Seemingly each time I learn slam dunk proof that mormonism is false, doubts creep in, that maybe I'm falling sucker for "anti" propaganda.

Is Mormon programming so powerful that it can override facts?

Absolutely yes, i have been getting slam dunks for a year and i still battle. You have to understand how long you were programmed for. The only way i can gauge myself on my decision is how much i improve in each of my counseling sessions. If i was still in the morg i would be in even worse shape than i am in now and i need to remember that, i would literally be dead probably if i did not leave it was literally killing me.

>
> Is Mormon programming so powerful
> that it can override facts?
>

Well, you know it's not the theology that keeps people in!

Remember when you were a kid and you learned that Santa Claus, in the form and manner you thought he existed, was was not real? But then you'd catch yourself wondering if some part of the myth might be true? Especially given how much effort you could see being put into creating belief, or at lease reliance!

If you're not a stone cold atheist (yet), 'forever' remains a consideration, and if you're BIC, you've only heard of one way to enjoy 'forever' and turning away can be daunting.

But either way, mo or exmo, be true to yourself; don't be doing something just for others' approval.

The thought of forever is very daunting because this life is long enough in my opinion. I feel like i have been here forever maybe longer than old dog.

I will be a stone cold Atheist after I am dead. Right now I am a hot blooded Atheist.

Yes.

Fear is a huge part of the programming, and few are immune to fear.

Even if you set aside the "anti facts" for a moment, much of what you were taught was how and why to be afraid of doing "the wrong thing." Even private thinking could be "sinful," so don't have "those" thoughts. "Be fearful of them" was the underlying message, time and time again.

You are adjusting, and letting go of fear is part of that.

https://youtu.be/1RWOpQXTltA

Here's a little something to chew on-
Mormons are commanded to be a record keeping people. The early saints kept records of everything the prophets taught and did because it was the Lord in action, and they produced their diaries and news paper articles as faithfully as possible.

Most of those diaries are kept from public view because they are testimony killers. Those faithful records and accounts are the stuff the "antimormons" feed off of.

The Journal of Discourses is full of stuff that kills testimonies and a treasure trove for enemies of the church! And yet, all of those words were published by the church and was promoted as being spoken over the pulpit by church leaders while under the influence of the Holy Ghost.

Why is that?
Is it because *all* of the early saints lied about their most sacred experiences? Were all of the sermons made up and published by antimormons in the church materials?

If the church was everything it says it is, you could read everything at the recommendation of the church.

Never doubt your doubts.

ALWAYS mistrust ANYONE who would tell you or anyone else to "doubt your doubts."

That's one of the surest signs of a CON JOB.

With the morg, that directive comes from the TOP DOWN.

This IS one of those times to TRUST YOUR FEELINGS.

Debunk TSCC one precept at a time. By the time you are finished it will add up to sum ZERO. There won't be anything left to believe, and you can own your doubts as God given. Be thankful you have been blessed with a questioning mind that can reason these things out.

A "slam dunk" for LDS would be:

"Look everywhere, read everything! You'll find no source able to factually dispute our claims!

Let us know when LDS scores a point.

Investigating doubts about anything indicates a mature mind working properly. Coming from a farming background I usually say "that's a bunch of shit" when I doubt something. Too bad I also came from a Mormon background that fed me bullshit all my life. Only recently was I able to find my way out of that enormous pile to realize it.

I like quotes. Here are a few that apply to this discussion but not in any logical order.

“Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”

This is why FAIR and FARMS and the other apologists are critical to the church's survival.

“I admire men and women who have developed the questioning spirit, who are unafraid of new ideas as stepping stones to progress. We should, of course, respect the opinions of others, but we should also be unafraid to dissent – if we are informed. Thoughts and expressions compete in the marketplace of thought, and in that competition truth emerges triumphant. Only error fears freedom of expression.”
- Apostle Hugh B. Brown,

“There are altogether too many people in the world who are willing to accept as true whatever is printed in a book or delivered from a pulpit.” – Apostle Hugh B. Brown,“

Apostle Hugh B. Brown's statements seem to contradict Apostle Boyd K. Packers comments below.

“I have a hard time with historians... because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.” Apostle Boyd K. Packer

"Some things that are true are not very useful." Boyd K. Packer

“This is a people adapted to unquestioning obedience. Orthodoxy becomes instinctive to the conditioned mind, and words mean whatever they need to mean to support the organization.” Don Bagley

"Sometimes, to discover the truth of a matter, one must be willing to place their currently held opinions and beliefs on the alter of honest inquiry." me

"To really understand something is to be liberated from it."

I can attest to this. It has taken me many years of study to free myself and become comfortable in my knowledge Mormonism is a complete fraud.

Yeah, I think so. We were programmed to think anything critical of the LDS church can't be trusted. "Anti-Mormon" material was all "lies, half-truths and distortions."

That being said, it doesn't mean you should blindly believe anything your read, pro or con. You should still examine the evidence, determine if the sources are reliable, study both sides and then come to your own conclusions on what the evidence shows.

Sometimes "the anti's" ARE wrong on something. Or maybe there is a more nuanced way of looking at some bit of history or issue.

Tobias Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Seemingly each time I learn slam dunk proof that
> mormonism is false, doubts creep in, that maybe
> I'm falling sucker for "anti" propaganda.

I never would have believed anything that the Tanners or any other anti MORmONS had to say EXCEPT that I had paid enough attention to what was going on to know that Gordon BS Hinckley and other MORmON leaders were a LYING about THE (MORmON) church. In fact they LIED a lot.

I knew enough about MORmONISM to know that IF Gordon BS Hinckley and his trite BS commentary about MORmON polygamy not being doctrinal was suddenly pitted against and thrust into the middle of Brigham Young's tyrannical despotic administration and reign then Gordon BS Hinckley most likely would have ended up with his throat cut, ala the MORmON temple penalties, maybe with in a day or two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YEMX0VooD4

IF a person just pays attention to the garbage that the MORmON leadershit continually spouts then the doubts about MORmONISM soon completely disappear as it becomes quite clear that MORmONISM is based on garbage more than anything else. "Doubt your doubts" is a prime example of MORmON garbage. Then comes the ultimate confirmation of MORmONISM -that being in Hell or ceasing to exist would be highly preferable to being in any MORmON (worse than Hell) heaven with insufferable sanctimonious MORmON asses.

> Is Mormon programming so powerful that it can
> override facts?

That is the very essence of being a faithFOOL member of THE (MORmON) church and staying in the foul vile grossly overpriced MORmON secret handshake social club.

Yes, that's how I know the people at the top either a) don't have any understanding of people who leave the church or b) they do understand but want to make us look bad to active members. As if anyone in Mormonism "just leaves" at the drop of the hat because they, ya know, want to sin and be neutered apostates in the telestial kingdom for eternity without their families and friends.
SMH.
I doubted my doubts for a long time before I went inactive. I looked for reasons to still believe. I tried to convince myself there was a way the church could be true. I wanted to believe it was true. I knew what happens to people who leave; the shunning, the gossip, the slander, the pity, the condescension. Who would want any of that?
I wanted to believe but my integrity demands consistency of me. I can't pretend to believe when I don't. I can't lie and go through the motions of the church just because I want to continue the illusion. Either the church is everything it claims to be or it isn't. They've said so themselves. I believe it isn't, with confident certainty.
That's what it came down to for me. It was about whether the church was true or not true. There were no other qualifiers for my decision to leave.
I doubted my doubts and doubted my doubts and doubted my doubts some more. Eventually it was like trying to deny gravity even though you hit the ground every time you trust-fall; do you keep doubting gravity or do you eventually concede that gravity is more plausible than no gravity? To keep falling would be insanity when the evidence is clear. Same with the church.
Yes, I could deny that all the "anti Mormon literature" was made up, but when it was proved correct time and time again (including from the church essays), for how long could I keep denying it?
The church offers no evidence other than "good feelings". Nice feelings aren't enough because many people have used that excuse to justify things that were clearly misguided. Catholics, Muslims, Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses are all just as convinced of their faith because of the same "nice feelings". The church affixes a fancy word to these feelings, "a testimony". A testimony is based on what? Nice feelings.
And those nice feelings have a tendency to dissipate rather quickly when one learns the hidden parts of Mormonism. Funny how that works. If a testimony was based on the truth of the church and not nice feelings, a testimony wouldn't crumble on impact against the cold wall of facts. The testimony would be just as strong because it wouldn't be contingent on how much you knew about the church but simply the truth of whether it was true or not.
So yeah. I exhausted doubting my doubts. There comes a time when one has to accept truth wherever it's found.

The only thing to doubt is lacking doubt. I doubt your doubts are not doubts.

I wish Joseph Smith would have doubted his doubts.

there was no doubt about what Joseph Smith really wanted, lots and lots ego stroking personal adulation along with tons of indiscriminate sex and enough resources (money) to facilitate it happening.

It dawned on Joe that the best way to get those things was to endlessly invoke the name of Christ. From there on out, Pervert Joe never let up because there was no doubt in his foul pervert mind about the best way to get what he wanted.

Mormonism demands a lot of time and energy to practice, so it's hard to be a little bit Mormon. You're either in pretty deep, or you're out. Mormonism requires believing firmly in things, such as priesthood power and golden plates from angels, that have to be either silly delusions or profound facts. It's either totally true, or absurd.

That kind of sharp either-or, all one way or all the other, is typical for fundamentalist ideologies, because it makes for strong commitment. If anything has a continuous spectrum then you can move along it gradually, doubting and relaxing---or believing and doing---more and more over time. If there are only two camps, though, then once you're in, you stay in, because the only alternative is the huge leap to the opposite camp, and if you're not ready to go quite that far, then you can't move at all.

Rigid binary thinking is one of the worst things about fundamentalist ideologies. It may even be the basic thing that one wants to reject, if one abandons the ideology, more than any individual dogma. And yet an instinctive association of truth with simplicity and certainty seems to be one of the hardest things to escape.

By all means doubt doubts. Whatever your current alternative to Mormonism may be, it is very probably wrong---at least in some ways or to some extent. Things are all less clear and more complicated than Mormonism teaches. Of course this includes critiques of Mormonism: they are not as perfectly clear and simple as some anti-Mormons might have you believe.

Just because the alternative to Mormonism is not perfect, however, does not at all mean that Mormonism must be true after all. When things seem uncertain, it is natural to feel nostalgic about the old simple faith. To take a Biblical metaphor, when the children of Israel got hungry in the desert, it was natural for them to want their old slave rations back. Free people don't get their meals supplied the way slaves do, and that sucks. It is worth it, however. Learn to grow your own food, and keep on.

Everyone's different, but in my case, once I found out the Truth, I was convinced. I never doubted the facts, because everything I learned just corroborated them.

My ancestors were neighbors of JS, and they APOSTATIZED from their Church of England to join JS's polygamous cult. Our family was in possession of hand written journals, which I had the privilege of reading. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to make copies, because the cult confiscated (conned my relatives into donating them to the archives) all of these, over the years. TSCC promised my relatives that they were welcome to come to the Marriott Library, and read the journals, whenever they wanted to--but when they tried, TSCC said they "had no record" of any such journals. Like, "Oops, some silly student must have botched up the records and lost them...." or something like that. I warned my cousins that this would probably happen, and when it did, they resigned. Yeah!

I like the analogy of the bull sh*t. Realizing Mormonism was a hoax did take some time, but once I knew the Truth, I never wanted to eat bull sh*it again. Who would?

The Truth hit me with a certainty, that religion never could. I believe more strongly that the church is false. My children never believed in Joseph Smith in the first place.

No, I never doubted my doubts. I would never be fooled again. I resigned, and never looked back. After walking out of that ward house for the last time, my elation was so great, and my life changed so much for the better, that I couldn't deny my own heart, my own feelings, as well as my brain.

(Well, I didn't need any special intuition or "prompting" to know that hatred, child abuse, threats, and lies were not of God.)