Posted by:
Craig Stevenson
(
)
Date: March 15, 2011 10:40AM
So I have been reading this board and posting with a cover name for several years now and I decided it was time to be myself.
My name was removed from church records late last year but I have been out of the church for over 5 years. I postponed having my name removed for many reasons but I guess the biggest was my parents. My father had been ill for the last ten years and finally went to meet his Maker a little over two years ago. Then there was my mom who is still TBM and continues to believe. I think she does more out of a hope that she will see my dad again than any other reason and I will not take away her hope of being with dad by stealing her belief in any way. So I waited until I simply could not put it off any longer. She knows I am not a member and although she is not happy about it, she has dealt with it quite well and she lets me believe the way I want while I let her believe the way she wants. She lives with me and my wife because she can't afford to live on her own and it is a good relationship even though my wife and I are not morgbots.
I just want to say that the happiness I have known since leaving the church is unmatched by anything I ever knew while a member. I spent the last 25 years of my life as a member on antidepressants, three at the same time for most of that time, and with all that I still lived with guilt every day of my life. Why did I live with guilt? Well, my nature is to study and gain as much knowledge and information about a subject as is humanly possible, and I did just that with the church. I studied everything that was available, and as most of you know from personal experience, knowledge was what led me out of the church. But until I was able to accept that what I had believed in my entire life was not what I had believed it to be I had to deal with the constant discord between what I knew logically and what I believed emotionally. As it goes though, while I was still believing, and since I had so much knowledge about the church and what was expected of someone who hoped to attain the celestial kingdom, I knew that it was not enough to NOT do the bad things, but I had to DO many more things than I was humanly capable of actually doing because so much is expected of every member. That was where my guilt came from. Not because I was doing anything contrary to what the church taught but because I knew I was simply not doing everything that was expected of me and although I tried like hell to do it all, there were only so many hours in a day and there is only so much a person can do, and that is never enough for the church. Towards the end I was second councilor in the high priest group, I was home teaching 6 families, one of which was a woman with 7 kids whose husband had walked away from to be with his girlfriend and who constantly needed a car fixed or something in her house fixed, which I always did because I was her home teacher. I was never home because I was either at work or doing something for the church and to top it off I was in the darkest spot in my life with depression because I simply did not feel like I was doing enough.
One day I was teaching the class in priesthood when a less active member asked a question that provided me with my opportunity to finally see the light. He asked me if it was true that Joseph and Brigham had actually married women who were married to living husbands. Well, even with all my studying I had never come across that, mostly because my studies always stayed away from those "anti-mormon" sites. I vowed to find the answer for him because nobody else in the class could (or would) provide the answer to his question. When I discovered the answer that was all I needed to finally open my eyes and realize that what I had always believed was nothing more than lies. I had always had certain questions that I had never found the answers to but I was able to cog-dis my way around them, but once my eyes were opened it was like someone opened the flood gates and all the answers to all my questions came flooding in.
So, I have been a non-believer for well over 5 years now but just recently have I become a true non-mormon. All of my friends are still believers, at one degree or another in their belief, and my oldest friend who is like a brother to me who for many years was a non-believer like me recently became active in the church again. He wrote to me and told me how much the church means to him and how happy he is to be back in and that he hopes I will remember how important the church is and come back too. I replied and reminded him that I had removed my name from the church and that I was no longer a member and that I would never be a member again in this lifetime. He said that would not affect our friendship, but I have not heard from him since. That makes me sad mostly because I hate to see a good man waste his life dedicated to a fraud like the church, but there is not much I can do about it so I accept whatever happens just as I did when I finally told my mother about my decision. As many of you already know, the church tears families and friends apart and cares nothing about the lives it destroys while promoting its propaganda that it is a family centered and caring organization.
Well, I guess that is my story and all I wanted to share today. I have finally come out of the closet and told the world who I am and what I believe, or do not believe as the case may be. I will be posting under my real name from now on so my alias is gone forever now. This feels almost as good as the day I finally accepted in my heart and mind that I no longer believed in the church and that I was no longer going to participate in the lie that is the Mormon church. I am free and god it feels great!!!!!