See above - I am actually kind of surprised to find that I really am in some kind of a recovery at this point but upon further reflection I messed myself and my situation up a little more than I thought I did by joining the LDS church and giving it the best I could for some time.
Part of my recovery is realizing that the LDS CHURCH WILL NEVER CHANGE INTO SOMETHING REAL. I will never feel like telling people I was in it, I will never bring my friends and family to it, and as nice as a few aspects of it were, no one can really have them because they rest upon nothing.
There is no unravelling the knot or peeling the onion to find the "true" center because its not there. I work in a job where, if one is a practiced liar, it is a significant career advantage and is actually a necessity in some instances. Most of us can kind of turn it on and off but there are a few folks whose switch has been stuck in the "On" position and dissimulation becomes their natural response to everything, even when being truthful would be better for them and everyone else. This is where the LDS church is right now. These folks never get better as far as I have seen so I expect that will be the case for the LDS church.
I submit - the LDS chruch has become incapable of being straight-forward and above board about anything. Even when something is a guaranteed total burn that will bite them later, they still do it. This behavior becomes natural as a person, men especially, gets deeper and deeper into the churches gullett after being paralyzed with its poisionous slobber of forever families, the CK, obedience, etc....
The LDS church has been wrong too long to ever be right again. There is no bending it, pleading with it, nor negotiating with it. The salt has lost any savor it ever had and it will not get it back. That realization has disabused me from trying to make it work for me again; it can't because it is not and will never be what it says it is and even if it did it wouldn't mean anything to me anymore.
The church is what Kurt Vonnegut in "Cats Cradle" called a "Granfaloon" -Wikipedia defines it nicely as "a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless"
that the church is nothing but a huge Entertainment Industry Corporation, because when you reduce it to its essential parts, what they sell is no more or less than books, movies, and re-enactments based on an imaginary theme.
If you re-cast the members as fans, along the lines of those who are die-hard fans of Star Wars, or LoTR, or The Matrix, then it makes your definition of Granfaloon spot-on.
Well put - wikipedia article went on along those lines. Indeed,
"First, knowing that one is a part of this group is used to make sense of the world. When one associates with a particular group, those in the group focus on the similarities between the members. This is different from people not in the group. For "outsiders" differences are focused upon and often exaggerated. A problem with the granfalloon is that it often leads to in-group, out-group bias. Second, social groups provide a source of self-esteem and pride, a form of reverse Groucho Marxism as in his famous remark "I don't care to belong to any club that would have me as a member."-Henri Tafjel - I gotta get that book!