I don't understand why mormons view friends/family who decide they are no longer mormon as negatively as they do. Anyone have a good explanation of the reasoning? People who are never mormons and aren't interested in becoming mormons do not get the same negative treatment.

I went to a very small ward. There was literally a handful of young men from 12 to 18. So we all knew each other pretty well and I was pretty close to the kid just older than me and the kid just younger than me.

So... I visited home for a week recently, and the one just younger than me got word through my mom that I was back in town. I was genuinely excited about him visiting because I considered him an old friend and was curious about how he was doing. However, it became obvious pretty quickly that the goal of dropping by wasn't to catch up it was to rub it in my face that he was know better than me. I think part of why he thought he would be able to pull this off is because of some of the crazy rumors that have been going around about me in the ward. (drugs, college dropout, etc.) He had also just got off his mission a couple months ago. It didn't work out well as he would have liked because I'm actually doing pretty well and will be going to optometry school.

Right off the bat he was extremely condescending and started criticizing me for what I'm like currently and for what I was supposedly like back in the day (which was odd -- I was peter priesthood) and my influence on my family etc.

It was long, drawn out and painful. I felt very disgusted about the entire thing by the time it was over. What I was hoping would be catching up with an old friend wasn't...

And he's not the only one. It's like if you decide to stop being a mormon you are suddenly the anti-christ to your family and friends.

/end rant



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2010 02:07AM by jalden.

Re: Discrediting apostates --- Yup. Exactly what is calculated to happen when someone leaves the generational, traditional, religious culture of Mormonism. They become an outcast in many ways.
Some LDS folks don't have a problem with that, but it appears that most or many do.
It's the same thing that happens in most of the animal kingdom when one member leaves either on their own or pushed out.

I'm not a bit surprised by much of the treatment that is negative, non accepting, and critical by the cohesive tribe. Not at all. When we purposely take ourselves out of our tribe, there will naturally be negative consequences.
The defector is seen as a threat, different, not to be trusted, shunned, a danger, and a dozen other fearful attitudes creep up. It's very often taken as a personal insult.

So, we try to manage those waters as best we can, doing all we can to teach others how to treat us as human beings, still acceptable but different.

We are most fortunate when we have LDS folks in our lives as friends and family that are not threatened or fearful, caustic, rude, etc. because we changed our minds and left the family traditions.

But, as human beings, doing what they usually do, there will be those that cannot or will not adjust to our changes, at least not easily.

The only way I have found to deal with those who are not able to accept or understand my changes is to treat them with patience and love and be kind and polite. Just exactly the way I behaved as a Mormon! :-)

I agree. People aren't supposed to leave the Morg and especially not be happy! We shattered their delusions, so they hate us for doing that.

If the gospel is assumed true, then there are only one-sided reasons for rejecting it, all bad.
It's logical. If the gospel is true, then something MUST have gone wrong with you.
That's the fundamental problem, a false dicotomy that it's the gospel or bust.
And worse, you're now an agent of satan sent to tempt them, and they're scared of you.
It's quite paranoid.
IMO that's the fundamental evil of Mormonism- paranoid intolerance. That the apostate is even something to be tolerated is intolerance. I agree with SuzieQ#1 that you just have to be tolerant of their intolerance and that in itself will make them wonder WTF? Someday.

I recently asked a bunch of my mom friends who are LDS what they thought was worse, believing the gospel but not following it's teachings because it didn't suit you, or after long amounts of research about the church all from church resources (JoD, BoA, History of the Church, books for sale at Deseret etc) and a lot of prayer deciding that you no longer believe the gospel to be true... with the exception of one or two women (out of about 20) they all said that leaving the church was worse.
The main reason they gave was breaking your covenants.
It makes me so sad as I will probably just leave the group so as to not cause a stir. I can no longer participate in religious discussions because I feel like a fraud for not telling them (well I've told two of them). But everything in the group seems to lead back to the church with them. I'm not out to "deconvert" anyone, however I keep throwing in little comments. I didn't think I would ever be an "angry and bitter apostate" but it's surprising how angry it can make a person when someone proclaims that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy and only had women sealed to him after death. I imagine she is quite in shock to learn that he had over 30 wives. She also said but the wife had to agree to it first and that is why he never did cause Emma wasn't faithful enough, or something along those lines. She then went on to proclaim how ready she is to practice polygamy should we be asked to do it again.
When I was still TBM none of that would have seemed odd to me, faith trying for sure, but I had already determined to be faithful etc. Now it just makes me sick. All of it.
I pointed out that doctrinally speaking it would be better to have you names removed from the church as you would then no longer be held accountable in the same manner (sort of a spiritual bankruptcy I guess) and that those who believe but just chose not to follow the teachings are "sinning against the greater light" but no one really agreed.
Worst part is that some of these women are among my closest friends. One of them I have known for about 14 years.

Yeah, but wouldn't be inactive and being a 'Jack' Mormon be breaking your covenants too. I mean if you have gone to the Temple and then decide later to drink coffee, that most evil of all drinks, haven't you broken your 'covenants' just as much as someone who has researched themselves out?

They hate those who leave because it is a cult.

I was just. reading about siddah yoga, which is the spiritual practice referred to in the book Eat, pray, love and those who leave are vilified. Normal people don't hate because someone goes to another religion.

I think this type of shunning behavior is common with many if not most religions. In Islam you can be killed if you ever decide to leave. The Bible says to kill the non-believer. The Catholic churches history is full of stories about heretics and non-believers being vilified and killed in ghastly manners.

It makes you wonder about all those lessons on 'not judging'. They must have fallen on deaf ears. And why wouldn't they want to speak to us, surely their gospel is about 'lost sheep'. Maybe they do have moments of personal doubt and are afraid they will find out the real truth. They are in a comfort zone and don't want to face making decisions on their own (mind control). I'ts so sad.

But Cheryl, every tribe does that, every human group. To single out Mormonism as something less than normal, as a damaging cult that puts more pressure on people than is right or ethical, is wrong. All human groups practice ostracism and shunning and peer pressure. Are teens who pressure one of their peers to have sex or do drugs cultists? If they reject that peer member who refuses, are they not simply shunning that person? That can't make them a "cult."

"Cult" is just a mean word that really doesn't get us any closer to understanding what's going on. More importantly, Mormonism isn't a cult because there really are no cults and what Mormons do in cutting people off, destroying families, and shunning and pressuring people to obey and believe what they are told--none of that is any different than what any other human group does. They all use social conformism as a means to force people to follow a strict behavioral and dietary regimen.

It's a good thing. That's how we and they learn.

I don't agree that *all* tribes do this equally and if they did, so what? Just because *all* teen girls tend to giggle, doesn't mean that we or they can't mention it. And it doen't mean that a teacher can't ask them to stop if they're doing it during a class lecture. Everybody does it is the worst excuse there is for destructive behaviors.

*Cult* is a descriptive name and not mean at all. If someone is in a cult and overreact to the word, it says more about them than it does about the speaker.

An Appeal to Popularity (everyone does it) means nothing. If what "everyone" does is wrong, then it's wrong. And coming here to express your pain (generic "you" here btw) is a healthy way of dealing with that rejection. Instead of being told, in essence, to "suck it up" because "everyone does it" a little support and empathy might be in order.

Yes, humans have a general tendancy to band together and can often be hurtful to those who choose to leave their "band". That doesn't make it right nor does it make it less painful to the person being harmed. And Mormons (like other restrictive, authoritarian and insecure regimes) take it to a far greater level than the average "tribe". They actively attack those who have left, going so far as to make up offenses or sins to attribute to the offenders. This is evil and abusive and SHOULD be denounced by those who care about honor and integrity.

Cults set people up. The primary directive in the morg is to build and reatain membership. They don't have the power to fine or jail people who leave or pay them money to stay, so they use peer pressure as manipulation, in other words, lovebombing and shunning.

Your former friend as a newly returned mishie was just following his cult programming. The gossips gave him ammo to use against you and he's punishing you for not following your cult programming. He's also probably jealous of your success after spending two years on a treadmill.

Sorry. You deserve better. Congratulations on getting out of that rat maze and going forward in your schooling.

Are you surprised by this? I was vilified just because I didn't follow the WoW in high shool. I will never forget those demon eyes staring me down while walking through a party with a beer in my hand. Those people did me a favor though by giving me one more reason to leave the church.

Because you are no longer a member of their tribe. They look at you as an outsider or traitor. You left the tribe. You are now different. They are THREATENED.

I have been 'affected' by this, but I honestly dont think it's a 'Morg' thing..... it's more like a tribal reaction.
The same holds true of any member of a group who leaves that group. You can see it in other religions, sports affiliations, political affiliations... even national/racial affiliations.

George is introducing his Russian bride to some workmates. She's slim, athletic, constantly smiling and with a personality like sweet honey. It's their first anniversary and it's obvious they are blissfully happy.
Tom turns to his wife, an ugly 250lb harpy, who looks like she's chewing a wasp and says "at least I didnt have to go to some foreign country to meet my wife"

I can relate to this very well. Being the only Mormon in my family, I escaped being shunned by my family. They were supportive when I joined the LDS Church, and they were even more supportive when I left it. They finally admitted that although they'd never said anything, they thought it was a really weird organization, with very strange ideas.

Anyway, I have three really close friends. One I meant in Grade 7, when we were 12. Another I met at church when I was 16, and the other I also met at church when I was 21. I'm now 51.

For some naive reason, I thought they'd be supportive of my new life. I didn't want to upset them by telling them the truths that I'd found about the Church, so I talked only about my feelings and where my head was now in my search for truth. Sometimes they'd actually ask, "Where are you now?" so I'd tell them.

What's strange is that one friend (the one I've known since I was 12) left the Church a few years before I did. She's now a non-denominational Christian. But 8 months ago, she asked me where I was now and I said I no longer considered myself to be a Christian. She got rather defensive about being a Christian herself. I said that was perfectly fine with me. She could be whatever she liked, but I'm just not a Christian anymore. I haven't seen her since.

The way they handle it is strange too. The one friend has moved to the States. She was coming up for a visit and promised to get together with me. She never called while she was here. She never called later to say why she couldn't meet either. Not knowing where she was staying, I couldn't call her. I've never heard from her again.

The other friend asked me if I wanted to go to an event with her. The event came and went and she never called me. I'd forgotten which weekend it was, so I didn't realize it had gone by until my Dad mentioned it. When I later asked her what happened, she made more of a noise rather than an answer. "Uh, oh, that. Yeah, well ..." What?

What I don't understand is why people would make arrangements to get together with you and then not follow through with it. They don't answer my e-mails now. One has at least phoned me a few times, but doesn't follow up with any get-together plans. I'd rather they avoid me than make false promises of meeting with me. Or just be adult enough to tell me they're uncomfortable around me.

I never dreamed that I'd be friendless, as I've always had good friends in my life. At the moment, all of my friends live in my computer.

don't you think they should count, too?

I met my husband online. It wasn't through a dating site; it was through a messageboard where we had a common interest. Sure, I eventually met him in person, but he was my friend online first.

So if you have friends online, I wouldn't say you're friendless.. :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2010 09:58AM by knotheadusc.

Oh, definitely. They're wonderful friends, and I have friends from all over the world. I've met a few of them as well. I flew to Florida for a week and met a few gals from California, and we went to a concert. It was fun, but exhausting to do it in a whirlwind weekend.

But I mean that I have no one to go out to a movie with, or something like that, and I'm very shy, so don't meet new people easily.

Yeah, I understand that. I don't have a lot of local friends, either, and I'm a nevermo. I don't know that this is a Mormon phenomenon, though, as much as it is a change in the way people meet and talk to each other. Before the Internet, people were forced to communicate face to face or on the phone. Now that we have computers, you don't even have to get dressed and you can talk to someone. I think it sort of facilitates laziness in meeting new people. Instead of making an effort to engage, you can sit at home and log onto the net!

Skip to the final sentence if this is too long for you.

In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials". The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.

Socrates asks if it is not reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?

....Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.

"Suppose further," Socrates says, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true," viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?

After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing" (516b–c)

Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?" (517a)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2010 11:08AM by caedmon.

I read the Allegory of the Cave excerpt and liked it. I do think we tend to have a limit to how much of our reality we are willing to accept as being untrue.

If you point something out that means someone is wrong about where Brad Pitt was born, that is fine they will just shrug, accept the change, and move on. If you point something out that indicates a person's entire reality is false, its going to be incomprehensible and too strange to accept as truth -- so they are going to go back to looking at the shadow.

So... hate towards members becoming nonmembers could = I have to either believe something is wrong with you or I have to leave my cave. Unfortunately, believing something is wrong with the apostate is probably much easier than believing the foundation for how and why they live their life isn't based on truth.

The tribal theory is interesting too. I do think a lot of what we do (altruism, us vs. them mentality, obedience towards leaders) is because a large chunk of our evolution occurred in tribes.

It's still selfish and irrational behavior that pisses me off. I don't want my differing belief system to make me the cave-dragging, tribal enemy.

Mormons used to kill the people who left too.

It seems to me though, that if you really believed an apostate was going to Hell, then there'd be no point in killing them. Whatever God could do to them would be way worse than anything you could do to them. So why not just leave it up to God to deal with them?

They're clearly afraid of the non-believers and want to purge them out. And I guess it's the same with our former friends. They see us as dangerous. They're too frightened to even be around us too much.

Maybe our apostateness would rub off on them or something.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2010 01:26PM by Greyfort.

The mormons fear anything that upsets their sense of order and hope. Just like the film the MATRIX
"Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
[Neo's eyes suddenly wander towards a woman in a red dress] "

Angry with themselves for still being stuck, powerless in a damned cult, so they direct that emotion outwards??

works both ways. Lots of angry, nasty, raging people when none of it is necessary or produces a positive, loving result.

So they destroy the messenger. I've noticed most people who blindly cling to Mormonism do so because of an intense emotional need of some sort. For example, a lot of "born in the covenant" Mormons cling to it because it's all they know and they lack the strength to envision a new reality. They HAVE to validate their only reality at any cost. Others have equally complicated reasons. My desire for the perfect family blinded me for years to the fact that Mormonism can't produce that family. I saw the image and totally bought into it. Discovering that I couldn't get the family I wanted by following Mormonism was far more devastating than finding out Mormonism wasn't true. But it broke the hypnosis the LDS church held on me. The disaster of a bishop in our ward had his part-member family fall apart as a child. His LDS mom convinced him that it was because his dad wasn't a faithful Mormon. Now in his brain the idea of Mormonism not being true equals a devastating family tragedy (I've pieced the facts together from his own comments although the conclusion is my own). If he admits Mormonism isn't true, then his family will fall apart and the things that horrified him as a small boy - he will have to re live. He has no problem not only destroying people who leave but is perfectly awful to anyone he thinks isn't living the gospel to the best of their ability. Everyone has to keep all the rules and then the gospel WILL be true like he needs it to be.

It's easier to destroy another person than to face your fears and overcome them.

Because to mormons, all that matters is mormonism and other mormons. Nothing else matters. So to mormons, those that leave have betrayed them, and the cause of mormonism, which is to convert the world. So by leaving, you are doing the opposite of what mormonism is all about, growth of mormonism.

You left the clique of the cool mormon folks, and have become a nerd/unworthy/an enemy. They do try to rescue you, but then they have to shun you, because you no longer fit into their conditional world.

One thing that I have noticed over the years is that the leadership needs people to hate those who leave. I saw that first hand when the new Bishop began telling people that the resigned (and much loved) Bishop was an adulterer- that was a lie, but it soothed peoples fears. I saw that happen to others as well.

Fear that it might not really be true is a very big factor in mormonisms version of what they call faith. If it is not true, then everything is lost. Everything here and in heaven. To not believe is a sin. The Priesthood Authority held by the Bishop and his superiors is believed to seal on earth as in heaven and if you are condemned here, God will hate you also.

So when people leave it causes a fear that they might be right, and if they are a well respected member that fear multiplies. The only way to ease that fear is to imagine them to be an enemy, or an "other".

Therefore, rather than believe that those who leave the church may be right (because they are well respected and believable) it is SAFER to believe that they must be hiding a secret, and it is safer to believe that they are in fact, the enemy.

As an added feature, the symbolism of infection is used to cause people to fear the apostate as if they will somehow be infected with doubts or unbeliefs by associating with them.

I do not think that deep inside people actually hate those who leave the church, but rather they envy them, and at the same time fear them because it points out their own nagging doubts. Doubts that are a sign of weakness and unworthiness of Gods approval.

I have seen and felt the hate and discrimination of "not belonging" in jobs and groups. One mormon told me brig stated that,,, if you are not with us,,you are against us,,or something to that affect. Also have to consider the source of the statement. You break a sewer main,,you get shit.