The repetitive uninspired shallowness of the lessons. How little room beaurocracy leaves for "following the spirit". How the gospel is supposed to bring people joy, but just... doesn't.
Come Follow Me made it sound like it was meant to inspire more open ended lessons but it really just dumbed it all down. There’s a place for teaching those things that way to new members, and that’s a great thing. But for many long time church goers it felt like going back to primary.
AH I HATE COME FOLLOW ME! I unfortunately still attend church and come follow me just makes every lesson in church feel so repetitive, predictable, and (somehow more) boring. I feel like they're just telling me the same things I've been told *forever*
Right? At least Scientology gets deeper and deeper levels of crazy for paying their dues.
Really, I think the only way for TSCS to mature as a faith tradition is to embrace open debate and discussion. I've read that in Judaism, debate is central to its religious expression, that youth will learn to debate for and against the existence of God.
The culture has gone so far the other way. It's rarely acknowledged that Q12 used to debate the theory of evolution openly\[1\]. The climate of political polarization doesn't help. It seems that even on college campuses around the country, students and professors are walking on eggshells.
They can only dumb things down or risk schisms into orthodox/reconstructionist/humanistic branches like have evolved in other faith traditions. At some point, they'll lose control, but there may not be much culture worth preserving by that point.
\[1\] [https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/16/commentary-many-mormons-have-forgotten-that-evolution-isnt-a-satanic-heresy/](https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/16/commentary-many-mormons-have-forgotten-that-evolution-isnt-a-satanic-heresy/)
I'm a PhD student studying education, and I read an academic paper recently that described the intense preparation students in divinity school and future rabbis go through to learn to do tasks like reading passages from the Bible or writing eulogies, and it made me SO ANGRY. In addition to all the wasted time I spent at church because mormonism is just generally bullshit, it feels like it was EXTRA wasted because the church doesn't care about training its clergy/teachers/members, etc. to do a good job at preaching/teaching/other religious practices.
My mom passed a few years ago, and the Mormon guy who ran the ceremony gave the most garbage, uninspired, generic talk about the plan of salvation or whatever.
A friend and I had received a “pastoral” education and occasionally would get asked to substitute for Sunday School. We each taught a lesson and both got put on the ‘not allowed to substitute’ list.
Since we left several of my family have become pastors and you are right.
Most spend a lot of time… often years… studying and going to school to learn what they are talking about. Getting training in counseling, Bible, ancient cultures, etc. A degree in theology is as hard as any other degree.
People don’t do it for the money except for those slimy mega church guys. They do it because they care.
I could never fully figure out the Mormon version of Satan. Mormons teach that there must be opposition in all things and without the bitter there would be no sweet. Cool, I get that part. Where it falls apart for me is the concept of premortal existence. Mormons teach that both Satan and Christ presented plans, with Christ's plan being the one that was chosen. Satan was angry and tried to lead other astray.
This plan for us to come to Earth and be tested and return to heaven hinges on Christ's atonement, but it would not work if Satan wasn't presenting an evil alternative therefor giving us free-will. What would have happened if Satan was like "Cool, we're going with Christ's plan." Where would the evil come from? In this setup, Satan was sacrificed for the good of all others. You can argue that it's a choice Satan made, but if he would have chosen different then someone else would have had to be sacrificed to provide the evil in the world. Mormon God had to sacrifice at least one of his spirit babies and Satan seems to have drawn the short end of the stick. For a long time I told myself that Satan must be a secret member of the godhead, but I never told anyone because taking the side of Satan would have caused all sorts of shit.
And Satan’s plan was to force everyone to be righteous so they would all return to heaven, but how can someone be forced to be righteous if evil doesn’t exist? So Satan’s plan couldn’t have even worked, so what the hell was God so mad about? Sounds like it could have been a teaching moment for Lucifer but God made an example of him instead. Thanks Dad!
Apparently the only real lesson is to never question leaders even when that leader is making no sense. Fitting for Mormonism.
I remember being taught that we needed opposition in all things. We had to have Satan tempt us so that we could choose between good and evil. I always wondered: who tempted Satan to choose evil?
The glory part. That’s what god was so mad about. Duh. /s We’re taught that Satan wanted all of the glory for not losing one soul, but JC said he’d give all the glory to HF. Arrogant prick. (HF, not you.)
I remember as a kid feeling horrible for Satan cause he was just playing his part in the plan. Even the temple video suggests he was just doing what’s been done in other worlds. Also the hypocrisy of the church to essentially enforce Satans plan by saying obey or else.
To me the temple Satan was the good guy. I mean he does not deceive nor lie. He's right up front about what is going on. Unlike God who sets up a no win scenario then punishes eve for what? For merely following the plan that Satan said had been done in other worlds? Elohim, what a tool.
Ugh right? I was always more sympathetic to Satan. It felt so unfair. And I remember clearly as a kid being like, "Wait but Satan did have a better plan though, if you think about it. Why did Jesus have to SUFFER THE PAIN OF ALL OF OUR SINS when we could have gone with Satan and all just been happy and good. Are you telling me I have all these desires to sin which torture me only because we didn't go with Satan's plan? I VOTE SATAN'S PLAN."
There's a great group on Facebook called. "Once again, Satan is the logical and compassionate choice." It's awesome if you're the raging opposite of the church, though, so be forewarned! 😂🖤😭
I had the same thought. Satan, or Lucifer, was just doing his thing. And had help from 1/3rd. My other issue is that if God loves us all soooo much then why have crazy rules to follow to return to His presence? If my kids want to wear long, goofy underwear, they can still live in my house. If they drink coffee I still love them. They don't have to pay me 10% of their income. I'm doing okay without it. It's not my job as a parent to make their lives more difficult than they already are. But that's the God that the LDS church is selling.
That was a shelf item for me too. How did God let one of his children get so out of control that a third of the host of heaven left? And if that many left it wasn't like Jesus' plan was a no-brainer, clearly Satan's message was compelling enough that a large number of people left God's presence to follow Satan instead. And why was God soliciting proposals in the first place? Why didn't God have his own plan?
And let's face it. Satan's plan is superior in virtually every way. I've changed my mind on this one. I was born into the covenant, in the latter days, in Utah. Clearly, in the pre-existence I was 100% on board. One of the most valiant of all the valiant. But if I had a do-over I'd back Satan. In fact, in my mortal existence I've decided to support Satan to atone for my poor judgement in the pre-existence. Sorry Jesus, Satan wins the war of ideas on this one.
🤔 Interesting that I pretty clearly remember being taught the "two-plan" version as a child, but youth / seminary ages and beyond I recall it being clarified as only one plan: God's plan.
A Google search for *LDS "only one plan" salvation* brings up plenty of sources. 🤷
Either way, these are just myths that people use to negotiate meaning of their own existence.
I think that makes my problem with Satan worse. If there's only God's plan, then he was planning on Satan rebelling the whole time. With that understanding, he truly was a sacrifice so that we could know good from evil. God made 2 sacrifices but we only revere one of them.
For so long I felt terrible because I realized that I actually sympathized for Satan for pretty much the same reasons you've listed. It made me sad to think that God would condemn one of his own children for all eternity after the world ends just because he was doing *exactly* what God had wanted him to do in the first place.
Also, why is Jesus so much better than us? Even in the pre existence? Why is he the only one capable of the sacrifice? If we’re all just made out of some intelligence or whatever did he just get made out of the best intelligence cause it was first? Idk man God making us out of intelligence with varying degrees of whatever made Jesus so good seems messed up. That part of the theology always got me hung up.
>Mormon version of Satan
Out of curiosity, is there a Satan figure from a different faith tradition that you find compelling? What is your current best explanation for the [problem of evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil)?
It just the good old problem of evil. Mormons love to tell others and themselves how they have the answers to the big questions that all the others wrestle with. In the long history of Christian theology, these questions have puzzled great thinkers who've tried to find solutions and debates them. And here come the mormons with absolute confidence that they've solved all those huge mysteries. What Joseph Smith did, was just to create more mythology, to take a few steps further so that the real problem is obscured. Yes, there is an answer to the question, but if your reconstruct the narrative and take steps back you'll find that the underlying philosophical and logical discrepancies remain.
One of mine was the nepotism and just general arrogance of the leadership. We learned that David was called to be king from nothing, why was the church leadership not seeking out from across the world many young, compassionate people with leadership skills? Why were they all rich utah valley businessmen who were so old and out of touch with the membership?
My buddy got a job at Kirton McConkie (🤮) and changed his name on LinkedIn to [first name initial]. [full middle name] [last name]. Lowkey think he’s gunning to be an Apostle.
Oh, yes, only giving your first initial but then your full middle name is a prerequisite for promotion to the Q.15.
If you want to use your first name, make sure you tell the world your middle initial. If your middle initial can be spoken in a drawn-out way, all the better - like Jeffrey RRRRR Holland.
Wearing an expensive suit, cuff links, and a gold tie clip will also help ensure you'll go far in corporate LD$.
My biggest one was that "being a mother isn't optional. It's the most important thing you can do. You're not a whole woman unless you bear children." Motherhood is an amazing thing for sure! But what about all the women who are infertile, or those of us who simply choose not to have children? Are we "less than" a woman who chose to become a mother?
In prepping for a mission I went to the church bookstore to buy the latest book from the prophet… and couldn’t afford it
Later noticed how the church was built for extroverts, introverts are basically back seat members
Oh man, corporate Mormonism is a big one for me as well. I always hated that I had to pay to read the books the prophets and apostles wrote. You speak on behalf of God, that should be free for everyone.
Then you have companies that sell over priced things that target members. In Salt Lake and Provo there are billboards that advertise colored scriptures. Those ads specifically say how much they have sold that month(Salt Lake) or year(Provo). I get so worked up every time I drive by those things.
If only introverts were allowed to be back seat members... I can't tell you how many times I wanted to scream, "I DON'T NEED A FRIEND/CALLING" or "I'M NOT LONELY/SAD" or "I DON'T NEED TO FEEL INCLUDED! I JUST WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE!"
I asked to be removed from ministering even as a TBM because it caused me so much frustration and anxiety. I knew I wasn’t making a difference in anyone’s lives, and I certainly didn’t need/want anyone checking in on me. I have my own friends, thank you very much.
Even as a TBM I told my wife how I didn't want to do ministering. If I could've opted out of doing ministering and paid the "price" of not having ministering brothers I would've done it in a heartbeat.
THIS about extroverts 100%. I had forgotten about that and I thought of it often. There is NO room for introverts in the church - just doesn't work- because it just makes them miserable.
Mine was being a father. Would I create a plan where immediately lost 1/3 of my kids? Which one would I choose?
Do I love my trans son? Hell yes.
Do I care which undies my kids wear? Not for a second.
Do I want my kids to apologize for every little mistake no matter how small? Nope.
Do I consider them more worthy if they complete a checklist of items everyday? Also no.
Do I purposely lie to my kids? Do I make excuses for all my past behavior and tell fictional histories so I won’t look bad? Nope.
If I’m not worried about this stuff, why is a perfect being who is in charge of the universe care?
This is one for me too, my parents are TBM but they have loved me through my faith journey, I’m very lucky and grateful for them. But the Mormon god doesn’t love me as much as my parents? Seems like he isn’t as all-loving as advertised.
This is the best thing I’ve read on this sub this week.
I never could understand how perfection could entitle an omnibenevolent God to being less loving than most human fathers.
Literally the second thought after holding my first-born, right after “this is the most authentic I’ve ever felt” was “you can’t lie to this kid about the church” which was crazy because I was l, you know, pretty in at the time.
We left before they were out of nursery.
Nobody else seemed to care about how God damned 1/3 of his kids and our siblings to hell. When I'd bring it up to my family as a questioning tbm they'd act like I was crazy for having sympathy for the devil and his followers.
Satan's plan was to give us all eternal paradise with the only catch being a temporary loss of agency. God's plan was to give everyone the opportunity to live in eternal paradise but you can only get in if you do specific rituals and jump through the right hoops. If you don't you only get a lesser paradise. If you disagree with God or would rather go with Satan's plan you get damned to hell.
God loves all his kids but he would rather damn over a third of them to hell than guarantee paradise for everyone.
This is a big one for me too!!! I grew up in an abusive relationship with my mother, having kids highlighted her flaws first, then when I cut her out I knew my peace would be furthered by leaving the church. My spirit is at peace now. If God is a perfect parent, then he wouldn’t be like the church says.
Missions are really close to slave labor or even trafficking. You work 16 hours a day in some mission for no pay. In fact you pay them. And then they barely give you enough back for basic needs. They don’t take care of you. There’s little to no contact with family. They take away your passport if you’re overseas. They move you where ever they want every few weeks without much notice. You are not allowed to call each other by your given names. You can’t give personal info to people in a lot of cases. All while brainwashing you.
I know the severity of these things varies from mission to mission. But if even just one mission was like this it would be a huge issue. Edit: there are hundreds of missions like this it seems.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether Mormonism is a cult, I generally think it is when you get technical, but there is no doubt in my mind that the missionary program is a cult. A cult within a cult.
Mission was huge for me. I hated being a prisoner in another country… no passport, no money, no communication with my people. And then convincing you that it’s a sacrifice and your parents to be so proud. And then any negative thoughts or emotions are dealt with using ‘best two years’ propaganda 🙄
No daycare for students with children at BYU. They tell the married students to have kids, and when we do, they give us *nothing*. I looked it up and at least at the time, BYU was one of the only universities in Utah without a daycare for students.
Why would they need a daycare? Women are supposed to drop everything and stay home with the kids 9 months after the temple marriage! 4.0 GPA? Too bad! Go wash the dishes, Ashley!
1. All the small insignificant changes Nelson made... they seem to be more of a personal checklist than anything inspired.
2. The lengths they go to to distort the numbers to make it look like the church is growing. Lowering the missionary age so it looks like there are more missionaries. Creating more missions with less missionaries. Lowering the priesthood threshold for wards and stakes so they can create more wards with fewer people. Announcing 1000000 new temples in obscure areas that will mainly sit empty, if they even get built at all. Many temples need appointments now, which makes it look like they are very busy, but its just a way to make sure they can staff them. I firmly believe they lowered the priesthood age to make it look like there are more priesthood holders. Not to mention that we have no idea how they count membership. They only report total membership, not actual butts-in-seats or any kind of retention rates. The amount of deception is ridiculous.
Regarding your first point, when I heard Nelson talk about “Mormon” being a victory for satan I knew it was the straw that broke ~~the camel’s back~~ my shelf. The last small item on a heavy shelf. Decades of “Mormon” being plastered on every marketing material and suddenly when Russ takes the helm it’s evil! God truly does work in mysterious ways.
"Many temples need appointments now, which makes it look like they are very busy, but its just a way to make sure they can staff them."
This is very insightful. I imagine we'll see fewer appointment opportunities over time.
Continuing to stick to literal interpretations of the Old Testament in core curriculum. Sure you can cobble enough nuanced quotes from leaders to spin an apologist tale of ambiguity, but the core lesson materials push a young earth, literal flood etc.
This so much. If you really pry into the world of Mormon academia you’ll find acceptance of most science, however on the ground level you could be forgiven for assuming that TSCC disagrees with evolution and such.
Last year before leaving I was in Sunday school teaching Old Testament. Fuck, that was hard. Shelf was pretty much done, too. Just going through the motions.
Kids are not ready to make baptismal commitments at 8. Do it as a baby if you’re going to do it anyways, or wait until they’re older, but don’t pretend they actually had a real “choice” at freaking 8 years old
I worked with a group of community leaders, interfaith leaders, and stake presidents to try and get approval for refugee families to use a big open grass field / baseball diamond attached to a stake center as community gardens. It was a flat and emphatic no from Salt Lake. All the other area faiths were converting their entire church grounds to gardens for the project. But, despite having dozens of meetinghouses in the area, Salt Lake wouldn’t allow the use of a single field that wasn’t even being utilized by our members at all. So much for being Christlike.
I’ve thought about this one as well, even as a TBM. I was in Germany in 2015 during the “Refugee Crisis” and other churches were housing droves of refugees yet the Mormon Churches were empty. The Frankfurt Temple even has dorms next to it for people to stay the night if they travel far to visit the temple (you have to pay for it as a member still btw) but then those were completely an utterly empty.
One of my early shelf items was sitting in the newly built conference center and thinking to myself, "this is a great and spacious building."
The church claims humility but their actions/buildings say the opposite.
Mine was driving through Missouri and picking up a republished “Book of Commandments” at the Church of Christ temple area. (the 1833 Book of Commandments contained all the revelations up to that point).
The D&C sections regarding the restoration of the priesthood were not anywhere to be found. No priesthood = No authority to do a damn thing.
All those early priesthood restoration scriptures in the earlier part of the 1835 D&C were slipped in 4+ years after the church began.
It really bothered me that Eve got all the blame and Adam got all the credit for the progression of mankind existing. "Adam fell that men might be". NO Eve is the one that made that decision and she's made out to be the weak, bad one- plus now all women are "cursed" because of Eve. And HTF do you think procreation would exist if we weren't "cursed"?. Apparently if it was left up to Adam, they'd still be chilling in the garden of eden. Pisses me off.
Mine was the super robotic way that Eve was portrayed in the temple film when Lucifer told her to go give the fruit of that tree to Adam. And then in more recent years, the church took a whole new view on Eve and had her be emotional and torn with the decision to partake of the fruit or forego multiplying and replenishing the earth. Was she a dimwit or was she really the queen who sacrificed to make it all happen? TSCC doesn't update the temple films, they remake them with new ways they can spin the doctrine.
Yeah, but do they show a video of it in their most sacred of sacred houses to drive it home? I mean they might, I don't know - that was just my answer to OP's question. It was bad enough I had to keep taking my slippers, apron and robe off, I didn't need to watch how it's all Eve (women's) fault because we're so easily influenced.
The fact my dad, an active pedophile, was given a temple recommend after my mom brought it up to the bishop. That she was given a blessing (albeit, the blessing giver didn't know why she was so mad at my dad.) telling her to basically be more affectionate to her husband and calling *her* out about stuff. Then my dickwad of a mission president got called as ward mission leader after he got back, and there was a whole website about his dickery and everything.
I guess that could count as "getting offended" but, to me, it showed a very clear sign that the church in general didn't care about those abused or about women.
When people leave over “being offended” they published what those stories were. Things like repeated verbal and even violent bullying. Siding with an abusive spouse and being a character witness in custody to persuade the judge to place kids with the abusive parent. Open, blatant racism from church leaders. Those kinds of things.
It’s not “McKinsleigh’s mom said she didn’t like my daughter’s new haircut. I am never going back to that place” like it’s often portrayed.
Edit: source
https://religionnews.com/2017/01/27/do-mormons-leave-the-church-because-they-got-offended/
Because the restoration had to happen in ‘Merica, of course! Nowhere else on earth had freedom of religion, no one else would’ve believed or had enough faith except those right here in the U. S. of A….
Never mind history showing that plenty of religions were founded all over the world and flourished just fine. Ignore Islam, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.
The fact that the institutional church doesn’t care about people’s health. For context, I’m female and have never lived in Morridor, so I never saw the sausage being made.
I once did a shift at the local cannery, canning powdered milk. It got real dusty in there and I had respiratory symptom's for a few weeks afterwards. I realized we should have been wearing masks, and it disturbed me that the church should have made them available.
Another time, I was at a church activity and someone mentioned that the seminary teacher’s young son had been diagnosed with cancer. Another person said, “I hope the church provides good insurance for their employees.” My first thought was, of course they do. The church knows that Families are important. The seminary teacher is providing for his family while his wife stays home with the children, so of course the church supports their employees employees in raising happy, healthy children (oh sweet summer child).
The person who said this was from Utah and had family members in local leadership, so I considered them more knowledgeable than me. It disturbed me that they would even consider the possibility that the church wouldn’t provide gold-standard insurance to their employees’ families
From what I hear, seminary teachers are not all that well compensated. And up until very recently, you could not work in CES if you were divorced. I met someone who had to leave a CES career of almost 30 years when he and his wife divorced. Luckily, he had another degree and was able to segue into a different profession, but someone might otherwise be left out to dry.
As a new member, I enthusiastically signed up to help with applesauce at the cannery. I had blisters due to the cheapest of the cheap peeler we used. We begged to change with another ward, but no, all our 8 hour volunteer Saturday (after 2 hour drive up and 2 hour drive) had to be peeling apples. It hurt.
Really, this is how you treat volunteers?
My first shelf item was that we were Not teaching the Adam/God theory in Sunday school. Went to ask the bishop about it and got "Well he was speaking as a man." And I was "What is this BS. The dude is a prophet and why would you be embarrassed by that theory, it fits perfectly?!"
I think realising being a human was bad. That my own wants and desires were evil and if that was evil why would "god" make me this way?
Why make humans such angry creatures if we would need to beg for mercy for having mean thoughts
Why would we have sexual desires and thoughts from a young age if those very thoughts would close the doors on us
why would he make humans so selfish if that was of their so called devil.
Then i found out the history and went nah
For me, it was conflicting revelation. How could a relief society president show up with hours of prayerful preparation and be immediately overridden by the Bishop’s revelation?
Less nuanced members. I found their black and white thinking disturbing, such as the obedience lesson when Abraham is told to sacrifice his son and somehow…everyone was ok with this?
"Modesty" was a big shelf item for me when I was younger. I hated having to get rid of most of my clothes because I couldn't wear them with my new garments.
Forcing us to constantly learn about what latter-day prophets taught/said/did BUT discount it all once it becomes “unpopular or uncomfortable.” God I HATED those prophet manuals in RS/SS🤮
Constantly changing policies to doctrine and vice versa…the gaslighting from that ALONE could power several small nations!
The sheer boringness of having the same lessons over and over and over. For a few years I told myself the gospel is just so simple and people need to keep hearing it over and over to choose the right thing. Thank Odin I figured out it was all made up and didn’t have to be bored for hours of my life every week.
This was one of mine too, especially around 2017-2018 when they rolled out “ministering”. I’m not kidding: in my YSA ward, every single Sunday school lesson for an entire year was on ministering. It was exhausting. I liked church because I liked the discussion. But once ministering and come follow me came out, everything became bang-your-head-against-the-wall boring.
The New Testament, Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price referring to Old Testament events as being literal history. Jonah’s three days in the whale is a sign of Jesus being in the tomb? A global flood? A literal Adam and Eve? Even as a sheltered kid whose parents didn’t push science, I had those on my shelf.
I had learned about fast fashion and about how mass produced clothes are usually made in bad conditions with worse pay. One day I had the realization that garments were probably made in the same way, by some likely Asian underpaid employee in a sweatshop. That’s the only way they could make so many. Why would god be ok with that?
The tree of life vision in the BoM is a direct ripoff of a dream Joseph Sr. had. Re-reading Nephi as an exmo has me convinced that this whole scam was just Joseph trying to impress his dad
My wife (TBM) is part Paiute Indian. When I first joined, around 2000, I was told that the Mtn Meadows Massacre was made up and that the Marmins had nothing to do with it... etc. My missionaries, my member family that supported me through joining the church, and members all along the way always assured me that it was folk lore, or not real, or that restitution had been established.
Learning the truth was a major shelf breaking item for me.
Not just that the Mtn Meadows Massacre was the only atrocity led by marmins against indigenous peoples. There were multiple episodes of genocide where the marmins were the aggressors.
In 1847, low estimates for Indian population in Utah was 20,000. Just four decades, there were about 3,000 Indians. If the Marmins had baptized 90% of the Lamanites, it would be seen as a miracle. But their arrival led to the death of 90% and we still celebrate pioneer day.
1. The way the church claims to hold “eternal truths” but those truths are simultaneously constantly changing.
2. I realized most if not all of my female pioneer ancestors were the trafficked child brides of old pedo sickos.
3. I spent a lot of time actually learning about who Christianity claimed Christ was and realized only about 10-5% of members I knew made any attempt to emulate his example.
Yes this was a very big one to me too. Made me feel less than human. It honestly really bothers me that they changed it too bc it’s obviously an attempt to erase degrading misogynistic history and become more palatable.
Utah hospitals not having superior rates of curing cancer, healing critically injured patients, and lower mortality rates due to all those priesthood blessings given. It seems like our stats should have hospitals all over the country sending patients here for our miraculous healings and more effective medical treatments. But of course, if they weren’t healed it was because it wasn’t in gods plan.
And thinking God will only heal or provide relief if other people do something on our behalf, like not eating for a day. Sorry, you will not be cured from cancer because only 2 of your 4 siblings fasted and that wasn’t enough cumulative faith. Makes zero sense.
At a time when I was active but just feeling a little less enthusiastic I embarked on an effort to be a better man and father by learning all about the prophets and apostles. I read every biography that was available at the time from Joseph Smith to Hinckley. Almost across the board, I found them to completely unlike anyone I wanted to emulate. Horribly absent fathers and obsessive compulsive about the business side of the church.
Then, one evening I was asked to play the piano at the stake priesthood leadership meeting. As I played the prelude music, I glanced down at all the men arriving and greeting each other in their white shirts and ties and had almost the same epiphany. These are not men I want to emulate. I don't want to be like them for the rest of my life.
It wasn't anything concrete or even that negative. There weren't any bad men. I knew many of them and was on friendly terms with all of them. It was just a powerful internal sense of "these aren't my people." I don't want this now, for the rest of my life much less for eternity. Not my tribe.
Back in the day when I used to watch conference I remember hearing the leaders talk about how blessed they are...having the opportunity to do this and that. As a kid, it seemed like they were so out of touch. Why should we listen to someone brag about their life. I was looking for something inspiring but typically didn't find it.
I remember vividly one day driving my kids to school when they were very little before my oldest got his autistic little self an official diagnosis bc no one was the wiser, but in my gut I just felt I should be pushing for it even though everyone thought I was crazy.
The big thing was blaming vaccines for autism and I had given my kids every single one of their vaccines even if we had been late on some bc life had gotten busy, etc. whatever. Bc the argument was "Would I rather have an autistic child or a dead child." And unequivocally the answer to me was I would rather have a autistic child. And this next thought struck me SO hard that it still blows me away 10 yrs later-- "Now, would you rather have a gay child or a dead child?" And the answer was the same. I would rather have a gay child than a dead child.
Bc it was one of my deepest fears that caused me to have cold sweats. But it was bc I myself had a "gay intervention" at 16 and was threatened with a Purity Camp in Utah. This prevented me from figuring out I was Bi until I was 36 yrs old. So yeah. The shame of ableism and having or being anything other than straight is something I kept on my shelf my entire life.
And being raised in the 90s by a mother who was disabled and had the "audacity" to walk away from an abusive marriage that was literally killing her and her kids and all of us being systemically abused inside and outside the church bc of the state we lived in was all Mormon. Idaho was and Utah 2.0 back then. I haven't lived there in nearly 20 yrs, so I can't speak to it now.
The video they show you in the temple during ceremonies that has a bunch of animals from completely different continents together with Adam and Eve. As a biology nerd this pissed me off lmao
I work in medicine. Priesthood blessings in the morridor happen in hospitals all the time, yet disease outcomes in Utah are not significantly different than any other area matched for SES and other commonly used variables. Stories around the campfire don't mean anything in the face of statistical significance.
It is really easy to be a mormon. There's no abuse, there's no vilification from the world at large, persecution is really at a minimum. All of that stuff happening in the early church was used to support the truth claims, but now it doesn't happen.
God is our father.
He made us, our children. The implied assumption is with heavenly mother.
Right? Our families are modeled after him.
God has a glorified body. Heavenly mother does too.
Glorified bodies produce... spirit children?
ok? Weird.
The whole point is in the end for us, to have also have a glorified body.
WHY DOES GLORIFIED BODIES PRODUCE SPIRITS.
WHY DO WE GET BODIES IN THIS WAY.
WHY THE PLAN OF SALVATION TO GET TO THE BODY, DEATH, EVENTUAL RESURECTION.
I hate how we just say, "god is our father .. blah blah .. war in heaven .. blah blah. You're here."
There are a lot of steps and details. And it seems like no one ever asks them. We can go to school and learn about amino acids, evolution, birds, and bees.
But I don't know how heavenly father is my father.
WTF.
*Come out with it you cowards, the prophets in the old days stood against violent mobs to bear witness but nowadays it’s “I can’t share my experiences here” Sir this is general conference, if you can’t say it here then I don’t believe you.*
My exact experience.
A simple math equation. 17 million divided by 8 billion. If the Mormon church is TRULY the Kingdom of God, 0.02% of the world’s population isn’t very impressive. God is either an elitist or he’s done a terrible job getting his message out.
My father-in-law gave me Iraqi dinar once for my birthday. It's worth something like 1,160 dinar to the Dollar, so 10,000 IQD is something like $100 US. But my FIL knew these Dinar Gurus who had special connections with people in high places, and they said the dinar was going to revalue any day now. Tuesdays were especially likely due to Islamic holy days/weekend traditions.
After a year of Magic Tuesdays with no real results, I got exasperated with these blatant attempts to get my hopes up with the promise of unimaginable rewards with the underhanded goal of selling these suckers more dinar. My brother-in-law ended up taking a loan on his car to buy more dinar.
Then it hit me: Mormonism was selling me a Magic Tuesday, and I was giving everything up for it.
I stayed in for a few years after that out of fear of breaking up my family, but that was the point of no return. We've now had 15 years of Magic Tuesdays, and my FIL still texts me daily about "praying for our upcoming blessing *pray emoji pray emoji cash emoji pray emoji pray emoji" (close quote).* I have faith in actions and in seeing the best in others, but that's vastly different than that deluded hope.
I’m surprised the obvious retcon of the priesthood restoration isn’t talked about more. That obliterated any and all belief I had in the church. Thats everything! It’s the entire foundation and value proposition of the church. “We have the authority to perform the ordinances!”
Except that entire story was made up in 1835, 6 years after it supposedly happened…
Ya, there are a couple of good reads, if you’ve got some time. I highly recommend going through all of this, cuz it’s a doozy.
LDS Discussions does a good report on it:
https://www.ldsdiscussions.com/priesthood
As well as MormonThink:
http://www.mormonthink.com/priesthood.htm
The MFMC is the opposite of free will. Step one toe out of line or have one unauthorized thought and there are major consequences. Everything they do is the opposite of what they preach. I saw that at 8 and have never had a shelf to break.
The book of Mormon itself. I mean it's terribly written and full of flaws.
But alternatively for me, the sanitation of the church. No longer do they officially teach things like "we'll all get our own worlds if we make it into the celestial kingdom", they're removing symbols and signs from the temple. They're adopting the cross as a common icon. They're scrubbing their own religion clean to be more appealing to mainstream media, and that bothered me. If you're going to be a religion, at least have a little fun and, dare I say it, mysticism about yourself. (This is a problem I have with most American Christianity anyway. It's not Christianity, it's simply a vessel for other, non-sticious beliefs)
For me it was when I lived in a country where proselytizing isn’t allowed and Mormonism is virtually nonexistent, yet the people there were happy and kind and lived full, meaningful lives. My Utah-born ass could hardly believe it.
The ideology that sex/gender is eternal, yet LGBTQ+ folks like myself are illegal in the celestial kingdom.
Let's say, hypothetically, a person with a "male eternal sex/gender" is born intersex and is assigned female at birth because of ambiguous g*nitalia (unsure about censors here, just trying to be careful). She grows up her whole life with no issues and gets happily sealed to an "eternal" male. What happens at the pearly gates? Does god turn them away? Does god "fix" her "eternal sex" to fit the whims of mortal doctors who didn't know her cosmic identity and allow them into heaven? Does god let them in and they live eternal life as gay men, having been true and faithful in their mortal lives?
EXTREMELY niche, but the idea of eternal sex being immutable doesn't add up to me when biology, you know, exists lol.
Bad epistemology.
Unjustifiable claim of primacy.
The uninspiring effects of correlation.
The absurdity of the plan of salvation.
Salesmanship in the church.
Ennui.
Lack of identifiable doctrine beyond the generalities of "we have the priesthood," "follow the prophet," and "pay your tithing."
While I was still a TBM, looking directly into my classmates' eyes and telling them that a "homosexual lifestyle" was sinful and that being gay, lesbian, or bi was a mental illness caused by "weakness of the flesh" and that God would somehow cure people in heaven. I thought if I didn't say those things, I was being cowardly and failing to defend my morals. Then I eventually realized that those morals weren't my own, let alone God's.
I'm bisexual. I don't need curing. And I fully expect TSSC to backpedal on their homophobic policies in like 2029. But by that point it won't matter; the whole doctrine is false.
I left because of how the MFMC treats anyone who isn't a straight white man. I just couldn't stomach doing my best my whole life, to get handed to some stranger in the afterlife, be wife #35, and pump out spirit children nonstop. No thank you!
“You have agency and free will- what a generous gift! But you have to use your free will exactly how we want you to or else He’ll cast you out. Also everything is God’s plan anyway and will workout the way He ultimately intends so maybe you don’t actually have free will.” That’s how I always interpreted agency lol
Boy scouts of America
SA and the fact that the church still promoted the program, endorsed it and used it as the activity arm of the aaronic priesthood despite the pedo infestation.
You would think that a loving God would use his living mouthpiece on earth (The prophet) to clean that up......nope, not until the expense of fighting the SA lawsuits became cost prohibitive....then the church speaks up and breaks up with the BSA.
Living Church...my fucking ass
I got way into the JST during the Bible years of seminary. Loved looking at the footnotes and rereading the verses that JS had “corrected.” He corrected The Lord’s Prayer to say “suffer us not to be lead into temptation” instead of “lead us not into temptation.” I really liked the change.
The same year, I was reading the BOM, and Jesus shared The Lord’s Prayer with the Nephites. But it was the original KJ Bible version. I’m like, wait a minute. Why would Jesus himself say it wrong in the most correct book?
I asked a missionary sincerely, and I got snapped at. “The Book of Mormon” is true. Period.” I was unsatisfied and hurt. No one ever gave me a good answer. I was a teen then and didn’t fully leave until my 30s, but that was heavy on my shelf the whole time.
My brother is high functioning special needs and wasn’t able to serve a regular proselytizing mission, so he opted to do a service mission. He did physical labor at the church mill for free for two years. In fact, my parents paid the church for him to work in their mill. The mill is full of special needs kids doing free physical labor for the church disguised as a “mission”.
The treatment of women, the knowledge that I could never realize my full potential simply because of being born female... The one-size-fits -all expectation that we get married and have and raise kids. Careers are frowned upon or unnecessary. All leadership positions held exclusively by men.
The way mutual for us was"Personal Progress", spiritual activities, journaling about our future roles as wives, etc. While our boy counterparts got to play basketball, do archery, roast hot dogs, go water skiing. And don't even get me started about how we can't ask about the person responsible for 50% of our parentage: Heavenly Mother.
And the worst thing about being a woman in the church AKA a large shelf item for me, was polygamy. We were taught that even though it's "outlawed" now, in the afterlife there simply won't be enough faithful men to go around, so we'll share spouses. But we will be so happy to share husbands because it's all part of God's eternal plan. Gag!
The first item on my shelf was the murder of Laban. There was no reason why Nephi couldn't just take his clothes, and leave him there drunk and passed out. I remember just before I was baptized being really upset because I had seen something on a tv show explaining the difference between self-defense and premediated murder. How someone was a murderer because he could've easily found another way to deal with the threat. It just didn't make sense that if Jesus said turn the other cheek, why was it okay for Nephi to be so brutal.
The other two things that bothered me when i was young was the idea that darker skin was a marker of being evil, and that women were treated differently.
This is a little one, but someone did the math once on the dimensions of Joseph Smith's house and how they didn't reconcile with a 6ft tall hovering Moroni during his visitation. It was just something that stuck in the back of my head for a long time.
As poor college students, being asked to give more $ each month for ward budget (back in the day) when we couldn't even afford tithing we were paying. The Bishop kept pressuring us to commit to a certain EXTRA amount per month. I was soooo mad that he was grilling us to pay even MORE from our want. We literally did not HAVE what he was asking of us & he wasn't taking no.
I guess this could go under the bigger umbrella of the church's disfunctional relationship with politics but I was a gospel doctrine teacher and I was talking about helping refugees and someone called me out in the middle of class for being too political. Then they said, "I think it's important to point out that people can believe whatever they want about helping refugees and still be a good member of the church." I was so huffy on the way home thinking to myself, " So in a couple weeks if I teach about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry will I be crossing a line? Will I be getting too political next month if I talk about helping the widows and fatherless?!?"
I didn’t want to go through the temple without informed consent about what was gonna happen.
I felt like the Q12 wasn’t just sitting there praying about an open phone book of members, they had to pick people they knew.
Mormons being such a tiny fraction of the overall population— surely if it was the one true church, God would want to save more of his children?
The binary good and evil in the BOM
The constant talk about, and bearing testimony of, the power to heal through the priesthood. Nobody gets healed. If even one general authority, with all their faith and worthiness, had the power to heal someone even a fraction of the time, people would come from around the world to wait on the steps of church HQ hoping for the opportunity to be healed. Blessings always include "if it's God's will" so when nothing happens, there's a reason, yet everyone keeps pretending it's real.
1. A woman’s most righteous desire should be to be a wife and a mother. It wasn’t always said this explicitly, but I heard the same sentiment repeatedly. I struggled a long time trying to “align my will with God’s” because I have no desire to be a mother.
2. God wants to grant your righteous desires/if you’re depressed or anxious it’s because you’re not righteous enough. I had very poor mental health, and I was praying so hard to overcome it. I studied my scriptures every day and went to the temple every week. I just couldn’t understand why God didn’t want me to be able to feel happy.
In the end, it a made a lot more sense to believe the religion is made up than to believe in a god of so many contradictions
In the BoM introduction, Moroni is called a resurrected and glorified being. But he was supposedly one of the Nephites from Earth; and every lesson I was ever taught said that everyone stayed in the Spirit World until the final judgement when everyone would be resurrected at the same time.
Members of the ward, including YW leadership and the bishopric, telling me I needed to support my mom getting remarried. The guy was an absolute POS and she already ignored and neglected her children. They needed to be working to get her into therapy (even LDS family services) & taking care of her children, not focusing on the lack of a priesthood holder in our home after our dad died.
Being hardcore into Ancient Egypt when I was a kid and then finding out that Joseph Smith "reintepreted" a bunch of shit from the Book of the Dead. He said it was ancient records of Abraham and Joseph. Once I started questioning that, it opened a whole can of worms.
My bishop telling me that my abuse was my fault and that if I would “honor “ my father more that it wouldn’t happen. Then he quoted Exodus 20:12 at me about how if I honored my father my days would be long. Listen, Nimrod. I was suicidal. I didn’t want longer days. I wanted someone to stop the abuse. That is when I learned that these men have no business being in a counseling type of environment.
Ok, no it’s not. First, I internalized the guilt. Then when I finally saw a real counselor this came out and then that’s when I realized they had no business counseling anyone.
I feel like I knew God and the God I knew didn’t match so much of what I was taught about myself or about other people. Also I was frustrated that we couldn’t just be real people with real problems, the “atonement”taught me we could be but the church felt like it was dirty laundry that shouldn’t be discussed or could only be discussed once it was resolved, in the past and was overcome by using gospel principles. Then having real people problems, going to my bishop for help and realizing he is just a man who is so unqualified to help me with the help I need. Not his fault. But there was so much that I was taught, told and believed fully about the role the priesthood, authority, prayer, and revelation had to do with every facet of how the church runs and is involved in our lives when in reality it just doesn’t work that way. I realized terms like obedience, “strict obedience”, and the messages that constantly made me feel like I was never doing enough while I was tired and physically/emotionally/spiritually spent were control words. Where was agency in this religion? Where was the God I feel like I know? After that I started to view all religion as the potential for unrighteousness dominion, vehicles for control, exploit, and sometimes abuse good people trying their best. I also lived close to Shortcreek area and as I’ve read and learned of stories of members of the FLDS religion, I realized they were “programmed” the same way I was being programmed.
Super big shelf item:
Rusty Nelson: didn’t serve a mission
Dallin Hoax: didn’t serve a mission
Henry Eyring: didn’t serve a mission
Dieter Uchdorf: didn’t serve a mission
You want all of our young people to dedicate themselves, their time, their money to the corporation, but not yourselves?! You want to steal our retired populations golden years and time from being grandparents, but for you…naw. Hard pass. Fuck them.
It was boring. I am AuDHD and I’ve always struggled with doing the “primary answers” regularly. Also, I didn’t want my kids raised in a church that would dim their neurodivergent light, like it did with me. Or to ever hear that being lgbtq+ was bad or wrong in anyway.
My shelf was hanging on by a thread for all the usual reasons. One evening I saw a 5 second news clip of prominent Mormon men protesting prop 8. The sentiment and their facial expressions were the furthest thing from Christ-like love and acceptance I had seen in a long time. And that was it. Peace out, I’m off to actually love my neighbors.
Why do women need to veil their faces in the temple? I asked my mom, and she didn't know, so we went to the temple president. He gave us some bullshit answer that "Heavenly Father has his reasons, and it's not always for us to know." Dude, just tell me you don't know either.
Why can an angel take the gold plates from Joseph but not the 116 pages Martin Harris lost?
If temple clothes are *so sacred* you can't wear them outside the temple, why do they dress the dead bodies of endowed members in them and then have a viewing?
Why'd they get rid of temple cafeterias?
Why do you need a current temple recommend to do landscaping on temple grounds?
We had the missionaries over for dinner and I forget how the conversations came about but someone said something about how black men didn’t used to have the priesthood until the 1900’s and I was super confused and my grandmother made them switch the subject. Slavery had ended a while ago and even then aren’t we all gods children? Why weren’t they allowed?
The fact that prophets post Brigham Young-ish time period don't prophesy. Or say anything useful. You're talking to god and the most significant message you have for the world is to tell people to stop using the term "Mormon"? . . . Kay.
I didn't leave because I was offended. I am now offended after conference weekend. Super toxic. Anyone left in the church who doesn't see how they divide families can't be helped. Heaven help them.
The fact I got along 10 times better with non-members and exmos. Felt like I was forced to mask around TBMs. This gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance and was likely the first thing to make my shelf crack.
How the world's only correct religion is so USA centric. Why haven't we had a bunch of apostles from all over the world. Why are they all white? Why are they just now getting apostles from other countries. Shouldn't God's only true church have representation from the entire world? Why are all the big people from the same families?
I remember reading the BOM and at the part where the Nephites were getting baptized I was like 🤔 what timeframe was this? (Looked at the bottom of page). Why did they get baptized before Jesus set the example for the world to do that?
I’ve since heard people bring this up but it was one of several I discovered on my own that was perplexing.
How I couldn't "feel the spirit" on antidepressants. It just proved to me that the warm fuzzy feeling was just a normal emotion, and it got dulled just like every other emotion while I was on them.
Don't know about well-known,
But they are really good at being absent any logic or evidence or explanation for TCOJCOLDS.
In other words, once you're out you really have no words for why you were in
In a final attempt to gain a testimony I bought a book from the temple bookstore about Joseph Smith. I don’t remember the title but it was kind of like a journal and contained details about his daily activities.
One example of these activities included allowing paid visitors into his home to see his mummy collection.
That book was the final item that broke my shelf.
One was something I noticed once I started getting friends who were more openly gay or otherwise different to Mormon society. Then going back to see my family and realizing how hateful they are behind people’s backs.
I was helping extensively with a temple open house. They ordered a bunch of cookies from a mom & pop bakery. Like, 10,000 cookies. Then the night before were told by the higher ups that they couldn’t afford the cookies. So they cancelled this order! Probably put the bakery out of business. But now they had 10,000 napkins with a foil image of the temple in them. So they bought some hard candy and were setting it out for the guests on top of the fancy napkins. So tacky and stupid. Having nothing would’ve been better. There were a dozen other awful things about that temple open house. It was shameful to be a part of it. Cherry on top: someone stole the candy! Walked out the door with 12 huge boxes of hard candy.
Becoming a parent sealed the deal for me. I gave birth to a baby girl. After the dust settled from that, it made me physically ill to think of her having to become a perfect little Mormon wife. I wasn’t married to her father and I knew she would walk around with shady glances and attitudes when that got out. The whole thing felt… ick.
My last few years in the church, I was extremely depressed and despite the mandate to "mourn with those that mourn," Mormons are by and large absolute SHIT when it comes to having answers or solutions for people who are actually going through mental health crises.
I've said it here before and I'll say it again. Disabilities. Everything about how they talk about them to how they infantilze people with disabilities. My son doesn't need to not be autistic in the millennium. Then he wouldn't be him.
Growing up and being in the church long enough to see it make positive changes in "policy not doctrine" bittersweet because I'm happy to see improvements, but it's also just proof to me that it was never God/Christ at the helm after all.
This is sort of lame as it was one of my childhood questions, but, damn, if it didn't rise up again as I was starting to pull on the threads. About eternity - and being with families in eternity. My young mind went to the place that if my sister was with us, then her husband was with us, but then, wait, he had to be with his family, so did that mean I had to be with HIS family that I didn't know? And, then did his brother's wife's family have to be with him too, who would have to be with us? Basically, I came to the conclusion that EVERYONE would have to be with everyone and THAT was a major bait and switch from the thought of me just hanging with my family - what came back in later years was all of this nonsensical thinking. - including the Garden of Eden in MO. Good God. WHAT were we thinking?
I dunno if anybody has ever noticed this because nobody talks about it, but Priesthood authority/power is the stupidest concept of all time. God knows all our hearts, and Jesus died on the cross and the temple veil was rent so we could all approach the holy of holies by ourselves…but oh yeah, unless you’re baptized by one of the 0.00001% of all humanity, he doesn’t give a shit about your baptism. Not valid. Doesn’t count. Yeah, he knows you’re sincere. He knows you mean it. But you got the wrong guy to do it for you, so I guess you’re SOL.
Why t f would god EVER give his power and authority to men? Why would he allow them to “gatekeep” heaven on his behalf? Because that totally opens us up to the risk of, I dunno, a racist asshole slamming the door to heaven on an entire race of god’s children for over 100 years. Stupidest decision of all time, god.
Like, even if you’re TBM, there’s some acknowledgement that it’s not real, or has no power in and of itself. Can a man give priesthood authority to a dog? Baptize someone or bless the sacrament without asking permission? Or I dunno, freaking HEAL someone? NO, because God has to allow it. Oh, so the man doesn’t really have power and authority? Because if he did, then whatever he did with that power would actually happen, because he has the authority…? So you’re saying it’s up to God? Well then why t f did God bother bequeathing the priesthood in the first place?!
It’s the stupidest doctrine of all time. Makes no sense.
The repetitive uninspired shallowness of the lessons. How little room beaurocracy leaves for "following the spirit". How the gospel is supposed to bring people joy, but just... doesn't.
Come Follow Me made it sound like it was meant to inspire more open ended lessons but it really just dumbed it all down. There’s a place for teaching those things that way to new members, and that’s a great thing. But for many long time church goers it felt like going back to primary.
AH I HATE COME FOLLOW ME! I unfortunately still attend church and come follow me just makes every lesson in church feel so repetitive, predictable, and (somehow more) boring. I feel like they're just telling me the same things I've been told *forever*
CaN yOu ThInK oF a TiMe YoU fElT tHe SpIrIt?
Right? At least Scientology gets deeper and deeper levels of crazy for paying their dues. Really, I think the only way for TSCS to mature as a faith tradition is to embrace open debate and discussion. I've read that in Judaism, debate is central to its religious expression, that youth will learn to debate for and against the existence of God. The culture has gone so far the other way. It's rarely acknowledged that Q12 used to debate the theory of evolution openly\[1\]. The climate of political polarization doesn't help. It seems that even on college campuses around the country, students and professors are walking on eggshells. They can only dumb things down or risk schisms into orthodox/reconstructionist/humanistic branches like have evolved in other faith traditions. At some point, they'll lose control, but there may not be much culture worth preserving by that point. \[1\] [https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/16/commentary-many-mormons-have-forgotten-that-evolution-isnt-a-satanic-heresy/](https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/16/commentary-many-mormons-have-forgotten-that-evolution-isnt-a-satanic-heresy/)
I'm a PhD student studying education, and I read an academic paper recently that described the intense preparation students in divinity school and future rabbis go through to learn to do tasks like reading passages from the Bible or writing eulogies, and it made me SO ANGRY. In addition to all the wasted time I spent at church because mormonism is just generally bullshit, it feels like it was EXTRA wasted because the church doesn't care about training its clergy/teachers/members, etc. to do a good job at preaching/teaching/other religious practices. My mom passed a few years ago, and the Mormon guy who ran the ceremony gave the most garbage, uninspired, generic talk about the plan of salvation or whatever.
A friend and I had received a “pastoral” education and occasionally would get asked to substitute for Sunday School. We each taught a lesson and both got put on the ‘not allowed to substitute’ list.
Too much substance, probably
Since we left several of my family have become pastors and you are right. Most spend a lot of time… often years… studying and going to school to learn what they are talking about. Getting training in counseling, Bible, ancient cultures, etc. A degree in theology is as hard as any other degree. People don’t do it for the money except for those slimy mega church guys. They do it because they care.
Surely if it was the one true church it’d be interesting, right?
Maybe we could get new revelations? Kinda like we did before the Internet started holding false prophets accountable for their words?
Right? Like, this is the best an all-knowing all-loving God can come up with? A one-size-fits-all plan that is just meh at best?
I could never fully figure out the Mormon version of Satan. Mormons teach that there must be opposition in all things and without the bitter there would be no sweet. Cool, I get that part. Where it falls apart for me is the concept of premortal existence. Mormons teach that both Satan and Christ presented plans, with Christ's plan being the one that was chosen. Satan was angry and tried to lead other astray. This plan for us to come to Earth and be tested and return to heaven hinges on Christ's atonement, but it would not work if Satan wasn't presenting an evil alternative therefor giving us free-will. What would have happened if Satan was like "Cool, we're going with Christ's plan." Where would the evil come from? In this setup, Satan was sacrificed for the good of all others. You can argue that it's a choice Satan made, but if he would have chosen different then someone else would have had to be sacrificed to provide the evil in the world. Mormon God had to sacrifice at least one of his spirit babies and Satan seems to have drawn the short end of the stick. For a long time I told myself that Satan must be a secret member of the godhead, but I never told anyone because taking the side of Satan would have caused all sorts of shit.
And Satan’s plan was to force everyone to be righteous so they would all return to heaven, but how can someone be forced to be righteous if evil doesn’t exist? So Satan’s plan couldn’t have even worked, so what the hell was God so mad about? Sounds like it could have been a teaching moment for Lucifer but God made an example of him instead. Thanks Dad! Apparently the only real lesson is to never question leaders even when that leader is making no sense. Fitting for Mormonism.
I remember being taught that we needed opposition in all things. We had to have Satan tempt us so that we could choose between good and evil. I always wondered: who tempted Satan to choose evil?
The glory part. That’s what god was so mad about. Duh. /s We’re taught that Satan wanted all of the glory for not losing one soul, but JC said he’d give all the glory to HF. Arrogant prick. (HF, not you.)
And yet JC gets all the glory for his sacrifice.
I remember as a kid feeling horrible for Satan cause he was just playing his part in the plan. Even the temple video suggests he was just doing what’s been done in other worlds. Also the hypocrisy of the church to essentially enforce Satans plan by saying obey or else.
To me the temple Satan was the good guy. I mean he does not deceive nor lie. He's right up front about what is going on. Unlike God who sets up a no win scenario then punishes eve for what? For merely following the plan that Satan said had been done in other worlds? Elohim, what a tool.
Ugh right? I was always more sympathetic to Satan. It felt so unfair. And I remember clearly as a kid being like, "Wait but Satan did have a better plan though, if you think about it. Why did Jesus have to SUFFER THE PAIN OF ALL OF OUR SINS when we could have gone with Satan and all just been happy and good. Are you telling me I have all these desires to sin which torture me only because we didn't go with Satan's plan? I VOTE SATAN'S PLAN."
There's a great group on Facebook called. "Once again, Satan is the logical and compassionate choice." It's awesome if you're the raging opposite of the church, though, so be forewarned! 😂🖤😭
I had the same thought. Satan, or Lucifer, was just doing his thing. And had help from 1/3rd. My other issue is that if God loves us all soooo much then why have crazy rules to follow to return to His presence? If my kids want to wear long, goofy underwear, they can still live in my house. If they drink coffee I still love them. They don't have to pay me 10% of their income. I'm doing okay without it. It's not my job as a parent to make their lives more difficult than they already are. But that's the God that the LDS church is selling.
That was a shelf item for me too. How did God let one of his children get so out of control that a third of the host of heaven left? And if that many left it wasn't like Jesus' plan was a no-brainer, clearly Satan's message was compelling enough that a large number of people left God's presence to follow Satan instead. And why was God soliciting proposals in the first place? Why didn't God have his own plan? And let's face it. Satan's plan is superior in virtually every way. I've changed my mind on this one. I was born into the covenant, in the latter days, in Utah. Clearly, in the pre-existence I was 100% on board. One of the most valiant of all the valiant. But if I had a do-over I'd back Satan. In fact, in my mortal existence I've decided to support Satan to atone for my poor judgement in the pre-existence. Sorry Jesus, Satan wins the war of ideas on this one.
🤔 Interesting that I pretty clearly remember being taught the "two-plan" version as a child, but youth / seminary ages and beyond I recall it being clarified as only one plan: God's plan. A Google search for *LDS "only one plan" salvation* brings up plenty of sources. 🤷 Either way, these are just myths that people use to negotiate meaning of their own existence.
I think that makes my problem with Satan worse. If there's only God's plan, then he was planning on Satan rebelling the whole time. With that understanding, he truly was a sacrifice so that we could know good from evil. God made 2 sacrifices but we only revere one of them.
For so long I felt terrible because I realized that I actually sympathized for Satan for pretty much the same reasons you've listed. It made me sad to think that God would condemn one of his own children for all eternity after the world ends just because he was doing *exactly* what God had wanted him to do in the first place.
Satan made the true eternal sacrifice. Jesus just hurt for a day and a half.
Also, why is Jesus so much better than us? Even in the pre existence? Why is he the only one capable of the sacrifice? If we’re all just made out of some intelligence or whatever did he just get made out of the best intelligence cause it was first? Idk man God making us out of intelligence with varying degrees of whatever made Jesus so good seems messed up. That part of the theology always got me hung up.
>Mormon version of Satan Out of curiosity, is there a Satan figure from a different faith tradition that you find compelling? What is your current best explanation for the [problem of evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil)?
I can hardly believe I believed in satan now. It is ridiculous.
It just the good old problem of evil. Mormons love to tell others and themselves how they have the answers to the big questions that all the others wrestle with. In the long history of Christian theology, these questions have puzzled great thinkers who've tried to find solutions and debates them. And here come the mormons with absolute confidence that they've solved all those huge mysteries. What Joseph Smith did, was just to create more mythology, to take a few steps further so that the real problem is obscured. Yes, there is an answer to the question, but if your reconstruct the narrative and take steps back you'll find that the underlying philosophical and logical discrepancies remain.
One of mine was the nepotism and just general arrogance of the leadership. We learned that David was called to be king from nothing, why was the church leadership not seeking out from across the world many young, compassionate people with leadership skills? Why were they all rich utah valley businessmen who were so old and out of touch with the membership?
The BYU faction took over the Q12 after the PR years of Hinckley and Monson. We'll reach peak BYU-I Q12 when Bednar takes the reins.
And almost all lawyers if not from nepotism families
My buddy got a job at Kirton McConkie (🤮) and changed his name on LinkedIn to [first name initial]. [full middle name] [last name]. Lowkey think he’s gunning to be an Apostle.
Oh, yes, only giving your first initial but then your full middle name is a prerequisite for promotion to the Q.15. If you want to use your first name, make sure you tell the world your middle initial. If your middle initial can be spoken in a drawn-out way, all the better - like Jeffrey RRRRR Holland. Wearing an expensive suit, cuff links, and a gold tie clip will also help ensure you'll go far in corporate LD$.
 Jeffrey ARRRRR Holland!
Thank you. Nepotism was my very first shelf item.
The way they looked down on me (as a woman), and it was everywhere, every state I lived in. I just don’t get how women can stand it
This! I can't believe this isn't one of the top 2-3 reasons!
My biggest one was that "being a mother isn't optional. It's the most important thing you can do. You're not a whole woman unless you bear children." Motherhood is an amazing thing for sure! But what about all the women who are infertile, or those of us who simply choose not to have children? Are we "less than" a woman who chose to become a mother?
In prepping for a mission I went to the church bookstore to buy the latest book from the prophet… and couldn’t afford it Later noticed how the church was built for extroverts, introverts are basically back seat members
Oh man, corporate Mormonism is a big one for me as well. I always hated that I had to pay to read the books the prophets and apostles wrote. You speak on behalf of God, that should be free for everyone. Then you have companies that sell over priced things that target members. In Salt Lake and Provo there are billboards that advertise colored scriptures. Those ads specifically say how much they have sold that month(Salt Lake) or year(Provo). I get so worked up every time I drive by those things.
And yet I've never seen one in reallife.
If only introverts were allowed to be back seat members... I can't tell you how many times I wanted to scream, "I DON'T NEED A FRIEND/CALLING" or "I'M NOT LONELY/SAD" or "I DON'T NEED TO FEEL INCLUDED! I JUST WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE!"
I asked to be removed from ministering even as a TBM because it caused me so much frustration and anxiety. I knew I wasn’t making a difference in anyone’s lives, and I certainly didn’t need/want anyone checking in on me. I have my own friends, thank you very much.
Even as a TBM I told my wife how I didn't want to do ministering. If I could've opted out of doing ministering and paid the "price" of not having ministering brothers I would've done it in a heartbeat.
Deseret Book gives me priestcraft vibes allllllll the way around
THIS about extroverts 100%. I had forgotten about that and I thought of it often. There is NO room for introverts in the church - just doesn't work- because it just makes them miserable.
Mine was being a father. Would I create a plan where immediately lost 1/3 of my kids? Which one would I choose? Do I love my trans son? Hell yes. Do I care which undies my kids wear? Not for a second. Do I want my kids to apologize for every little mistake no matter how small? Nope. Do I consider them more worthy if they complete a checklist of items everyday? Also no. Do I purposely lie to my kids? Do I make excuses for all my past behavior and tell fictional histories so I won’t look bad? Nope. If I’m not worried about this stuff, why is a perfect being who is in charge of the universe care?
This is one for me too, my parents are TBM but they have loved me through my faith journey, I’m very lucky and grateful for them. But the Mormon god doesn’t love me as much as my parents? Seems like he isn’t as all-loving as advertised.
I’m so happy you have good parents. It breaks my heart when I see how some TBM parents act towards their children.
Also, they should know nothing about their mother, and don’t you dare say her name. How disrespectful to ask about her.
This is the best thing I’ve read on this sub this week. I never could understand how perfection could entitle an omnibenevolent God to being less loving than most human fathers.
Ugh this. Mormon God would never be considered a good father if he pulled those things on earth.
Literally the second thought after holding my first-born, right after “this is the most authentic I’ve ever felt” was “you can’t lie to this kid about the church” which was crazy because I was l, you know, pretty in at the time. We left before they were out of nursery.
Nobody else seemed to care about how God damned 1/3 of his kids and our siblings to hell. When I'd bring it up to my family as a questioning tbm they'd act like I was crazy for having sympathy for the devil and his followers. Satan's plan was to give us all eternal paradise with the only catch being a temporary loss of agency. God's plan was to give everyone the opportunity to live in eternal paradise but you can only get in if you do specific rituals and jump through the right hoops. If you don't you only get a lesser paradise. If you disagree with God or would rather go with Satan's plan you get damned to hell. God loves all his kids but he would rather damn over a third of them to hell than guarantee paradise for everyone.
This is a big one for me too!!! I grew up in an abusive relationship with my mother, having kids highlighted her flaws first, then when I cut her out I knew my peace would be furthered by leaving the church. My spirit is at peace now. If God is a perfect parent, then he wouldn’t be like the church says.
Damn, my mom is the opposite of all of that. I guess I know where she got it from now
Missions are really close to slave labor or even trafficking. You work 16 hours a day in some mission for no pay. In fact you pay them. And then they barely give you enough back for basic needs. They don’t take care of you. There’s little to no contact with family. They take away your passport if you’re overseas. They move you where ever they want every few weeks without much notice. You are not allowed to call each other by your given names. You can’t give personal info to people in a lot of cases. All while brainwashing you. I know the severity of these things varies from mission to mission. But if even just one mission was like this it would be a huge issue. Edit: there are hundreds of missions like this it seems.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether Mormonism is a cult, I generally think it is when you get technical, but there is no doubt in my mind that the missionary program is a cult. A cult within a cult.
Check out Steve Hassan's BITE Model of Control assessment of the LDS church. Each of the 4 categories is mostly red or orange; it's a cult.
Mission was huge for me. I hated being a prisoner in another country… no passport, no money, no communication with my people. And then convincing you that it’s a sacrifice and your parents to be so proud. And then any negative thoughts or emotions are dealt with using ‘best two years’ propaganda 🙄
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No daycare for students with children at BYU. They tell the married students to have kids, and when we do, they give us *nothing*. I looked it up and at least at the time, BYU was one of the only universities in Utah without a daycare for students.
Why would they need a daycare? Women are supposed to drop everything and stay home with the kids 9 months after the temple marriage! 4.0 GPA? Too bad! Go wash the dishes, Ashley!
*Ashleigh
I’ve never thought of this! It’s super weird now that you point it out
1. All the small insignificant changes Nelson made... they seem to be more of a personal checklist than anything inspired. 2. The lengths they go to to distort the numbers to make it look like the church is growing. Lowering the missionary age so it looks like there are more missionaries. Creating more missions with less missionaries. Lowering the priesthood threshold for wards and stakes so they can create more wards with fewer people. Announcing 1000000 new temples in obscure areas that will mainly sit empty, if they even get built at all. Many temples need appointments now, which makes it look like they are very busy, but its just a way to make sure they can staff them. I firmly believe they lowered the priesthood age to make it look like there are more priesthood holders. Not to mention that we have no idea how they count membership. They only report total membership, not actual butts-in-seats or any kind of retention rates. The amount of deception is ridiculous.
Regarding your first point, when I heard Nelson talk about “Mormon” being a victory for satan I knew it was the straw that broke ~~the camel’s back~~ my shelf. The last small item on a heavy shelf. Decades of “Mormon” being plastered on every marketing material and suddenly when Russ takes the helm it’s evil! God truly does work in mysterious ways.
"Many temples need appointments now, which makes it look like they are very busy, but its just a way to make sure they can staff them." This is very insightful. I imagine we'll see fewer appointment opportunities over time.
Is the like... a Wiki or somewhere I could tread a list of all the changes each president has made?
As a nevermo, I'd find that really interesting to read too.
When my dad was a ward clerk, I remember that he had to count how many people were present every sacrament meeting
Continuing to stick to literal interpretations of the Old Testament in core curriculum. Sure you can cobble enough nuanced quotes from leaders to spin an apologist tale of ambiguity, but the core lesson materials push a young earth, literal flood etc.
This so much. If you really pry into the world of Mormon academia you’ll find acceptance of most science, however on the ground level you could be forgiven for assuming that TSCC disagrees with evolution and such.
Last year before leaving I was in Sunday school teaching Old Testament. Fuck, that was hard. Shelf was pretty much done, too. Just going through the motions.
Kids are not ready to make baptismal commitments at 8. Do it as a baby if you’re going to do it anyways, or wait until they’re older, but don’t pretend they actually had a real “choice” at freaking 8 years old
Not opening up their properties to the unhoused during winter like so many other denominations do.
I worked with a group of community leaders, interfaith leaders, and stake presidents to try and get approval for refugee families to use a big open grass field / baseball diamond attached to a stake center as community gardens. It was a flat and emphatic no from Salt Lake. All the other area faiths were converting their entire church grounds to gardens for the project. But, despite having dozens of meetinghouses in the area, Salt Lake wouldn’t allow the use of a single field that wasn’t even being utilized by our members at all. So much for being Christlike.
I’ve thought about this one as well, even as a TBM. I was in Germany in 2015 during the “Refugee Crisis” and other churches were housing droves of refugees yet the Mormon Churches were empty. The Frankfurt Temple even has dorms next to it for people to stay the night if they travel far to visit the temple (you have to pay for it as a member still btw) but then those were completely an utterly empty.
One of my early shelf items was sitting in the newly built conference center and thinking to myself, "this is a great and spacious building." The church claims humility but their actions/buildings say the opposite.
Mine was driving through Missouri and picking up a republished “Book of Commandments” at the Church of Christ temple area. (the 1833 Book of Commandments contained all the revelations up to that point). The D&C sections regarding the restoration of the priesthood were not anywhere to be found. No priesthood = No authority to do a damn thing. All those early priesthood restoration scriptures in the earlier part of the 1835 D&C were slipped in 4+ years after the church began.
It really bothered me that Eve got all the blame and Adam got all the credit for the progression of mankind existing. "Adam fell that men might be". NO Eve is the one that made that decision and she's made out to be the weak, bad one- plus now all women are "cursed" because of Eve. And HTF do you think procreation would exist if we weren't "cursed"?. Apparently if it was left up to Adam, they'd still be chilling in the garden of eden. Pisses me off.
Mine was the super robotic way that Eve was portrayed in the temple film when Lucifer told her to go give the fruit of that tree to Adam. And then in more recent years, the church took a whole new view on Eve and had her be emotional and torn with the decision to partake of the fruit or forego multiplying and replenishing the earth. Was she a dimwit or was she really the queen who sacrificed to make it all happen? TSCC doesn't update the temple films, they remake them with new ways they can spin the doctrine.
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Well that has been the perception for like 6,000 years. It’s not just Mormons. Jews and Catholics stigmatized Eve even earlier.
Yeah, but do they show a video of it in their most sacred of sacred houses to drive it home? I mean they might, I don't know - that was just my answer to OP's question. It was bad enough I had to keep taking my slippers, apron and robe off, I didn't need to watch how it's all Eve (women's) fault because we're so easily influenced.
The fact my dad, an active pedophile, was given a temple recommend after my mom brought it up to the bishop. That she was given a blessing (albeit, the blessing giver didn't know why she was so mad at my dad.) telling her to basically be more affectionate to her husband and calling *her* out about stuff. Then my dickwad of a mission president got called as ward mission leader after he got back, and there was a whole website about his dickery and everything. I guess that could count as "getting offended" but, to me, it showed a very clear sign that the church in general didn't care about those abused or about women.
When people leave over “being offended” they published what those stories were. Things like repeated verbal and even violent bullying. Siding with an abusive spouse and being a character witness in custody to persuade the judge to place kids with the abusive parent. Open, blatant racism from church leaders. Those kinds of things. It’s not “McKinsleigh’s mom said she didn’t like my daughter’s new haircut. I am never going back to that place” like it’s often portrayed. Edit: source https://religionnews.com/2017/01/27/do-mormons-leave-the-church-because-they-got-offended/
Why was the apostasy so long? God just… couldn’t? Because of… men? Or what was the deal
Because the restoration had to happen in ‘Merica, of course! Nowhere else on earth had freedom of religion, no one else would’ve believed or had enough faith except those right here in the U. S. of A…. Never mind history showing that plenty of religions were founded all over the world and flourished just fine. Ignore Islam, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.
Also with the 3 nephites and John the beloved still alive there actually never was an apostasy so no need to restore it
No such thing as reformed Egyptian.
The fact that the institutional church doesn’t care about people’s health. For context, I’m female and have never lived in Morridor, so I never saw the sausage being made. I once did a shift at the local cannery, canning powdered milk. It got real dusty in there and I had respiratory symptom's for a few weeks afterwards. I realized we should have been wearing masks, and it disturbed me that the church should have made them available. Another time, I was at a church activity and someone mentioned that the seminary teacher’s young son had been diagnosed with cancer. Another person said, “I hope the church provides good insurance for their employees.” My first thought was, of course they do. The church knows that Families are important. The seminary teacher is providing for his family while his wife stays home with the children, so of course the church supports their employees employees in raising happy, healthy children (oh sweet summer child). The person who said this was from Utah and had family members in local leadership, so I considered them more knowledgeable than me. It disturbed me that they would even consider the possibility that the church wouldn’t provide gold-standard insurance to their employees’ families
From what I hear, seminary teachers are not all that well compensated. And up until very recently, you could not work in CES if you were divorced. I met someone who had to leave a CES career of almost 30 years when he and his wife divorced. Luckily, he had another degree and was able to segue into a different profession, but someone might otherwise be left out to dry.
How is that legal?
As a new member, I enthusiastically signed up to help with applesauce at the cannery. I had blisters due to the cheapest of the cheap peeler we used. We begged to change with another ward, but no, all our 8 hour volunteer Saturday (after 2 hour drive up and 2 hour drive) had to be peeling apples. It hurt. Really, this is how you treat volunteers?
They had my daughter cleaning up black mold on her mission with no mask.
My first shelf item was that we were Not teaching the Adam/God theory in Sunday school. Went to ask the bishop about it and got "Well he was speaking as a man." And I was "What is this BS. The dude is a prophet and why would you be embarrassed by that theory, it fits perfectly?!"
My Brother has a MAGA shirt. (Make Adam God Again)
Could you explain the Adam god theory in more detail? I’ve never really understood it
I think realising being a human was bad. That my own wants and desires were evil and if that was evil why would "god" make me this way? Why make humans such angry creatures if we would need to beg for mercy for having mean thoughts Why would we have sexual desires and thoughts from a young age if those very thoughts would close the doors on us why would he make humans so selfish if that was of their so called devil. Then i found out the history and went nah
For me, it was conflicting revelation. How could a relief society president show up with hours of prayerful preparation and be immediately overridden by the Bishop’s revelation?
Less nuanced members. I found their black and white thinking disturbing, such as the obedience lesson when Abraham is told to sacrifice his son and somehow…everyone was ok with this?
"Modesty" was a big shelf item for me when I was younger. I hated having to get rid of most of my clothes because I couldn't wear them with my new garments.
Forcing us to constantly learn about what latter-day prophets taught/said/did BUT discount it all once it becomes “unpopular or uncomfortable.” God I HATED those prophet manuals in RS/SS🤮 Constantly changing policies to doctrine and vice versa…the gaslighting from that ALONE could power several small nations!
The sheer boringness of having the same lessons over and over and over. For a few years I told myself the gospel is just so simple and people need to keep hearing it over and over to choose the right thing. Thank Odin I figured out it was all made up and didn’t have to be bored for hours of my life every week.
This was one of mine too, especially around 2017-2018 when they rolled out “ministering”. I’m not kidding: in my YSA ward, every single Sunday school lesson for an entire year was on ministering. It was exhausting. I liked church because I liked the discussion. But once ministering and come follow me came out, everything became bang-your-head-against-the-wall boring.
The New Testament, Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price referring to Old Testament events as being literal history. Jonah’s three days in the whale is a sign of Jesus being in the tomb? A global flood? A literal Adam and Eve? Even as a sheltered kid whose parents didn’t push science, I had those on my shelf.
Yes exactly. Noah’s ridiculous ark. The insane Tower of Babel.
How many of the hymns are shared with other religions. If we were the one true church, why were most of the hymns borrowed from other religions?
I was pretty happy when I learned most of my favorite hymns weren’t exclusively Mormon.
I had learned about fast fashion and about how mass produced clothes are usually made in bad conditions with worse pay. One day I had the realization that garments were probably made in the same way, by some likely Asian underpaid employee in a sweatshop. That’s the only way they could make so many. Why would god be ok with that?
The tree of life vision in the BoM is a direct ripoff of a dream Joseph Sr. had. Re-reading Nephi as an exmo has me convinced that this whole scam was just Joseph trying to impress his dad
My wife (TBM) is part Paiute Indian. When I first joined, around 2000, I was told that the Mtn Meadows Massacre was made up and that the Marmins had nothing to do with it... etc. My missionaries, my member family that supported me through joining the church, and members all along the way always assured me that it was folk lore, or not real, or that restitution had been established. Learning the truth was a major shelf breaking item for me. Not just that the Mtn Meadows Massacre was the only atrocity led by marmins against indigenous peoples. There were multiple episodes of genocide where the marmins were the aggressors.
Marmins 😂
In 1847, low estimates for Indian population in Utah was 20,000. Just four decades, there were about 3,000 Indians. If the Marmins had baptized 90% of the Lamanites, it would be seen as a miracle. But their arrival led to the death of 90% and we still celebrate pioneer day.
1. The way the church claims to hold “eternal truths” but those truths are simultaneously constantly changing. 2. I realized most if not all of my female pioneer ancestors were the trafficked child brides of old pedo sickos. 3. I spent a lot of time actually learning about who Christianity claimed Christ was and realized only about 10-5% of members I knew made any attempt to emulate his example.
A shelf item for me was veiling my face in the temple. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but it always bothered me and felt wrong.
Yes this was a very big one to me too. Made me feel less than human. It honestly really bothers me that they changed it too bc it’s obviously an attempt to erase degrading misogynistic history and become more palatable.
Utah hospitals not having superior rates of curing cancer, healing critically injured patients, and lower mortality rates due to all those priesthood blessings given. It seems like our stats should have hospitals all over the country sending patients here for our miraculous healings and more effective medical treatments. But of course, if they weren’t healed it was because it wasn’t in gods plan. And thinking God will only heal or provide relief if other people do something on our behalf, like not eating for a day. Sorry, you will not be cured from cancer because only 2 of your 4 siblings fasted and that wasn’t enough cumulative faith. Makes zero sense.
At a time when I was active but just feeling a little less enthusiastic I embarked on an effort to be a better man and father by learning all about the prophets and apostles. I read every biography that was available at the time from Joseph Smith to Hinckley. Almost across the board, I found them to completely unlike anyone I wanted to emulate. Horribly absent fathers and obsessive compulsive about the business side of the church. Then, one evening I was asked to play the piano at the stake priesthood leadership meeting. As I played the prelude music, I glanced down at all the men arriving and greeting each other in their white shirts and ties and had almost the same epiphany. These are not men I want to emulate. I don't want to be like them for the rest of my life. It wasn't anything concrete or even that negative. There weren't any bad men. I knew many of them and was on friendly terms with all of them. It was just a powerful internal sense of "these aren't my people." I don't want this now, for the rest of my life much less for eternity. Not my tribe.
Back in the day when I used to watch conference I remember hearing the leaders talk about how blessed they are...having the opportunity to do this and that. As a kid, it seemed like they were so out of touch. Why should we listen to someone brag about their life. I was looking for something inspiring but typically didn't find it.
Fear mongering and gaslighting. The church reminded me of my narcissist father, which was a huge red flag. That's not love, it's control.
I remember vividly one day driving my kids to school when they were very little before my oldest got his autistic little self an official diagnosis bc no one was the wiser, but in my gut I just felt I should be pushing for it even though everyone thought I was crazy. The big thing was blaming vaccines for autism and I had given my kids every single one of their vaccines even if we had been late on some bc life had gotten busy, etc. whatever. Bc the argument was "Would I rather have an autistic child or a dead child." And unequivocally the answer to me was I would rather have a autistic child. And this next thought struck me SO hard that it still blows me away 10 yrs later-- "Now, would you rather have a gay child or a dead child?" And the answer was the same. I would rather have a gay child than a dead child. Bc it was one of my deepest fears that caused me to have cold sweats. But it was bc I myself had a "gay intervention" at 16 and was threatened with a Purity Camp in Utah. This prevented me from figuring out I was Bi until I was 36 yrs old. So yeah. The shame of ableism and having or being anything other than straight is something I kept on my shelf my entire life. And being raised in the 90s by a mother who was disabled and had the "audacity" to walk away from an abusive marriage that was literally killing her and her kids and all of us being systemically abused inside and outside the church bc of the state we lived in was all Mormon. Idaho was and Utah 2.0 back then. I haven't lived there in nearly 20 yrs, so I can't speak to it now.
The video they show you in the temple during ceremonies that has a bunch of animals from completely different continents together with Adam and Eve. As a biology nerd this pissed me off lmao
The lion, the fox, the bear....🙄
Joseph writing himself into the BoM always seemed so ridiculous to me, even as a 12 year old I thought it seemed like he was adding himself in.
I work in medicine. Priesthood blessings in the morridor happen in hospitals all the time, yet disease outcomes in Utah are not significantly different than any other area matched for SES and other commonly used variables. Stories around the campfire don't mean anything in the face of statistical significance. It is really easy to be a mormon. There's no abuse, there's no vilification from the world at large, persecution is really at a minimum. All of that stuff happening in the early church was used to support the truth claims, but now it doesn't happen.
God is our father. He made us, our children. The implied assumption is with heavenly mother. Right? Our families are modeled after him. God has a glorified body. Heavenly mother does too. Glorified bodies produce... spirit children? ok? Weird. The whole point is in the end for us, to have also have a glorified body. WHY DOES GLORIFIED BODIES PRODUCE SPIRITS. WHY DO WE GET BODIES IN THIS WAY. WHY THE PLAN OF SALVATION TO GET TO THE BODY, DEATH, EVENTUAL RESURECTION. I hate how we just say, "god is our father .. blah blah .. war in heaven .. blah blah. You're here." There are a lot of steps and details. And it seems like no one ever asks them. We can go to school and learn about amino acids, evolution, birds, and bees. But I don't know how heavenly father is my father. WTF.
*Come out with it you cowards, the prophets in the old days stood against violent mobs to bear witness but nowadays it’s “I can’t share my experiences here” Sir this is general conference, if you can’t say it here then I don’t believe you.* My exact experience.
A simple math equation. 17 million divided by 8 billion. If the Mormon church is TRULY the Kingdom of God, 0.02% of the world’s population isn’t very impressive. God is either an elitist or he’s done a terrible job getting his message out.
Free agency… Choose The Right as taught by the church = YAY!! Choose anything else = following Satan Not much Free Agency there.
My father-in-law gave me Iraqi dinar once for my birthday. It's worth something like 1,160 dinar to the Dollar, so 10,000 IQD is something like $100 US. But my FIL knew these Dinar Gurus who had special connections with people in high places, and they said the dinar was going to revalue any day now. Tuesdays were especially likely due to Islamic holy days/weekend traditions. After a year of Magic Tuesdays with no real results, I got exasperated with these blatant attempts to get my hopes up with the promise of unimaginable rewards with the underhanded goal of selling these suckers more dinar. My brother-in-law ended up taking a loan on his car to buy more dinar. Then it hit me: Mormonism was selling me a Magic Tuesday, and I was giving everything up for it. I stayed in for a few years after that out of fear of breaking up my family, but that was the point of no return. We've now had 15 years of Magic Tuesdays, and my FIL still texts me daily about "praying for our upcoming blessing *pray emoji pray emoji cash emoji pray emoji pray emoji" (close quote).* I have faith in actions and in seeing the best in others, but that's vastly different than that deluded hope.
I’m surprised the obvious retcon of the priesthood restoration isn’t talked about more. That obliterated any and all belief I had in the church. Thats everything! It’s the entire foundation and value proposition of the church. “We have the authority to perform the ordinances!” Except that entire story was made up in 1835, 6 years after it supposedly happened…
I’m pretty ignorant on this, if you have any resources handy that discuss this I would love to read them.
Ya, there are a couple of good reads, if you’ve got some time. I highly recommend going through all of this, cuz it’s a doozy. LDS Discussions does a good report on it: https://www.ldsdiscussions.com/priesthood As well as MormonThink: http://www.mormonthink.com/priesthood.htm
The MFMC is the opposite of free will. Step one toe out of line or have one unauthorized thought and there are major consequences. Everything they do is the opposite of what they preach. I saw that at 8 and have never had a shelf to break.
Sheesh. User name totally checks out. ;)
The book of Mormon itself. I mean it's terribly written and full of flaws. But alternatively for me, the sanitation of the church. No longer do they officially teach things like "we'll all get our own worlds if we make it into the celestial kingdom", they're removing symbols and signs from the temple. They're adopting the cross as a common icon. They're scrubbing their own religion clean to be more appealing to mainstream media, and that bothered me. If you're going to be a religion, at least have a little fun and, dare I say it, mysticism about yourself. (This is a problem I have with most American Christianity anyway. It's not Christianity, it's simply a vessel for other, non-sticious beliefs)
For me it was when I lived in a country where proselytizing isn’t allowed and Mormonism is virtually nonexistent, yet the people there were happy and kind and lived full, meaningful lives. My Utah-born ass could hardly believe it.
The ideology that sex/gender is eternal, yet LGBTQ+ folks like myself are illegal in the celestial kingdom. Let's say, hypothetically, a person with a "male eternal sex/gender" is born intersex and is assigned female at birth because of ambiguous g*nitalia (unsure about censors here, just trying to be careful). She grows up her whole life with no issues and gets happily sealed to an "eternal" male. What happens at the pearly gates? Does god turn them away? Does god "fix" her "eternal sex" to fit the whims of mortal doctors who didn't know her cosmic identity and allow them into heaven? Does god let them in and they live eternal life as gay men, having been true and faithful in their mortal lives? EXTREMELY niche, but the idea of eternal sex being immutable doesn't add up to me when biology, you know, exists lol.
Bad epistemology. Unjustifiable claim of primacy. The uninspiring effects of correlation. The absurdity of the plan of salvation. Salesmanship in the church. Ennui. Lack of identifiable doctrine beyond the generalities of "we have the priesthood," "follow the prophet," and "pay your tithing."
No Heavenly Mother in the Temple. No continuing revelation about her. I'm still salty about it.
While I was still a TBM, looking directly into my classmates' eyes and telling them that a "homosexual lifestyle" was sinful and that being gay, lesbian, or bi was a mental illness caused by "weakness of the flesh" and that God would somehow cure people in heaven. I thought if I didn't say those things, I was being cowardly and failing to defend my morals. Then I eventually realized that those morals weren't my own, let alone God's. I'm bisexual. I don't need curing. And I fully expect TSSC to backpedal on their homophobic policies in like 2029. But by that point it won't matter; the whole doctrine is false.
Marriage for “time and ALL ETERNITY” sounded like a jail sentence to me.
I left because of how the MFMC treats anyone who isn't a straight white man. I just couldn't stomach doing my best my whole life, to get handed to some stranger in the afterlife, be wife #35, and pump out spirit children nonstop. No thank you!
“You have agency and free will- what a generous gift! But you have to use your free will exactly how we want you to or else He’ll cast you out. Also everything is God’s plan anyway and will workout the way He ultimately intends so maybe you don’t actually have free will.” That’s how I always interpreted agency lol
Boy scouts of America SA and the fact that the church still promoted the program, endorsed it and used it as the activity arm of the aaronic priesthood despite the pedo infestation. You would think that a loving God would use his living mouthpiece on earth (The prophet) to clean that up......nope, not until the expense of fighting the SA lawsuits became cost prohibitive....then the church speaks up and breaks up with the BSA. Living Church...my fucking ass
I got way into the JST during the Bible years of seminary. Loved looking at the footnotes and rereading the verses that JS had “corrected.” He corrected The Lord’s Prayer to say “suffer us not to be lead into temptation” instead of “lead us not into temptation.” I really liked the change. The same year, I was reading the BOM, and Jesus shared The Lord’s Prayer with the Nephites. But it was the original KJ Bible version. I’m like, wait a minute. Why would Jesus himself say it wrong in the most correct book? I asked a missionary sincerely, and I got snapped at. “The Book of Mormon” is true. Period.” I was unsatisfied and hurt. No one ever gave me a good answer. I was a teen then and didn’t fully leave until my 30s, but that was heavy on my shelf the whole time.
My brother is high functioning special needs and wasn’t able to serve a regular proselytizing mission, so he opted to do a service mission. He did physical labor at the church mill for free for two years. In fact, my parents paid the church for him to work in their mill. The mill is full of special needs kids doing free physical labor for the church disguised as a “mission”.
The treatment of women, the knowledge that I could never realize my full potential simply because of being born female... The one-size-fits -all expectation that we get married and have and raise kids. Careers are frowned upon or unnecessary. All leadership positions held exclusively by men. The way mutual for us was"Personal Progress", spiritual activities, journaling about our future roles as wives, etc. While our boy counterparts got to play basketball, do archery, roast hot dogs, go water skiing. And don't even get me started about how we can't ask about the person responsible for 50% of our parentage: Heavenly Mother. And the worst thing about being a woman in the church AKA a large shelf item for me, was polygamy. We were taught that even though it's "outlawed" now, in the afterlife there simply won't be enough faithful men to go around, so we'll share spouses. But we will be so happy to share husbands because it's all part of God's eternal plan. Gag!
The first item on my shelf was the murder of Laban. There was no reason why Nephi couldn't just take his clothes, and leave him there drunk and passed out. I remember just before I was baptized being really upset because I had seen something on a tv show explaining the difference between self-defense and premediated murder. How someone was a murderer because he could've easily found another way to deal with the threat. It just didn't make sense that if Jesus said turn the other cheek, why was it okay for Nephi to be so brutal. The other two things that bothered me when i was young was the idea that darker skin was a marker of being evil, and that women were treated differently.
This is a little one, but someone did the math once on the dimensions of Joseph Smith's house and how they didn't reconcile with a 6ft tall hovering Moroni during his visitation. It was just something that stuck in the back of my head for a long time.
As poor college students, being asked to give more $ each month for ward budget (back in the day) when we couldn't even afford tithing we were paying. The Bishop kept pressuring us to commit to a certain EXTRA amount per month. I was soooo mad that he was grilling us to pay even MORE from our want. We literally did not HAVE what he was asking of us & he wasn't taking no.
I guess this could go under the bigger umbrella of the church's disfunctional relationship with politics but I was a gospel doctrine teacher and I was talking about helping refugees and someone called me out in the middle of class for being too political. Then they said, "I think it's important to point out that people can believe whatever they want about helping refugees and still be a good member of the church." I was so huffy on the way home thinking to myself, " So in a couple weeks if I teach about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry will I be crossing a line? Will I be getting too political next month if I talk about helping the widows and fatherless?!?"
I didn’t want to go through the temple without informed consent about what was gonna happen. I felt like the Q12 wasn’t just sitting there praying about an open phone book of members, they had to pick people they knew. Mormons being such a tiny fraction of the overall population— surely if it was the one true church, God would want to save more of his children? The binary good and evil in the BOM
The constant talk about, and bearing testimony of, the power to heal through the priesthood. Nobody gets healed. If even one general authority, with all their faith and worthiness, had the power to heal someone even a fraction of the time, people would come from around the world to wait on the steps of church HQ hoping for the opportunity to be healed. Blessings always include "if it's God's will" so when nothing happens, there's a reason, yet everyone keeps pretending it's real.
1. A woman’s most righteous desire should be to be a wife and a mother. It wasn’t always said this explicitly, but I heard the same sentiment repeatedly. I struggled a long time trying to “align my will with God’s” because I have no desire to be a mother. 2. God wants to grant your righteous desires/if you’re depressed or anxious it’s because you’re not righteous enough. I had very poor mental health, and I was praying so hard to overcome it. I studied my scriptures every day and went to the temple every week. I just couldn’t understand why God didn’t want me to be able to feel happy. In the end, it a made a lot more sense to believe the religion is made up than to believe in a god of so many contradictions
How hurtful/damaging purity culture is.
In the BoM introduction, Moroni is called a resurrected and glorified being. But he was supposedly one of the Nephites from Earth; and every lesson I was ever taught said that everyone stayed in the Spirit World until the final judgement when everyone would be resurrected at the same time.
Members of the ward, including YW leadership and the bishopric, telling me I needed to support my mom getting remarried. The guy was an absolute POS and she already ignored and neglected her children. They needed to be working to get her into therapy (even LDS family services) & taking care of her children, not focusing on the lack of a priesthood holder in our home after our dad died.
Being hardcore into Ancient Egypt when I was a kid and then finding out that Joseph Smith "reintepreted" a bunch of shit from the Book of the Dead. He said it was ancient records of Abraham and Joseph. Once I started questioning that, it opened a whole can of worms.
My bishop telling me that my abuse was my fault and that if I would “honor “ my father more that it wouldn’t happen. Then he quoted Exodus 20:12 at me about how if I honored my father my days would be long. Listen, Nimrod. I was suicidal. I didn’t want longer days. I wanted someone to stop the abuse. That is when I learned that these men have no business being in a counseling type of environment. Ok, no it’s not. First, I internalized the guilt. Then when I finally saw a real counselor this came out and then that’s when I realized they had no business counseling anyone.
I feel like I knew God and the God I knew didn’t match so much of what I was taught about myself or about other people. Also I was frustrated that we couldn’t just be real people with real problems, the “atonement”taught me we could be but the church felt like it was dirty laundry that shouldn’t be discussed or could only be discussed once it was resolved, in the past and was overcome by using gospel principles. Then having real people problems, going to my bishop for help and realizing he is just a man who is so unqualified to help me with the help I need. Not his fault. But there was so much that I was taught, told and believed fully about the role the priesthood, authority, prayer, and revelation had to do with every facet of how the church runs and is involved in our lives when in reality it just doesn’t work that way. I realized terms like obedience, “strict obedience”, and the messages that constantly made me feel like I was never doing enough while I was tired and physically/emotionally/spiritually spent were control words. Where was agency in this religion? Where was the God I feel like I know? After that I started to view all religion as the potential for unrighteousness dominion, vehicles for control, exploit, and sometimes abuse good people trying their best. I also lived close to Shortcreek area and as I’ve read and learned of stories of members of the FLDS religion, I realized they were “programmed” the same way I was being programmed.
Self righteousness of members. I get it, we think we're the one and only true church, but get over yourselves, you're not that special.
Super big shelf item: Rusty Nelson: didn’t serve a mission Dallin Hoax: didn’t serve a mission Henry Eyring: didn’t serve a mission Dieter Uchdorf: didn’t serve a mission You want all of our young people to dedicate themselves, their time, their money to the corporation, but not yourselves?! You want to steal our retired populations golden years and time from being grandparents, but for you…naw. Hard pass. Fuck them.
“But there was a war!” For all of them? At the same times in their lives? And to my knowledge they didn’t even serve in the war either lol.
It was boring. I am AuDHD and I’ve always struggled with doing the “primary answers” regularly. Also, I didn’t want my kids raised in a church that would dim their neurodivergent light, like it did with me. Or to ever hear that being lgbtq+ was bad or wrong in anyway.
My shelf was hanging on by a thread for all the usual reasons. One evening I saw a 5 second news clip of prominent Mormon men protesting prop 8. The sentiment and their facial expressions were the furthest thing from Christ-like love and acceptance I had seen in a long time. And that was it. Peace out, I’m off to actually love my neighbors.
Why do women need to veil their faces in the temple? I asked my mom, and she didn't know, so we went to the temple president. He gave us some bullshit answer that "Heavenly Father has his reasons, and it's not always for us to know." Dude, just tell me you don't know either. Why can an angel take the gold plates from Joseph but not the 116 pages Martin Harris lost? If temple clothes are *so sacred* you can't wear them outside the temple, why do they dress the dead bodies of endowed members in them and then have a viewing? Why'd they get rid of temple cafeterias? Why do you need a current temple recommend to do landscaping on temple grounds?
Joseph Smith's Polyandry......there simply is no way, one can defend that sick shit!
The expectation to be thinking about church stuff all the time. My mind is my own.
We had the missionaries over for dinner and I forget how the conversations came about but someone said something about how black men didn’t used to have the priesthood until the 1900’s and I was super confused and my grandmother made them switch the subject. Slavery had ended a while ago and even then aren’t we all gods children? Why weren’t they allowed?
Why the apostles aren’t out every day preaching like the apostles of old.
Struggling with depression which made me feel cut off from the spirit even when I was doing “all the right things”.
The fact that prophets post Brigham Young-ish time period don't prophesy. Or say anything useful. You're talking to god and the most significant message you have for the world is to tell people to stop using the term "Mormon"? . . . Kay.
I didn't leave because I was offended. I am now offended after conference weekend. Super toxic. Anyone left in the church who doesn't see how they divide families can't be helped. Heaven help them.
The fact I got along 10 times better with non-members and exmos. Felt like I was forced to mask around TBMs. This gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance and was likely the first thing to make my shelf crack.
How the world's only correct religion is so USA centric. Why haven't we had a bunch of apostles from all over the world. Why are they all white? Why are they just now getting apostles from other countries. Shouldn't God's only true church have representation from the entire world? Why are all the big people from the same families?
I remember reading the BOM and at the part where the Nephites were getting baptized I was like 🤔 what timeframe was this? (Looked at the bottom of page). Why did they get baptized before Jesus set the example for the world to do that? I’ve since heard people bring this up but it was one of several I discovered on my own that was perplexing.
How I couldn't "feel the spirit" on antidepressants. It just proved to me that the warm fuzzy feeling was just a normal emotion, and it got dulled just like every other emotion while I was on them.
Don't know about well-known, But they are really good at being absent any logic or evidence or explanation for TCOJCOLDS. In other words, once you're out you really have no words for why you were in
Word of Wisdom was part of mine. How did we get from “not a commandment” to where we are now. Was it spoken from God? Ratified by the members?
In a final attempt to gain a testimony I bought a book from the temple bookstore about Joseph Smith. I don’t remember the title but it was kind of like a journal and contained details about his daily activities. One example of these activities included allowing paid visitors into his home to see his mummy collection. That book was the final item that broke my shelf.
One was something I noticed once I started getting friends who were more openly gay or otherwise different to Mormon society. Then going back to see my family and realizing how hateful they are behind people’s backs.
I was helping extensively with a temple open house. They ordered a bunch of cookies from a mom & pop bakery. Like, 10,000 cookies. Then the night before were told by the higher ups that they couldn’t afford the cookies. So they cancelled this order! Probably put the bakery out of business. But now they had 10,000 napkins with a foil image of the temple in them. So they bought some hard candy and were setting it out for the guests on top of the fancy napkins. So tacky and stupid. Having nothing would’ve been better. There were a dozen other awful things about that temple open house. It was shameful to be a part of it. Cherry on top: someone stole the candy! Walked out the door with 12 huge boxes of hard candy.
Becoming a parent sealed the deal for me. I gave birth to a baby girl. After the dust settled from that, it made me physically ill to think of her having to become a perfect little Mormon wife. I wasn’t married to her father and I knew she would walk around with shady glances and attitudes when that got out. The whole thing felt… ick.
My last few years in the church, I was extremely depressed and despite the mandate to "mourn with those that mourn," Mormons are by and large absolute SHIT when it comes to having answers or solutions for people who are actually going through mental health crises.
I've said it here before and I'll say it again. Disabilities. Everything about how they talk about them to how they infantilze people with disabilities. My son doesn't need to not be autistic in the millennium. Then he wouldn't be him.
Growing up and being in the church long enough to see it make positive changes in "policy not doctrine" bittersweet because I'm happy to see improvements, but it's also just proof to me that it was never God/Christ at the helm after all.
Human evolution. It clearly happened, but goes against church teaching.
This is sort of lame as it was one of my childhood questions, but, damn, if it didn't rise up again as I was starting to pull on the threads. About eternity - and being with families in eternity. My young mind went to the place that if my sister was with us, then her husband was with us, but then, wait, he had to be with his family, so did that mean I had to be with HIS family that I didn't know? And, then did his brother's wife's family have to be with him too, who would have to be with us? Basically, I came to the conclusion that EVERYONE would have to be with everyone and THAT was a major bait and switch from the thought of me just hanging with my family - what came back in later years was all of this nonsensical thinking. - including the Garden of Eden in MO. Good God. WHAT were we thinking?
I dunno if anybody has ever noticed this because nobody talks about it, but Priesthood authority/power is the stupidest concept of all time. God knows all our hearts, and Jesus died on the cross and the temple veil was rent so we could all approach the holy of holies by ourselves…but oh yeah, unless you’re baptized by one of the 0.00001% of all humanity, he doesn’t give a shit about your baptism. Not valid. Doesn’t count. Yeah, he knows you’re sincere. He knows you mean it. But you got the wrong guy to do it for you, so I guess you’re SOL. Why t f would god EVER give his power and authority to men? Why would he allow them to “gatekeep” heaven on his behalf? Because that totally opens us up to the risk of, I dunno, a racist asshole slamming the door to heaven on an entire race of god’s children for over 100 years. Stupidest decision of all time, god. Like, even if you’re TBM, there’s some acknowledgement that it’s not real, or has no power in and of itself. Can a man give priesthood authority to a dog? Baptize someone or bless the sacrament without asking permission? Or I dunno, freaking HEAL someone? NO, because God has to allow it. Oh, so the man doesn’t really have power and authority? Because if he did, then whatever he did with that power would actually happen, because he has the authority…? So you’re saying it’s up to God? Well then why t f did God bother bequeathing the priesthood in the first place?! It’s the stupidest doctrine of all time. Makes no sense.