Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

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Res Ipsa
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Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Res Ipsa »

Anonymous sources have reported over the last few months that the Holy Ghost is suffering from burnout. “It’s bad enough that we have to watch the millions of people who, uh, self abuse. But now we’re flooded with millions of hours of porn viewing. Just trying to keep up is exhausting,” said one assistant.

But technology has ridden to the rescue of the beleaguered Spirit. A new generation of apps allows “accountability partners” to track these nasty habits of wayward parishioners. https://www.wired.com/story/covenant-ey ... ring-apps/ That’s right: techno wizards has lifted these burdens of the omnipresent spirit and placed them into pastors, youth group leaders, and that guy Ralph who lives down the street.

“Thank Heaven,” said one employee in the monitoring and compliance division. “Now we can get back to doing our main job — finding car keys.”
he/him
When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.

Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
Marcus
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Marcus »

Wow.

On a similar note, many years back, when missionaries were still pestering me, a pair came the door that included one young boy who looked so defeated and sad that I looked up his name afterwards on Facebook. I found his profile, with a picture that matched, and indications he had attended some type of camp before his mission titled "Sons of Helaman."

Further investigation led to this explanation for yet another apparent substitute for the Holy Ghost:
This showed up in my Facebook feed this morning. Have you guys heard of this program? ...I am truly disgusted. Hasn't the church already done enough damage to our young men?
"The Sons of Helaman program has become known as the most effective training system available to help LDS young men gain the self-mastery needed to overcome addictions to inappropriate media so they can go on to serve honorable missions and become temple worthy.

Church Leaders and Parents have asked us to create a resource for prevention and to help those who only have “lost battles” occasionally."
I will never forget the haunted sadness in that little boy's eyes. Whatever they did to him destroyed his soul.

I've told my sons more than once that I consider it to be the greatest accomplishment of my life that I changed the course of a generation by making sure that they were not raised in a cult.
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Rivendale
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Rivendale »

Covenant eyes. Seems like the app programers were reading this study.
The researchers divided the children into three groups. In the first group, they left the children unsupervised to play the game as best they could. In the second group, they remained in the room and supervised the play. In the third group, they told the children that someone special would supervise them. In National Public Radio's report of the experiment ( Is Belief in God Evolutionarily Advantageous?), reporter Alix Spiegel described Prof. Bering's way of simulating the presence of an invisible supervisor - of simulating a deity:
"The experimenters showed the kids a picture of a very pretty woman, a character that Bering had made up whose name was Princess Alice. The kids were told that Princess Alice had a magical power. Princess Alice could make herself invisible. Then the children were shown an empty chair and were told that Alice would watch them play the game after the researchers had left."
The question Prof. Bering sought to answer was this: Which group of children was least likely to cheat? As it transpired, the unsupervised children in the first group cheated more - as any parent or teacher would have anticipated. The supervised children in the second group cheated less. The children in the third group - supervised only by an imaginary princess in an empty chair - matched the children in the supervised group in obeying the rules of the game.
Convinced that the children supervised by "Princess Alice" were as likely to play by the rules as the children who'd been supervised by a real person, Prof. Bering repeated the experiment (slightly altered) with adults. It produced the same result: Adults were much less likely to cheat when they thought God (or, at least, a god) was watching them.
dastardly stem
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by dastardly stem »

I have a sad note about the Sons of Helaman group you mention, Marcus. I don't like getting too much into specifics but my brother and his family found out the hard way. They simply weren't capable of dealing professionally with my brother's son, but still tried to anyway. They really only made things worse.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Marcus wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:34 pm
I've told my sons more than once that I consider it to be the greatest accomplishment of my life that I changed the course of a generation by making sure that they were not raised in a cult.
Amen and ditto!

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
Marcus
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Marcus »

dastardly stem wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:42 pm
I have a sad note about the Sons of Helaman group you mention, Marcus. I don't like getting too much into specifics but my brother and his family found out the hard way. They simply weren't capable of dealing professionally with my brother's son, but still tried to anyway. They really only made things worse.
oh dear. I can imagine only too well--I'm sorry that happened to your nephew.
Marcus
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Marcus »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:42 pm
Marcus wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:34 pm
I've told my sons more than once that I consider it to be the greatest accomplishment of my life that I changed the course of a generation by making sure that they were not raised in a cult.
Amen and ditto!

- Doc
:lol: thanks, and glad to hear it!
mcjathan
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by mcjathan »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:42 pm
Marcus wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:34 pm
I've told my sons more than once that I consider it to be the greatest accomplishment of my life that I changed the course of a generation by making sure that they were not raised in a cult.
Amen and ditto!

- Doc
Agreed! My 3 sons, and daughter's life trajectories are completely different than they would have been. My oldest was 12 when we withdrew from Mormonism -- he's now 30. I couldn't be happier with the decent, competent, honorable humans they've all become.
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Re: Badly Needed Relief for the Holy Ghost

Post by Marcus »

mcjathan wrote:
Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:15 pm
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:42 pm


Amen and ditto!

- Doc
Agreed! My 3 sons, and daughter's life trajectories are completely different than they would have been. My oldest was 12 when we withdrew from Mormonism -- he's now 30. I couldn't be happier with the decent, competent, honorable humans they've all become.
"completely different trajectories" is exactly right. We cleaned out my attic, in the course of which my oldest son found a couple of my old journals and asked if he could read them. i said yes, and he came to me the next day in tears, saying he had no idea how oppressive my religion had been and how overwhelmingly difficult my journey out of the cult had been. He thanked me for putting my him and my other children on a different path, at great cost to my self, my career, and my life. i bore a considerable amount of the damage so that my kids could avoid it, and he saw that clearly in my journals.

Occasionally, i see posts on exmo reddit of people deciding to stay in the church when they don't believe, who have young children. i have a hard time understanding a position of staying in the church as a nonbeliever, because the children in such a situation are still being indoctrinated.

For example, here is a post re: the latest publication of the "for the strength of the youth" pamphlet:
how
The new FSY... explicitly excludes my children on a different non-believing parents as reliable sources of "truth." This further divides mixed-faith families and u.ndermines relationships between parents and children. https://old.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... uch_butter
This clearly indicates one is sending their children to a church that is teaching them that non-"faithful" (ie nonbelievers in the lds religion) parents are not a source of wisdom and advice.
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