Posted by:
melissa3839
(
)
Date: November 09, 2010 04:03PM
For me, it was 2 things, and they both happened when I was 12:
1-- When our class teacher on Sunday told us we could “become gods” after we die. Keep in mind, I believe in God, and I have always listened to what he has told me in my heart. 90% of the time, when I hear something about God, I get this feeling in my chest of “These are good words-- this is truth”. But when our teacher said that about becoming gods… Even just being a little girl, I INSTANTLY had this overwhelming feeling of “WHOA! Stop! That is 100% false!”
Up until the age of 12, the church had only told us things that pretty much every church tells you (well except the whole Joseph Smith thing, and even that, I never really took to… whenever I heard that story, I always kinda felt like “Ok… Who the heck is this guy, again???” . But never before had I felt a “false doctrine” warning that powerful about anything they had told me. As soon as I did… It planted the seed of doubt in the entire church.
2-- When I got a pamphlet in Young Womens, telling me “The lord forbids any and all forms of masturbation.” Once again, I got that “This is false” feeling again. Just 2 weeks before, my school had our nurse come in to talk to us girls about periods. 2 girls in our class had already started, so they figured they had better warn the rest of us. The nurse told us “Some times a young woman might… Explore her own body, like the private areas, and such…” (We all looked around and giggled, like ‘eeeewww’- but at the same time, we all had this telltale look on our face, because we knew we had done that…). Then the nurse said, “And don’t worry, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Its perfectly normal and natural! Its human instinct getting to know yourself, so don’t feel bad about that.” Well, I thought that sounded very open, understanding, and medically professional. I agreed with it too.
But when I got that pamphlet saying it was “forbidden”…. That just sounded unreasonably intolerant, and I began to feel disconnected from the church, like they saw anything sexual as dirty, and they couldn‘t accept that humans had physical needs. I took the pamphlet into my (single) father. He was always frank and honest with me about everything. I asked him his opinion on this. Keep in mind, both of my parents believe in God, but they had never been to a temple for anything, and were never very gung-ho about LDS. My father just sighed, and calmly told me, “You know, as long as you’re not putting yourself in medical danger, I think what a person does with their own body when they are alone is nobody else’s business. I think they’re going a little overboard trying to make little teenagers feel like they won’t get into heaven, if they do something perfectly natural. I wouldn’t read too much into that.” He basically said the same thing the nurse said. And again, I agreed with it. It just felt more like truth to me.