I went on a mission, and I still recall the complete surprise it was. I fully expected a happy, positive experience, based on ‘true love’, and kindness. What I got was a para-military nightmare, based on pressure, anger, politics, and back stabbing.
My companion and I were belittled in front of other missionaries by the Mission President. It was nasty display of sarcasm, meanness, and pettiness. After all these years, I still recall the way it made us feel. We had been treated like dirt.
No-one was ever thanked, or told they were appreciated. They were forced to endure endless nonsense, and a terrible sense of guilt. At meetings, they were interviewed, and confronted. Prying questions were standard fare. This, we were assured, was ‘religion’ and ‘love’.
Missionaries ratted on each other, and carefully manipulated the favor of the Mission President, his harpy wife, and the boot licking assistants. Many spent the entire time looking for personal advantage. lightfingerlouie, board post 11th November 2007, ‘Treatment of Members – What is the Church For Anyway?’
Something to the effect that if we didn’t want to go any further, we should then leave. My mom and dad looked at me. I knew they could see my stunned faced. They tried to look at me and smile, but I could tell that they knew I was about to bolt. My heart was racing. God I wanted to leave. Run Lance run! Run! GO NOW! But I didn’t. I crumbled under the peer pressure of having my parents’ friends there. I crumbled under the pressure of being the ‘last great hope’ because my siblings had left the Church. I knew that if I were to leave, my mother’s heart would have been broken, and that I had failed her. I couldn’t bear to imagine her weeping at the thought that I too had rejected the gospel. No. I stayed. We made slashing gestures across our throats and abdomens. We made symbols, and promised to place the Kingdom of God before everything else in our lives. I met some man at the veil, we made the five points of contact, and he pulled me through the veil. I went to the Celestial Room. There was a mirror there, and the boy that was staring back at me was scared, in shock, and devastated. All I could think was, But the Book of Mormon is true. It’s true. I know it is. I can’t think about this right now. Put it away. Don’t think about the temple. The church is true. It’s true. It’s true. I know it is. God, why? Why?!
The Church isn’t true. Antishock8, board post 19th May 2006, ‘My Temple Experience’
Miss Eliza R Snow, the poetess, and a Mrs Whitney, were the officiating attendants on that occasion. The former conducted me to one of the bathing tubs, and placing me in it, she proceeded to wash me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. As she did this she repeated various formulas to the effect that I was now washed clean from the blood of this generation. Fanny Stenhouse, ‘Tell it All: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism’ p359
... We all kneeled down, and with our right hands uplifted towards heaven, we took the solemn oath of obedience and secrecy. We swore that by every means in our power we would seek to avenge the death of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, upon the Gentiles who had caused his murder, and that we would teach our children to do so; – we swore, that without murmuring or questioning, we would implicitly obey the commands of the priesthood in everything. ibid. p365
[President Faust] emphasized the need to sacrifice for temple building and shared how members in Argentina found ways to donate during the construction of the Sao Paulo Brazil Temple. They gave the gold from their dental work to help pay for the temple. He said that he had purchased some of the gold fillings for more than the market price to share with congregations the nature of the sacrifice made by these members. Church News 9th May 1998
Q) What is the Biblical translation of Pay Lay Ale?
A) By these words, Adam is asking God for the three things most desired by men: Money, Sex, and Beer. Randy J, board post 5th April 2000
Pay Lay Ale means ‘Wonderful Lucifer’.
I found this info on a site called wakeupmormons. In their research they found that the chant comes from the Hebrew ‘Pele Heylel’, meaning ‘Wonderful Lucifer’. No wonder Lucifer was the star of the temple ceremony. He even appeared while Adam was praying at the altar. Interesting that this was one of the parts that has been deleted from the endowment ceremony. So, the Morg does have Satanic underpinnings. There is so much symbolism in plain sight. How did we not see it for so long? Carol Y, board post 26th April 2012, ‘Pay Lay Ale Means Wonderful Lucifer’
The [Kiev] temple will be a blessing. People will join the Church by the hundreds and thousands. Dieter F Uchtdorf
We know about the similarities between the secret handshakes and bloody oaths of secrecy used in Masonic rituals on one hand and the secret handshakes and bloody oaths of secrecy used in the Mormon temple on the other hand (some of which continued to be a main feature of Mormon temple worship all the way up to 1990).
When you take a bloody oath, accompanied by pantomiming the way in which your life will be taken from you (e.g. throat-slitting and disembowelment) if you reveal the special handshakes (signs and tokens) of your organization, we are definitely talking about keeping secrets. So the lame TBM spin that the temple ritual is ‘sacred not secret’ is not persuasive.
As indicated above, we know that the Mormon temple ritual included the handshakes and throat-slitting/disembowelment pantomimes up until 1990.
We know that the LDS Church was established by Joseph Smith during the peak years of the Anti-Masonry movement, the geographical center of which was in – you guessed it – the very area of New York in which Joseph Smith lived ...
We know that secret handshakes, secret passwords and bloody oaths seem completely out of place in a religious organization that ostensibly teaches about love, openness and truthfulness in all things, while condemning ‘secret combinations’ and ‘secret societies’.
We know that it’s absurd to think that the omniscient god and creator of all the universe needs to rely on a clumsy system of secret handshakes and passwords to determine who can pass the veil into his heavenly sanctuary ...
Incidentally, when it comes to the infiltration idea, it makes more sense to think of the LDS Church as a creation of Freemasonry from the beginning, rather than as an organization that was ‘infiltrated’. All of the top leaders of the founding generation of the LDS Church were Freemasons. Brigham Young used to proudly sport his Masonic pin on his vest. (There is a famous photo of Brigham Young where you can see in some later reprints that the original photo was retouched to remove the pin.) Gorspel Dacktrin, board post 26th October 2009, ‘Mormons Claim the Temple Ceremonies are Divine, Not Derived from Ministry’
Joseph told them to go to Kirtland, and cleanse and purify a certain room in the Temple, that they must kill a lamb and offer a sacrifice unto the Lord which should prepare them to ordain Willard Richards a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Wandle Mace, Journal p32
He set the temple ordinances to be the same forever and ever and set Adam to watch over them, to reveal them from heaven to man, or to send angels to reveal them. Joseph Smith, History of the Church vol 4 p208
... it is generally supposed that sacrifice was entirely done away when the Great Sacrifice ... was offered up, and that there will be no necessity for the ordinance of sacrifice in future; but those who assert this are certainly not acquainted with the duties, privileges and authority of the Priesthood, or with the Prophets. Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith p172
The Mormon Church has sent more than a million missionaries around the world. John Sweeney, This World: The Mormon Candidate, BBC 2012
I went to Mongolia ... There are gangs of street kids that roam around the city. There were no real charities there to help them out and the Mongolians were always shooing them away like flies. We were natural targets for them because not only were we Americans, we were also pretty much the only people in the entire country that wore suits! We must all be filthy rich, right? They used to follow us around sometimes and beg. Our oh-so-Christ-like Mission President told us over and over that we were not to so much as talk to the street kids because they were distracting us from our real mission: to save souls. If we felt guilty about it then we were to donate any left-over money to the branch fast offering fund so that it could be administered ‘in the Lord’s way’. That was supposed to make us feel better.
Mongolia is a high desert, and so it is cold in the winter. I’m not talking about Utah cold either. I grew up in Alaska and I’ll be damned if I wasn't freezing all winter long! During the winter these kids would live under the streets because that was where the hot water pipes were. All of the buildings were steam-heated from central boilers spread throughout town and so there were hot pipes in the sewers. One spring there was a flashflood and hundreds of these kids drowned. Did anyone care? Did Christ’s true servants even so much as say a prayer for them?
It was common for these kids to sleep in the entrances of the apartment buildings. If they kept their mouths shut nobody would kick them out. Because they would beg from us our entrances seemed to have more of these kids in them than others. So here I am, a servant of Jesus Christ, with a pocket full of money and a kitchen full of food and starving homeless kids on the other side of my door. I caught hell for letting one in just one time!
Like so many missionaries I spent my 2 years feeling guilty …
So here are these kids sleeping, starving, and even shitting in my entryway and sure enough, one morning we find one of them dead. Mormonism is responsible for fucking each of us up in our own special ways, and for me this was it. I was really messed-up over this dead kid that we had just ignored on our way into our apartment the night before. I went to the MP and bawled my eyes out to him. He gave me a blessing and it kinda made things better – that’s how brainwashed I was. I let a kid starve/freeze to death but it was ok because he was fast-tracked to the Celestial Kingdom.
What could a few tens of thousands of dollars from the church have done? There are places like this all over the world. I don’t believe in god or christ but if they had a ‘true’ church on this world, everyone would know it because of its fruits ... It makes me sick. Akexmo, board post ‘Anger, Anger’