i read all about the nixon watergate scandal last night

recently i’ve read about that scandal, a scandal with a cheater’s donkey kong world record score, the boeing 737MAX scandal……. lots of scandals involving breakdown of organizations and people and morals. fascinating stuff

i’ve always been one that valued the truth. even unpleasant ones.

yes, losing my idealistic worldviews hurts. but after that, it’s a lot easier for me.

i’d rather start with the whole truth, i can handle that much easier, and the fall is much greater if you’ve lied to me for decades about being the “one true church” and then you’re proven to just be another human organization

one anecdote: i had warts when i was a kid of like 8 or 9. they were on my chest and i was embarrassed to go swimming at the community pool. went to a doctor to get them burned off. he lied and said it would only hurt a little, quickly put on the liquid nitrogen, only THEN did he tell me it was gonna burn and they’d take 2 weeks to scab over, swell up to 2x their size and then fall off. I was offended and hurt, not that there was pain and the warts were gonna be temporarily even uglier, but that he LIED to me, that he didn’t TRUST me to handle the truth. i totally would’ve let him go through with it even if I’d known the truth.

hahaha what 8 year old is gonna listen to a doctor saying “this is gonna hurt” and then let him do it anyway??? but that’s the kind of kid i was. when I was a toddler, an adult family friend took a big bite of my big, round, symmetrical rice cake, and I wailed because it was no longer symmetrical :P.

side note: i find it hilarious that my (lds) patriarchal blessing says i’m “highly developed and disciplined to truth”, and it was largely that obsession with truth that led OUT out of the lds church.