false dichotomy - you'll never be happy!

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Portia
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Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2007 11:06 am
Location: Zion

false dichotomy - you'll never be happy!

Post by Portia »

So I find it troubling and actually a bit surprising that something I said to my hipsterish student therapist a bit over a week ago would actually be repeated over the pulpit nearly verbatim. I told her that I felt the Church sets up a false dichotomy, that it had set some quite narrow confines of lifestyle and outlook and then intimated in doomsday tones that the big scary world is bad and the safe happy Church is good.

I told her that I felt that thought process was unhelpful for me, and missed a lot of the nuance of actually living.

Heavyhanded guilt and shaming tactics seem to be profoundly counterproductive, but there's something so fundamentally off about claiming "the unrighteous (a term that's not well-defined, but is strongly tied to "the big bad world") may experience any number of emotions and sensations, but they will never experience joy."

I can assure him that I experienced my share of despair within the LDS framework and my share of rapturous joy outside it. Where will I go? Go where I wanna go, actually. There's not actually anything to "fix."
User avatar
Portia
Posts: 5186
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2007 11:06 am
Location: Zion

Re: false dichotomy - you'll never be happy!

Post by Portia »

"At the end of every hedonistic rainbow is a pot of joy." is my favorite straw man ever.

But if anyone wants to cross-stitch that for me in a late 1960s color scheme, I'd so put it above my bed as inspo. Maybe I can put it next to my dead mom's macrame owl. Groovy! :P
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