On Harry Potter; Family (and other) Prayer

On Harry Potter
I believe I have now related my thoughts about Harry Potter to a number of people, but now I'm going to lay it down for the whole internet. I've almost finished reading the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Arabic. I first read this book when I was around 12, before it was a craze and I found it moderately entertaining (why do I always want to spell that word 'intertaining' anymore?) but nothing to write home about. Reading it again as an adult has given me some new perspectives on it. Before I get the "but it's a KIDS' book!" let me just say, I know that, but I still find these ideas to be relevant.

Harry Potter has spent his entire young life with his aunt, uncle and cousin, who all seem keen to ignore him. From the first few chapters of the book, we find that they talk to him as little as possible. You would expect his speech development to be delayed, or for him to at least be lacking some forms of socialization. Hand in hand with this, is that he lives in an essentially abusive environment. He lives in a closet, for fuck's sake. He probably has never heard a word of encouragement in his entire life. Why haven't any of his school teachers asked him about it? You'd think someone would look into that. Maybe a friend's parent? I say: the system is failing him.

My second major problem with this is, as the product of a fairly abusive homelife, how in the world does he go from zero to awesome by the time he gets to school? He should have some self esteem issues, not be the swaggering jock that he is, deciding he's allowed to roam around the school all night and not get in trouble. He would still be dealing with some issues. Rather, he appears to be 100% well adjusted to boarding school life. He appears confident and well liked. Again, not what I would expect to happen to someone within days after leaving his abusive home life. Why isn't he haunted by his childhood? I didn't spend my childhood in a closet (okay, I did sometimes hide, but that's a lot different), or have my parents die and I still have a lot of hangups and moments where I just can't. let. shit. go. So what is the deal with Harry Potter, super wizard? His behaviour is not reasonable.

On Family Prayer
I was considering today the remarkably passive aggresive nature of public prayer. Mormons are encouraged to pray pretty much all the fucking time. They are encouraged to pray with their family (morning and evening prayers being an ideal), before meals and at church services (before and after each section. OH the praying!). These are just the public instances of prayer. I think one is always supposed to have a prayful heart, or something like that. In any case, I mostly want to consider public prayer. Since we know prayer doesn't work (sorry: spoiler alert, I guess), we have to consider other functions. Sure, one is basing community building on ritual, but I think there is another, more obnoxious basis to this: being passive aggressive. Let's make up a compltely fictional example that could never be taken from anything I have ever experienced. Say that in a family of people, the parents have spent the entire day bickering. The topic of bickering doesn't matter. Kids are on high alert trying to stay out of it. At the end of the day, before everyone goes to bed, someone decides that it's time for family prayer. Everyone gathers up and bows down. Say one of the parents prays. Something like "Dear Heavenly Father, please help us to have compassion for each other, help us open our hearts and let them not be hardened. Fill our home with a spirit of peace." And you know, other prayer cliches. But this isn't a plea to god to "help" everyone stop being such an asshole, it's a direct call to action to the people around you to stop being such an asshole. Realistically, you can do this with any topic. Obviously, not everything has to be passive aggressive, like "please help the kids do well in finals" or something, although you could take it as "maybe if you would study sometimes." But there are definitely ways in which it is pretty damn passive aggressive.

Today!

My Persian test is today at 2. The moment of truth when I find out if a summer's worth of studying is enough for me to skip out on first year Persian and pass go straight to second year. Well I won't get the results right away, but you can more or less tell if you failed miserably right then.

Will there ever be a time when mormon songs are completely gone from my brain? Sometimes these things just pop into my brain and I have no idea why.

Godhood is blond, full of blinking

There are a lot of things I could say about this hilarious/awesome/ridiculous video, but I think i'll let the video speak for itself. Note: I don't know who made this video, I just stumbled on it. Also, just about everything in the cartoon part were things I've heard in church before.

Recap, now with moar balance

Just like in my dream, I went to Ian and cried (so to speak) and then I woke up. I thought I had been addressing these issues, but when asked to articulate why I hate Mormons now, I didn't even have an answer. I'd been wondering why I wasn't over things, but I hadn't taken the time to really consider why I feel how I feel (beyond my usual "mormons/my parents are crazy!"). And as always, kicking demons out into the daylight makes them so much less scary.

Reasons why:

• Hypocrisy. Everyone wants you to think everything is always lovely and fine and that they care, but everything is NOT fine and people are really mean sometimes. Like when my dad and step mom were getting divorced. Before then, everyone liked my dad and said he taught good sunday school lessons and whatnot, after wards, my step mom was like "rawr, Ed is so mean." and everyone was like "oh poor baby, we hate him now." and I'm like WTF. There's a sort of group shun mechanism in place that is like, people like you as long as you're doing what the group wants, but as soon as you step out of line, everyone hates you. Which brings me to my next point
  
• Control. and I know this is present in any religion, and I'd even say that control is the point of religion, but of course, I experienced the control of mormons, so yeah. Ah gods, this is just like a textbook example from my sociology book. Isolation from the out-group, fatigue (6am seminary all through high school? yes I was tired), strong in-group hierarchy, on and on. Textbook aside, people are always bothering you to do stuff. They make it try to seem like everyone cares about you so they call you all the time or stop by your house and shit.
  
• Cognitive dissonance. This is more of a personal one. I feel like for Mormonism, I had to split my brain into two parts; the part of everything I know about the world from books and school and all my sources of learning stuff, and then there's the part for religion. And when i was thinking about one, I wouldn't use the other part of my mind. Now that I've exiled religion because it doesn't jive with the "things I know" stuff, I feel like my mind still lacks unity. Like there's still this other part that just isn't doing anything now, and may be taken back over by mormons at any minute. Okay, unlikely that I'll be conquested, but I won't dismiss the possibility.
  

For a long time, i thought too much about it, and then i didn't think about it at all. I used to cry a lot, but I haven't cried for a while. Too much religion, and now too little. The irony of being a unicyclist but completely lacking balance in my life isn't lost on me. So I guess now that's the next step. And I'm okay with that.