Dealing with parents
My parents have been cold to me since I came out as bi a few years ago (they're very worried that I'm now super likely to cheat on my wife), and they did not react well at all to my little sister coming out a few months ago, but they still complain that I don't call them enough/love them enough, so I called yesterday for Easter with the express purpose of not pussyfooting around their comfort zones.
I told them Jesus wasn't a capitalist and they shouldn't be either.
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I started by talking about how weird the trucking industry is and how it desperately needs self-driving trucks in the next 10 years, but how we also need to solve income inequality before we automate everything with robots or we'll transform into a cyberpunk corporate dystopian hellscape, then moved into how Mormon leaders, who we believe to be literal apostles, JUST SAID WE NEED TO SOLVE INCOME INEQUALITY FOR ALL GOD'S CHILDREN SO WHY ARE YOU REPUBLICANS
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Most Christians have no excuse for being capitalists who worship mammon (see Acts 4 where Christ's church literally has all member's property become common property, thereby forsaking the concept of private ownership). Jesus says things like, "Hey BTW, rich people don't go to heaven," and only barely stopped short of saying, "Hey seize the means of production, comrade," in the New Testament. He literally outlined a utopian religious society for the church post-resurrection.
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So most Christians have no excuse for being unabashed conservative capitalists.
BUT MORMONS HAVE EVEN LESS OF AN EXCUSE. We've got more books of scripture and modern prophets/apostles that even more explicitly reject the idea of private property and tell us we should be striving to create a utopian society that is totally contrary to capitalist ideals.
So I told my conservative Mormon parents that, based on my religious Mormon/Christian faith, I reject capitalism.
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And what's more, I told them I don't understand how they can ignore the aspects of their religion that don't fit with the political views they've been told to hold their entire lives.
And I did all of this while keeping my cool and countering my lawyer-devil's-advocate-playing father's bullshit derailments and pivots by citing facts and scriptures that contradict his politics.
Hey, if they want me to call more often, they I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about.
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So yeah, I continue to worry and confound my baby boomer parents because I'm their bisexual progressive anti-capitalist leftist techno-utopian Mormon transhumanist son who aggressively informs them they're not actually living their religion with their right-wing bullshit politics and they desperately need to reject the conservative culture that for some reason (*cough* BrighamYoung'sRacistAssBullshit*cough*) permeates the church, and I'm actually quite proud of all that.