A mid 40s dude who deconstructed Mormonism and is now all f’ed up. A bit obsessed with Mormon history and Biblical scholarship.
Utah, USA
Joined June 2014
- Tweets82.8K
- Following2K
- Followers4.2K
- Likes62.7K
Stacker retweeted
You don’t get it, do you. You treat 7:30 a.m. ward meetings, filling in for a deacon, and “comforting the widow” inside your specific building as the measurable definition of reducing suffering.
Anything else, coffee, football, a drive, or just not showing up is automatically “self-service” and “evil.”
Then you demand that people who left prove, to your satisfaction, that they now reduce more suffering than when they were active.
But the only activities that count as “good” in your view are the ones the Church assigns.
So your demand is unfalsifiable. If they don’t list Mormon callings, they’re selfish; if they do, they should still be going.
You’re not really asking a question of how me or anyone else serves humanity. You’re just making a bullshit loyalty test to your own idea of the world. Because you know nothing else.
You’ve spent the day labeling people who skip your meetings as objectively crappier, more self-serving, and sources of evil while taking the moral high ground for doing what your bishop told you to do.
All you’re doing is equating institutional compliance with goodness and then getting mad when others don’t accept your worldview.
Stacker retweeted
Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: ‘No One Is A Good Boy’ buff.ly/7DVri9H
Stacker retweeted
Wanna know how I know calling people Mormons is not inherently a slur or offensive and any pearl clutching on the topic is just a performative persecution complex: 1000s of Mormons just cheered with enthusiastic joy upon a Pat McAfee calling them Mormons.
Stacker retweeted
So it seems that certain individuals have been spreading around fake AI generated screenshots of me claiming I preform ritualistic sacrifices on animals, aswell as false rumors such as that I believe I’m Joseph Smith reincarnated and other ridiculous things.
The fake ai pictures of my profile pic don’t even have eye balls BTW. See the comparison between the real and fake. I will be addressing this either tonight or tomorrow so stay tuned for that. The lengths people will go to is shocking.
Stacker retweeted
Can raising your child in a deeply religious household ensure that they stay part of the faith?
Nope. It doesn't even give you a 50/50 chance.
I created an index of childhood religiosity, and even among those who scored in top 20%, less than half attend church weekly now.
Stacker retweeted
Brother Call, well done.
While lesser men waste time on doctrine & retention, you have kept your eye on the real crisis:
Women’s shoulders.
And thankfully Brother Pilot has volunteered for the difficult work of watching all of it very closely.
Repeatedly. For righteousness.
unavailable
Stacker retweeted
I have to admit that I feel a lot of compassion for @maklelan right now.
He doesn't take about his personal faith in a public setting.
I try to do the same.
I've always seen it as a no win situation.
Everyone wants to believe that you are on "their side."
Whenever I post data that makes one group look bad, a vocal minority believe that this is clear evidence of my deep bias.
I can give you examples of people saying that I am biased against nearly every religious group in the United States.
It can't be just because "this is an unmistakable trend in the data"
Why can't we just believe that there people out there just trying to tell the truth as best as they can?
Stacker retweeted
This is the last time I will mention or refer to Jacob Hansen on social media. This is in response to my pointing out that Jacob pretends to have the prerogative to arbitrate "the boundaries of the celestial order." He pretends that he's just reporting static & objective lines >
Stacker retweeted
MEXICAN MORMON FUNDAMENTALISM, A 🧵:
While there has been a rapid increase in the announcement & construction of Latter-day Saint temples in recent years, many members of @Ch_JesusChrist are less familiar with temples affiliated with other branches of the Restoration…
Stacker retweeted
This entire interview from Bushman is worth watching.
In this short clip, he admits how the church hid treasure seeking and seer stones, changed the narrative about the seer stone, and changed the book of commandments to include Urim & Thummim.
More clips to come from the 49-minute interview. youtu.be/OAAKV1JDBHk?si=8Alr…
Stacker retweeted
Jacob Hansen is clearly upset that Joe Rogan had on @maklelan instead of someone he deems as worthy of representing Mormons.
What Jacob doesn’t understand is that to everybody outside his echo chamber of apologists who’s job is to disingenuously represent a religion in order to make it appeal to the world come off as annoying and pretentious to anyone outside their echo chamber. The only people who want to listen to them are people who already agree with them.
Joe Rogan has no interest in having on a professional apologist because nobody would want to watch it. Don’t be surprised if someone like me gets on Joe Rogan before mainstream LDS apologists do.
Stacker retweeted
The Urantia Book. Where did the words come from?
The man who delivered it had no formal training, wrote nothing else in his life, and never took credit for the content.
In 1955, a 2,000+ page book appeared, allegedly dictated by celestial beings through an anonymous man in a trance-like state. (Almost double the size of the Book of Mormon)
It wasn’t edited. It wasn’t workshopped. It wasn’t rewritten.
Just revealed. Over 500,000 words
*Describes a vast multiverse with 700,000 inhabited planets
*Lists a hierarchy of spiritual beings beyond angels
*Gives a new, highly detailed biography of Jesus, hundreds of pages long
*Filled with technical prose, new philosophy, cosmology, and theology
Followers say it’s too complex, coherent, and expansive to be man-made. No one could have produced this level of complexity, depth, and coherence without divine help.
Where did the words of the Urantia Book come from?
Timeline Overview:
*Early 1920s: The dictation process allegedly begins through a man in a sleep or trance state (never publicly named).
*Mid–Late 1920s–1930s: A group known as “The Forum” meets regularly to read, discuss, and compile the revealed content.
*By the 1940s: Most of the content is finalized and prepared for publication.
*1955: The Urantia Book is officially published by the Urantia Foundation in Chicago.
Believers claim that the book was not written, but dictated directly by celestial beings through the sleeping subject, with no revision or creative input from humans other than formatting and punctuation.
Stacker retweeted
A radio pulse from another world just arrived — and it is not a greeting.
Sixty-four light-years away, in the glare of the young star Beta Pictoris, a gas giant about ten times the mass of Jupiter is broadcasting. Astronomers using South Africa’s MeerKAT array have isolated the signal to the planet itself: Beta Pictoris b. For the first time, a radio source beyond the Solar System has been pinned to a single exoplanet rather than its star.
The temptation to hear a message is understandable. The reality is stranger, and more useful. The bursts are short, repeating, and fiercely circularly polarized — radio waves that corkscrew through space between 0.85 and 3.5 GHz. That is the fingerprint of an electron cyclotron maser: electrons racing along magnetic field lines and dumping energy as radio light. In other words, an aurora. Not the pale curtains of Earth, but a storm on a world whose magnetic field is at least 1.25 kilogauss — thousands of times stronger than Earth’s surface field.
Beta Pictoris b orbits about 10 astronomical units from its star and takes roughly 24 years to complete a lap. It spins in eight to nine hours. That combination — a young, massive planet, a dynamo-powered magnetosphere, and a stellar wind slamming into it — can drive auroras of almost cartoonish power. The polarization even flips handedness from one observing run to the next, as expected when different magnetic poles and viewing angles rotate into view.
So no civilization. Something better for science: the first direct measurement of an exoplanet’s magnetic field. Magnetic fields decide how atmospheres leak into space, how planets shed heat, and whether a world can hold onto the chemistry of life. Jupiter already shouts in radio; now a planet around another star has joined the chorus.
The next move is obvious. Point the same technique at other giant worlds and listen for the aurora’s scream. The galaxy just got a new way to take a planet’s pulse.
Stacker retweeted
What's weird is you may be more ethical, more compassionate, more loving at your core than the people around you, but if you don't subscribe to a certain set of beliefs, you will be shamed and discarded and made to be a villain. I know this is how it's always been, but it's hard to believe that this kind of banishment is still going on around the world. In almost every group. And they all think they are right for doing this. When you take a step back from the world, it just looks so childish and ridiculous. Even with all of the confident men and women out there, sitting back with their arms crossed, sure of their judgments, you just have to laugh some days. 🌠
Stacker retweeted
I grew up in a fundamentalist cult. I always wore dresses below the knees. The boys had to have a certain haircut. Everything was just so. It was quiet. People were well behaved. There was no chaos. No drama. No problems, really. But it was still a cult.
I ended up getting away from it all, but got into much worse circumstances. My life was never the same. Of course, the people I left behind would say it was because I left the fold, but I would say it was because of the way I was raised. I wasn't ready to grow and deal with the real world. My shame and blame and despair came from feeling worthless after walking away (and the abuse from my dad), and it showed up in a thousand different ways. I became untethered.
Nowadays, I don't feel a particular attachment to anything, and this is very difficult. It's hard to stand alone. I understand why people don't do it, especially when they have so much to lose. But, what is lost, in the scheme of things, may be worse. Look at the world as it becomes ever more divided. Look at the insanity we are dealing with.
Just look around and tell me that everything is going to be okay.
You can't, can you.
Everyone is locked into their own small worlds.
And nothing has fundamentally changed.
Labor Day. We arrived at my sister’s pool party a late. Grabbed some leftover food and my family sat down at an empty table.
My mother came over to say hi. She told us my sister’s neighbors were there. And they weren’t LDS.
This was a strange thing to say. Irrelevant to anything going on. But also normal because this is how things are done. She didn’t say it in a negative way. Just stating the fact.
But it shows that everything revolves around what people believe.
My in laws do this too. That’s our neighbor but they don’t go to church much. Or that’s my neighbor, they’re good people and active. That’s my neighbor who isn’t LDS.
So, no wonder we don’t tell our family we don’t believe either.
Stacker retweeted
My cult??
Look at her post again. Notice the asymmetry: she says the friend helped strengthen her testimony, but when the friend leaves, she doesn’t say, “Maybe she learned something worth hearing” or “we all can believe differently and that’s fine.” It’s, “Something happened to her; please pray for her” as if it’s some type of spiritual emergency.
She’s speaking from a cult not Ransom.
Would a healthier community say: “I love you, I trust your judgment, I’m curious about your reasons if you ever want to share them, and our relationship doesn’t depend on us believing the same things.”?
Stacker retweeted
"And let the apostle when departing take nothing but bread until he arrive at his resting-place; but if he ask for money, he is a false prophet."
—The Didache