but rather finally recognized what type of person you always were?
Let me put it this way. When I was 5 I asked my mom where the gold plates were. When she told me the angel had taken them back I remember thinking that it sounded like the dog ate my homework excuse. In other words, I ALWAYS had doubts. I was born with doubts. Growing up in a TBM world my childhood could best be described as a neverending effort to deny my doubts in favor of a world that made no sense to me. (Kind of like gays who do all they can to fit in a hetero world.)
So my exit out of the church, at age 42, was not so much a discovery of facts that showed mormonism to be false but rather a realization of myself as a person who never believed it in the first place.
I feel kindbof lucky that im figuring all this out during my teen years. Some of the stuff ive heard from exmos who didnt figure it out until AFTER they were married to TBMs and had TBM kids... I just cant imagine having to go through that process at that point in life
My experience was very near to that. It was the first time that I allowed myself to honestly consider the question, 'is the church true'. In that moment my testimony vanished. Every little nagging question that I had repressed all my 25 years (23 years ago) came flooding back in an instant, and I knew it was a load of shit. Poof! Testimony gone. And the liberation of my mind had begun...
The study came after, and continues to this day. It has only served to confirm how spectacularly fortunate I was to have had that moment of real, honest questioning that night in 1988.
I could have written almost the exact same thing. For 26 years I was asking, as I had been taught, if it was true, and I thought I was getting answers. Finally I found just enough information to seriously ask myself for the first time, "What if it isn't true?" All the mental gymnastics of trying to reconcile Mormonism with reality vanished in that instant of "Holy shit!" realization. I studied for a while to make sure that I hadn't somehow made a mistake, but really, once common sense kicks in, it's impossible to believe all the crazy stories any more.
I was blind as a bat and so happy as a convert to have found the truth. It was the happiest time of my life back in 2002. My first little doubt came after I read a book from the Deseret bookstore on Emma and how she felt about polygamy. I also realized in that book there was another Mormon denomination called RLDS and knowing there were off shoots added further disappointment. I still believed it was all true no matter how many things I found out along the way. As little ago as December 2009 I was pressuring my hubby to get temple worthy by bringing in the big guns. Since it didnt work and he still would not comply, I started a Bible reading program to comfort me. By September 2010 I was writing my resignation. During that time I had done enough online research to unravel my testimony and then the Gospel of John shoved me over the edge.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2011 11:33PM by suckafoo.
I had doubts from the time I was very little. I always wondered how we could know the church was true. I had doubts about the blacks/priesthood issue and women as second class citizens from the time I first heard of them. Another problem was that I never found church particularly spiritual or fulfilling. I tried, but I never had a testimony.I learned about the problems long after I quit attending.
I never bought into it for a minute, but I really TRIED to. It's all I knew and I thought everyone else had figured something cool out that maybe I was missing. Turns out, I was right all along and finally allowed myself to admit it. It was kind of scary, but liberating and wonderful too. So, my journey out wasn't nearly as bad as some peoples'. I just hopped on some exmo sites and was immediately validated in everything I had been thinking for decades.
Since my early youth I always thought that the creator of man and the world, galaxies, planets with no end etc....
could have come up with a better scenario than the con of hidden plates,seer stones and top hats, polygamy, polyandry, curse of the blacks,my neighbor interviewing me about sex, money grubbing church. It was all about the money then and its all about mormoney now.
"Yea, it shall come in a day when there shall be churches built up that shall say: Come unto me, and for your money you shall be forgiven of your sins." (Mormon 8:32)
I never bought into it either. Even as a kid I refused to get up in sacrament meeting to repeat the "testimony" we had learned in primary. In fact, I'm proud to say that I never did bear my testimony – I didn't have one.
I was a little kid when the announcement was made that blacks could have the priesthood. Until then, I didn't know that they had ever been denied the priesthood! No one was ever able to explain why to my satisfaction. Then the ERA thing happened. I was very young but I remember talks over the pulpit about the evils of equal rights for women. None of it made sense to me so I asked my parents why the church wouldn't want mom or me to have the same rights that dad did. They were at a loss too, but gave me the "we'll understand it all someday" speech. I thought it was bullshit. I was always bothered by the polygamy thing and didn't understand why we spent so much time in primary and sunday school talking about all of the former presidents of the church.
Some of the most un-Christian behavior I have ever seen came from people I knew from church. By the time I was 12-years old, whether the church was true or not, I didn't care. I didn't want to be associated with a group that would act like that, so I stopped attending. Still, I didn't really know about the problems with church history and doctrine until I came to this board several months ago after getting angry about the church's involvement in Prop 8.
I had to get myself out by reading up on the church and actually proving to myself that it was fake, because I couldn't just leave for good without any proof (lol it's funny, because people join the church without any proof at all!). But it made me a better person in the end and I discovered who I really was after the process. So for me, the other way around.
Yes, I did not study my way out. I had several dreams where people from church, we were in a church setting, were berating me for speaking my mind and having an opinion about something trivial. The dreams were so life-like that I pondered on them for several days afterward. I found my way to, I think, the NOM board by way of an email my dh received from a former mission companion. It was very innocent and soon realized I definitely identified with the NOM point of view.
I am not a BIC pioneer stock member. I am a convert. I didn't join the church to please my dh but because at the time I didn't think there was any harm in doing so. To me, it was his religion, his culture, his heritage, not mine. I was just buying some stock in it cause the guy I loved was part of it and I felt like he would have done the same if he wasn't raised in any particular religion and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. Bummer, I got hoodwinked. I finally confessed to my dh that I didn't believe in JS or the BOM. He seemed ok with it. We've never really broached the subject again. I just left him with this nugget to ponder. "I've tried being a mormon for 15 yrs. How about now you try not being a mormon for 15 yrs. and you tell me what feels right to you."
how did you know the "dog ate my homework" excuse when you were 5 years old? =)
i can honestly say i studied my way out, but it took first a life-shaking experience that made me suspect something wasnt right, when my bishop tried to tell me and my wife what we could and couldnt do sexually, between each other. that started my studying of church history and to see what other people outside the church thought about that subject--exmo and nevermo.
A lot of things never added up to me- The Curse of Cain doctrine, justifying rape, murder, and property destruction, celestial polygamy, "skin of blackeness" no horses in the New World, the land bridge etc... I put these things on a shelf for survival. I was torn because I *knew* science could trump religous ideas, but thought there had to be an explanation. I also remember reading the PoGP one day in SM and I turned to my TBM mom and started asking her questions about it. She was very evasive.
When I got to BYU, I had my first real freedom and decided to do whatever I felt like, be damned any consequences. I stumbled on the BY racist doctrines and a few years after I resigned, the DNA research by Simon Southerton.
I grew up with a provisional belief. If the people I loved and trusted said it was real and true, then, okay, I'd go along. And I did a pretty good job convincing myself.
But my Still Small Voice® kept saying, "Mmmmmmm, I don't know about that."
And I would say, "Shut up."
In a way, you could say I studied my way out of the church, but not by reading up on church origins or digging into the scriptures. I studied psychology and learned about peer pressure, group think, self-inflicted delusions and cult behavior. I learned about propaganda and indoctrination. The switches were thrown in my brain and I realized, "Oh, this is just like the church, but it must be different and good somehow."
I hung in there a little longer while my I-want-to-believe self duked it out with my it's-a-load-of-baloney self. Fortunately, the sane part of me prevailed.
That's close to my experience as well. I studied psych & thought the same thing. I stopped going to church to hang out with my never-mo bf. It turned from a few Sundays to a 5 years. It wasn't really until last year that I took the time to read all the information out there & study it & realize it was all bologna. Soon after I read all these books about the FLDS & polygamy & that pretty much did it for me.
Stray Mutt Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > "Oh, this is just like the church, but it must be > different and good somehow." >
I did that so much too. I think everyone does to some extent. When I found out how cults worked and noted the similarities i just kind of went "oh well yes that is how all those bad organizations that are devil shadows of the true church of god" The church was above any reproach for me. I knew about the pshycology of a public affirmation and what that does to a persons belief system but just figured it was fine since "it really is true in this case and if it builds testimonies that is a good thing."
Yes, I always had doubts like the others here, even tho I converted as a teen. I read volumes of books on my way out as a way of validating the way I already felt about the church, and as a way of reversing 32 years of indoctrination. For example, I could not read the Book of Mormon without putting it down and thinking to myself, "there is no way this was written 2000 years ago." Grant Palmer's book merely served to confirm what I'd already long suspected--that the Book of Mormon was a fraud. Reading was and is very therapeutic in the deconversion process.
Leaving mormonism was acknowledging the true disbeliever I've always been and a great deal of research aswell. I was actually 13 when I realized that I was actually supposed to believe the stories in the bible and the BoM, I had before that thought they were just stories. I never really could believe in the "scriptures", it always sounded phony to me. Ten years later I left mormonism and stopped pretending that it's possible to remain a mormon when you think their scripture is BS.
It was the whole idea of an omniscient, omnipotent God who restored a church that most people will never hear about. If it's that important and it was going to control my every action, he should have done a better job selling it.
But Socrates (my husband) asked me this morning if there was ANYTHING I had a hard time convincing myself when I was growing up.
There was just one. And that doubt was directed more at myself than at the claims of Mormonism. I had a hard time with personal revelation. How could I know if I was feeling "the spirit", or if it was just me? How could I know if I was getting an answer to prayer, or if I was just feeling good about what I WANTED (or perhaps feeling bad about what I FEARED)?
I didn't trust fleeting feelings as "testimony", or answers to prayers. My sense was that they were inconsistent and shifted too often to rely on them.
I had a hard time with getting a testimony for that same reason. I just figured that if i lived it long enuf, the testiimony would someday just emerge. Didn't happen. I did think i had a testimony of the bom tho.
While it took finding the most glaring errors to get me to admit it...I had problems with things all along.
For a decade and a half or so I gave it my best though. I served a mission, served in callings, followed the Mormon plan for my life only to realize that despite all of the working and trying I still didn't believe it. I managed for those years to shelf issues and hold off disbelief. Eventually though it all came home.
My wife sometimes still accuses me of lying to her about my belief when we got married but the fact is I didn't even realize myself at the time that I didn't really believe. I was trying to....but in the end it just didn't work.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2011 10:52AM by badseed.
It's funny because I was actually thinking about this just last night. After reading all the stories here about people researching so that they actually KNOW (as opposed to warm-fuzzy know) that it is false, I've been feeling like I did it wrong.
I spent my whole childhood never quite believing it, but really wanting to because everyone I knew 'knew' that it was true. At the point that I just couldn't take the holier-than-though attitudes and hypocrisy I hadn't read a thing that was anti or even unflattering to the church. I just knew that 'God's People' couldn't act that way and quietly stopped going. (Helped by the fact that I was now in college and living away from home) The learning about the true origins and all the inconvenient truths has only fairly recently happened (mostly thanks to this board) and has made me feel more secure in my choice.
As someone else mentioned, it's funny that you can feel so guilty leaving because you just never felt it was true, but that they expect you to join up and play the game your whole life based on a feeling...
you knew it was a fraud all along and are only getting back to your real self -- the self that had a lot of questions and doubt but was peer-pressured, family-pressured, friend-pressured and leader-pressured into pretendint to have a testimony.
But in order to cut through all of the layers of lies that accumulated through the process of trying to please all those who wanted me to share the delusion (a la misery loves company) and share the consensus testimony, I had to study and figure out for myself what maded sense and what didn't, so that the usual tactics of guilt and intimidation wouldn't work again. In that sense, I indeed had to study my way out.
I realized there is probably no god when I was in the 2nd grade. I remember what I was doing when it occurred to me. It was an epiphany that nagged at me until I realized the Church is false at age 33.
However, I doubted my own reasoning ability. I felt that here are all these adults who believe in Jesus and God and Joseph Smith. Maybe they know something that I don't. Then as I got older, I wondered if that thing they knew was in the temple. As time went on, I grew more sure of my ability to reason but more invested in Mormonism.
There were also fear triggers that I picked up along the way. I was irrationally afraid to entertained my doubts or read books critical of the Mormon church. In time, I reached a crisis point where I had to free myself from this mental cage I was in, and that was when I ordered Todd Compton's book from Amazon, then one of D. Michael Quinn's books, then Charles Larson's book, etc.
I never really did believe so much as feel afraid to not believe. As I've read some of the replies to this thread, it occurred to me that Mormons talk about faith but what they're really talking about is fear. The Church doesn't strength their faith to believe. It strengthens their fear of disbelieving.
I studied my way out of the Church, but that was really just to bolster my intellectual capacity to win debates with Mormons. The real turning point was overcoming the fear, embracing what I knew was the truth, and leaving the Church.
Back in the early 1950s when I was a young child growing up in the mormon church, I started having a difficult time reconciling religious magic with my common sense viewpoint of the real world. Everything about religion is magic. Take for example the concept of god. The Mormons teach that god is a physical entity who looks like a man. So where exactly does this physical god reside? It did not make sense that god could be floating around up in the sky. It did not seem logical that there was anywhere on the planet earth that was god’s home base. The idea that god could be living somewhere outside the solar system made absolutely no sense. So I became an atheist at a fairly early age.
Consider the idea of prayer. As I sit inside my house and speak in a normal tone of voice, it is 100% obvious that the sound of my voice goes no further than the walls of my house. With hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people (located all over the earth) praying concurrently, how is one physical god able to hear them all, understand what they’re saying, and somehow or other respond to the subject matter of each prayer?
By the time I was 14 years old I was certain that religion was a bunch of magical horsepucky that made no sense whatsoever. But since my parents were dedicated TBMs, I had to bide my time for a few years before I could break from the church. I started ducking out of meetings whenever possible and I did my best to avoid listening or paying any attention to what was going on in the church meetings.
When I started attending college at age 17, I just quit going to mormon church meetings. Of course my parents did not like that much, but they understood me well enough to know that I had no interest whatsoever in their church. Other than being unwilling to attend church, I was a responsible young man who did not cause my parents any grief. So I suppose that they decided they had best leave well enough alone.
So to respond directly to the statement of the original poster, I “reasoned” my way out of the church. I had enough self confidence to totally believe that I was right, and thus I had no doubt as to the correctness of my actions.
Of course, they blamed me for not having enough faith, or not being worthy enough, or not being able to see that the magic had actually worked.
But I knew enough about magic acts to know that no matter how convincing the illusion is, it's still a trick, even if you can't figure out how it was done.
You're my hero that you were doubting at age 5! I didn't doubt until I was at least 11, and even then it had nothing to do with the fact that it all seemed hokey, but rather me pondering how a person could actually know if their religion was truer than others, which was sparked by my exposure to people of many other religions.
Of course I went on to buy the explanation of the spirit hook line and sinker, augmented by people who were very good at selling that point. My lack of exposure to any of the negative aspects of the church turned me into an extreme mormon in my teenage years. My freshman year at BYU turned me into an even more fanatical extremist.
So when I went on a mission to Europe and started expecting results from my fanaticism, my faith had to undergo an overhaul when, to my shock, I didn't see any. By the end of my mission I had transformed from super-conservative mormon to liberal mormon.
And thus I remained until, after graduating from BYU and eventually starting to look for answers, I found enough information to be able to put all the pieces of my life and faith together, and realize in a single moment that I had been duped.
Today it still strikes me funny that I was so capable of such a magical view of the world.
I started doubting at age 15. For me the doubts came when I questioned why God would only visit Joseph Smith and tell him about how every other religion was wrong. I mean if all of the religions were wrong, wouldn't God have appeared to all of the people to tell them that they were all wrong? And then tell them about "the one and only true church?" I didn't start studying until recently thanks to this board of great advisors.
I am embarrassed to say that I didn't make use of my own thought processes until I was 23. Never questioned, never doubted. Accepted everything at face value. You couldn't have asked for a better sheep.
But when my brain finally kicked in gear, I saw through the church instantly. I hadn't doubted, but I was really not into the church. It bored me to tears, all of it, even though I believed it, and it was such a relief to realize it was bull$h#*!
I definitely didn't study my way out, but it was reading a chapter of Miracle of Forgiveness that turned the light on. After years of praying for a testimony, the first time I had an honest to God overwhelming feeling regarding the church, it was the opposite of what it was supposed to be. And what I finally *KNEW* was that Spencer W. was full of it and the church was too.
I walked away and finally read No Man Knows My History about 35 years later.
Picture sitting in the car park of a temple minding your own business when the Relief Society president of your ward comes up to you and states "if you are not careful you will study yourself right out of the Church"..
I feel that I was born with doubts too. I went along with it all because I had to as I could not have said at 10 or 11 or 12 I dont believe it. I was dependant on my TBM parents.
My mission started me on the road out as that is the time the loving & friendly church I grew up with was replaced with a mean & nasty adult church.
It was the experience of my mission that demonstrated to me that nothing worked, period. My prayers were never answered, priesthood blessings never worked, & gospel promises never materialized. I could not even get a confirmation from God that what I was doing, as a missionary, was the right thing to do. I returned home honorably but spiritually wounded, fatally.
I thought that if I investigated the "non-approved sources" then I would go straight on down to hell. It was in my early 20s that I just stopped going because something just wasn't right. Similarly, I think I've always had disbelief, but the temple truly sealed the deal (and yet I still went on a mission for 4 1/2 months). I tried to fake it after the temple and mission, but I just couldn't do it, so I stopped going. Tortured myself with guilt for years and years. It was in the past 2-3 years that I finally started to research the REAL history, not the whitewashed, glossed-over history.
Funny thing is, my mom always considered me to be her most analytical and logical child. I'm the only one who's out of the church. Go figure.
Left in middle age because I realized that there was something wrong with mormons and mormonism, and researched if others found out the same things.
I was always feeling victimized and controlled to fit into their mold and decided that I didn't want to take it anymore, and so I walked away. I've come to realize that mormonism isn't real Christianity, and I've found a church that more resembles my version of Christianity as found in the New Testament.
My research into mormonism and how it is cultic, and damaging is what opened my mind to questioning JS and the church.
If the church wasn't soul sucking and damaging, and the members controlling, judgemental and conditional in love/acceptance, I would be still an active member.