5) Acceptance: I have my moments, but mostly I’m OK with life as it is. I know my wife will never look into the problems with the church. For a long time I wanted so badly for her to just listen, but she wouldn’t. I finally had to be OK with her not knowing, as long as she was OK with me. I go to sacrament meetings fairly often with my wife, and that’s OK. I used to roll my eyes and grind my teeth a lot, but now I mostly just take it as an hour of observing a culture. It’s kind of entertaining. Runtu, board post 15th June 2012, ‘Apostasy and the Five Stages of Grief’
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and ponder what I have lost, and I weigh that against what I’ve gained. I’m still not sure it was a good trade. To be sure I’ve gained insight, perhaps wisdom and certainly I’ve jettisoned a lot of superstition, but the losses have been heavy as well. I’ve brought sorrow to many that love me, and sometimes I feel and intense longing for the ‘brotherhood’ that once was much a part of my life. Often anger and frustration boil to the surface. Alas, there is not a choice to be made, for once this door is open, once the truth seems apparent, there is no going back. How could I, and yet often I wish I could? I’ve often said, ‘I don’t need proof, just plausibility’. I was naive, I was faithful, I was happy. Some armour can not be repaired. Sometimes this solitary journey seems lonely indeed. SLDrone, board post, ‘A Melancholy Longing’
Sometimes I want to go back. Sometimes I yearn for it. Sometimes I’ve laid awake at night and thought about what I have lost, what might have been had I continued in faith. Contrary to popular Mormon belief, the road out of Mormonism is not the easier path. At least not for me. I often long for the brotherhood, I miss the surety of the meaning of life. I long for the common goals and faith that bound me so firmly to my community, and to my family. I miss the contentment of faith in a benevolent and loving Father in Heaven. There is much to regret on the path out of Mormonism. It is a road often strewn with sacrifice and tears. It is a road that disappoints so many who love me, and I them. I’ve often wondered if the sacrifice to myself of feigning belief was worth the benefit of the happiness it would bring to those that surround me. But what of integrity, what of truth to thine own self? SLDrone, board post, ‘A Sometime Longing’
We live in a world of scientific illiteracy. Superstition and pseudo-science reign supreme, the anecdotal mythology the engine of our demise. Religion is the antithesis of progress and is as preposterous today as it was millennia ago. The pope of today opposes the scientific research of the fetal stem-cells, just as his predecessor opposed any fact refuting man and earth as the center of the universe. Scientific and honest progress is thwarted in that it dares to challenge to doctrine of the dishonest and uninterested. The clouds of an unseen and oft unfathomable god fill the minds of men, darkness gathers, ignorance roars with a deafening thunder, the demons awake. Of this I am tired. SLDrone, board post, ‘Of This I am Tired’
I recently had lunch with a General Authority friend of mine that offices in the Admin Building. On my way down the hall I ran into Packer who actually had the gall to ask why I was wearing a colored shirt in that building and lightly scolded me. SLDrone, board post, ‘In a Recent Meeting With a GA Date’
What really upsets me is the pain that I have caused my family, particularly my mother. The church is her whole life, and without it she would be devastated. She has so many dreams of her forever family in the next life. I am her oldest and so I feel that she has placed many expectations for me. I have not lived up to any of them.
I cannot escape the feelings of disappointment that both of my parents have toward me, even through the masks of unconditional love they show me. Ladibug69, board post, ‘Ruining My Forever Family’
Mormonism is, in the end, a death cult.
... I ought to point out that there is nothing unique about any genuine cult being a death cult, for in the name of life, every single one of them ends up worshipping death in their own way: Islam, Nazism, the J Dubs, the Jonestown people, the Solar Temple people, the Heaven’s Gate people, the Mormons, all of them. I might say that if anything is sacred, life is, and therefore, all of those cults constitute the ultimate in blasphemy, Mormonism not excepted.
That Mormonism is a death cult in the end is true in many senses, broad and specific. For example, the ultimate sacrament ritual, symbolized by the partaking of the bread and water, is the sacrifice of Christ’s body as a means of uniting all (worthy) humankind together, and humankind with God ... While Mormonism seeks to sidestep the blatantly macabre aspects of the Catholic focus on crucifixion and death by cheerily offering up glib slogans about worshipping the ‘risen’ Christ versus the slain Christ and refusing to place crosses on its churches, at its core it posits the same things as Catholicism and all Christianity does: there was once a golden age of innocence and virtue – the human race fell – it is only through the human sacrifice/deicide of Jesus of Nazareth that we can begin to overcome natural filthiness.
But Joseph’s cult, as in so many other ways, takes this to a whole new level of weirdness and invidiousness. We have as Mormons the obligation of murdering all those parts of our humanity which can’t in the end squeeze into the church’s unusually constricting mould of the ‘ideal’ male and female. In other words, cult righteousness equals de-humanization. The ‘natural man is an enemy to God’. Feminists must become Mollies. ‘Los machos’ must give up the motorcycle tours, Metallica, and Maxim magazine, and Ned Flanderize themselves. Those with some sense of autonomy must overcome their ‘rebelliousness’ and submit every last aspect of their lives to priesthood ‘authority’. Homosexuals must become heterosexuals, or at least, are required to spend their lives killing off what now appears to be an innate proclivity. Males and females who would rather remain childless must overcome this ‘wicked tendency’ and reproduce. Those who see wisdom in waiting to marry, see wrongly – they must marry when they are young. They don’t know what is best for them.
... Each one of us is a ‘self’ – and we must kill off that self. We must turn ourselves into fodder for the machine, just to keep it going ...
And of course, in the end, it doesn’t even really care at all when its missionaries are literally murdered for it. The church ignored the many death threats issued by Bolivian terrorists against Mormon missionaries; it ignored the bombs left at La Paz chapels; it ignored the firebombing; and left the missionaries there in La Paz. Then, after the assassination of Elders Ball and Wilson, the church left its missionaries there just the same as always, just as they had after the warnings started coming in. And Hinckley went to Wilson’s funeral, once his bullet-riddled body arrived back in Utah in a coffin, and said, ‘It doesn’t really matter how long we live in this life’, and then left, accompanied by his bodyguards.
The Mormon church, for all its shiny, happy photo models, can only survive when all that we would associate with being truly human, and all we would associate with reality, is killed off. It must eradicate to stay alive, and the sooner I cease hearing about grown men cowing to the threats of their wives and agreeing to keep quiet, when their children are being brainwashed and having all that is potentially most unique and valuable about them sucked out of them, just to serve Joseph’s cult, the better. The truth deserves better than that, and so do our children, for Mormonism is a cult and a fraud, and a million smiles and barbecues and fake friends won’t change that. Tal Bachman, board post 9th August 2005, ‘Mormonism, The Death Cult’
Mormons invented themselves just as other religious and ethnic groups invented themselves. But Mormons did so in such a singularly impressive way that we will probably always remain baffled as to how exactly it happened. Laurence Moore
As long as people want the Mormon Church to be true, more than they are willing to face the possibility that it is not, they will not entertain evidence or reason. Delusion becomes a choice. Jim Whitefield
It is, after all, far too easy to pinch and kick the bizarre Mormon Church; to say it’s ripe for satire and parody is to say a Catholic schoolgirl is ripe for debauchery. It’s like shooting polygamist fish in a barrel of coffee. Mark Morford
But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion. Jon Krakauer, ‘Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith’
A Mormon told me that they don’t drink coffee. I said, ‘A cup of coffee every day gives you wonderful benefits.’ He said, ‘Like what?’ I said, ‘Well, it keeps you from being Mormon ...’ Emo Philips, cited The Guardian September 2005
The theology comes across as totally barmy. We can become gods with our own planets! And the practices strike me as creepy. No coffee and tea is bad enough. But the underwear! Michael Ruse, Chronicle of Higher Education 30th November 2011
There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen. Neil LaBute
Mormon ‘profits’ [prophets] are losing control, particularly of members, thanks to the Internet, and at some level of awareness, they know it. In centuries past, religiously-addicted men ordered people to believe or suffer torture and/or death. In 2009, the best LDS apostles can come up with is to threaten Latter-day Saints with punishments from God, the ‘Holy Ghost’ leaving them, ‘Satan's buffetings’, and ‘eternal damnation’ if they don’t ‘repent’. CdnXMo, board post 5th October 2009, ‘Holland Becoming Unhinged in General Conference: Religious Addiction on Display and Mormons Don’t Realise It’
As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are. Harold B Lee, eleventh Mormon president, article Ensign January 1973, ‘Admonitions for the Priesthood of God’