I only post occasionally, but I'm a major lurker. I have a question for you all. When you first thought about leaving mormonism, did you invest a lot of time and effort into investigating the truth? Or did you just decide to leave, and that was it?

I've seen a lot of posters say they read book after book once doing crept in, trying to decide if it was true or not. I had a completely different experience, and wonder if any of you were more like me.

I spent three years prior to my apostasy studying and working to gain a testimony (because I felt worthless for not being faithfu enough), to no avail. Then one day, after yet another pointless Sunday meeting block, as I was berating myself for YET AGAIN failing to "feel the spirit", a thought occurred to me. Just a simple little thought: "I'm a good person."

It felt so good that I thought it again. "I'm a good person. If there's a heaven, I'm pretty sure I would get to go." Then I wondered what kind of loving god would keep me out of heaven just because I had a hard time believing in all the confusing and contradictory things they told me at church. I wondered what kind of god would send in all the confusing and contradictory things they told me at church. I wondered what kind of god would send some of his children into The Big Test with answer guides and some without. I wondered what kind of god would create a single path to salvation, and yet at the same time create a world full of different people and cultures and experiences.

Then I thought, "If god is who the mormon church says he is, I want nothing to do with him." So I picked up my Bible to see what it had to say about god, and in less then 30 verses I was out. I decided right then and there that I didn't think the church was true, and didn't care if it was. I knew I would rather spend eternity in the telestial kingdom with my principles than in the CK with a god I couldn't respect.

In ten minutes I went from hating myself for not being a good enough mormon to being out, and never looking back. It was another six months or so before I found this site, and read some of the fascinating evidences against mormonism (DNA, BoA, etc).

How many other people left without needing to know verifiable reasons it was false? I'm not trying to sound boastful in any way - in fact, I sometimes think I did it all wrong, and that I should have looked more closely into it before making such a huge decision. What I did was completely uncharacteristic for me.

But I'd love to hear if anyone else had an exit similar to mine. Or, your thought process if you did study your way out - at what point did the warm fuzzy feelings stop mattering as much as the true things you learned about the church?

Gah! Sorry for all the misspellings and duplicated text. I posted from my phone.

I was at in line at a grocery store. I was watching a girl who had some disabilities bag groceries. I thought about her life, alternatively taking shit from people at work or what might be even worse, their pity and patronization. I realized there was probably no god and no inherent meaning to any of this.

Then I started reading church history....

It was only life experience that brought me to this point. When I found out ALL the dirty underbelly of the church--it was just icing on the cake. I was inactive for years before I finally realized I didn't believe and that was a rather abrupt realization. I went inactive for self preservation--not because I wanted to "sin" or didn't believe.

Mine is similar to yours. I got married a year ago and I had my husband baptised because I thought the church was true. I had been previously inactive for about 4 years. But now that I was married I decided that I better clean up my act if I wanted my family in the next life. So as I said my husband was baptised in late December and we had been going to church up until march when we decided the church wasn't for us. One day I was thinking about the church being true (because I was having a hard time getting a definite yes or no answer) and this thought popped into my head... Our minds are so powerful that we can feel anything we want to.. So if I wanted the church to be true badly enough I'd answer my own prayer and think of course it's true it feels right. I started talking to my husband about our minds and we both started realizing that there is no way we would really ever know if it was true or not because how could we tell the difference between a good feeling and a real answer. It was then that I found this site and started reading all the interesting things about JS and the church that I never knew about. But I knew without reading any facts first, that I couldn't be in the church anymore because I wasn't going to rely on a feeling that would of course be biased considering my entire family is Mormon and I wanted it to be true so badly.

But I fall into the "book after book" category. It took five years of serious study before the light finally came on. I continue to read as much as possible. I'm currently reading a book on neuroscience and have two more books on other topics waiting on the bookshelf.

Nothing can take the place of thinking for yourself!

I am a life-long Mormon but never believed any of it - never felt anything, never bought into anything, never understood the appeal of it. None of it made sense and I drifted along doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing. One weekend I found this site and in about 10 minutes I was done - done with the church, done with all the nonsense, and done, most of all, with feeling like I could never, EVER do enough, EVER, no matter what, EVER. That's when I started reading all the books I have and spending way too much time on exmo boards. But, I was already done - once I started investigating, simply to validate what I already knew, it was immediately over. What a relief.

My experience is similar. When I was in my early 30's I decided it was time to quit being a jack mo and get back to church, so I bought a few books from Deseret book store. One of them was Miracle of Forgiveness. I was molested as a kid, so always knew (according to TSCC) that I was forever stained and ruined, and I never felt I was a good clean person. I knew for sure that I wouldn't be going to the CK because I was too unclean to live with god.

By the time I read MoF I knew a couple women who had been raped, and reading that book, I knew it was just plain wrong for them. They hadn't done anything to provoke it, they weren't partly to blame because they hadn't fought to the death. I couldn't believe it for myself yet, but being able to know for certain that the women I knew were not in any way to blame for what happened to them gave me my first doubts about the so-called prophets.

By the time I read the Doctrine & Covenants, the blinders were off and I was able to see how convenient it was that every time Joseph Smith wanted something (like sex with women other than his wife) that God would give him a revelation that gave him what he wanted.

It took a few years for me to connect the mormon god with the mormon prophets. When I did I was certain that the mormon god was a jackass, and like you, I decided that even if he was the real god, I didn't care. I'd rather hie off to outer darkness to join Satan in fighting against that god.

I didn't know the factual stuff until a decade later when I found this board.

and neither did my fear of him. I walked away before I had any idea there was a problem with the history or doctrine or leaders.

It's very gratifying to find out I was right.

Ziller went from “knowing the Church was true” to “knowing the Church was bullsh*t” in less than one week.

This was before the interweb and without any “anti-Mormon” literature or information whatsoever.

A simple heartfelt desire to prepare for a mission led Ziller to read the Book of Mormon.

Ziller already “knew” the Book of Mormon was true without ever having read it, but as a missionary, Ziller would be asking investigators to read it, so Ziller thought he should read it as well.

Ziller felt self-obligated to finish reading the whole Book of Mormon – and he did, but after 1st Nephi, Ziller knew that the Book of Mormon was an obvious fraud and the biggest piece of garbage ever to masquerade as literature.

Ziller knew he was done with Mormonism and wasted no time in preparing a list of sins that now needed to be committed.

ziller

It was a strange journey for me... I was a BIC, TBM, early morning seminary attending, returned missionary, married in the temple BIC. My wife started having problems with the church and went inactive. I went inactive shortly after that, my marriage was more important. I was inactive for years, like 10 years... All the while thinking, I'll probably go back some day. I thought I still believed. There were points that I defended the church even against evidence to the contrary.

Then a few short months ago, my niece was excommunicated based on "evidence" from her facebook page... This was the turning point for my belief system. It's a long story, but for the point here, it was a shock to me that they would do this to her.

I started researching, looking things up on the internet, here and elsewhere... And it was a like a snowball going down hill. As the research piled up, my faith dwindled. I don't know if there was any "evidence" or any one point, but I do remember realizing that the church wasn't making me happy, even the little fire that I kept lit for it, if anything it was making me unhappy... Even as an inactive "member". Didn't that fail the test that the church sets? "If it's true you'll 'feel good'?!?"

I dropped the last of my beliefs in the church and went on to listen the audio book edition of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. The evidence he presented, so logically and so well organized, was all the proof that I needed that I didn't need a "God" to tell me how to live and be a good person.

So was there evidence? Sure, but I think that only helped me realize what I was feeling all along.

Sorry that was longer than I expected...

I gave up on the idea of god first. After that, I started poking around and discovered just how crazy mormonism really was and how deep in the sand my head had been but there was no convincing to be done at that point as I was already an atheist.

After a lifetime of being a tbm, TM, RM, kids, the mormons I knew where awful. I came to the conclusion that mormons acted cultically and came to the conclusion that the church was a cult and went to the internet to see if others thought the same thing. But all the while, I still thought that the church was the one and only true church.

My research showed that yes, others thought it was a cult. So I stopped attending. But my research also showed that the church had many other issues and that solidified my decision.

Now that I am out of the box, I can't believe how messed up and cultic the church is.

It was such a strange experience for me. I'm very much logic-driven rather than emotion-driven. It's still hard for me to believe a flashbulb feeling of self worth was enough to change my entire life.

Its just a matter of degree.

My reaction is that you seem to just have a better defined self concept than most of us who were raised within the guilt-ridden, judgment-imposing and codependent emotional framework of mormonism, and you clearly had better connections internally to your own authenticity.

Personally I experienced the "cognitively dissonant moment" you describe a thousand times for a thousand different reasons for many, many years. Yet, my default reaction was to believe the mantra that it was MY problem, and refuse to acknowledge what my own authentic self was trying to say.

When my rational mind would be screaming questions about why a loving god would decide to set up a mortal framework in the way that mormonism asserts, I would be constantly pushing it back with self-talk about how I could not ignore revealed truth, and that I had to find a way to accommodate and believe.

Being somewhat creative (like many of you) I succeeded in studying and praying and creating the most preposterous rational belief structures that nevertheless provided enough logical integrity to navigate the cog-dis.

For me it then took many years as the pressure of the evidence against these belief structures increased to intolerable levels. At this point my own experience was very traumatic and somewhat similar to others such as Bob McCue, who writes poignantly about being physically sick for weeks.

Another of the reasons I have discovered to be furious at the betrayal of mormonism is the poisoning and undermining of one's ability to be well-connected with basic human authenticity. The entire bullshit, damaging paradigm of "testimony" seriously messes with the ability to properly contextualize emotional reactions. I just recall living for years with the notion that "the spirit" was all around me and that every feeling and intuition I might have was potentially an EXTERNAL prompting that I had to constantly analyze minute-by-minute, looking for evidences of divine origins, all subject to the irrefutable definition supplied by mormonism.

Resigning eventually became logically non-negotiable, however recovering is showing itself to be a far more complicated process than my logical mind would have imagined in the beginning.

You only need just a few confirmations beyond a reasonable doubt that place JS in a position that he was not a prophet. For example, that the B of M was a fabrication (remember cornerstone of our religion), B of A was a fabrication, and JS behavior was not what you would expect from a man of God - outright lies, polygamy, failed prophecies, etc. Beyond that it's just icing on the cake.

My story...I was a new convert but not new to the Bible having been raised Methodist. I got along with everyone and was well-liked.

I was called to be EQ teacher and was doing my utmost to fulfill my calling until I had to teach a lesson on "The Temples of the Lord".

I had a terrible feeling about the topic and realized I knew very little about it. I needed to know as much as possible so I stayed up an entire night researching on the internet. I kept finding references to freemasonry and realized I didn't know much about that either and researched that for hours and hours.

By the next morning I had convinced myself that the LDS temples were copied from freemasonry and that Joseph Smith was not a prophet at all, but a plagiarist. He stole most of his material from the masons. Since the masons are also a secret society, no one could expose Joseph without revealing the secrets of masonry.

It was like a dam broke in my mind and heart. I was trying to build a testimony but instead my testimony fell like a house of cards. If you don't believe JS was a prophet, then everything about LDS melts away as trivial and irrelevant.

I quit attending immediately. I just walked away realizing it was all an elaborate scam and feeling angry. I didn't resign, in my mind TSCC no longer held any relevance. I just walked away and never turned back.

The things you said I can relate to SO much. I often reverse it in my head and think, ok so if I go to heaven and God says, "I'm sorry - I can't let you in because you did not believe in Islam" how unfair and crazy would that be to me! Because I didn't follow a religion that did not feel good to me and made absolutely no sense God would punish me forever? I think not!

I left the church because of issues with the temple. I figured that it was true but decided that I would rather live in a lower kingdom than in a kingdom where crazy stuff like what I had experienced was practiced. I thought I might go back someday. The guilt didn't settle in for awhile but then it really started to ruin my life. I still believed in God so I started to pray about whether or not the Church was true. Praying about it made me feel incredible anger for several days. I felt more confused than I've ever felt. One morning I woke up and felt amazing. I felt I had made the right choice to leave. There's no way there is only one path for every single person in this world. I have started the process of reading and studying not because I need to be convinced of the lies, but because I want to know the story behind them.

I was a return missionary at BYU. A friend gave me The Miracle of Forgiveness to read to help me with a "problem". I read the one chapter and halfway through it I knew that Spencer W. not only didn't know what he was talking about but he was dangerous. You can't be that and be a prophet, and I knew it was all a lie in about one second. Like you, it was just a feeling, but realizing the church was false was instant and beautiful. I walked away immediately and I never looked back. That was enough for me. About 35 years later I happened to read Faun Brody's No Man Knows My History. Suddenly seeing the ugly truth about the church was euphoric. Talk about icing on the cake.

While on my mission, there were lots of other people committed to their own beliefs. I wondered why mine were supposed to trump theirs.

There was no prophesying, seering or revelating going on. In fact, there was some pretty ugly doctrine and history.

There was no inspiration at the local levels. Just people doing as they saw fit.

There was no advantage to Priesthood blessings over what everyone else experiences. Tithing, etc, if any, were self-fulfilling.

Outside studying.... comparative religions, anthropology, bio and earth science, etc.

Sundays were boring and far from uplifting; in fact, very consuming.

I came to the conclusion that mormonism was just another man-made religion. So... all the anti-mormon stuff didn't come into play until I had already left.

I was a missionary. I studied about the falsehoods of mormonism only AFTER I was already out for several years.

I'd struggled with faith even as a missionary. Went to leader after leader and was basically told that I must not be living some principle fully and thats why I didn't believe.

I excluded myself from much of the fun of being in the military. I was ok with it because I thought it would be for something. I was going to an Institute class with mostly military guys in it. The teacher was a very caring missionary couple. They really were great. I was about to deploy to Japan for 7 months. I asked the teacher; "When will I just believe? Tell me exactly what I need to do, because I keep trying and I really am putting all my effort out there. When will I JUST believe?" He told me, "Maybe never. It might be part of your struggle in life to show faith but never have it."

I was so confused. After that things got busy with deploying and stuff. In Japan I was on my way to church. I ran into some guys from my platoon. They were on their way to do a BBQ and drink. I told them maybe after church. Well church services had changed to a different chapel on a different base. They didn't tell me or any of the other single guys with out families. I immediately thought, "FUCK this! I am done."

I was done. I went to the platoon party and got drunk. I had a very bad hang over the next day. I never felt guilty.

It wasn't until all the fall out from Prop 8 that I started wanting out completely. I was going to go confess a sin and hope for excommunication until I learned here on Rfm how to resign.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/21/2011 01:49AM by bingoe4.

The double bind was the tipping point for me. And once I knew it was all a crock of mindfuck, the rest became ammunition.

I came from a family where my dissafectation would come with a debate. So I prepared.

And I'm glad that I did. While it wasn't fun to go the rounds with my parents about why I know the church is hog diarrhea, it congealed into them that I was DONE and that I wasn't going back and if they want to try to demonstrate the church's "truth," that I won't stand for it without stating what I know.

I left after about 2 months of reading but I am still reading 7 years later. I want to know everything about it in case I ever get the opportunity to educate my family about the Church. So far only one sibling has listened/left and that was in the last 3 months.

Book after book for me.

The church made me feel good, or at least when it didn't I made myself feel good. So I never really had a need for it or problem with it. I stuck with it because I "knew" for certain that it was true.

I had to study my way out.

I lost my faith in religion as a whole long before deciding to leave. I do recall a short time of cognitive dissonance where I still believed the church but was effectively atheist. It ended shortly.

So no proof was necessary for me. :-)