uf-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="av4uf-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Jesus tells us to keep all his commandments. Then he gives a commandment regarding who we should support in the government of our countries. And what are the rules? Uphold people who are good, honest, and wise because when the wicked rule, the people mourn. So no wicked people. Do not uphold the wicked or we'll be sorry. Anything less than good, honest, and wise is evil and we should forsake the evil and cleave to the good. And live by the word of God. Every word. Even ones about government, I suppose--he says every word.</span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="fbo47-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fbo47-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="fbo47-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="fjold-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fjold-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="fjold-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">And then he says don't be afraid of your enemies--keep the commandments and God will turn away wrath and indignation from you.</span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="5990e-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="5990e-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="5990e-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="16e3l-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="16e3l-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="16e3l-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">So choosing to only uphold the good and wise and honest is a matter of faith. We have to have faith that if we do our part, God will keep his promise. </span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="38v39-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="38v39-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="38v39-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="1g883-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="1g883-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="1g883-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">What that does NOT look like, then, is upholding leaders who are not good and wise and honest because we fear the "other" political party. That is a lack of faith. God is stronger than the "other" party, but we have to keep the commandment in order to get the blessing. And that means if the "other" party is running a candidate who is good, honest, and wise, and our party is running a candidate who is NOT good, NOT honest, NOT wise, we can't vote for our party's guy. Instead, we find a different way (vote for the good one, even if against our party? vote for someone else who is good, honest, and wise?). If we trust God, we do not trust a wicked man to save us from the wrath and indignation of people who want to destroy what we believe in. We trust God and turn away from the wicked man and do not uphold him.</span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="1op7m-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="1op7m-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="1op7m-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="b7kd1-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="b7kd1-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="b7kd1-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Personally, I'm still doing research on the candidates in the upcoming election. </span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="ej4km-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="ej4km-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="ej4km-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="46tpm-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="46tpm-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="46tpm-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">But so far I have found that Trump is not good (good men do not cheat on their wives, they do not tear families apart, they do not mistreat children, they do not brag about sexually assaulting women, they do not cheat people they hire for jobs, they do not mock the disabled, they do not teach people to cheer at someone else's misfortune or pain, they do not incite violence and demean others or increase "us vs them"-ness). He is not honest (he has told 20,000 provable lies and untruths in the last 4 years alone, his helpers in crime revealed that he has cheated on his taxes and business loan applications, among other things). He is not wise (wise men do not cancel preparation for emergencies, they don't downplay danger, they don't avoid solutions that could save lives, they don't refuse to read the briefings put before them, they don't ally themselves with other wicked, untrustworthy men and hurt proven allies). </span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="fg2mu-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fg2mu-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="fg2mu-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="etj9c-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="etj9c-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="etj9c-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">I think his presidency has proven that when the wicked rule, the people mourn. What can we say about the unrest because of racial tensions, the deaths of over 200,000 people from covid, the millions unemployed, half a million newly homeless, families ripped apart, asylum seekers tortured and sent home to die? This is all pain and mourning. Hundreds of millions more people mourning now than 4 years ago. </span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="3sve3-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3sve3-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="3sve3-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="ekicj-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="ekicj-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="ekicj-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">And why? Because we did not trust God enough to follow his commandment to not uphold any but good, wise, and honest leaders. Because we feared what the Democrats might do more than we trusted God to follow His commandments and only uphold good, honest, and wise leaders. </span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="ecbdf-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="ecbdf-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="ecbdf-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br data-text="true" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;" /></span></div></div><div data-block="true" data-editor="8ldd6" data-offset-key="drrct-0-0" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="drrct-0-0" style="animation-name: none; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative; transition-property: none;"><span data-offset-key="drrct-0-0" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">This cannot stand. We must trust God more than we fear the Democrats or the Republicans. He can take care of what they are doing that is wrong. He can lead us to handle it. But we have to keep the commandment to get the blessing.</span></div></div>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-79482944056862703602020-05-08T05:18:00.002-06:002020-05-08T05:25:30.615-06:00Signs of Societal DecayOne of the things Anda and I have noticed and started discussing is that in the overall scheme of the Book of Mormon, we have clear pictures of at least three societies that had "ripened in iniquity" and were destroyed as a result: the Jaredites, the Nephites (twice--one just before Jesus and one in about 420 AD), and the Ammonihahites. And in all three cases, there are certain "markers" or "red flags" that appear just before the society is destroyed. They are things we can watch for in our own society.<br />
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The markers that we've noticed in our studies:<br />
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1. People seek for power over doing what's right, and at any cost. The scriptures talk about people seeking for "gain," which is defined in text as money and power, not just money.<br />
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2. The poor suffer and are not cared for, and there is great inequality economically and educationally.<br />
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3. Secret combinations exist and are not resisted, but joined.<br />
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4. The people cast the righteous out from among them.<br />
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5. The people reject the prophets and either cast them out or outright kill them.<br />
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6. The people stop protecting and cherishing their women and children, but most noticeably their children, becoming willing to let them suffer in the adults' pursuit of their own ideological goals.<br />
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7. Anger is rampant, to the point that people cannot think clearly any more.<br />
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8. Pride is embraced as good, humility is mocked and persecuted.<br />
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9. Governmental norms and structures break down and become impotent, quite dramatically and somewhat suddenly.<br />
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Can you think of any more? These things are very consistently mentioned when a society is ripening for destruction. The first I noticed was number six, that they stopped caring about children. This struck me because in the narratives, it's quite brazen. The Jaredites suit their children up and send them into battle with their women without any regard for the fact that they would quickly be slaughtered. And, given the reality that no children survived the battles to the second and third and fourth rounds, they had no problem killing the children either. In Ammonihah, they throw living children into a pit fire and burn them alive. At the end of the Book of Mormon, there are graphic descriptions of children being fed on the flesh of their fathers, women raped and tortured to death, and, like the Jaredites, nobody is left after the last battle except they are hunted down and slaughtered--children included.<br />
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Once we realized there was this consistent marker of a society about to be destroyed, I started noticing the others. Normally these things start slowly, and then go from functional to destroyed in one person's lifetime. These kinds of Apocalypses happen quickly once it's time. And there are usually a decade of prophets warning the people to repent first. Or more. There is ample, clear warning.<br />
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So of course I had to start comparing to our own society, and I am disturbed by the results. We have evidence of every one of these things happening around us right now. People are seeking for power even at the expense of what is right, not just in our American government but in governments all over the world. There is increasing inequality, and the poor are suffering all over the world. I thought that people were not casting out the righteous and killing the prophets--I guess we're not there yet and I hope we never get there--but I realized that socially we are. Socially we are beginning to demean and belittle the righteous and rejecting the words of the prophets (or even their persons) and encouraging others to do so as well. Even members of the Church are doing this. Anger is rampant. Pride is encouraged and honored. Governmental norms and powers are breaking down at breakneck speed. At least we're still caring for children, right? That's what I thought at first, but then I remembered that I am still very upset about how immigrant children are being treated at our own border, being locked up and fed badly and denied access to health care, lawyers, clean clothes, sufficient food, asylum. We are sacrificing children for ideological goals. Just like every society that is destroyed. I'm not sure I would know about secret combinations, but President Benson is often quoted by my friends saying that they exist all around us. Satan has put out so many conspiracy theories that the real secret combinations are likely impossible to detect from among all the fake ones.<br />
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Nonetheless, it appears we are ripening for destruction. The markers are here, all around us. And it's happening rapidly, within my lifetime.<br />
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There are cases of people turning and not being destroyed. Limhi's people, for example. They were threatened with destruction and only a record would remain, and they suffered a lot and repented. Does that mean we are in for a lot of suffering? I hope not. I fear perhaps.<br />
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But, I told myself, we have not been warned clearly and explicitly by the prophet and apostles, right? And people are always warned first before they are destroyed. But then I remembered this paragraph from the Proclamation on the Family, "we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets." This is a document that has been widely ridiculed and rejected by a handful of vocal, energetic members of the Church who are also actively rejecting the prophet and encouraging others to do likewise.<br />
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I'm sure if people do not repent, there will be more and clearer and more explicit warnings. It seems that God does not destroy people without many, repeated, very clear warnings first. The scriptures talk about prophets (not just "a prophet") coming for years to warn people before things fall completely apart. And how the government handles those prophets foretells the outcome--if the government protects them and allows them to speak, usually the people come around, but if the government silences them and punishes or executes them, the people do not. I guess this is why it's so very, very important to choose good leaders, but that is not the focus of this particular bit of writing. Although King Mosiah II does warn, pertinently, "Now, it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right, but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right. Therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law: to do your business by the voice of the people. And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you, yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land."<br />
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I am busily compiling a document exploring the actual teachings that are presented by Korihor, Nehor, and others in the scriptures that lead to these destructions as a way to help myself identify them in modern life. I hope to be able to share what I find at some point. But I did want to get these general markers written down and shared first so I don't forget them.<br />
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The thing that is most hopeful to me, personally, is that I know many good people who are not seeking to get gain, who do care for the poor and needy, who love and protect children, who embrace the righteous and the prophets and reject anything even hinting of secret combinations. They are people who reject anger, contempt, and disdain, who are humble and good people who love others and work to keep the world wonderful, the governments stable, families safe, and rightness and goodness growing. As long as we have wonderful, righteous people among us, all is not lost. And we do. Many, many, many of them from all faiths, all backgrounds, all walks of life. The world might be ripening, but not all the people are. There is much good to be found everywhere you look, and this gives me hope.<br />
<br />Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-9368805675008201272020-03-23T17:25:00.003-06:002020-03-23T17:25:49.084-06:00Tips for dealing with long-term uncertainty<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="esmar" data-offset-key="2tair-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="2tair-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">For those of you feeling the mental strain of uncertain times, some tips I have collected that have worked for me as I've lived through well over a decade of incredible uncertainty, social isolation (due to the sleep disorder) and going without:</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="44q6c-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Stand in the sunshine alone. Sunshine helps. Breathe.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="1p77h-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Take every beautiful sky as a sign that God has NOT forgotten you.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="51b9a-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Go out in nature and take time to notice the beauty there. Breathe.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="9v233-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Remember those little things that you always enjoy? The little things, not the big things. Do those. (reading, eating ice cream, drawing, etc.)</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="1590p-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">It is absolutely okay to distract yourself. Watch movies. Be creative. Plant your garden. Most things pass with time. You are not being disloyal or irresponsible if you just go forget about it and lose yourself in something pleasurable for a bit. Go work on your novel, sew a thing, build something, or whatever engages your mind that you enjoy. . </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="720ff-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Tune in to your body. Now ask yourself, "Am I, at this moment, physically okay?" If not, fix what is hurting, eat, sleep, or fill your needs. Probably, though, you are fine. At this moment, you're fine. Promise yourself to deal with each moment as it comes, not in advance. And then eat, sleep, move around, repeat. Every day. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="s9qo-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Be as educated and prepared as you can, follow the instructions as well as you are able, and then let go. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="93gmp-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">You need three people to tell you you're okay when things are feeling really bad. Find those people. Call them and vent. I have three people that I know will tell me I'm okay. I can be one of yours if you need. Don't feel you need "an excuse" to call people. Just do. They need you, too.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="6kfs3-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Mentally bundle all those things up that are bugging you and scaring you. Tie them in a big hobo rag. Put that whole bundle at Jesus' feet and ask Him to take care of all of that for you. Cuz he has greater capabilities than any of us.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="1eqj-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Realize that all that talk of empowerment and being strong and you can do it was all LIES. You are not strong. You can't do it. You have no power. This is absolutely bigger than you are. BUT: Jesus is strong. Jesus can do it. Jesus has power. Jesus is bigger than this is. And, even better, He wants to share his strength, power, and love with YOU. So it doesn't matter that you can't because He can. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="1gsbq-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">When things get really bad, kick the crap on the floors into the corners (no, don't clean it up yet), turn on your favorite music, and DANCE. Just dance. Even if you don't feel like it. Just dance.</span></div>
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Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-74619641074678508442020-03-06T20:40:00.000-07:002020-03-06T20:43:35.614-07:00But What Do We Lose?A friend and I had an exchange on social media the other day that left me thinking for a long time. His argument was that the temple does not need to be gendered because men and women are equally good at things and should both have the priesthood. He used anatomical terms to make his point--the existence of male or female body parts does not determine competency, and therefore the temple should not be gendered.<br />
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I would feel a distinct loss if the temple were not gendered. It's one of the few places left where I feel that women are cherished for being women.<br />
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See, the problem is that the standard in our culture is still men--especially, ironically, among feminists. We still say things like "Women are just as capable as men." People still flinch and think it's odd when someone says something like "Men are just as capable as women." When there is a problem in business between the innate way men do things vs women do things, we ask the women to change to conform to the male way ("lean in" and "speak up" and "say it again" and "mention your female companion who said it first" and all that garbage.) Nobody EVER chides the men and insists they need to learn to hear how women speak, rather than women learning to speak how men hear. This is because the standard is men.<br />
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And the definition of women is actually degrading the more we insist that women are equal (equal to men...you see the problem with the very concept of discussing equality? It assumes there is a standard that everyone is equal to, and that standard is men.) I don't mean degrading as in demeaning. I mean degrading as in coming apart. You can see it in Caitlyn Jenner insisting she knew she was a woman at heart because she loved fingernail polish. As if that has something to do with female-ness. You see it when, as my friend did, women are reduced to vaginas. As if the existence of that body part is the most important part and only distinguishing thing about being female. You see it when we think someone must be transgender because she likes trucks. What's wrong with women liking trucks? We have been reduced to superficial measurements, most of which are objectifying.<br />
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If we de-gender the temple because we insist we know best, as we often do (insist, I mean, not actually know), what will happen? We will erase women. We will insist that all of us are equally men. We can all be men together. We're all the same and as good as that male standard, even if some of us lack the body parts for it. You see what that is? That is awful. That is saying we are just as good as men....almost. We are not women--we are men who are missing a little something, but don't worry! It's okay! We'll pretend you have it and treat you like all the other guys. Because you can bet your bottom dollar they're not going to go genderless by making the men wear dresses and veils. But nobody would think twice if they made the women wear trousers. Quite the contrary--they would tout it as an advance instead of a loss. Making us more like men is success. (Alas.)<br />
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Women are not men. Women are not as good as men. Women are not body parts (or the lack thereof.)<br />
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And we lose something significant when we insist that we become genderless in places like the temple or society because genderless doesn't mean genderless. It means male.<br /><br />I don't think genderless is possible, actually. I think gender is so inherent that you can't erase it and we can't even conceive of erased--we just conceive of male and call it genderless.<br />
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I, personally, love the idea that God understands and values his daughters not in some sort of equitable pity that we're actually as good as his sons, but that he actually values women for what they actually are. Women. Not broken men. Women.<br />
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Please don't take that away from us.Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-30974404848002842302020-02-29T17:16:00.002-07:002020-02-29T17:16:20.888-07:00Did I just read that?In an article about COVID-19.<br />
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"<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Lyon, serif; font-size: 17px;">At least four cases of people with an unknown origin have been reported in Oregon, Washington and California." </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Lyon, serif; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Lyon, serif; font-size: 17px;">So people are randomly appearing out of nothing. Now THAT is an epidemic to worry about.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Lyon, serif; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Lyon, serif; font-size: 17px;">(Source: </span><a href="https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/state/washington/article240761641.html">https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/state/washington/article240761641.html</a>)Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-633102161592805782020-02-05T01:25:00.001-07:002020-02-05T02:04:06.643-07:00Free printable .pdf Download of The Book of Mormon, simplified formatIn this folder is my finished project, the simplified visual format of <i><b>The Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ.</b></i><br />
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<i>I did not simplify the text or words,</i> only the visual formatting, making it significantly easier to read. Please read the editor's note at the beginning to see exactly what I did for this. The text is still the same familiar text.<br />
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There are four different versions in the folder, and three levels of quality for each. The text is the same for all the versions.<br />
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Here's the google drive folder. Let me know if the files don't work or you can't access them. Please read on before you download or print for instructions and clarification about the different files in the folder.<br />
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<a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lmhMW-lHkJVf8u2ubFxuEq5NrFU7y88W?usp=sharing">https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lmhMW-lHkJVf8u2ubFxuEq5NrFU7y88W?usp=sharing</a><br />
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The levels of quality are:<br />
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"Average quality," which is designed for printing at home or viewing online.<br />
"pdf A quality," which is an archival format that is designed for opening on any system or any device without quality loss or data scrambling.<br />
"Commercial printing quality," which is what it says, a higher quality file that is suitable for commercial quality printing.<br />
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All four files come in each of the three quality levels, as well as in a .wpd file, which is a WordPerfect document (because it supports the parallel columns format).<br />
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The files named "The Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus" are the core file. This file has more space in the text. It's good for reading on devices or if you want to make a lot of notes. If you printed this double-sided, it would take 282 sheets of paper.<br />
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The files named "The Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus for printing large...." are optimized for printing on 8.5x11" sized papers. Printed double sided, it would take 224 sheets of paper.<br />
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The files named "The Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus for printing small compact...." are designed for printing on half-sized sheets, to make a smaller, more portable book. If you can ignore the weird margins, this can also be printed as a large print edition. Printed double-sided, it would require 145 sheets of paper.<br />
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The files named "The Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus for printing small relaxed...." are designed for printing on half-sized sheets to make a more portable book, but the font is larger than the "compact" version, and the lines aren't quite as close together. It can also double as a large print edition if you can ignore the weird margins. Printed double-sided, it would require 241 sheets of paper.<br />
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To print the small versions on Acrobat Reader DC, open the file you want to print and then click on the printer icon. Choose "Booklet" (under Page Size and Handling) and "both sides" (under Booklet Subset). Let the range autofill, and choose Left under binding. It's counter-intuitive, but choose portrait orientation instead of landscape (it will print correctly oriented). Follow your printer's instructions to print double-sided. You should get four pages per sheet this way. Be very careful not to mix the pages up as they come out of the printer or when you cut them!. Once the entire document is printed, cut each sheet down the middle between the two pages, being careful not to reorder the sheets at all, and keeping the two halves in separate piles--left side and right side. Once all the sheets are cut, "close" the two piles like a book. This should give you an entire book in one stack, all the pages in order, ready to bind.<br />
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If you need permission from a copy shop to bind, I give you my permission.<br />
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You can also three-hole punch and put into a full-sized or half-sized ring binder.<br />
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And now for some interesting tidbits!<br />
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The word "yea" in the Book of Mormon has two meanings: "yes," and "following is a clarification, explanation, expansion, or explication of the thing I just said." Interestingly, the Nephites only use "yea," but the Lamanites distinguish between a positive and a negative clarification/expansion/etc. They use both "yea" and "nay," as you can see in AntiNephiLehi's speech.<br />
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I opted to remove both spaces and hyphens from the word AntiNephiLehi because that is how it appeared in the handwritten manuscript of the Book of Mormon.<br />
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The word "behold" is not just a filler! It is actually a narrative command, where the narrator is instructing you to notice. We like to think that "behold" means the same thing as "see," so it must function in their language the same way "see" does colloquially in ours, but it's much closer functionally to a speaker saying, "Notice that" than a couple of friends chatting and saying, "See, I didn't think so...."<br />
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In the original handwritten translated text, the word "chapter" was not followed by any numbers. Those were added later. Interestingly, ancient texts from around 600 BC did, in fact, have a word that meant "end/start of section" and was not followed by any numbers. We translate this as "chapter," but we like to add numbers. It is possible (we can't know for sure) that this is the concept that was used in the chapter breaks in the Book of Mormon. Also, the original chapter breaks were put in by the original authors and editors, so my version uses their chaptering instead of the modern chaptering out of respect for the men who wrote the book.<br />
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You will notice the original authors had an "end quote" phrase. Nephi uses "And after this manner of language did....." the speaker speak. We see similar, "And many more such things...", or "And these were the words," or other similar phrases that amount to "and thus so and so said."<br />
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Mostly, the fun little things are not super important. What is important is this book is awesome and it's true. You really can learn so much about Jesus by reading this book. I hope you enjoy the easier to read format.<br />
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Please do share!<br />
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Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-79082011527167303312019-12-05T14:10:00.001-07:002019-12-05T14:10:24.037-07:00Would we identify Christ as Christlike?This week, people doing the Light the World service game with the Church were challenged to share on social media about someone they consider Christlike. I read a lot of wonderful tributes to a lot of wonderful people. It got me thinking.<br />
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If Christ were actually walking among us in blue jeans and a T-shirt doing His work, would we put a tribute up to Him on social media about how Christlike He is? Would we identify Jesus as Christlike?<br />
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We tend to identify people as Christlike who serve others, who fill their time doing good, and who were really nice and supportive and loving to the person who is making the tribute. We also tend to identify people as Christlike who are very good people who conform to our social expectations. I didn't see any tributes to ex-cons, homeless people, or recovering addicts, for example, even though they most certainly can be Christlike.<br />
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So would Jesus conform to our expectations? He did not conform to the expectations of of the Pharisees of what a righteous Jew looked like. He, in fact, is very nonconformist because His whole message is to overcome the world, and conformity is actually usually a worldly mandate (what is conformity but matching what the world around you expects of you?) (Hopefully the world around you is righteous. Not just looks righteous and tries to enforce the appearance, like the Biblical Jews and much of the modern world, but really -is- righteous.)<br />
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Another thing people identify as Christlike is being a loving support and a comfort. And Jesus did promise that He would not leave us comfortless. And He does love and support us. But He also discomforts us. He pushes us to grow and stretch and become, often in ways that are uncomfortable. He pushes us to leave behind the most natural ways of doing things--the natural man is natural and easy, and we are supposed to not embrace that. He asks us to be humble and accept God leading instead of us leading in our lives. He tells us we're wrong and to repent, even if our beliefs are closely held and we are 100% sure we are right, and even if our actions feel fully justified and harmless to us. That's not fun. That's not comfortable. That's not easy. The only thing that makes it work at all is that we can be confident of his absolute, unfailing love for us (proven by giving up His life for ours), His authority, and His infinite knowledge. Without those three things, we could not submit to His tutelage, and we wouldn't want to, because it's not comfortable. Growth is not comfortable. Becoming is not comfortable. Metamorphosis is not comfortable.<br /><br />The secondary question I came to in all this pondering was where I should have started in the first place. What does Christlike mean? Which is to say, "What is Christ like?" My parents told me that they are pretty sure Jesus can dance and knows all the funniest jokes. They didn't want me to think of Him as a weak, emasculated, wimpy, sweet quiet thing that spends all day holding butterflies on his fingertips and smiling sweetly. He's presented that way a lot. It dawned on me once that Jesus is smart and sensitive. Do we think of Jesus as smart? Do we consider that hundreds of people could hear Him speaking in outdoor meetings before mics were invented, so He was probably kinda loud? Do we recognize that He was a rebellious teenager in running away to teach in the temple when he was 12 and not telling His parents first? Doing His own thing all the time, His own way, against the grain and against what His society would prefer. He didn't seem to get less rebellious. Good thing He was right.<br /><br />In learning about His mission and His ministry, do we fail to learn about Him as a person worthy of emulation? Obviously we cannot and need not and should not do His mission--we have our own missions in life. But we can obey Him, and we can emulate His person, if we can figure out what that is. We can list things from the scriptures and learn a lot, but the thing I came back to over and over was His invitation to "Learn of me." Do you know that "of" means "about," but it also means "from"? And Jesus is clear that He wants us to know him (not about Him only) so that when we see each other, we know each other--we will see Him as He is and be like Him. He warns that people will think they knew Him and He will have to tell them, "I never knew you." Which is to imply that you never knew me, either, isn't it?<br /><br />So what is Christ like? I think perhaps it would be wise to get to know Him, learn from Him, and find out.Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-73832527179875748242019-10-07T14:02:00.004-06:002019-10-07T14:15:46.399-06:00Why "God designed all the bad stuff we go through" can't be trueRecently, someone who should have known better taught in our stake conference that God designs all the bad stuff we have to go through.<br />
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He used those words, and he said it more than once.<br />
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Now, I don't want to condemn this person. He had recently gone through a lot of tragedy in his family, and I think he was searching for meaning and comfort and to cling to faith, and somehow he felt like if God planned this for his family, that meant it was for our good and he could take that bitter medicine and would be okay.<br />
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The trouble is, this is a false doctrine, and it can easily be explained why.<br />
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If God designs or plans something, then it is His will. Therefore, the people who are making it happen are doing God's will.<br />
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So if someone breaks into your house and kidnaps, rapes, and murders your five year old (as was in the news recently), that person is doing God's will and is, therefore, His servant. That means it would be unjust for God to punish them because they were doing God's work.<br />
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This flies in the face of reason, of the nature of God, and of God's words, which condemn soundly this kind of behavior in all kinds of ways. If we make this behavior God's work, then we make God a liar because he cannot both forbid us to do these things and condemn them and simultaneously have been the planner of these these things.<br />
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Furthermore, if we attempt to stop these kinds of tragedies and intervene in abuse, poverty, illness, we are working against God's will because he planned those things for those people. We would be sinning by trying to interfere with God's plans and trying to stop God's work.<br />
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This also is impossible in light of God's own instructions to us that we should obey the commandments, not hurt people, and try to help people out of poverty and illness, including by using God's own power to do so. If God designed and planned those horrible things to happen to people, he would be contradicting himself by asking us to work against his will to stop them!<br />
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So in two ways, God comes out a liar if we allow for the idea that God designed all the things we go through.<br />
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There is another danger to this doctrine as well. If we embrace the idea that God planned all the bad things that people go through, then we are less inclined to jump in and help when they are suffering. We instead are inclined to think that we should let them suffer because God wants them to, and who are we to interfere in God's plan for those people. It's a wicked belief that leads us to abandon actual commandments and let people suffer alone.<br />
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Fortunately for the man who taught this false doctrine, there is true doctrine that will give him peace and comfort and purpose, and these true doctrines come right from the scriptures.<br />
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It is important to remember that God is ultimately in charge of the world, and He is aware of our suffering. Knowledge of suffering is not the same as intention for suffering, though. But He does know and He can help. Allowing us to learn and grow and suffer does not mean he planned it, nor that he lacks power to intervene. He can and does intervene--but sometimes not how we want Him to.<br />
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Romans 8:28: "And we know that all things work together for <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/rom/8?lang=eng&clang=eng#note28a">good</a> to them that love God" and D&C 90: "Search <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/90.24?clang=eng&lang=eng#note24a">diligently</a>, <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/90.24?clang=eng&lang=eng#note24b">pray</a> always, and be believing, and <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/90.24?clang=eng&lang=eng#note24c">all</a> things shall work together for your good." The promises is not that God designed these things, but that He has the power to turn all things to your good if you love Him.<br />
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God allows the hellish experiences (because earth life really is hell in a lot of ways), but we can be assured that He will turn those to our good (remembering that His eternal view of our good, which is rooted in our ultimate glory, is different from our limited earthly view, which is rooted in immediate comfort more often than not). When the scriptures say we have to submit to the will of our Father, it is talking about this--submitting to God's way of turning things to our good, not necessarily that we have to submit to awful experiences purely because they are God's plan for us.<br />
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The other comfort is Jesus. We can get comfort and peace and experience because Jesus suffered all things to help mitigate the realities of living in a fallen world. He saves us, not from God's will, but from the reality of mortality. If we embrace the false idea that God designed all our hells, then we risk not putting Christ at the center of things. Sometimes we have to swallow a bitter pill, for sure, but we don't have to do it alone, and God <i>wants</i> us to reach out for help and relief through Jesus. If we think God planned it, we might not take advantage of our privileges under the atonement and the priesthood, and God gave us those things so we would use them and benefit from them, not ignore them so that we can suffer. Suffering in and of itself is not noble or wonderful or glorifying, and we risk elevating it to this magical status, over Jesus, if we embrace the idea that God designed our pain. Martyr complexes benefit no-one.<br />
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In reality, embracing the true doctrine invites us to lean on Jesus. It is a gentle but powerful invitation to actively exercise faith and trust our Father. It invites humility and becoming as a child and understanding our true, proper relationship with our Father. The false doctrine, in contrast, leads us to be angry at God and push back. It makes God our enemy. It rewrites baptism to God pushing us under the water and holding us there for our own damn good, and that destroys faith.<br />
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But God is not our enemy, and we do not need to embrace doctrines that destroy faith. Gentle invitations to exercise faith are much better, and we should pursue and embrace those. "I know you are suffering, and I'll help you through it and ease your pain and make sure it benefits you" is much, much nicer (and more accurate) than "I planned this hell for you. Thank me."<br />
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We don't need to embrace the false doctrine, even though it is widely taught. Instead, we should cling to the actual doctrine: that God can turn things to our good if we love Him, and that we have Jesus to help us. This doctrine leads to a true exercising of faith. The other does not.<br />
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<br />Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-65234035554528328802019-08-13T22:33:00.003-06:002019-08-13T22:33:58.566-06:00Did I just read that?<br /><br />To illustrate the importance of punctuation.<br /><br />This is the headline: "<b>Tree falls on tent killing woman</b>"<br /><br />This means a tree fell on a tent that was killing a woman.<div>
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But with a comma, it could mean a tree fell on a tent, killing a woman.</div>
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And with a hyphen, you get that a tree fell on a woman who kills tents (a "tent-killing woman").<br /><br /><br />Punctuation makes a big difference!</div>
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(headline here: <a href="https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/tree-falls-on-tent-killing-woman/73-41d8fb1b-d038-40b7-a412-a6e2e9a6687d">https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/tree-falls-on-tent-killing-woman/73-41d8fb1b-d038-40b7-a412-a6e2e9a6687d</a>)</div>
Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-35206418353624696552019-06-04T02:03:00.003-06:002019-06-04T02:08:02.229-06:00Did I just read that?<br />
I don't even know what to make of this one. This is the caption that appears under a picture of a window in an abandoned building.<br />
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"This is the Giuseppe Antonini, which was a facility on the outskirts of Milan. The facility once housed Napolean Bonaparte and Benito Mussolini’s illegitimate son."<br />
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<a href="https://mentertained.com/abandoned-buildings/46/?v=2">https://mentertained.com/abandoned-buildings/46/?v=2</a><br />
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I can't even...how did Napoleon and Mussolini have a son? There are so so many problems with that. I mean, they're both men...and Napoleon died 62 years before Mussolini was born....and would you really want those gene pools mixed?....and they spelled Napoleon wrong.<br />
<br />Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-49438351451652255902019-02-04T21:51:00.003-07:002019-02-04T21:51:24.533-07:00Did I just read that?"<span style="background-color: white; font-family: proximanova, sans-serif;">Investigators later determined that two toddler-aged children were inside the suspect during the shooting but were not injured. Police said neither Martinez nor Pacheco were the parent or guardian of the children. "</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: proximanova, sans-serif;">Uh....not sure how that works.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: proximanova, sans-serif;">https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/dpd-2-kids-were-inside-car-when-federal-agent-shot-man-woman/73-7bdd7b28-7cc4-42dd-8579-4d279f6830a5</span></span>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-27320520280850112552019-01-03T18:39:00.002-07:002019-01-04T04:12:25.235-07:00Yet another post on feminism<span style="font-family: inherit;">I know I write about feminism kind of a lot. Off an on. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The reason I write about it so often is I feel immense pressure to be a feminist (ALL acceptable women are feminists, apparently), but at the same time, I feel an immensely strong gut reaction telling me feminism is not healthy for women. But the logic and spoken aims of feminism are very compelling, and some of the problems they are addressing are very real and need to be addressed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So I feel conflicted, and I write to try to address that conflict, to resolve it and help myself understand why I can't be a feminist of any stripe despite the social pressure and the work that needs to be done.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Before I say anything else, I do know that I'm oversimplifying by using the word "feminism" and that there are many kinds of feminism (and I actually am not opposed to all of them.) I also know that there are many problems that women face that need to be fixed. And I also am saying right up front that I know many excellent feminists that this absolutely does not apply to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's my latest bullet list of reasons feminism is making me uncomfortable, based on my own observations. (I add that because feminists are incredibly aggressive--to the point of cruelty--at defending their positions, and whenever I post stuff like this, they come out to tell me that my observations are wrong and mean and destroying women because feminism is the only path to success for women. So I'm saying up front: These are my own personal observations from my own personal life. They in no way are blanket claims of always truths, but they also are the things I've seen over and over and am making judgments based on--and that's probably unfair but it's my reality. And the fact that I have to put this in here should tell you something about why I can't embrace being a feminist.) So, my list:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Despite protests to the contrary, feminism publicly is still often anti-man, anxious to belittle and condemn men and deny the masculine nature in order to elevate women. I don't think this helps anyone.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminists still use men as their "measuring stick" of what is success and where we are aiming to be. I don't see any way to succeed if we make men the measuring stick because we are not men and never will be, so we will never quite measure up. It puts women in an inherently inferior position, and it forces women to deny their nature in order to succeed. This harms women rather than helping them.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism often belittles women for intelligently making the best choice they can for their own lives, claiming that if they don't decide to conform to some money-based evaluation of "success," they were manipulated by society and couldn't possibly be making these choices of their own free will. That actually makes it harder for women to be what they want to be, not easier. (You can see this in the pressure women have put on them to not choose a caring profession, to choose a science or math major even if they really love history, etc.)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism makes faith and having a relationship with our Father in Heaven noticeably more difficult for women. For some reason, Feminists often seem to have an automatic distrust of the motives of every man, and not of women. Consequently, they find it hard to trust and act on instruction from God. I have a hard time embracing anything that makes faith harder and more complicated, and that interferes with women's ability to form trusting relationships with God and Jesus.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminists are often obsessed with power and who has it, to the detriment of understanding and interacting with their world. This is a very narrow way of looking at the world--very reductionist--that does not tend to show a whole and fair picture. It is, absolutely, one piece of a big puzzle. But it's a mistake to say you understand the whole puzzle completely based on observing one piece, or even a cluster of pieces.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism distorts thinking, and in a way that leads to greater unhappiness in life and a limited ability to interact with society in a way that will actually make changes to things that hurt women. Feminism is not a paradigm through which to view the world if you want high life satisfaction. It pushes finding offense and power imbalance in every single thing you see--but only if you are on the lower side of the imbalance (never if you have more power, and especially never if you are misusing it). There are other distortions to the thinking as well.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism elevates women to a more perfect status that they actually have right to claim (with claims like, "If women were the bishops, nobody would ever be offended in church" that are patently untrue and also ridiculous), elevating themselves to ridiculous and foolish heights, while simultaneously laying claim on and denying the existence of feminine traits. (This is really part of the distorted thinking, isn't it?) On the one hand, they say there are no inherently feminine traits but it's all social constructs, and on the other, they restructure school to take advantage of the way women think and work to the detriment of boys. All while saying we need to act more like men to succeed. (The danger of saying there are no inherently gendered traits is that in doing so, they are accepting male-ness as the default and denying female-ness exists at all.)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism not only ignores but denies that sometimes women have a role in their "problems." (For example, sometimes women bear the burden of the "thinking work" in a household because they are so sure only women can do it right that they actually refuse to let men carry that burden at all out of certainty that the men will do it wrong. And then they complain that the men aren't carrying the burden. Or, in a less negative light, sometimes women make less money than men in the same jobs because they women put higher priority on family time and refused to make the family sacrifices that put them in the top positions at work, eligible for the top raises. So they make less money, but it's a direct result of the good choices they made.)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;">• The sociocultural demands that feminists have put on women in the name of "freedom" have made it harder for women to embrace and enjoy motherhood (especially of raising many children) and do it well. The only valid contribution to society is measured in dollars and cents and positions at work. That's just a shame, and its wrong, too. Anyone can make money. Only women can mother. (Men can contribute, but they father--which is also vital. Just different.)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;">• Feminists don't understand what women actually are and what will make them eternally happy in the greatest senses. (Really, only God can know that for anyone, so it's not their fault.) But, despite this lack of knowledge, they work very hard to not only define but enforce a single right "path" to life satisfaction that they not only offer but demand that all women walk. They deny they do this, but actions and social pressure speaks louder than words.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism is essentially inward-looking. But God has asked us to spend our lives looking outward, not inward: serving others, loving others, using our talents to build His kingdom, having charity, etc. Humility is impossible if our entire paradigm is inward. The nature of feminism is in opposition to the nature of "Forget yourself and get to work." Feminism is often selfish and rooted in pride, and that is not a path to anything good.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• So much of feminism is whining and complaining, indulging in anger and celebrating being bitchy and obnoxious. I'm not interested in those things. That's not who I want to be, and that's not what I want to spend my time or energy on.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminist approach to problem solving is counterproductive. It practically forces people to dig in their heels and defend their position rather than productively leading everyone to greater understanding and change. This is weird because the much-maligned "Feminine Nature" is actually supposed to be good at gently leading people along to change and understanding, but feminists are particularly bad at this, coming across as rude, selfish, obnoxious, and aggressive instead of as a safe way to learn and change and fix problems. (For example, complaining, having mean letter-writing campaigns, and protesting against the Brethren is far, far less likely to cause change than simply asking the questions. "Why don't women do _____?" is way way more effective than "Women Must be allowed to do _____!")</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• Feminism leads to a particularly narrow view of the world. It thrives in and loves the echo chamber. For example, any time there is a change they hoped for, they think, "We did this! It's because of our voices!" without even a thought for, say, the global nature of the Church, the fact that there are other voices that were speaking out in more effective ways, that God had something in mind, etc. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">• In acknowledging that there is pain and unfairness in the world, feminism seems to reinforce and rejoice in it. It comes across as the ultimate "girls crying in the bathroom" clique that ever existed, and seems to love the victimhood more than the possibility of healing. And in trying to hear and love the victim, they often are cruel to those who were not hurt.<br /><br />And now that this is written, I'm always afraid to post these because of the inevitable backlash. No-one is more capable of being cruel and needling to the heart of a woman than an angry feminist. No-one has more "need" somehow to lash out and address every slight and every insult than an angry feminist. And feminism teaches women to see hurt and be angry all the time. Feminism, in practice, is often the glorification of the bitch. And I have been treated cruelly so many times by feminists that I'm afraid to even post this, anticipating backlash (and for some reason they feel compelled to attack, not just brush it off and think, "She's wrong. I'll just go on with my life and ignore it."). But I want myself and my kids to understand why I can't join in, so here it is. Again. (I write about this stuff SOOO much!)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ultimately this is my bottom line: Throughout my life, I've had times where I looked at a group of women (returned sister missionaries and mothers of many children come to mind right off the bat) and saw characteristics I wanted to have. I found myself saying, "I want to be like them," and I knew I had to embrace the same experiences and ideals they had in order to gain the benefits they had that I wanted. There is no other way to get the deep, calm, wise patience of being a mother of many children than by mothering many children (whether they are your own birthed children or others you mother). There is no other way to get that particular kind of confidence and class that returned sister missionaries have than by going on a mission. When I look at feminism and the women it produces, I don't think, "Gosh, I want to be just like that!" In fact, I often think, "Oh my! I hope I'm not like that!" That gives me very little incentive to embrace feminism.</span></span>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16.8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-32886771018657473772018-11-23T20:52:00.000-07:002018-11-23T20:52:23.468-07:00Did I just read that?<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px; transform: none;">
Following this stunning non-sequitur: "However, 400 years later, scientists now believe that they could bring the dodo back to life through cloning of some of its closest living relatives. Scientists recently published a paper which identified the overall genomic structure of dinosaurs."</div>
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...we get this quote (I hope mis-quote) from scientists identifying passenger pigeons as dinosaurs, and being excited that birds and non-avian dinosaurs have a lot of chromosomes (because someone thought they didn't?!):</div>
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'University of Kent scientists Darren Griffin and Rebecca O’Connor wrote in an article for The Conversation: “We discovered that birds and most non-avian dinosaurs had a lot of chromosomes (packages of DNA). Having so many allows animals to generate variation, the driver of natural selection. Nevertheless, and it is a long shot, it may be possible in future to use Jurassic Park technology to help undo some of the harm that humans have caused. Mankind has seen the extinction of well-known avian dinosaurs such as the dodo and the passenger pigeon."'</div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/971538/cloning-news-dodo-dinosaur-extinct-clone-latest-university-of-kent</span></span></div>
Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-40548373086154286712018-11-16T01:28:00.000-07:002018-11-16T01:28:48.254-07:00Did I just read that?There is so much wrong with this article that we laughed all the way through.<br />
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<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/science/a-gurgling-mud-pool-is-creeping-across-southern-california-like-a-geologic-poltergeist">https://www.foxnews.com/science/a-gurgling-mud-pool-is-creeping-across-southern-california-like-a-geologic-poltergeist</a><br />
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Start with the simile in the headline (uh--what kind of comparison is that?! Did this person know what a poltergeist is?), and go downhill from there.Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33682292.post-34215878414300060442018-10-25T06:37:00.001-06:002018-10-25T06:37:29.428-06:00Commas Matter.<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
A couple of things I found while pondering punctuation in the scriptures.</div>
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1. "...people, who are of the House of Israel," means something different from "...people who are of the House of Israel." I believe based on the context that the first is used but the latter was intended. (This is just one example where the phrase appears: "...the work of the Father shall commence in preparing the way for the fulfilling of his covenants which he hath made to his people who are of the <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">house of Israel." The comma would indicate He has no other people but the house of Israel, which flies in the face of the doctrine that all of mankind are God's children. Leaving the comma out indicates we are talking about a specific group of God's children with whom he made specific covenants, but leaves open the possibility that He has other children with whom He has also made specific covenants that are not addressed in this verse. We have wars (literally) over this idea--that God only has one people and which is it--and it's all cleared up by properly punctuating.)</span></div>
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and 2. "touch upon them as much as it were possible for Christ’s sake" means something different than "touch upon them as much as it were possible, for Christ’s sake." When I realized it was the latter that was actually used in the scripture, I laughed. The comma turned a perfectly acceptable phrase into a swear, and we've been reading it that way for a hundred years. Oops!</div>
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Becca Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04177698452364502845noreply@blogger.com0