I know that TSSC pushes the whole eternal family thing (right up the old keister), but what was the most difficult belief to let go?

I never got how the eternal family thing worked, anyway, I mean how do you even know that everyone would be in the same level of heaven? And if everyone had their own planet to run, how was everyone together? Was there a yearly family reunion on kolob?

I don't know how morbots can claim to be christian when it states that Joe the 'ho will be the one to allow entry into heaven (or is that one of those teachings that they dropped?), not god. And that heaven had different levels. That is just so contrary to the new testament god.

The most difficult doctrine to abandon was the idea of someday becoming a god and having my own universe and so on. Silly me!!

But the biggest "revelation", the "AHA!" moment, the "EUREKA!!" discovery was realizing that the priesthood is absolutely powerless and meaningless. The only authority the so-called Melchizedek or Aaronic priesthoods have is the authority TBMs willingly give them. Without the members' acquiesence like dumb sheep (of which I was, indeed, one) the GAs have no authority whatsoever.

GAs, priesthood leaders, are all just ordinary men with made-up titles in a bogus church in a fraudulent religion.

Personally I think it’s the WOW. Even though I don’t believe it’s a commandment I’ll never smoke or drink. And my diet is better than it’s ever been.

When I came out as a non-believer it hit my mom pretty hard. Her concept of heaven now no longer included me. That’s really screwed up. Suppose all of her family were to not make it to the CK, Why did she have to work so hard to get there. The whole idea that someone else’s heaven depends on me towing the line was pretty weird.

the 72 virgins...

whoops! Wrong religion...

wowbagger Wrote:
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> the 72 virgins...
>
> whoops! Wrong religion...

As a woman, the thought of 72 virgin men is not my idea of heaven. With 72 of them, all together, they might last two hours......

For some reason, I'm thinking 36 hookers would be more fun than 72 virgins. The hookers would at least know what they are doing, so you'd get more bang for the buck.

The hardest belief to give up that I still cling to somewhat is the idea that my behavior is tied to how well my life will be(blessings, in mormon parlance). I can be the nicest person in the world, and yet things could be over in an instant. All it would take is a distracted driver and being in the right place at the wrong time on the way home.

The only reward I have for my behavior is my own emotional well-being. For some reason, that's a tough pill to swallow.

The teaching that God and Christ are two seperate people. I admit I don't fully understand the concept of the Trinity but if God and Jesus ARE seperate then that makes TSCC polytheists and that goes against their claim to be "mainstream" Christians

The idea that when I'm dead, I won't know how history will unfold. I always figured that as spirits we'd look down from paradise on the goings-on on earth until the second coming, which would be sometime soon.

Now I wonder what will the world be like in, say 200 years, or even 1,000 or 5,000 years - and I'll never know.

I still hate that part.

I would like to believe there is something after this life but I just don’t see it now.

TSCC shaped me in many ways. I’m not going to start drinking and smoking.

The hardest belief to give up was that all other churches are wrong. Actually I still believe that but it means something different now. TSCC was very successful in teaching me how other religions are wrong. I just needed to add one more to the list.

I then knew it wasn't my fault!

...rather than just using them for the benefit of those at the top.

Unworthy of love, acceptance, approval... All that stuck with me a LONG time.

The idea of the "one and only"--and I haven't a clue why--having someone save themselves for me, like I saved myself for them. Maybe because it was drilled so strongly into me and the idea of being "soiled."

It was rather interesting that they didn't seem to think that my future husband needed to have saved himself.

I've been with 2 men in my life--my husband and my boyfriend. Both of them have EXTENSIVE sexual experience. It was tough to come to terms with that. They put WAAAAYYY too much emphasis on whatever sexual purity is. I don't even think they know.

Yes. The double standard persists, in TSCC as much as in society generally. Women should be virgins at marriage, but 'boys will be boys.'

In Priesthood meetings, YM do not get the "licked cupcake" lesson!

The cupcake lesson is was given to me in YM and Sunday School. The difference in how it was presented to the YM vs Sunday School was the context. In sunday school they asked if you would want to be the cupcake, in YM they asked if you would want to take the licked cupcake to the temple.

I was one of the few males I knew who took it serious. I waited and always thought I would be blessed for it. I look back now and can't believe how stupid I was.

I know what you mean. My young adult/late teen days would have been more interesting were it not for all the guilt inducing brainwashing courtest ot the cult.

Yeah it sucks to think back on for me too. I can't believe how many women I turned down growing up because of all those Mormon hangups. All they had to do was get a little touchy with me and/or start kissing me and I would dump them because I didn't want to put myself in a situation where I would commit the sin next to murder. I had a couple even ask me about sex and I ran from them like they were the devil himself. I feel stupid now for how I acted. The sad thing is it's taken a lot of time to change all that programming, and I'm still working on some of it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/17/2011 07:24PM by jackol.

I went pretty quickly from TBM to agnostic atheist.... I suppose, in between, there was a part of me which still believed in three personages of godhead.....

even now I do not believe in any of it, I still think the concept of 'the trinity' is a much more stupid concept. I have yet to meet a christian who can explain the ins'n'outs of how a triune god relates to the new testament stories without using the word 'schizophrenia'.


the hardest habit to break is the WoW. I dont smoke and I dont drink. I recognize it is 'just my habit', and I dont mind if anyone else indulges. All my friends and family know I dont drink, and it would be seen as 'weird' if I did start to indulge

but , yeah..... 'Habit' rather than 'belief'

The Hardest Belief to Give Up:

that the Universe is imbued with inherent meaning of which humans can apprehend and even comprehend. And truth to tell, I haven't completely given up on this belief.


Losing belief in LDSinc caused what Camus called an absurd feeling. I've struggled with the next step of embracing the absurd notion. Simply put: I exist and the Universe exists; but between myself and the Universe antinomy exists. So, what to do?

Camus would have me live with it as it is, sans judgement, sans hope, etc.; but I fear I "lapse" too often into what he called philosophical suicide (of which he accuses the likes of Shestov, Jaspers, Kierkegaard and others). Quite taken by Plato when young, I'm prone to "lapse" into belief in Platonic Forms ala Husserl.

So I roll my rock and observe that life itself is enough.

Human

(Yesterday's discussion of NDEs etc got me thinking; something I try not to do, since it merely leads to The Absurd; which is where I am today.)

was probably the reason I didn't go crazy when I finally let go. It convinced me that I could create the meaning I craved and didn't need to rely on some sort of inherent cosmic significance. My professor must have thought I was nuts the semester I took Existentialism. I would be sitting in the back row, moved to tears. It was an incredible semester and a new beginning for my life.

It appears Camus found you with perfect timing.

Out of curiosity, did your professor have you read Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge? Such an odd, unsettling work.

I gave up theism first; threw out the bathwater with the baby.
I have grown in my thinking so much that this is no longer an issue for me, but I had always taken a lot of comfort in some sense of ultimate cosmic justice. I ultimately trusted that god really would sort everything out in the end. When I figured out that good people really might just suffer for nothing, and bad people might just get away with being bad, I had to come to terms with the fact that life really isn't fair.

Without doubt, "eternal life" is the hardest doctrine to give up. Not just the idea of being with my family forever, but the idea that *I* won't last forever. As far as I know, if I get run over by a bus tommorow, that will be the end of me. No "progression", no "kingdom of glory", no seeing God, no seeing dead ancestors, no waiting around waiting for my family to join me. Nothing. Dead.

I can completely understand why so many people cling onto a spiritual belief when leaving the Morg, even if no new organised church is sought. There is something very human about holding pleasant beliefs about the afterlife, and something very cold and sad about this life being all there is, especially when we are living unhappily. But without any evidence to the contrary, we can't assume there is anything else.

I think my belief in god was the hardest to let go of. Once I did that, all the mental gymnastics I was performing to controll the cognative disonance were no longer needed. It was not long after that I checked out of the morg mentaly and not much longer till I was totally out.

the belief the there was an invisible superhuman watching over me.


i wanted to believe there was shelter, justice, and mercy somewhere.


now knowing that it is you who makes your reality is sort of challenging, intimidating, and empowering all at the same time.


sometimes i wish i could be inserted back into the matrix and forget this whole nightmare. it gets pretty cold and dark some days.



i'll get over it. i know.

Most things weren't to tough to give up, but going from being an eternal being with infinte potential at an inperceptibly small stage in my existence to a sack of organic material with just a few decades left kind of shook me up. Made me re-evaluate life.

I got over it though, and truth be told I'm not bothered by it like I thought I might be.

I really liked the idea of eternal life and having my own planet and such... It gave me a huge inferiority complex when I first started to step away - almost to the point of depression.

However, that realization has helped me learn to value the time I have that much more. I am no longer living to die.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/17/2011 06:28PM by dressclothes.

That my parents knew what they were talking about.

Yeah, they took that first tumble off their pedestal when I was quite young, as I ran into cog dis very early, although all I knew it as was "bad feelings". Cog dis directly concerning my parents via the church.

But I kept putting them back up on that "authority" pedestal well into my 20s.

Now I'm seeing just how little they know. They spend all their spare time at church, they have stagnated for decades.
They did not "do the best they could with what they had"(their version of an apology). No, they blindly followed church directives and had also looked forward their whole childhoods to the day THEY had kids and could reenact their tormented lives upon us kids, from the role of power.

They said as much. Just wait until YOU have kids, they told me. Then you'll understand.

Understand crushing the air out of a kid for fun or punishment?
Understand putting someone else's hard contacts in your child's eye "for a chance for you to try contacts".
Understand why I should never have new clothes or good food but the church gets 10%, because clothes just wear out and food is just poop that hasn't made it to the toilet yet?
Understand why I shouldn't have a mattress, just pillows on the floor?
Understand why I shouldn't have non mormon friends, they're not good people?

No, they didn't view me as a person, they told me I was a possession until I turned 18.

I hope they don't wonder why I don't want to spend time with them, but they do. My mom refers to me as a troubled teen in one breath while my dad says we were "such good kids" in the next. We were, in fact, so afraid of them that we were VERY well behaved. But my mother waited for the littlest reason to become "disappointed" in us, and you know where that goes.

No, they didn't try to give us more than they had growing up. Isn't that what most parents do?

If i didn't know better, i would say we grew up in the same house. The only difference i could see is that your parents made an attempt (albeit lame) to apologize. All the rest of it sounds incredibly familiar.

They think i am a horrible parent because i listened to my children, considered their feelings, and let them have a voice. They kept telling me my kids would grow up having no respect for their elders. In a way they were right. My kids don't know them,but have no respect for the way they treated their children and their zombie like adoration for all things mormon.

I've thought and thought about this question. I can only think of a long list of things that have been so easy to give up. Maybe it's because i was an inactive for almost 20 years before I rejoined the ranks. I don't have the fear of the outside that a lot of mormons do.

I feel like i gave up way more going back in. Coming back out this time is for different reasons, and is permanent. I am way more focused on what i'm getting back vs. what i'm giving up. I am very lucky, my DH is in the same frame of mind.

This is going to be our first holiday without the church being in the room. Champagne all around!

I still have yet to drink alcohol so I'd have to say WoW

I always got a lot of security out of knowing who I was, where I came from, why I was on the earth and where I'd be going (more or less) after I died. Now I realize I have NO answers. No idea of what I'm here for or what will happen after I die. I almost take it too far - when someone is completely convinced there is no life after this one, I can't believe that either because we don't really know. I just can't believe in anything for sure now because I realize how much I don't have any answers.