No way could I be the person I am now and still be in the church. When I look back at it, I didn't have the luxery for self discovery or to follow what I wanted. I was put on someone elese's agenda and I was knocking myself out to follow it or lying to make it look like I was. You just end up coping with it and years of lying, coping, and reluctantly putting up with it, takes it's toll on you mentally.

In the church I always felt stressed and that I was being pulled five sepparate ways. Now it's me. I know who I am, I can just relax. My lifestyle is what I choose it to be.

What I learned is we have to make the change. Nobody is going to do it for us. Freedom is right there you just have to chose it and move to it. Sometimes family comes around. You usually find better friends. Life gets better it really does.

Agreed. Any time you lose the ability to think for yourself, you lose something of yourself. Any time you are told to not believe what you hear or see, but believe what you are told you lose confidence in your ability to navigate in the world. Any time you are forced to be obedient through fear and intimidation, you lose some of your morality because you are having someone else's morals forced upon you. Any time that your life is about appearing good rather than developing character, your priorities take a hit.

The mind can only take so many hits, so many compromises, so many buried insecurities and shames. You need to be able to be faithful to your true self and keep as much control as possible over your life but most of all, you need time to work out your hang ups. Time the church won't grant you, not to mention you aren't allowed any hang ups in the first place. But everyone has them and having to pretend to be perfect, lest you be shunned, while not having the private time to sort yourself out because of church demands... Geez, it's a recipe for mental health disaster. No wonder most Mormons seem strange to most non-LDS.

I think that TSCC admires ambitious, outgoing, Type-A personalities. If you are a creative, laid back Type B, or a woman, Mormons don't turn themselves inside-out to get to know you.

Moreover, Mormons seem to admire OCD people, who excel at only one thing. Our ward had many performing sopranos, doctors and surgeons, attorneys, MLM promoters, who seemed too deeply immersed in their careers to ever drop the persona. (Looking back, maybe these dedicated people used their careers as an excuse to not do heavy church callings--LOL)

Mormons worship narcissists! Pedophiles are welcome to teach in the Primary. Criminals are forgiven, and allowed to repeat their crimes. Sociopaths are sought after, because they are relentless in pushing themselves onto others, and they make swell missionaries. A mission is the measure of a man, and the better liar and more phony a man (or woman) is, the better he/she will get along in Mormon society.

Secrecy is at the center of Mormonism, in its temples.

Weird intimacy, snooping into each other's underwear and sex life, private interviews with an older man and a young women, Mormonism's polygamous roots, polygamy in heaven, men and women proving their virility/sexuality by having too many babies too soon, men being arrogant enough to believe they will become Gods someday, all the lies and denial--all this is very sick.

Getting baptized for dead people--just that one ritual alone is the antithesis of sane!

Some of your terminology is interesting:

narcissist, pedophile, criminal, sociopath, liar, phony, arrogant.... hmmm....who comes to mind here?

Looks like the apple doesn't fall far from the tree down at the old cojcolds.

A man cannot change his personality from type B to type A.

I just invalidated Mormonism with the above statement. According to Mormon culture, I am a liar. They claim that there is no type B personality, only failed type A's.

The Mormon church is not looking for leaders--they have dozens and dozens of octogenarians on the hire list.

The Mormon church wants docile sheep, but they want the sheep to be aggressive, too.

How long can one put up with the tangled web they weave?



(thanks to Bill Shakespeare for the web metaphor)

The "tangled web" is actually from Sir Walter Scott. I always thought it was Billy S. til I looked it up one day.

Methinks my memory is tangled.

“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense, satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed especially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness.

If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators, which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.

Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad, for if he were King of England, that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do.

Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity, for the world denied Christ’s.

Nevertheless, he is wrong.

Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatics’ theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

DUH

Type A men are rewarded in the church, but Type A women certainly aren't, unless they are deep undercover. Women have to be utterly subservient on the surface and passive-aggressive underneath to be accepted.

So if you want to stay married and keep seeing your kids you are insane for staying in the church???

"So if you want to stay married and keep seeing your kids you are insane for staying in the church???"

Maybe it would be more accurate to say, "I think it's impossible to be completely sane and remain a TBM."