Are you folks as perplexed as I am over those who identify as ex-Mormon, but who have merely gone into an offshoot of Mormonism? It just seems like a weird intellectual/spiritual compromise. I have a long-time family friend who walked out of his marriage and into Chris Nemelka's cult; another long-time freind of mine revealed she was following Denver Snuffer.

Last weekend I met a woman who lives not far from me in Utah County. She asked me what ward I was in--I hesitated, trying to remember what the actual name of my ward was. She said, "Well, I'm an ex-Mormon." I said, "So am I!" "I could tell," she laughed, by how you answered my question.

She asked me what led me out of the LDS Church. I said it was Joseph Smith's very unprophet-like ways and the fraudulent Book of Mormon. Her face fell. "Have you heard of Denver Snuffer?" she asked. "He clears all that up."

I said very matter-of-factly: "It's all nonsense to me. I'm out of it all together."

These folks are not really ex-Mos. They are merely counter-culture or fringe Mormons. They still believe it. They haven't really escaped.

So do people only qualify as exmos if their beliefs match yours?

How do you assess this? Interviews, perhaps? Or a doctrinal statement?

What do you do if their beliefs don't match your requirements for membership of the ex Mormon community? I hear disfellowshipping is popular, but personally I prefer excommunication. it's got more style.

Duplicate post



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2015 05:27PM by finnan haddie.

is a J-dub an ex-christian? How about one from the ahmadayyah sect of Islam, or they exmuslims?

No.

I don't. If someone claims to be an exmo I see no reason not to believe.

Nothing. Is there a requirement to be an exmo, other than claiming to no longer have a belief in moism? Excommunication does have more style, but the morg is bleeding out. They need the numbers. Lol

What does this have to do with joining another man made religion?

Only that you replied to a post saying of those who join Mormon offshoots, "these people aren't really exmos", and you extended the conversation to cover "any other man made religions".

Seemed to me you were saying anyone who left Mormonism but retained any kind of religious faith didn't deserve to be called an exmo.

If that wasn't what you meant, I withdraw my snark.

she : "have you heard of Denver Snuffer ?"


me : "the serial killer ?"

The world was safer when he was just The Denver Panty Sniffer. These guys always up the ante.

Out of the frying pan and in to the fire.

All of Mormonism is based on the same non-sense that Joseph Smith came up with. Going from the LDS Church to some other Mormon sect means that you just wanted to change superficially. They really haven't noticed how absurd Joseph Smith's teachings really are.

Ida Smith, great-great granddaughter of Hyrum Smith, gifted her gravesite in the Smith burial spot to Christopher Nemelka. She died in January of this year. I wonder if Nemelka bought her a plot somewhere else, or if he even attended her funeral.

http://www.mrm.org/christopher-nemelka



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2015 12:17PM by GodLedMeOut.

Ida Smith decided later in life that she wanted to donate her body to university medical students for learning & research, so she no longer needed a burial plot. After deciding this, she met Nemelka and after some conversation they both felt the arrangement was a perfect fit for both their desires & interests for that last available Smith burial plot to be legally transferred to Nemelka.

(I realize I'm catching this thread almost two years later. I've just learned about Nemelka & am reading up.)

I have a friend who just cannot let it all go so he holds sacrament meeting at home with just his wife and kids. Maybe he will eventually follow a fringe group. I just thought he was smarter than that.

The ultra-legalistic and performance-based based nature of the modern correlated Church provides very little in the way of spiritual food to those that hold a supernatural view of the world. So, it doesn't suprise me at all that those who are more [ahem] "spiritually-minded" would jump ship into to something that offers a more rewarding experience without having to give up on one's familiar fairy-tales. I'm much more surprised when a life-long LDS Mormon becomes an evagelical, or a catholic, etc.

If you promote a greater emphasize on Christ, the BOM, and the NT and pull back from the heavy handedness of the D&C, Smith's post-Kirtland era doctrines, all of the post-Smith prophets, etc. you start to get something like Rock Waterman-style Mormonism. From my perspective, this style of Mormonism is far more uplifting and spiritually supportive and far less guilt inducing and soul sucking than LDS-style Mormonism. If I was less rationlist/materialist oriented than I am, I could see the appeal.

That's my take on the Snuffer/Waterman types...

As for people jumping ship to Nemelka. I guess that another take away from the history of Mormonism is that some people just dig "Bat $h!t Crazy". Go figure?!

...that my dad didn't join up with a fringe group when they excommunicated him.

(He was ex'ed because my sister brought assult charges down on him for the abuse she and her daughter suffered. I don't know the whole story because I have been estranged from my family for over 20 years. Rumor has it, dad was ex'ed, but at some point went back...I have no idea if any of it is true or not, because they are one big batch of lyers.)

I could see where the main church would not be "Mormon Enough" for him. For all I know he might have gone to one of them....

He REALLY liked the idea of poligamy. Makes me want to throw up thinking about it.

@westerly62
That is the part I don't understand. The RLDS aka Community of Christ have already done that and it didn't work out for them. They had Emma Smith and Joseph Smith the 3rd to run their church which sounds like a powerful combination but it didn't go anywhere. Maybe they just didn't stick to the script because their prophets were supposed to be descendants of Joseph Smith but they gave up on that decades ago. Their prophet resigned as prophet and the new prophet got a revelation saying that it was all bogus in a veiled way. They even dropped the Book of Mormon as scripture. Maybe they were just too honest. Any amount of Mormonism is hard to swallow. For example Joseph Smith tried to sell the copy right of the Book of Mormon. Why would any prophet of God after going through everything he claimed he went through would try to sell the copy right to the work of scripture God just gave you? Also if Joseph Smith were to sell anything it should have been the Gold Plates or Sword of Laban. He would have received millions for them if they were real.

I suppose it depends how you define "Mormon"


I would tend to call anything "Mormon" that revolves around the Book of Mormon and the other writings of Joseph Smith. Even if you deny these writings are literally true (as Community of Christ does), if they still hold a central place in your beliefs and practices, I would call that Mormon.

On the other hand, if someone understands "Mormon" to refer only to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, then leaving that church and joining an unaffiliated offshoot would make them an ex Mormon.

I'm not going to argue with that - especially when you consider that, however strange the belief system is, what causes the most harm is the cultish, controlling nature of the organisation. If someone escapes the cult, but wants to carry on believing weird things in peace, I'm not going to tell them they can't call themselves an ex Mormon. Who cares about boxes, anyway?

Of course, leaving one cult and walking straight into another is a definite risk.

I've mentioned before, that when I left...It was before the internet was really going....I lost my testimony over Brigham Young. I could not find any "Prophets or teachings" that weren't lame, empty or downright vile (misogynistic, racist, blood atonement, etc...).

Therefore, I started looking into RLDS (before they became Community of Christ) The Brethren, The Strangites, etc...

It was then that I started reading some of the "anti" Mormon books/sites and found out a lot of the truth about Joseph Smith. This gave me my biggest faith crisis. The reason is that to my heart, mind and soul; Things like the "Restoration" and the priesthood powers seemed so necessary. Why shouldn't we have prophets, healers, seers, etc... like they did anciently??? Why shouldn't a restoration be needed?

So, All I'm saying is that finding/accepting the fact that LDS incorporated is no longer a church (and probably never was) is just one step on the path to truth. Many stop there and have constructed new beliefs and interpetations of the scriptures.

I'm embarrassed to say that I'm an ex-Snufferite. I was always more interested in the doctrine as a true believing Mormon. Snuffer made sense in showing how the modern church was in "apostasy" from the purity of the Restoration. I was even rebaptized in their belief system. There was a lot of strange woo-woo stuff taught (casting off devils and their demon-type weapons, preparing for Zion because the world is going to end, etc.). It was depressing and weird to hang around them, and I began to realize that I'd jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Snuffer's writings are appealing to those who are tired of the same 'ol watered down correlated crap served at church. But if you still want to believe in the BoM and JS, then it's an alternative, I guess. Snuffer said that JS didn't practice sexual polygamy...that he was only "sealing" people to him because he'd already received his calling and election as mentioned in D&C 132. I think he knows too much about lds history to not be aware of all the evidence against Joseph. I think that he's just being willfully ignorant.

The desire for truth and reality that brought me out of mainstream Mormonism into this offshoot, is the same thinking that kept me going and continuing my research into Joseph's sexual predation, and finally finding the cold, hard evidence of the extensive plagarisms in the BoM. The CES letter and the side by side comparison to the BoM to The Late War dealt a death-blow to that last sagging shelf.

Thank god I brought my husband and grown children and their spouses out with me. I have no TBM friends anymore, and no relationship with extended family. But good riddance. The Vampire Morg has sucked away too much of my life and $$ as it is. I just wish I'd figured this out when I was younger.

I will always be grateful to Snuffer and Waterman's writings for waking me up from the sleeping death I was in as a struggling TBM. They were my way out. I'm just glad I kept moving. I'd like to convince my offshoot friends to look at the evidence against 'ol Joe, but if he falls, then there didn't need to be a restoration, the BoM is fiction, and what do they believe in now?! Unfortunately, the truth is just too hard for some folks to bear. It's a line in the sand they just won't cross. I feel sad that they're willing to look at the problems with everyone from Breedem Young onward, but they refuse to scrutinize JS or the BoM in the same way.

Here is an expose of The Sealed Portion by Christopher Nemelka - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccWMPusONg