Scrupulosity - Tumblr Posts

this is a thought I’m sort of ashamed of and it comes from years of having severe OCD, and it’s that I don’t think anyone deserves to go to Hell. I’ve thought a lot about how bad it would be, how terrible the idea is, and I can’t make myself truly believe anyone deserves that. I can’t

Sad to say I think I’m dealing with a sudden, strong wave of scrupulosity. It’s been eating me up for weeks now and it’s crazy how out of the blue it is. I’m going to try to follow the 10 commandments for the scrupulous but I’m really nervous and hesitant about telling a priest. Any advice is GREATLY appreciated, thank you and God bless.

I've been musing a bit on that one post that went around during the recent holiday season, to which someone added their family tradition of Present Practice. My god! Imagine actually telling kids what behavior is expected, instead of expecting them to intuit it and punish them when they get it wrong!!

Separate post because this topic is a little tangential to that, but I think it does a great job of unearthing one of our very well-hidden internal biases, which goes as follows:

Good people don't need to be taught.

A good person (in this case, a good child) shouldn't need to be told to be gracious and grateful when given a gift. A good child should just know that a holiday tradition of gift-giving is a social performance to strengthen family bonds and that personal preference or genuine reactions are secondary to that performance. A good child should just know how to value gifts, how to express thanks, how to praise and compliment. No caretakers in their lives should need to put any effort into instructing or modeling these things.

Good people should just know how to be good. If they were really Ontologically Good, their inherent goodness would simply intuitively guide them to correct behaviors. If they can't do that on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

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...Which all sounds very reasonable and obvious, and surely a mistake that only fundie christian families would make! Except that people in the social justice sphere also do this all the time. It's not anybody's job to educate you. It's 2024, how do you not know this already? If you were a Good Person, you wouldn't need to be taught. You would simply intuit the correct philosophies and gravitate to them according to your superior internal moral compass.

If you were a Good Person, you would already know that everything you were taught by your family and/or background was wrong. You should have rejected it already. You should have cut off your family, your heritage, everything about your childhood and upbringing that was Bad and Wrong. You should have known it was all a lie.

If you were a Good Person, you should be able to find the correct way yourself. You should be able to seek out the proper educational resources, and distinguish them from bad advice leading you astray, and make sense of them all according to your own internal moral code.

If you were a Good Person, you would have found your way by the proper, dignified, official channels, not by reading a comic or watching anime. You shouldn't need entertainment or art to guide you. You should just know.

And if someone can't do these things on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

mutuals

Welcome to my scrupulosity

Where god can do whatever he wants and to pray against any of it is to reject the will of god which is a sin and is selfish which is a sin and is fearful which is also a sin and is prideful to think I could ever have anything other than whatever god decides for me whatever that is and that’s also a sin and so much sin in infinite layers and unknown hidden corners of my heart and mind that even I don’t know and only the spirit of god knows so I must continually pray to expose every facet of my divide deceitful heart so that I can see my sin which god is waiting for me to be willing to see and I’m never willing enough which is also a sin

But oh my god aren’t I so spiritual, so holy, so earnest, always in prayer, gifted with discernment and words of wisdom and words of knowledge and prophecy and what’s that? I should be leading and teaching and speaking and shepherding others

Hey-o religious trauma is real and Christianity reinforces trauma and rewards your coping mechanisms which perpetuates the trauma.

Do you know how you cope with the cognitive dissonance of believing a good god can kill you at any time in any way because you deserve it and it’s his will and would be loving? You disappear. You “die to yourself”, aka dissociate. You cease to exist except in an animated body rehearsing the speech and behavior of theological dogma.

In actuality, your morals are the choices you make based on your values, derived from your ethics. If you lose your belief in god and decide human catastrophe and suffering is funny and something to be celebrated, that’s a you problem and even with a practicing belief in god, you will gravitate toward theology that still reflects those values, as the artist did.

We don’t have to think this way or see things that way. We don’t have to believe that humans are irreparably flawed For Some Reason. We can select different beliefs based on different criteria we choose to highlight and emphasize, and live accordingly.

ok i had to go read minna sundberg's christian coming-to-faith comic and this is literally a flaming trainwreck. like i don't think there's been a single scene so far where i wasn't like ''okay this is literally insane i think you need therapy"

The Christian conditioning to “pray and wait on God’s will” fucked up my life. Decades of choices, plans, skill building, wealth building, lost and unrecoverable, sacrificed to god and the church.

The years that the locusts ate were my good, young life poisoned by scrupulosity, the locusts were the high-control rules and conditions the church wielded to eat up my life.

There are three rules:

1. If you do not go after what you want, you will never have it.

2. If you do not ask, the answer will always be no.

3. If you do not step forward, you will remain in the same place.

CARING ABOUT YOURSELF IS NOT INHERENTLY SELFISH OH MY GODDDDDDD

this is just a bunch of text and barely a comic sorry, but i really wanted to talk about this stuff even if i don't have the energy to properly draw