Anyone who has ever read my blog or previous blogs will know that I can't stop talking about my parents. The weird relationship (those I realize it's entirely normal) swings between love and frustration seems never ending as we create friction between each other as we grow older and more apart.
That's the reality.
My attempts prior to try and avert this situation have been met with disapproval, arguments, and eventually throwing of hands up into the air in surrender to the inevitable. All I can do now, it seems, is to accept the current and ongoing trend of us growing apart and hope that maybe in the future something will stop that or, miraculously, reverse that.
I was raised like any good Mormon boy on the promise by Church officials and God that families "can be together forever" someday. That somehow family was the most important thing. Nothing would come between us and family. I read the scriptures, the talks, and the declarations made by holy men and women of my childhood faith. I listened to testimonies given by people in the different ward I've attended, words from my own parents, and so on on this very promise and its validity. I have listened to it all and believed.
I believed without question.
But belief hardly ever coincides with reality. The two have never been mutually exclusive. Even now as I write this I can still hear the Primary hymn, "I Have a Family Here on Earth" whispering softly in my mind. But it seems that such promises, talks, and testimonies were all shared and given with an asterisk next to them. The asterisk seems that children like me are not actually part of the family. We are merely apart of the physical, biological family here on earth, but we will no doubt be cast aside in that mystical Mormon heaven known as the Celestial Kingdom.
This life must be endured, it seems. This life must be lived in but not lived completely. Such ideas, it appears fade in the promise of eternal salvation and life that goes beyond the grave. We sell our time on earth for cheap, untested virtues that lie beyond the impenetrable veil of silence, total silence. Where is Hades guarding that gate or Hel or Pluto or so many scores of deities that have marked the passage of those halls with hallowed footsteps? What difference does it make that some new god has undertaken the role of these gods? What difference does it make that this god has reconstructed all of the afterlife into some new order? It doesn't matter, really.
God fits so little into this world or the next. The promise of families being together forever is so bizarrely believed to be fact based on some mystical spell of belief. The reality, in my opinion, is that if you want to be with your family in the "afterlife" try getting to know and loving them now. You aren't going to like them anymore in the mythical millenniums to come. You might even like them less.
What difference does it make who I love? It matters not. That has always been my plea. A religion so fixated on dividing families over the issue of attractions between two consenting adults is no place where families can be together. Instead it is an organization not in the business of love and mutual understanding but one that promotes a false worldview that encourages hatred, division, and suffering. Such a group is one I want no part of.
Maybe without Mormonism my parents would be where they are now. Maybe it is just their nature to not want to accept their own children for their various deviations from what they have been told is "normal." Maybe. But the fact that I have lost my parents to this faith and that some illusory god matters more than our relationship tells me only one thing: I will hate this and every other religion out there for this one fact. I may be tolerant of faiths, I may be tolerant of individuals of faith. But I will forever hate their organizations that promote hatred, fear, and misunderstanding towards their own children and communities for the fact that it divides, destroys, and kills.
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