I grew up in the church and had many interviews with bishops but not in a million years did I ever tell them anything about my personal or sexual life. Yes, I lied to them all them time. Even as a young man I knew they had no traininig or education in being a professional clergy so why on God's earth would anyone tell them anything of a personal nature. Everything said could get back to one's parents or the congergation. I have since left the church and I never sat down with a bishop to discuss issues realating to DNA, church history etc,. etc,. before I left, what would have been the point?

No one should ever confess to a bish anything they wouldn't tell an old lady stranger walking in a mall.

I left early and never had anything much to confess and wouldn't have done it in any case.

Because they (we) were brainwashed? Other than that, I don't know.

Remember telephone telagraph telabishop

Because that is what you were told to do, that is what you were raised to do, you would go to hell if you didn't.

That said, I lied right up till I went on my mission, but got some serious pressure to come clean before I left.

You must not have believed in Mormonism the way I did. I believed,

1) the church was true and led by true prophets of god who spoke for God
2) these same prophets proclaimed that in order to receive full repentance for sexual sins, you MUST confess them to your Bishop.

While I HATED having to confess my sexual "sins" to my Bishop, I thought god wouldn't forgive me until I did so.

No way was I going to confess anything. The bishops daughter and I were best friends. We all agreed, mums the word. That bishop had an easy time with the teens. The quietest, nicest bunch of kids.

I tried so hard to be the perfect Mormon girl and be worthy to marry my husband in the temple. I never did anything "unworthy" until my husband and I were engaged. I lied to get into the temple because I just couldn't deal with the pressure. My husband was a convert. He called me drunk about a month before our wedding and told me that he wasn't sure about all this mormon stuff and that he would probably drink from time to time after we were married. The morning after our temple wedding he ordered coffee at our bed and breakfast. I thought we were damned for sure.

At least in Catholicism, confession is secret as well as sacred.

Growing up in Moism I was taught that the Catholic Church is the great whore of the earth and all other religions were founded by the evil anti-Mormon Devil. The degrading dogma was pounded sternly into my naïve psyche. After all it had to be true since I was taught that by the Protestant minister in the pre-1990 Temple endowment. Many times I would engage with family or church members in ridicule and decry the worthlessness of the authoritative power professed by Catholic Priests during confession. I would happily point the finger and condemn the process as stupid: confessing to the Priest, repeating a certain number of memorizations before a graven image, and then all is magically forgiven.

I think that condemnation prepared me in a very good way. I learned and believed early on that confession was so personal that it should only be between God and me. I rejected and never read Spencer W. Kimball’s, “The Miracle of Forgiveness.” This process led to my disbelief that any LDS Bishop had authority as a “common judge in Israel” to be involved in my repentance of any sin.

Looking back on my life I never confessed one thing to any of my Bishops - not once.

Today the poor youth aren’t fed the anti-Catholic drivel. The Morg has had to retool its brainwashing message to appear more friendly, more loving, and more mainstream – after all, the PR image is everything to them. Rather than teaching the harsh dogma of yesterday, today’s youth are indoctrinated with a seemingly endless laundry list of itsy bitsy sins that must be confessed. The poor kids today are drenched with guilt to the nth degree.

I reject the whole notion. It’s one of the many cult-control mechanisms associated with cults, religion and especially Mormonism.

social conditioning is a hell of a drug

Because you feel so guilty about your actions, mostly because you've been trained your whole life to feel guilty about them, and you've likewise been trained to believe that talking to the bishop is the only way to remove that guilt.

Sad thing is, it works for a lot of people who don't realize that the cure is a brainwashing-based cure to a problem that the church created in the first place. Then, because the problem is with the church, in order to keep them from suspecting this when they run into the same problem again and again, they are brainwashed to believe that the church's cure is the only hope they'll ever have for a permanent cure.

I was thrilled to realize that the actual permanent cure was as simple as walking away.

I was a true believing convert--I took TSCC VERY seriously and they had me 100%...so I actually believed the Bishop was in charge of me and my "forgiveness" for "serious sins". He represented God, or might as well have. He could do no wrong.

Bishops did odd things and I never noticed while TBM, just blew it off. One Bishop sat there and played with a pencil [I mean real tricks! He was not paying any attention to me] the whole time I told him private very personal and important sins...I should have realized he wanted to be somewhere else and this was all a crock. I had a friend [non-white] tell me the Bishop was a bigot, he treated white people a lot better. I didn't believe that---after all, he was a Bishop! A representative of God. Bullsh**.

A Bishop once told me [35 years ago] that we would soon be paying 15% tithing. He also tols me I would lose my husband if I didn't lose some weight. He was wrong on both guesses. What a crock.

A Mormon bishop is simply a slow megaphone.

Joshua: Greetings, Bishop Falken.
Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?