The Mormon church raised us to be “peculiar” or “set apart.” It taught us that other Christian churches were in fatal error and other religions just go down from there. It fostered a mentality in us that had us feeling more kinship with a fringe mountain sex cult more than any other group of human beings. We were prepared from the time we were young to hold opinions that most of the world was gonna look sideways at, bare minimum, if not actively mock and discriminate against. We more or less assented to this, not knowing any different, until we accumulated enough weight on our shelves to crack. But even in our burgeoning apostasy, we were prepared to be “other than” if it came down to that.

The church fostered something in me that contained the rudiments of an independent streak, but it functioned in practice more like an addiction to contrarianism in the service of a fixed dogmatic position with the expectation that I would be rejected by skeptics but in turn feel closer to my tribe for trying to have the fight. I thought myself an intellectual, but I was a coward. I feared to think thoughts that would cost me my tribe. I actively, compulsively even, thought thoughts designed to stop myself from thinking the forbidden thoughts that the church was wrong. But to keep my shelf from cracking, I had to keep myself busy. To keep my mind busy, I studied scripture and deconstructed the way other faiths viewed the scriptures. In the process, I learned how to debate well and how to think good thoughts other people would entertain. I was loved for this by those who knew me as long as I did serviced their testimonies with it.

The reason I chose to be churchless and godless after my shelf finally collapsed had a lot to do with the partial critical thinking skills I picked up trying to prove other faiths incorrect. I didn't suddenly wonder if there was something to someone else’s theology after all; I just added Mormonism to the pile of defunct systems of thought in my peripheral awareness that weren't worth my time.

It’s amazing how many of the church’s rules and nuances for finding a faith and joining a church we still follow even while deconstructing the wellspring we originally obtained those axioms from. I think the most tragic one of all is a preparation to hold views that will be hated by most people and to settle for this as long as there’s a tribe or support group of sufficient size that loves us for it.

I’ve heard that people who leave cults often just end up in another cult. Perhaps that’s because we were culturally conditioned at a deep axiomatic level to feel uncomfortable with being normal, being mainstream, or holding banal viewpoints that don’t stir people up against us by their very nature. We don’t feel like we belong unless we feel like we’re on the straight and narrow way watching everyone else in the broad road below waste their lives away in a comfortable thoughtless stupor of mediocrity that cannot save them in the end.

The idea that cultists don't think is false. Thinking is what keeps them in the cult: thought patterns that keep their twisted and bothered feelings from ever resolving themselves. All it takes to leave a cult is to let go of the reinforcing habits and let your troubled feelings of cognitive dissonance wash over you and see where the waves take your thoughts. The hardest feeling to resolve, the one I’ve fought with the longest, is that feeling that there’s some Truth out there that needs discovered and proclaimed from hill tops and that doing so will bring closure, comfort, snd belonging. There is no such Truth; or should I say, there is always another truth. There is no end to learning and challenging what you thought you knew should you choose to live that way. Intellectualism is to me like getting high on Truth, and there’s always a new high to chase. It has nothing at all to do with tribal belonging for me anymore and I’ve almost resigned myself to loneliness in the habit. I feel eternally wound up for a fight with someone over what is and is not true, but years after my departure from the church, I have no idea what I’m accumulating all this junk in my head for. Sheer habit, I suppose.

I don’t know how else to exist. I wish I had the ability to quiet my thoughts and just bob on the surface of human association in a comfortable way sometimes like I see other people doing around me. Not sure how to do that. That may be partially what my ASD diagnosis does, but the other half of it is my upbringing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2023 01:52PM by Cold-Dodger.

I've shared that I too have an ASD and ADHD diagnosis and it has helped immensely to find my tribe among those who have both as well(to a lesser extent I can commiserate with either ASD or ADHD folks but there's always something that falls short in manner and temperament that makes me feel lonely still when around them; I've found a small handful of connections with family and friends who have both and it is much easier to feel at home with them because our wavelength and social needs seem very similar). So, that has really helped me understand my own brain after leaving Mormonism. Mormonism had me feeling so broken, so desperate to belong, like one day I would wake up and my brain would be different, it would "click" and I'd be the ideal servant. I remember thinking there was something wrong with me that I couldn't sit still and read and study scriptures, or that I abhorred so much the endless service and sales pitch to non members. I thought there must be something deeply tainted within me that a love of Christ was not strong enough to clear my mind and help me focus.

So, reclaiming my identity as someone with a different operating system and learning how to best utilize those patterns and symptoms has been empowering. Especially when I can talk with my girlfriend about how frustrating executive dysfunction is or talk with my brother about how odd other people think, it sometimes makes us feel like the only cognizant person in a room because solutions or ideas don't come so easily to others as it does to us. It's been such a gift to find others like me, especially reading you and your experiences Cold D. That we're not broken/in love with sin and not better than anyone else but just operating on a different computer system.

Reading and watching science discourse(and history) has helped break the illusion that any ultimate truth will be found and will be settled about anything. Plus, it has brought genuine wonder and true magic into my life. Do you know what a camera obscura is? That's bonkers! Like, how much we take for granted, waving around our handheld devices without truly comprehending the miraculous, bizarre fiend that light is. Just by what rules and behaviors we know about it and can define and test. I haven't been able to let the fascination with it go ever since I learned about how this insane box with a hole in it works.

That was a small tangent unrelated but I won't apologize for sharing about it. Have a good day.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2023 03:10PM by blackcoatsdaughter.

I have nothing brilliant to say but wanted to note that I so enjoy reading your posts, Cold-Dodger and blackcoatsdaughter. You write so well, about how you are, out and about in the world as unique individuals, and the insights you have gained.

I relish phrases such as: "this insane box with a hole in it" and many others that you have each written to express yourselves.

I wish I had something insightful to offer but sometimes I got nuthin'.

But I'm glad you're here. You help others to see not only your experiences with Mormonism/religion but how the world looks from your perspective. Kind of like your own personal camera obscura. Or something like that.

Bless you, Nightingale. You just keep recovering from Mormonism and being awesome.

I know the Muslim scholars of Baghdad during the golden age of arabic science played with the camera obscura. It was probably through the Moors on the Iberian peninsula that this idea reentered western european consciousness like so much other knowledge about the lost classical world. I know the Dutch had a monopoly on the best glass lens technology for a long time. It’s suspected by some, but IDK, that the imprint of Christ in the Turin Shroud was created with some kind of camera obscura.

Check it out: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33164668

I do feel like I have a different OS under the hood than most other people a lot of the time. There’s a new group on red it called r/autisticwithadhd you should check out. They call it AuDHD. Lol.

Writing helps me take the soupy sloth of my mind and commit it into a linear form so others can follow my train of thoughts. Reading and writing is how I discovered how much I have in common with the internal workings of other people, even though staying focused is hard. When you’re able to align your special interests and intellectual captures with the idea that the answers are in books of other written info and that writing will help you find other people with answers, it becomes possible to wolf down the written word and write volumes in turn despite the ADHD. It happens in sprints and jolts and usually at the last minute. I do love to procrastinate for some reason. There’s nothing like catastrophic levels of pressure to force my focus. Lol.

I see others as the others. I'm the one who got it right and their seeing me as "other" proves they are too stupid to see that.

I am my own "In Crowd".

Done & Done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm the one who got it right

Haha. I'm going to remember this from now on. It's better than thinking I'm just tripping through life making errors or worse.


> I am my own "In Crowd".

I'm going to print out this philosophy and frame it. :)

I love spending time alone and some people think that's surpassingly weird. But it's OK - I can just crown myself as 'in', and a crowd, and all is well. The mess I make in a day you'd think a crowd had swarmed through so that's perfect.

I've always had to be my own in crowd. Never fit into mormonism and I certainly don't care to talk to anyone from high school. I did find a crowd at Thiokol. The wonderful men I worked for. It was the way they treated me that got me through the hard times in my life. And yet they are mormons. But they weren't like any other mormons I knew or know now.

Mormonism was never a good fit for my whole family. We were always the "others."

Done & Done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I see others as the others. I'm the one who got
> it right and their seeing me as "other" proves
> they are too stupid to see that.
>
> I am my own "In Crowd".

Intellectual snobbery is great if you can pull it off.

I think CD touched on a deep subject. How do you handle not being part of the herd? If the brainwashing doesn't stick, you are on the outs. The lost sheep. Gag me with a liahona.

The best thing to do with alienation is to own it. If you can't understand me, you are welcome to go away. Rule and reign in your Mormon heaven without me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2023 11:50PM by bradley.

I don't understand this.

"I think the most tragic one of all is a preparation to hold views that will be hated by most people and to settle for this as long as there’s a tribe or support group of sufficient size that loves us for it."

I've managed to do that without a support group. If you feel like a stranger in a strange land, that's a good sign. There's nothing healthy about being well-adjusted to a sick society.

To quote Terence McKenna, the cost of sanity in our society is a certain degree of alienation.