A Reality We Have Created Poster
🖨️ Printed on archival matte paper
🛸 Ships within 2-3 days
This piece was inspired by reflecting on my personal experience of gaining belief in my former religion, Mormonism. The religion's founder created an all-encompassing narrative or dogma to answer life’s biggest questions. The mythology culminates in his description of the afterlife and three “kingdoms of glory,” or levels to heaven. The moon, the stars, and the sun symbolize these, called telestial, terrestrial, and celestial, respectively. My adolescence and early adulthood were dominated by the drive to act in a way that would get me into the “celestial kingdom.”
The ideas that spawned from his delusions became a shared reality for me and millions of others.
🖨️ Printed on archival matte paper
🛸 Ships within 2-3 days
This piece was inspired by reflecting on my personal experience of gaining belief in my former religion, Mormonism. The religion's founder created an all-encompassing narrative or dogma to answer life’s biggest questions. The mythology culminates in his description of the afterlife and three “kingdoms of glory,” or levels to heaven. The moon, the stars, and the sun symbolize these, called telestial, terrestrial, and celestial, respectively. My adolescence and early adulthood were dominated by the drive to act in a way that would get me into the “celestial kingdom.”
The ideas that spawned from his delusions became a shared reality for me and millions of others.
🖨️ Printed on archival matte paper
🛸 Ships within 2-3 days
This piece was inspired by reflecting on my personal experience of gaining belief in my former religion, Mormonism. The religion's founder created an all-encompassing narrative or dogma to answer life’s biggest questions. The mythology culminates in his description of the afterlife and three “kingdoms of glory,” or levels to heaven. The moon, the stars, and the sun symbolize these, called telestial, terrestrial, and celestial, respectively. My adolescence and early adulthood were dominated by the drive to act in a way that would get me into the “celestial kingdom.”
The ideas that spawned from his delusions became a shared reality for me and millions of others.
A Reality We Have Created - The Essay
“​​Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
-Richard Dawkins
“Please let me know if this is true,” I pled.
In my bunk bed.
Arms folded, beneath my head.
I’ll stop rhyming now.
I was in the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, Utah. Just a few days into my two-year stint as a Mormon missionary. The MTC is a sprawling campus of buildings housing thousands of missionaries who run around in groups, attending to the rigorous schedule. It’s sort of like an extended orientation. Everyone is new, excited, scared, homesick, and trying to adjust.
The people running the MTC seemed to have two goals in mind.
The first was to get all of us to either gain or strengthen what Mormons call a “testimony.” A firm belief in the religion as the one “true” church. The second, much less explicit goal was to weed out the fakers. Those who had lied in their interviews before leaving home and had “un-repented sins”–AKA had broken rules that they didn’t confess. It’s a big deal for missionaries to be “pure.”
Those two goals were intertwined.
They told us we had to be “worthy” to feel God’s spirit. The only way to gain a testimony was by asking God and feeling a spiritual confirmation. Not worthy? No testimony. So the pressure was on. We all wondered if we were worthy enough.
The vibe was inadequacy.
…
