huckelberry wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 10:31 pm
FreeRangerI think your concerns are not impossible to understand nor silly. I do think you may be caught looking at parts of the situation and letting them get exaggerated. Considering television I do not watch a large variety of shows but I do see ones with strong sympathetic male roles. Blue Bloods off the top of my head. Comedy seems to gravitate to silly male images sometimes. It is easier to make them funny. I find that sort cheep humor.
It is nothing new for divorce to be difficult. Lawyers take money and courts are set legally to place welfare of children first.
I really do not think that there is a particular exmormon group or type. There are a variety of ways people go. I do agree with you that it is possible to see some values in the Mormon church which are worth keeping.
Thanks for that respectful validation huckelberry,
My Mormon dad loves Blue Bloods! I confess I have not tried to watch it. I watched the first episode of Yellowstone though and so far I like it. You might be right that I could be looking at parts of the situation and exaggerating it. We all have our blind spots and misperceptions.
I guess part of it is, perhaps I'm somebody who is motivated by mythology and benefits from a religious structure. I'm not alone by the way, since I already mentioned Nietzsche, after reading all his major works and many biographies and summaries of his philosophy, I realized that Nietzsche knew that man has two brains, one secular and one religious, and so he actually tried to create a pagan religion (dionysian pantheism) because he accepted the fact that we are homoreligious. I'm not going to bore anybody by giving an evolutionary explanation for the importance of male heroes, but I do think it's important and I do think that Woke culture is trying to attack the male hero archetypal as I covered in my initial post. I know that the Woke crowd will gleefully mock this, but watching the Rocky 4 movies at a young age motivated me to start exercising and get in shape; which did wonders for my self-esteem as a youth. The rocky character was in many ways the equivalent of a Greek god which inspired me on an unconscious level just as the Greek gods motivated Greek men. Being more introverted and shy, my Mormon Mission actually provided the structure to actually practice what psychologists call ERP by talking to strangers regularly, which helped me develop a more extroverted persona.
Right now, in many television and movies there is not the mere bolstering of the female and female empowerment but the simultaneous devaluing of masculinity in many cases. In other words, there is an anti-masculine cultural mythology going on that is not inspiring at all. A lot of the heroes I grew up with are being attacked and replaced by feminine Heroes. Rather than Hollywood producing their own new mythologies and new superheroes they are in my view systematically undermining the male hero archetype in order to undermine Life-driven hierarchy and promote a more anti-masculine ideology. Which makes the Mormon mythology look better by comparison even as an agnostic currently.
For a long time I was content in my atheism because I replaced my former LDS religion with chronic skepticism and reductionism which gave me the identity of the Constant Deconstructor. But that eventually wore off and now I find myself craving a cosmic identity again, and tribal structure; especially after I have read several scholarly and scientific books on the value of belonging to a group/tribe as a man and the benefits of religion even for an agnostic or atheist. And I've also spent a lot of time outside of religion to see that it does provide a moral anchor and ethical standard to live up to that is missing in many secular cultures as the responses of some on this board demonstrates.
I used to actually think as an atheist that we could use reason to create a Vulcan Utopia, but instead all I've seen is the rise of Wokeism and name-calling and meanness and a mob mentality. So in this atmosphere Mormonism starts to yes, to me, look like a lighthouse.
Even the anti-Mormon Shawn McCcraney who I watched do nothing but criticize and condemn Mormonism, stop for a second to look at the other versions of Christianity out there and secularism, and he was like oh my gosh Mormonism is not as bad as I thought.
And some ex-Mormons like Jonathan Streeter, who recently went on Midnight Mormons and after saying some anti Mormonism things that made the Midnight Mormon dudes squirm, actually ends out the episode by saying basically even though he's an exMormon he now finds that many Mormons are actually starting to appear to him as on his team in fighting the dangerous Far-Leftist Chaos as he sees it.
Sorry, I guess I was ranting again LOL. Thanks for your support in helping me think this through.
