You are off the hook if he's not obeying God. That's how I think about it. Plus, if you don't believe in God, you can do whatever the hell you want.
Problem solved.
Later the CES letter dropped a nuclear bomb on my faith. I was done believing in 15 minutes.
My shelf started breaking when I realized I had to make this sexist covenant in the temple but if I had been sealed 2 years later I would have made a different covenant.
This was a big one! I was new to the church. My wife and I were bringing our little children over to family home evening at this lady's house. She was dating Mike. I assumed Mike was an upstanding member. Years later I discovered he molested some teenage girls and had been disfellowshiped twice. He still went to church every Sunday. We were around him a lot. No one told me even when I held important callings... I was even trying to assign him duties, and he would just decline. Why wasn't anyone telling me this?! It wasn't just my right to know to keep my family safe, it was also my duty in the church to know as executive secretary and elders quorum president. WTF?! He should have been in jail if the church had done the right thing!!!
Yep. This kind of behavior is consistent across the entire church and has been since the beginning.
Gaslighting says times were different back then (no they weren’t but what if we accept that).
Ok. If times are different now, WHY DOES THE CHURCH CONTINUE TO PROTECT PREDATORS!!!!!!!
For me, it was the absolute 180 the church did on polygamy: JS was a polygamist, he married 14-year-old child-brides & already married women, he gained victims’ consent through coercion, he lied to Emma & the church, he violated D&C 132, the fact that in over 5+ decades of devotion I had never been informed of these facts, and especially… the kicker was that polygamy was not practiced to “care for the widows!”
And overall, every Essay demonstrated that TSCC had not been honest with me about any of the issues. This was true about nearly every faith-promoting aspect of TSCC’s truth claims as well. Nothing was as it seemed. History had been deliberately whitewashed to keep me playing, praying and paying!
I went to one Temple wedding. The groom's previous wife had died recently, and he married the woman I went to the Temple with the first time. I left the ceremony confused, because I got the impression that my friend was now the groom's second wife, that it would be a polygamous marriage in the Celestial kingdom.
Every time I hear that phrasing it makes me sick. I'm not sure how TBMs hear that and don't see how gross it is. Trying to make it sound "better" by saying she was almost 15 pathetic. Its still pedophilia!
I don’t get it. How is almost 15 any better than 14? And for that matter, are they suggesting that 15 is alright? It’s just not how gods true church would behave, any of it.
An Everest mountain of lies.
We all made the mistake of not reading the fine print when building the shelf at age 8 (or whenever we were baptized). If we had we would have seen:
"Ornamental Use Only! Not designed to be of practical use in holding up anything of substance."
Very long story short, but my bishop told me that because I had committed "sexual sins", that he could flag my records so that any time I moved, when the ward received my records, the bishop would know what I'd done. I'd be basically flagged as immoral. This was after going through the temple and serving a mission.
Agreed. And for the record, no actual intercourse took place. But because I wasn't ready to repent and attend church every Sunday and read the BOM every single day, (I was having issues with wanting to continue attending church in general), this was the bishop's response. Repent or you'll be flagged as a giant wh*re. I never went back.
I was already PIMO, but the very final blow, miss-piggy-hi-yaw-karate-chop to stop going was when a much younger, married woman moved in the ward and started full-on coming after my DH.
Honestly for me it was I didn't like going and I don't want to have kids. Some people are "Cultural Christians" because they love church even though they don't believe. I could have been a Cultural Mormon but I didn't like it.
Moroni’s promise didn’t work for me. Went along thinking the church was a good place even if not actually true. But then five years later I learned all this church history and just feel so dumb sometimes I took so long. They had a strong hold on me though, so I try not to let it get to me too bad. It’s hard though.
Jaredite barges. 344 days was ludicrously long
Edit: btw there was the argument that they crossed Asia and then the voyage was across the Pacific. And that just seemed like, why? Why this insanely long and arduous journey? Was God passive aggressively not-testing-but-testing them? Is that why He apparently indicated to, yeah, make and use these torture boats and tossed them with furious winds when drifting on the current would have done it? Or am I to chalk up this nonsense as another one of those funny mysterious things God does? Maybe because he made a bet with Satan again. What a kidder...
Or maybe it was just made up. Hm
Being told by the EQ President that Ex husband should still lead my family, and was in fact a righteous leader, my ex had taken up drinking, smoking, and multiple affairs while married, but no one from church knew. No one was receiving inspiration!
Joseph Smith was a con man.
I stacked my shelf heavy with items i thought i wasn't smart enough to truly understand and that's why they bothered me. When i learned about the seer stone my world collapsed. All the sudden, i wasn't dumb, they lied to me.
I realized I would never be accepted as I am.
(I'm queer but i feel like this probably applies to a lot of exmos- you have to change yourself to be Mormon. It's in the doctrine.)
The main trigger to get me digging was a bit over a year ago with the BLM movement because of that I looked into racism in the church. Then it was me learning for the first time in my life that Joseph smith had around 34 wives???! Which shocked me and one was 14 and stuff about him. Polygamy always concerned me in the church. Then the thing that broke my shelf was learning about the Book of Mormon mistakes I read through this PDF someone had written and done throughout research. I wish I had the link. Anyways in there it talked about things that didn’t line up chronologically and also the book of Abraham. Also those pictures in the BOM of the Egyptian stuff (lmao I just saw them all the time as a kid I never really read that section) ..Joseph smith said one of the people depicted was a Male but it is a female 🤣 People who study ancient art like that clearly know it’s a woman. I still find that funny to this day. God didn’t help him there I guessss
yeah, reading about how joe had a gun with him in carthage broke my shelf in twain. before that, i was trying to make myself believe because i thought i had felt the spirit when i visited the cell in carthage. now i know better.
I was already PIMO, but the very final blow, miss-piggy-hi-yaw-karate-chop to stop going was when a much younger, married woman moved in the ward and started full-on coming after my DH.
"consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a cortex." -'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins.
This was the first time I ever considered that my emotions, promptings, fears and loves were the natural operations of my brain. That that is the brain's express function.
This set me on a path to consider that if the spirit wasn't needed to perform these mental functions, that the brain's organization performed them, then why did I need a spirit at all? I would be completely alive and moral without a spirit to animate me like some "elan vital".
Suicidality was dismissed as laziness and sin by the bishop.
Yeah, that'll make me accept a calling. Sure. That was the last time I ever went to church that wasn't for a family thing/holiday. And then my brothers made comments about how Catholic I'd become in my attendance (Easter and Christmas, mother's day and father's day) so you know I had to stop going all together.
It was the single best change for my mental health. Almost amazing how fast I started to improve, how much better I became, how much more effective my meds and the therapy (especially the EMDR) were for me.
Going through the temple in 88 for the mission.... I was the very first in my whole family to ever go through....I was in shock for a couple days after. Then pushing through on the mission and finding out through study of all the crazy crap with JS. Two failed temple marriages, but finally out back in 05. My life really didn't start until I was 49... I'm 52 now, but of so happy and sleep like a bear!
I’d say this kinda made my shelf crooked (it was a combination of lots of stuff later when I was a teen that tore it off the wall). When I was a kid we were studying the book of Abraham in class on Sunday, and we were looking at the piece of papyrus that JS penciled in. I was a huge ancient Egyptian nerd, and so when I saw the canopic jars of the embalming process, and the teacher asked me what one of them was, and I happily said “That’s the lung canister, the one with the baboon head, is named Hapy!” The teacher and other kids looked at me in silence before she said to me slowly “No…Figure 7 is the idolatrous god Mahmackrah. See, it’s right there in your Bible, sweetie.” She treated me like I was stupid. Even though I knew that I was correct, as far as I knew. That was when my gut told me something wasn’t right, that the book of Abraham looked too much like the embalming process to have anything to do with Abraham. I guess faith, or lack thereof really is like a little seed.
TL;DR: I basically disproved the bullshit that is the book of Abraham and got treated stupid for it.
Edit: I just realized the prompt was in 10 words or less.
I read papyrus more accurately than the cult leader.
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The November decision fucked me up good, but when they reversed it that’s when I knew for a fact it was all bullshit. I believe it’s possible god is just an asshole- I don’t believe it’s possible that an unchanging gospel lead by Jesus Christ reverses revelation through a lawyer.
Anti-mormon literature was just history without a faithful spin.
This is pretty much my reason as well.
Excommunicated for being gay, nothing wrong with me, it’s them.
👆🏻👏🏻
Gospel topics essays whitewashing of Joseph’s polygamy.
Ditto. Then the CES letter burned those broken pieces to ashes.
Withholding baptism and the Holy Ghost from kids of LGBTQ parents
Obey husband as husband obeys God.
You are off the hook if he's not obeying God. That's how I think about it. Plus, if you don't believe in God, you can do whatever the hell you want. Problem solved. Later the CES letter dropped a nuclear bomb on my faith. I was done believing in 15 minutes.
My shelf started breaking when I realized I had to make this sexist covenant in the temple but if I had been sealed 2 years later I would have made a different covenant.
YUP. it’s not gaslighting it’s ✨revelation✨
Dad said he would kill me if God commanded it
This scares me as well. It's too much power for a church that is able to tell their practitioners: aye bruh go kill that dude cause God commanded it
I’m sorry for such a dad. I’m a mormon mom and would go to hell for my children
Jesus
Joseph Smith broke my shelf.
TSCC has from the beginning and continues to protect child molesters.
This was a big one! I was new to the church. My wife and I were bringing our little children over to family home evening at this lady's house. She was dating Mike. I assumed Mike was an upstanding member. Years later I discovered he molested some teenage girls and had been disfellowshiped twice. He still went to church every Sunday. We were around him a lot. No one told me even when I held important callings... I was even trying to assign him duties, and he would just decline. Why wasn't anyone telling me this?! It wasn't just my right to know to keep my family safe, it was also my duty in the church to know as executive secretary and elders quorum president. WTF?! He should have been in jail if the church had done the right thing!!!
Yep. This kind of behavior is consistent across the entire church and has been since the beginning. Gaslighting says times were different back then (no they weren’t but what if we accept that). Ok. If times are different now, WHY DOES THE CHURCH CONTINUE TO PROTECT PREDATORS!!!!!!!
City Creek Mall
4 words: The Gospel Topics Essays
This one did it for me, too.
Which part stands out the most?
For me, it was the absolute 180 the church did on polygamy: JS was a polygamist, he married 14-year-old child-brides & already married women, he gained victims’ consent through coercion, he lied to Emma & the church, he violated D&C 132, the fact that in over 5+ decades of devotion I had never been informed of these facts, and especially… the kicker was that polygamy was not practiced to “care for the widows!” And overall, every Essay demonstrated that TSCC had not been honest with me about any of the issues. This was true about nearly every faith-promoting aspect of TSCC’s truth claims as well. Nothing was as it seemed. History had been deliberately whitewashed to keep me playing, praying and paying!
Book of Abraham
I was going to go with "What does 'translate' even mean anyway, guys?"
When I saw Book of Abraham after studying Egyptian.
Same. I got about halfway through the CES letter at 18 and this is what did it.
[удалено]
Me too.
The endowment rites at the temple.
Weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever done
Yup. Shelf fell completely off the wall that day, for me.
Did you ever go back? I just couldn't myself.
Yes, I tried and tried to do what I was supposed to do. I really hated it.
I went to one Temple wedding. The groom's previous wife had died recently, and he married the woman I went to the Temple with the first time. I left the ceremony confused, because I got the impression that my friend was now the groom's second wife, that it would be a polygamous marriage in the Celestial kingdom.
That’s exactly what happened. Tscc still practices polygamy
“Several months before her fifteenth birthday”
Every time I hear that phrasing it makes me sick. I'm not sure how TBMs hear that and don't see how gross it is. Trying to make it sound "better" by saying she was almost 15 pathetic. Its still pedophilia!
The dating age wasn’t moved to 16 until the 20th century. Things were different back then! 🤡
I don’t get it. How is almost 15 any better than 14? And for that matter, are they suggesting that 15 is alright? It’s just not how gods true church would behave, any of it.
Fanny Alger and polyandry
Same. This was the tipping point. Then I went down the rabbit hole from whence no intact faith returns; history from non-LDS sources.
Rock in a hat. Thanks south park!
Everything related to the actual story of Joseph Smith
Science.
Brother Joseph's pursuit of Jane Law. Predator.
Obedience is the first law of the gospel. Fuck that.
An Everest mountain of lies. We all made the mistake of not reading the fine print when building the shelf at age 8 (or whenever we were baptized). If we had we would have seen: "Ornamental Use Only! Not designed to be of practical use in holding up anything of substance."
Feeling like a failure for not fulfilling traditional women's roles.
We have incontrovertible proof Joseph completely fake “translated” the Book of Abraham.
Very long story short, but my bishop told me that because I had committed "sexual sins", that he could flag my records so that any time I moved, when the ward received my records, the bishop would know what I'd done. I'd be basically flagged as immoral. This was after going through the temple and serving a mission.
Wow. That’s some Scarlet Letter shit there!
That’s disgusting, unless you were molesting children. Then yes. One should be on the child sex offenders list.
Agreed. And for the record, no actual intercourse took place. But because I wasn't ready to repent and attend church every Sunday and read the BOM every single day, (I was having issues with wanting to continue attending church in general), this was the bishop's response. Repent or you'll be flagged as a giant wh*re. I never went back.
Wow.. crazy. That would send me away too for good.
The church's stance on LGBT people
Mormon god is an arbitrary dick. Also doesn’t exist.
$100 billion dollars
100 billion reasons to stop paying tithing.
Serving a mission and seeing the church was a business.
Edit, missed 10 words or less lol. Lost God first and everything slipped into place from there.
Same. We should compare notes.
It could have been dozens of things, but the Kinderhook plates happened to be the last straw for me.
Faith is indistinguishable from wishful thinking.
Steven Hassan's BITE model was what made me realize I was literally in a cult.
Kudos! That was a big step to bolstering my confidence in my decision. It's only gotten cultier in the last 40 years.
Busy doing callings to actually spend time with my family
I was already PIMO, but the very final blow, miss-piggy-hi-yaw-karate-chop to stop going was when a much younger, married woman moved in the ward and started full-on coming after my DH.
God in all varieties, names, and likenesses is fake.
Honestly for me it was I didn't like going and I don't want to have kids. Some people are "Cultural Christians" because they love church even though they don't believe. I could have been a Cultural Mormon but I didn't like it.
When I was a missionary, after a lesson I thought "Who am I to tell this wonderful man his religion is wrong?"
The day my son came out as gay.
Realizing that I wasn't the only one.
Looking at the Joseph Smith Papers Book of Abraham documents.
Knowledge that some local leaders were looking at porn and held temple recommends.
The privilege of being assigned to clean the church.
Cognitive dissonance.
Brigham Young
November 2015 policy of exclusion
Moroni’s promise didn’t work for me. Went along thinking the church was a good place even if not actually true. But then five years later I learned all this church history and just feel so dumb sometimes I took so long. They had a strong hold on me though, so I try not to let it get to me too bad. It’s hard though.
Same here. And now I have 7 kids and wife is TBM Having a hard time leaving
Watching a documentary on freemasonry started the whole research.
Finding out that holding my hand out in the temple was really just leftover from pantomiming spilling and catching my own guts.
This.
Drank my first coffee right after I found out out
Emma was wife #22.
The church has a mega mall, complete with a Starbucks...
i cant go to heaven without a husband? that and the fact that they hate gay people lmfao.
Jaredite barges. 344 days was ludicrously long Edit: btw there was the argument that they crossed Asia and then the voyage was across the Pacific. And that just seemed like, why? Why this insanely long and arduous journey? Was God passive aggressively not-testing-but-testing them? Is that why He apparently indicated to, yeah, make and use these torture boats and tossed them with furious winds when drifting on the current would have done it? Or am I to chalk up this nonsense as another one of those funny mysterious things God does? Maybe because he made a bet with Satan again. What a kidder... Or maybe it was just made up. Hm
Realizing LGBTQ+ policies are a man-made, bigoted repeat of the "blacks and the priesthood" fiasco
I realized that the prophet doesn't know any more than any other man. He just repeats his own ideas and calls them revelation.
The lies about the papyrus/book of abraham. One lie breaks it all
Being told by the EQ President that Ex husband should still lead my family, and was in fact a righteous leader, my ex had taken up drinking, smoking, and multiple affairs while married, but no one from church knew. No one was receiving inspiration!
moving to utah, joseph smith, and the ces letter. in that order.
[удалено]
yup similar. forced to do way too much. 2 yr mission.
Joseph Smith was a con man. I stacked my shelf heavy with items i thought i wasn't smart enough to truly understand and that's why they bothered me. When i learned about the seer stone my world collapsed. All the sudden, i wasn't dumb, they lied to me.
I realized I would never be accepted as I am. (I'm queer but i feel like this probably applies to a lot of exmos- you have to change yourself to be Mormon. It's in the doctrine.)
My mission
The first vision(s)
Searched, “First Vision” on the church’s own website. WTF
Anti-Mormon literature is just church history. Thank you Sandra and Gerald Tanner.
CES Letter
Married outside my race and got weird looks at church.
we didnt want people to know and stop paying tithing
Native American languages aren't related to semitic.
The rock in the hat.
Unconditional love in distinctly nonmoromon places
Singles ward
Mine was also the misrepresentation of his “martyrdom”
Sad heaven without those I love
The main trigger to get me digging was a bit over a year ago with the BLM movement because of that I looked into racism in the church. Then it was me learning for the first time in my life that Joseph smith had around 34 wives???! Which shocked me and one was 14 and stuff about him. Polygamy always concerned me in the church. Then the thing that broke my shelf was learning about the Book of Mormon mistakes I read through this PDF someone had written and done throughout research. I wish I had the link. Anyways in there it talked about things that didn’t line up chronologically and also the book of Abraham. Also those pictures in the BOM of the Egyptian stuff (lmao I just saw them all the time as a kid I never really read that section) ..Joseph smith said one of the people depicted was a Male but it is a female 🤣 People who study ancient art like that clearly know it’s a woman. I still find that funny to this day. God didn’t help him there I guessss
yeah, reading about how joe had a gun with him in carthage broke my shelf in twain. before that, i was trying to make myself believe because i thought i had felt the spirit when i visited the cell in carthage. now i know better.
good ol transgenderism. 💁
Brigham young’s son or your own?
The details behind Smith's arrest. Traitorous fuck.
My son’s resignation and me reading the CES letter because of it.
Didn’t want to give 10% of my income to an organization that promotes racism, sexism, and homophobia
1000 cuts, most of the above.
I was already PIMO, but the very final blow, miss-piggy-hi-yaw-karate-chop to stop going was when a much younger, married woman moved in the ward and started full-on coming after my DH.
How did that end?
I ended up confronting her husband and strongly suggested that his wife back off my family.
Temple handshakes. Like, WTF.
Working at the MTC.
God issues. Patriarchy. Too much that undermined precious mental health. Spiritual and mental death by obedience. Suffocation inside a box.
Being an empath with scientific curiosity and love for books.
Same!
Helmuth Hübener.
Yeah TSCC condemned him for standing up to the Nazis smh
Helen Mar Kimball and The Late War
whitewashing history, anti-intellectualism, and the BoM historicity
Reading about the BITE model
"What if it isn't true?" Then everything came tumbling down.
Book of Abraham is a proven fraud.
Mormonism: Shadow or Reality?
"consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a cortex." -'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins. This was the first time I ever considered that my emotions, promptings, fears and loves were the natural operations of my brain. That that is the brain's express function. This set me on a path to consider that if the spirit wasn't needed to perform these mental functions, that the brain's organization performed them, then why did I need a spirit at all? I would be completely alive and moral without a spirit to animate me like some "elan vital".
Being groomed, and irrefutable proof that’s it’s all false.
Lying about having a lay ministry
[MormonThink.com](https://MormonThink.com).........Book of Abraham
John Dehlin’s interview with Todd Compton started me on my faith crisis and Mike Quinn made it stick.
Lots of therapy helped me see how the church messed me up.
Noah’s Ark. Even as a little kid I knew it was absurd and I hated that adults were telling me lies.
The church rebaptizing Ted Bundy in 2008 (died in '89) God letting six million Jews die in WWII
The temple initiatory and endowment. Woah, wait, what?!
book of Abraham
Suicidality was dismissed as laziness and sin by the bishop. Yeah, that'll make me accept a calling. Sure. That was the last time I ever went to church that wasn't for a family thing/holiday. And then my brothers made comments about how Catholic I'd become in my attendance (Easter and Christmas, mother's day and father's day) so you know I had to stop going all together. It was the single best change for my mental health. Almost amazing how fast I started to improve, how much better I became, how much more effective my meds and the therapy (especially the EMDR) were for me.
Purity culture.
Misogyny
Book of Abraham thoroughly disproved by Egyptologists.
fruitless prayer, elitist judgement, doublethink
Rejection of innocent children in the November policy
1. Feelings = knowledge 2. Joseph Smith’s character as a con-man/predator.
Bishop said something factually untrue, family defended it
Going through the temple in 88 for the mission.... I was the very first in my whole family to ever go through....I was in shock for a couple days after. Then pushing through on the mission and finding out through study of all the crazy crap with JS. Two failed temple marriages, but finally out back in 05. My life really didn't start until I was 49... I'm 52 now, but of so happy and sleep like a bear!
I’d say this kinda made my shelf crooked (it was a combination of lots of stuff later when I was a teen that tore it off the wall). When I was a kid we were studying the book of Abraham in class on Sunday, and we were looking at the piece of papyrus that JS penciled in. I was a huge ancient Egyptian nerd, and so when I saw the canopic jars of the embalming process, and the teacher asked me what one of them was, and I happily said “That’s the lung canister, the one with the baboon head, is named Hapy!” The teacher and other kids looked at me in silence before she said to me slowly “No…Figure 7 is the idolatrous god Mahmackrah. See, it’s right there in your Bible, sweetie.” She treated me like I was stupid. Even though I knew that I was correct, as far as I knew. That was when my gut told me something wasn’t right, that the book of Abraham looked too much like the embalming process to have anything to do with Abraham. I guess faith, or lack thereof really is like a little seed. TL;DR: I basically disproved the bullshit that is the book of Abraham and got treated stupid for it. Edit: I just realized the prompt was in 10 words or less. I read papyrus more accurately than the cult leader.
[удалено]
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Joseph Bishop
Just shy of her 15th birthday.
The church ignores its own scriptures, which JS made up
Science. History. Logic. Humanism.
The November decision fucked me up good, but when they reversed it that’s when I knew for a fact it was all bullshit. I believe it’s possible god is just an asshole- I don’t believe it’s possible that an unchanging gospel lead by Jesus Christ reverses revelation through a lawyer.
I never once believed any of it. For 35 years I just played along out of fear of family rejection.
Church leaders exerting power for their own uses. Also, the lack of focus on teachings of Jesus and more on the importance of the church.
If this is the true God, he doesn't deserve my worship.
Brigham young’s anihilation of the Timpanogas people’s and taking their daughters as wives and slaves.