So my transition is moving a little slow. I guess thats a given since im trying to undo 30 years of mental conditioning by the church. Also, I have to tread carefully since Im temple wed and my wife would most certainly go berzerk if I flat out told her I no longer believed.

It would be really easy for me to just turn away from my current path and feign ignorance for the rest of my life. I would no doubt be miserable on the inside for the rest of my days, but I wouldnt have to worry about breaking my wifes heart or causing any discord in my family. As far as I am concerned, this is the cowards way out and I compare it to my time on the mission. I could have stuck it out, been a trunky missionary, and returned home to high praise and celebration. Instead, I chose to do what I felt was right (not easy) and left after 8 months, coming home to tears and disappointment. Leaving the church is what I feel I must do, but it will take time.

What I need help with today are things to solidify my conviction. I never read much "anti" literature because I had been warned that it was "worse than pornography" and since I had struggled with porn throughout much of my early adulthood, I steered clear of it. Ironically, it was a closer look at church history that caused me to become skeptical of the church. Richard Packham's list of things the missionaries will not tell you has helped quite a bit but I want more. Im looking for credible resources that arent out to hate on mormons, but just present cold, hard evidence. Also I want to know what things specifically helped YOU in your decision to leave.

Keep in mind, Ive been ignorant about much of what the church has done/is doing so please, spare no details!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2013 03:33PM by pathist.

A quick take is on YouTube "Top Ten Problems in Mormonism."

There's also a large, but thorough thesis that's a "Letter to a CES director."

You'll find more than the droids you are looking for. You'll find an entire clone army that was created by Emporer Palpatine himself.

Research the lies and the adultery. When mormons say polygamy you need to read that as adultery. You know, one of the 10 commandments with not lying being another one. Throw in worshipping false gods and blasphemies and the cult is barely batting .500.

You have to ask yourself, why would god have anything to do with the mormon church? Look at all his commandments they violate. If you want to believe in the god of the bible then I would suggest distancing yourself from the cult because you may be looking for a warm reception when you die. Something about pots of boiling excrement awaiting your arrival. Don't worry though, the jews believe jesus will be there with you.

I apologize if my words seem hurtful but this cult is wicked and destroys people's lives. They need to be exposed.

Wow, great and passionate post.

mormonthink is an excellent, well balanced site. http://www.mormonthink.com/

So is Richard Packham's site.
http://packham.n4m.org/index.htm

Both of these sites are well cited to source documents and helped me tremendously on my path out of mormonism.

I too started questioning by reading church history in my attempt to study the gospel.

Reading is the key. If you read everything, you will begin to see the big picture. There's a reason why, in mythology, man was warned to stay away from the tree of knowledge. Gaining knowledge is the most effective tool see through it all.

All the church can do is condition you to stay away from anything "not faith promoting" and associate it with fear and evil. Notice they don't say that "faith promoting" has anything to do with actual verifiable knowledge. Emotions and warm fuzzies are not reliable ways of finding out facts. The reason they stress emotions and testimony is because they don't have evidence. They depend on deferring to authority, and they happen to own the authority (from God! Surprise!).

For me it was simply a process of study. I outgrew the simple minded views of the church.

Read Demon Haunted World by Sagan. Once I developed my own "Bologna Detection Kit," my standards for evidence were higher. The claims of religion didn't pass my standards.

Google Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments. They show far more wisdom than anything I learned in church.

Just remember to never fear truth . No ones particular take on truth , but simple irrefutable truth . Not my truth or your truth , but what will always stand up on its own .

First, you need to break the mindset that you can't use your own brain to figure out if something is credible. The church has indoctrinated its members to believe that you can't trust reading anything about Mormonism if its not church approved. Look at the sources being used. Are they being properly cited? Is the citation credible? Are they drawing proper conclusions from what evidence they have cited? Study all sides. Draw your OWN conclusions based on ALL the evidence. You don't have to rely on others to draw your own conclusions.

First, Godmakers is a waste of time, as is most literature out there written by evangelicals. Some of it is good but if you notice most of their chapters consist of comparing doctrinal differences between Mormonism and the Bible then I wouldn't bother.

I would go to http://signaturebooks.com/ for most scholarly books about Mormonism. They are not written in an effort to be faith promoting but they aren't generally considered "anti" either. They don't hold back on the damning evidence but they also kind of tip toe through it with their conclusions as not to sound anti.

If you were looking for the fast track to obliterating your testimony with credible books, then I would read in the following order:

1)http://mormonthink.com/personalstories/A_Letter_to_a_CES_Director.pdf
2) Mormonism - Shadow or Reality - by Jerald & Sandra Tanner
This book is THE MANGUS OPUS of exposes on Mormonism. It an incredibly exhaustive expose citing nearly every historical document that is a problem in Mormon history. It hits on nearly every topic such as The Book of Mormon, plural marriage, blood atonement, changes in the temple, racism, etc.

That should do the trick, but if you want to further enrichment on the truth of Mormonism, then I compiled a list of credible, scholarly books which I consider the best books regarding learning the full truth about Mormonism. I have placed a star next to my favorite recommendations since most people would obviously not read all of them.

Overall/History/Joseph Smtih
* Mormonism - Shadow or Reality? (or The Changing World of Mormonism) by Jerald & Sandra Tanner
* An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins by Grant Palmer
* No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith by Fawn M. Broadie
* The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power by D. Michael Quinn
* The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power by D. Michael Quinn
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Mormon America, The Power and the Promise by Richard Ostling, Joan K. Ostling
One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church by Richard Abanes
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman
Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet by Dan Vogel
Joseph Smith: The First Mormon by Donna Hill
The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith by Bryan Waterman
Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon by David Persuitte
The Keystone of Mormonism by Arza Evans
The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past by D. Michael Quinn
Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters - John Sillito and Susan Staker

Polygamy
* In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith by Todd Compton
* Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith by Linda King Newell
Mormon Polygamy: A History by Richard S. Van Wagoner
Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage by B. Carmon Hardy
Nauvoo Polygamy: “… but we called it celestial marriage” by George D. Smith

Book of Mormon
*New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology by Brent Metcalfe
*Quest for the Gold Plates: Thomas Stuart Ferguson’s Archaeological Search for the Book of Mormon by Stan Larson
*American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon by Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe
Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church by Simon G. Southerton

Book of Abraham
*By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri by Charles M. Larson

Joseph Smith's Treasure Hunting, Folk Magic & Occult Practices
* Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn

Temple
Evolution of the Mormon Temple Ceremony: 1842-1990 by Jerald and Sandra Tanner
The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship - David John Buerger

Mountain Meadows Massacre
Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Will Bagley
The Mountain Meadows Massacre by Brooks, Juanita

Misc
Line Upon Line: Essays on Mormon Doctrine by Gary James Bergera
Power From On High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood - Gregory A. Prince

I wish you all the best in your path. What you are doing takes a lot of courage, especially since you were born, bred and married in the church.

There are a lot of great people here who can answer your questions and help you through any transitions.

Welcome.

I would love to see this thread get filled up with responses, because your feelings and questions are common and valid, and being in the middle when you have one foot in and one foot out sucks big time, as we know.


There is no silver bullet, no completely airtight example of why Joseph Smith and TSCC is not true, and that to me was hard to deal with for a bit. That's not to say that some church claims are not very, very substantiated against and statistically so improbable, but you might find that there is always a mental workaround someone can use to keep their faith. Such workarounds are what you'll hear from people or find from apologists, but when for so many things about TSCC the evidence against it is very strong and the argument to get around that evidence very weak, the shelf you put them all on is bound to shatter.

For example, the Book of Mormon as real history (my trigger to doubt). Zero evidence supporting it, tons of evidence against it, but the mental workaround is to go from the traditioanal church belief of it taking place up into North America to saying it must be some "as of yet undiscovered" and very small location probably in Central America. In other words, there actually were wheels and chariots and iron and horse bones and Nephites and so forth, we just haven't found it yet. Or the science is flawed. Joseph Smith claiming a discovered grave he passed was a "white Lamanite" name Zelph, was just a mistake but that's okay because he was not speaking as a prophet. Or however you want to work that out intellectually.
The point is, can we completely disprove there was no small area in Central America that was miraculously distinct from the surrounding (Asian-DNA'd) peoples? I guess not until we study every Native American's DNA and loot in the ground of every square meter of the Americas, but based on the evidence the PROBABILITY of those anachronisms all being true is crazy low.

There is no way we can outline tons of evidence in this thread for you, because the evidences stack up so high, and for that reason you have entire sites for compiling it all like MormonThink and others mentioned. For me, there are soooooo many aspects of the church that end up having a probability so close to zero of being true (check out the Book of Abraham, temple changes and Masonic origins, abandoned doctrines like Adam-God, the sketchiness of polygamy and polyandry, and consider your own confirmation bias and the psychology of religious experience, etc.). As I heard once, if each of these is a brick making up a wall, the probability that ALL these really far-fetched interpretations of things could ALL be true (multiply the already almost-zero probabilities) is statistically so close to zero as to be worthless, and the wall crumbles.

kokaubeammeup Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There is no silver bullet, no completely airtight
> example of why Joseph Smith and TSCC is not true,
> and that to me was hard to deal with for a bit.

yes there are. MANY "silver bullets."

However TSCC has the ability to fall back on "God did that for
a reason we don't know," and "he was only talking as a man,"
and "he really meant something else."

I brought up JS's adultery which lead to his lying about those
who told the truth regarding his behavior (Martha Brotherton,
Nancy Rigdon, & Sarah Pratt) to my TBM brother. He excused the
adultery by saying that for some unknown reason God had
commanded it and excused the lying by comparing it to those
who harbored Jews lying to the Nazis.

When you're dealing with that kind of mentality there is no
such concept as a "silver bullet." But in the real world the
case against Mormonism is airtight, many times over.

Imagine someone saying, "God had a reason for Al Capone to
have Bugs Moran and his men killed in the St. Valentine's Day
Massacre and he had to lie about it to protect God's work."
That's absurd, of course. Defending Joseph Smith is equally
absurd.

I freed myself after 30 years (at age 30).

Your situation is way more complex than mine because my future ex-wife at the time was a teenage convert who lost interest in the Church before I did. She abhorred the thought of being pregnant, and got an immediate abortion (legal) the one time our birth control failed. She told me my touch felt like being touched by an ape. After that, we used a bulletproof b.c. method. No sex.

I sought counsel from my bishop, who suggested that the solution to my marital disaster was to have a baby. I consulted an LDS social worker counselor. After my full confession to him, he determined that I was being punished by God for masturbating.

So for me, with my marriage in shambles, with my eternal companion (Salt Lake temple) become more and more physically violent towards me, I discovered that my ONLY TROO CHURCH was completely useless to help me address a seriously threatening problem in my face. WORSE than useless, actually.

I was already mostly estranged from my TBM family, so when I stopped attending cold turkey after moving from Colorado to Oregon it was relatively easy. My residual guilt, however, was evidenced by my mailing tithing checks to the local bishop I never met ... for several months until I regained enough consciousness to see the idiocy of what I was doing.

I was out of the Church, but not out of my disaster marriage. I waited until my sweetheart nearly bludgeoned me to death before dialing 911 and retreating to safety in the back of a sheriff deputy's cruiser. It still required tons of counseling and group therapy before I finally succeed getting myself divorced.

========

Back to your situation, pathist. You wrote that you "want more" than Richard Packham's list. There are all kinds of other resources. I found Fawn Brody's book "No Man Knows My History" to be full of shocking revelations for TBMs on a banana peel. The apologist reaction is "No Ma'am That's Not History" if you'd enjoy having your intelligence insulted.

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Just studying the hilarious writings of FARMS, FAIR, etc., will help you a lot. There is good reason the Church avoids officially responding at all to "anti-Mormon" claims. These dudes aren't stupid. They know that defending lies with even more lies will backfire sooner than later, so they just clam up. Smart decision, btw.

My heart goes out to you if you love your wife and want to stay together. If it's meant to be, she might eventually join you, which would seem ideal. If her grip on the Church is higher priority than her relationship with you, and your need to not live a lie is more important to you than staying with your wife, then appropriate choices will happen of their own accord.

Every human being possesses what I call a "Hierarchy of Values". These are core, fundamental priorities that ultimately steer every decision of our lives. When two people with similar hierarchies come together, relative peace ensues. If at some time, one person makes a paradigm shift in your hierarchy, the relationship goes on the block. If a similar shift does not timely occur with the partner, peace goes out the window and it will remain to be seen how it sorts itself out.

Here is strength for you: "In Reality, everything spontaneously manifests the inherent destiny of its essence, and it requires no external help to do this."

pathist, you are spontaneously manifesting the inherent destiny of your own essence ... who and what you ARE. Apparently, you are not a cog in the LDS, Inc. machine. You've got gravel in your gears and need to fix it. As you figure out each step along your path, keep this in mind.

"Treat and respect others as you would appreciate being treated and respected if the roles were reversed."

Relate with your wife as you would appreciate being treated if you were the TBM and she was on the banana peel.

You have the inherent ability to successfully navigate forward. Be who you are and stay true to your personal Hierarchy of Values and it will all work out.

"You are responsible for the effort, but not for the outcome."

Letting go of requiring or expecting any particular outcome is your path to peace here. Best wishes as you move forward. Remember that at any given time, you only have to know one thing. That one thing is:

THE NEXT STEP

Just hold in place until you see what your NEXT STEP is. Then, after you take that step, you will discover that your vantage point, your perspective, has shifted to a new place, and you might see possibilities that were blocked from your view, until you took

THE NEXT STEP.

=====================

One last idea, and then I will stop this diarrhea from my keyboard. This is very powerful, and you need powerful right now, pathist.

By now, you have discovered that the ONLY person you can change is YOURSELF. On the surface, that doesn't seem like much, but there's more to it. Something very powerful.

When you CHANGE YOURSELF, something quite amazing automatically happens. The entire rest of the Universe is compelled by natural law to ACCOMMODATE YOUR CHANGE.

Nobody has a choice about it. If you CHANGE YOURSELF, everyone and everything that touches you WILL ALSO CHANGE to make adjustments for what you CHANGED IN YOURSELF.

All of us human beings really are CONNECTED, and far more literally than one might think.

Now, here's the rub: You don't have control over HOW the Universe will accommodate your change, but IT WILL CHANGE ... GUARANTEED!

And consider this: When you make a POSITIVE CHANGE in yourself that moves you closer to the HIGHER GOOD, the change that you wrought in the Universe will also be a POSITIVE CHANGE for everyone else, including your wife ... even if lots of dust gets stirred up in the process.

That is just how POWERFUL you are, pathist.

Now go forth being true to yourself and MANIFEST THE INHERENT DESTINY OF YOUR OWN ESSENCE.

Maybe it's why the CREATOR bothered to CREATE YOU, and maybe it's the best way you can say THANKS.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2013 04:48PM by beyondashadow.

"I consulted an LDS social worker counselor. After my full confession to him, he determined that I was being punished by God for masturbating."

Wow, I thought it was bad when they told me that I probably masturbated because I had acne (I never admitted to any impurities). I'll never forgive those assholes for that.

These fuckers are destroyers of souls.