Which sucks because I normally have a very good memory unless drunk.
I'm pretty sure that I found this place multiple times though. I'm pretty sure I found it while still TBM but was too scared to enter.
At some point, I finally clicked on in and the next couple weeks were a blur. I lurked for awhile and read everything I could during every spare minute I had.
I think the holy ghost left to cry in a corner like he does every time I visit a porn site.
(Which is pretty much everyday! Take that! Holy Ghost! You bitch!!!)
I don't remember either. I do know that I started searching about things related to Proposition 8, so a link from that search probably brought me here.
Created by Richard Packham and I am sure he would be happy to tell you about it. It is for those of us who know our kids have been taken from us by a group who did not tell them the truth of their beliefs but only gave milk before meat. And now we live with the consequences. Some of the parents can not even see their own child marry as the child now chooses to be married in the Mormon Temple. We help each other and share thoughts with each other and are there for support. On a bad day, like it was for me, when my daughter went to the temple -to endure the rituals that go on there- and I knew she would not have any spiritual experience at all, it was helpful to have others who understood my pain. Some parents get to the site when all of a sudden their child retreats from them due to finding the Mormon family more attractive than their own. Tons of pain experienced by many there. You can imagine the parents who have a son go on a mission and quit college to do it. Join up if you find it fits you.
and wanted to throw in some authentic missionary experiences. This site was the only one I found which seemed to tell the truth about real human beings. I started lurking, then participating where I felt I had something to add to the conversation. Now I just snark away at will. ;-)
I googled to find an address to resign. Before that I had never visited an "anti" site or read "anti" literature. I lost faith based on reading church-approved Doctrine & Covenants and The Miracle of Forgiveness.
She was so furious that I dared to criticize his greatness she practically had vapors. I stood my ground, however, and told her that an untrained idiot with heartburn was criminally negligible to think they could actually write on a subject like rape and guilt.
Edit: That should be negligent not negligible -- but negligible works in a way too. :)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2011 12:35AM by Rebeckah.
First I stumbled across an exmo site when I was looking for something else. After reading many interesting posts and articles on it, I noticed a reference to this board. I clicked on it...
...and have clicked on it ever since. ;-)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2011 11:51PM by WiserWomanNow.
I had already read a few books, like "In Sacred Loneliness" and "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View." It was nice to hear people expressing the very things I was feeling. That validated my concerns and helped to give me the strength to leave the Mormon Church.
I was inspired by people like Dagny and Stray Mutt, and I still am.
Went to the Manti pageant in fourth grade (I'm in college now) and had to walk past the protesters. I saw a sign for a different "anti" site, and that URL stayed in my memory for a long time. In junior high I decided to actually visit the site and that spurred an investigation that eventually led me here.
I was recovering from a hip replacement and had read Under The Banner Of Heaven while in the hospital. When I got home I looked up the wives of JS and found this site.
Since I didn't have anything else to do I read this site day and night and eventually started posting myself.
I hadn't been to church in over 25 years at that point but considered myself to be an inactive jackmo. Someday I would repent and go back. Yeah right!
I've been here 8 years and realized long ago that I'm an exmo and an apostate. And in my heart I really have been for the last 35 years.
Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw "EXmormon". What a concept!!
I only knew of JackMormons. Being part of a tiny minority of Non-Mormons, raised within Mormon culture, experiencing hatefulness, ostracism, and chagrin, I had no idea that your suffering by being Mormons was worse.
My former boss told me a weird story.....she had to wait outside the temple while her son got married. What kind of wacky cult won't let you go to your own kid's wedding?
I had always thought that Mormons were just another form of Protestants. Baptists don't drink alcohol, either. Unitarians don't drink coffee. Unless it's organic, shade-grown, fair trade coffee.
I think I used Yahoo to check on her story. And I found this site.
We saved every nickle and dime we could spare for over 15 years so we could easily afford one day when the kids are grown to go out and be the BEST Mission President and Wife there "ever was and ever will be again".
With that, we started to study like crazy so we'd be spiritually and emotionally prepared as well. What can I say, we both only do things 100%.......
Somewhere along that timeframe, I ran across a written testimony from an new Ex-mo who was a Bishop at the time when he discovered the Church was false. It was incredible!!
Quite a few F-bombs there in that testimony! And I haven't been able to locate it since then. Anybody familiar with it?
Somehow our searching led us here. My eyes were opened.
Many years ago, when the internet was born, mormons -- as they typically do -- decided that the internet was an invention from god to spread the gospel.
So savvy internet mormons threw up websites that were basically their whole family history of christmas letters. I loved it! I would search terms like "mormon family" etc. just to read their family websites. It was kind of like the People Of Walmart meets Regretsy meets Awkward Family Photos. Pure comedy gold, I tell you!
But alas, shortly after, they heard from on high, the evils that lurk within the internets, and the family's dutifully pulled down their sites, one by one. And that's how I ended up up here. I stumbled on it while searching for little golden nuggets.
I'd been out since the mid 1970s, but had never met or conversed with another exmo till I found RFM in 1998.
I was a Metacrawler junky until a friend suggested Google. On my first Google search - totally unrelated - something caught my attention, so I followed it and wound up here.
It was instant vindication. I suspected there might be others, but never really knew until that particular moment. Weren't no handful neither. I read for about fifteen minutes then jumped right in and asked "Where the f**k have you people been?" It was most cool!
When I left the cult way back when, I promised myself that I would control my life from then on out. I was very vocal about my departure. As a result, my family would had nothing to do with me. It was a long and lonely road. What a relief it was to discover that I am not alone!
I was trying to strengthen my testimony by reading the apologist stuff to purify myself against that evil 'anti' mormon crap. So I thought I would read some of the stuff along with the FAIR stuff...
and realized it made a lot more sense to my 'logical-intellectual' bent of how I had seen the world work in reality.
I was doing my sole Humanities elective in college and selected "World Religions". The section on Mormonism presented info that made me raise an eyebrow as to where it came from. I was out to prove a classmate wrong on claims he was making to the class about stuff my LDS faith believed in and to my shock, my research proved him correct. This site was one of the ones that I hit doing that research and I've been here for 4.5 years now. Lurked that first year, walked away from the church telling the bishop to stuff all my callings and requested membership removal back in Sept 2007.
I reappear here sproadically every few weeks or months. I'm not a heavy poster, but I've seen this board change a lot since I first was reading it. Miss some of the people who used to be here but new blood always flows in as well. Some stay, some move on, but you can always find the same truths from each new group coming thru who finds out that the church is lying about its history big time.