I have to admire all the discourse regarding the B of M, D & C and Bible that many of you engage in....I never went on a mission, never read the Bible, B of M, D & C or any other scripture...always found them astonishingly boring. I attended church regularly until I went to Ricks College in the mid '60's....that pretty much put me off ever going to church again, although I did let my guard down in 1970 and got myself ordained an elder....don't know WTF I was thinking then....and although I still have many TBM friends, I do not consider myself a Mormon....

Just like you I found church topics boring as hell. I'd certainly never crack a church book open just to read it for fun. Preparing for a SS lesson was about the extent of what I could force myself to do.

The most amazing thing happened once I allowed myself to question. Now I love to learn stuff about the church. Too bad for the church it isn't the whitewashed version.

Stunted.

I was a SS teacher for awhile during the initial portion of my exit from TSCC. Each week, I would normally wake up 15 minutes before sac meeting ended, quickly throw on a shirt and tie, wander into the foyer as the closing prayer was being said and teach my lesson reading directly from the manual.

Half the time the class and I would end up just talking for the majority of the time with some half-assed attempt at making whatever we were talking about connect with whatever the lesson was supposed to be about.

After the lesson ended, I would go home and watch football or play video games. You could say I was pretty uninterested in church doctrine. :D



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2011 04:19PM by dressclothes.

Well, Andyb, hang around here for awhile and we will "edumakate" you! Seriously, please stay with us awhile and you will find out all the important - and not-so-important - stuff you missed. And we make it lots more fun, too!

That just sent chills up my spine... made me remember visiting TBM cousins in the early '70s that said "OOOOOH... FER CUTE!" at nearly every pleasing object that they came across.

I had trouble keeping my food down. Does anyone in the TBM culture still say this? Am curious.

No, now everything is fer realz!

That's the only place I know of where people say "fer ignernt."

I know someone from Virginia, by way of Baltimore, who says "ignert" and means it in the same way, too. As in ignert=rude. Of course he is TBM so he may have picked it up at church. LOL

In northern Utah, "ignernt" was used in place of "bad."

"He wrecked the car. So ignernt.

"Look at that hairdo! Ignernt.

That blouse is ignernt with that skirt. (I SWEAR I did not make this last one up)

Anagrammy

I forgot to add that I was raised by a TBM father...(my Mom joined the church when I was 11 and became even more TBM than Dad)...they held various positions: elders quorum pres. RS pres. high council...but never once pressured me into reading anything related to the church or to go on a mission..it was ALL my and my brother's own choice....VERY un-mormon parent behaviour as I'm learning on this forum...and I am SOOOO thankful for that wonderful and open upbringing...plus we lived in a rural area with almost no orher LDS families and in fact I was the only LDS kid in my classes all through school...Dad was a very successful farmer and so we never wanted for anything and he put his family and his business first and second. I just feel sorry for all the kids that had parents that put the church before everything else.

i like history so learning the 'whitewashed' history of the church was not a problem for me. Ditto for reading the bom. It was history as far as i knew. With some doctrine thrown in that i picked up as i got older. Was also given the bom stories for children (a non-distribution center version) at a gr 4-6 level that i read before reading the real thing.

Reading the real history makes more sense now that i know not to take everything as'the gospel truth'.

Maybe i was just always kinder to other people when i didn't know the 'full' story. ie their version. Why would someone give up the celestial kingdom over milk strippings? I figured it was god who would judge, not me. Now i get 'the rest of the story', thanks to ex-mormon sites.

Whoever replies to what makes you feel uninformed might avoid your strong areas of knowledge.

Frankly, I'm not overly impressed with discussions about madeup scripture in mormon books and publications. The guys to wrote that stuff weren't exactly brilliant or noble. They were/are average joes except that they have people buffaloed. It's all about image, so some of them like to used ten officious sounding antiquated words when one meaningful word would work better.

Heard the saying about putting lipstick on a pig? Don't worship swine or you'll smell like pig poop and swill.

Oh so true! That's why I usually reply to posts about liquor!

I've learned more about the church in the 2 months I have been "investigating" it, than I ever did in the 28 years I was an active member.

Unfortunately for them, I am learning the truth!

I have never read the D&C or the PoGP all the way through, despite attending seminary and institute. I've read the BoM about 4 times. I always found the BoM boring and a horrible read, though the PoGP always fascinated me. I always wondered who would figure out the unrevealed parts of the Book of Abraham facscimiles... I have a wonderful new perspective on that now!!!

You are fortunate, that you didn't waste perfectly good gray cells on idiotic lies and plagiarism. It would have only given you more to UNLEARN now. It has taken me about 4 years to flush all those fake factoids, twisted ideas, superstitions, falsehoods, and voodoo mumbo jumbo out of my poor, brainwashed mind. A lot of the garbage was memorized, as Sunday school and Primary and YW requirements. A lot of it was Primary song lyrics. It was all so repetitive. I was just average in my cult knowledge.

when I quit, I decided that "extinguishing" was the best method to recover from the Mormon mind-f**k. I took a couple of classes in Western European philosophy. As garbled as some of those old ideologies were, they still made perfect sense to me. No matter how much I studied Mormonism, it didn't make sense. That made me feel stupid. Yet--just about every other subject, and everything else in life did make sense. Read novels, poetry, study on the internet, take classes, read comic books--but don't bother to read the Mormon-published drivel.

Knowing enough of the truth definitely helps us to recover--but I do get sick of going over the details of something false--I don't want to study lies anymore. Science is my new religion right now.

The other universities wouldn't accept all those BYU religion credit hours--and now I know why. It is like I had a minor in Seventeenth Century New England Polygamous Cults or Very Bad Fiction Written By Uneducated Con-men. It is all useless information.

"The Book of Mormon, PoGP, and the D&C could not have been written by an uneducated boy, without God's help." Oh yes it could! Any con-man can copy passages from the King James Bible, and from Swedenberg's books, then make up the rest of the pulp. These were the worst, most boring, nonsensical books I've ever read. You haven't missed a thing.

You can still get the laughs from the reviews and deconstructions here on RFM.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2011 05:32PM by forestpal.

andyb Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have to admire all the discourse regarding the B
> of M, D & C and Bible that many of you engage
> in....I never went on a mission, never read the
> Bible, B of M, D & C or any other
> scripture...always found them astonishingly
> boring. I attended church regularly until I went
> to Ricks College in the mid '60's....that pretty
> much put me off ever going to church again,
> although I did let my guard down in 1970 and got
> myself ordained an elder....don't know WTF I was
> thinking then....and although I still have many
> TBM friends, I do not consider myself a Mormon....

It sounds like you never went through the temple...lucky for you. You would have either been bored or horrified. I completely agree with you about the incredible boringness of 90% of the scriptures.

I got all of my Mormon doctrine in the first twelve months, using my first gospel principles class manual. I never got any real scripture study done with anything else, although I did make a valiant-but-doomed attempt to read the BoM. The manuals are the real scripture, the BoM etc. are only emphasized because without that emphasis the leadership wouldn't have any basis for their authority.

But I've always found the NT Gospels to be a good read. They're short and to the point, have a decent narrative, and intersperse the religious philosophy with the storyline, which is usually a good way to go when you're trying to combine history and moral philosophy.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2011 11:39PM by silverlightx.

I did baptisms for the dead at the Carsdston (AB) temple back when I was 12 or 13...haven't been back since....married a Catholic (best ting I ever did) and don't go to mass either...just don't have much use for church or religion any more....all a load of horse shit as far as I'm concerned...and at 63 years of age I've got nobody to impress nor do I give a rat's ass what anybody thinks of me...I treat my family and friends really good and I'm a poor choice to get on the wrong side of....

I never read any of that stuff, either, and have learned far more about Mormonism and religion in general from this forum than I did in my first 20 years.

I memorized the books of the New Testament once, but could never get past the first few pages of any book of scripture. How others manage to read the whole thing, I have no idea.

"formed" much of your "in"--i.e. your inner you is formed to a large extent by the Mormon thoughts, concepts and bullshit ingested over the years.

If I had never been in-formed by Mormonism to the extent that I was, I wouldn't be spending as much time as I do identifying and throwing out the garbage that they put "in" me.

Or something like that. ;o)