We can debate back & forth on intricate points of doctrine and history with TBMs/apologists, but for me, there are some absolute deal breakers that each on their own, should really be more than enough for any person to get up and walk away from TSCC. My current top 5 are:

1) Clear racist policies/statements of past prophets and no idea how, why or when it started. Plus no apology.
2) The secrecy over church income and how contributions are used.
3) Prophets that don't prophecy and that own multiple lavish homes
4) Mormon God gives commandments that make no sense - parts of WoW, wait a year if you don't get married in temple first, one earring etc
5) building a multi-$bn mall

That the plan of salvation is really just a pyramid scheme. Seriously, that's my deal-breaker. It doesn't matter to me if it's true. True or not, it's stupid. It's an eternity of stupidity.

No thanks..

Religion should be about accommodating the needs and spirituality of the individual. Mormonism is the opposite; it turns everybody into pod people for the benefit of the organization.

you pretty much summed mine up already sherlock

For me it was the young earth theory that I had been taught all of my life at church and the obvious fact that Joseph Smith believed in a young earth. Eventually I learned that the competing old earth theory is quite literally rock solid. Since JS was wrong about it he could not possibly have ever spoken to the creator of the earth.

The common factor between my experience and the experiences of many others is the realization that you have been lied to. The lie is what makes people know that TSCC is false. I suspect that TSCC could be forgiven for some of the items you listed if they didn't keep them secret or lie about them.

Dishonesty.

How many of you would stay in a relationship if the other partner regularly lied to you, or even told you parts of the truth to only mislead you as to what was actually going on?

Or was so bold as to actually tell you up front, that they weren't going to let you know everything going on in their lives, because you just don't need to know stuff like that. It isn't very useful.

I would never be in business with someone like the church.

Why would I give them my heart and soul or worse yet, blind obedience?

Joey telling a 14 year old that her families salvation relied on her marrying him.

No accountability for tithing.

Skin color has to do with worthiness.

There are only two different lives to live. If you are male: mission, marry, babies, head of house who pays tithing. Female: marry a RM, babies, support head of house who pays tithing.

Suppose to blindly follow some old guy I never met.

The list is long and deep for me. But the changes to the scriptures at the beginning of this year was the most blatant revisionist history I have ever seen.

Did you mean the announcement if the new scriptures to come out in Aug? Or did I miss another scripture change?

you can see the changes online now.

Has anyone put together a before and after side by side comparison of the changes? That would be very interesting to see.

Once I realized I'd been systematically brainwashed and manipulated, it was time to go. I realized TSCC was just another cult, and how silly it all seems when you approach it from a rational, skeptical point of view.

Did I have to prove it wasn't true? Nope. If the church wants me to keep living that way, the burden of proof is on them.

The list below is incomplete. These are deal breakers for me.

THOU SHALL NOT STEAL:

Peoples land, water, or heritage (birthright)
A person's dignity or reputation
The lives of others (through human trafficking, slavery, sexual slavery, rape, murder, or to suicide because of oppressive religious policies or edicts)
A child's innocence
Other men's wives for your own sexual pleasure
A person's right to sexual identity and expression
No stealing from published works (plagiarism of bible)
Hardworking folks tithing money for your own gain
The best years of a young man or woman's life (missionaries)
One's right to privacy or self expression
A women's right to express her spirituality through ordination

And the list goes on and on ...



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/2013 01:46PM by Senoritalamanita.

That mormonism and mormons are too controlling. Mormonism turns normal people judgemental, controlling, conditional with their love and affection, some feel special with many feel superior, they are overly brainwashed/indoctrinated. That mormonism has elevated their stupid, insignificant mormon sins as BIG HUGE sins like drinking coffee or having a drink. Ps mormons, Jesus drank wine and commanded us to drink wine in remeberance of Him. Mormonism guilted me, shamed me and damaged my self esteem. Marrying a tbm can be a recipe for disaster. Sexual repression, us vs them mentality, always putting the church ahead of personal interests, I could go on and on. But essentially that the church is a cult and has strayed from Christianity.

and

mormonism turns narcissists into completely frigged up units

And they're equal deal breakers in my book. Even if I found a religion that actually treated women like godesses (instead of claiming they do while oppressing them) I'd still reject it if it were built on and promoted deceit.

Dealbreakers:
1. The book of mormon is fictional.
2. The "prophet" can't prophesy.

without the book of mormon or a prophet, what is left to distinguish Mormonism from other flavors of Christianity?

Reasons why "but it's a good organization!" doesn't apply:
1. They teach toxic, harmful gender roles, and propagate misogyny.
2. It's time consuming and expensive.

Adam-God doctrine: BY (supposedly a prophet of God) has a fundamental misconception of God's nature.

Book of Abraham: shows JS didn't have any ability to translate ancient documents.

1.the miracle of forgiveness- the whole thing is vile
2. sexism
3. homophobia
4. lack of charitable donations
5. the way they treat missionaries

1. Anti-gayism;
2. Racism;
3. Treating women as brood mares and second-class citizens;
4. Cliquishness ("We're better than you heathens!");
5. Deceit; and
6. Fraud.

Steve

For me, the ultimate factor is the promise of converse with celestial beings. The implication is that the GA's do it all the time, and the reason the rest of us don't is personal wickedness. That is, in my mind, the biggest fraud of all.

It is a mind control cult.

How could one possibly top 6 iron's "mormonism turns narcissists into completely frigged up units"? So fine.
For me, an item no-one else named. Literal-minded as I am, I threw the whole mess into the trash when I heard that Jesus said, "On the morrow come I into the world." What? WHAT? I am supposed to believe that a fetus in late-stage labor in the Middle East has suddenly learned to speak, IN ENGLISH? Must have startled the mother (Terry Jones, wasn't it?) out of her skin. What moronic, idiotic, cretinistic, retarded--yeah, I said retarded--troglodytic creepizoid who had the slightest vestige of a brain, could even begin to "believe", in even the vaguest way, such sheer CRAP? Mormons, that's who. It is "none of I", buddy. Don't even suggest that I respect anybody who claims to believe that rot. May they fry on an Arizona sidewalk.

There are many, but it all boils down to hypocrisy. I was doing baptisms in the Salt Lake Temple. Suddenly through a side door a woman was entering the room being held up by 6 men. She had to have weighed over 600 pounds. I am a nurse and can judge weight pretty well. Everyone had to step aside while she performed baptisms. I waited 30min and left. I heard others waited over an hour.
Someone who has a glass of wine every now and then, and runs in marathons is not temple worthy, but extremely obese unhealthy people can get a temple recommend. At that point I really started observing and just did not like what I saw across the board. Especially tithing and WoW being attached to getting a temple recommend. I do not agree with paying to go to the temple.

The dealmaker for me was when I studied freemasonry and stumbled across a long list of very familiar parallels such as a First Vision account and all things temple-related.

Joe Smith was not a prophet, he was a plagiarist. Oh sure, his info was "revealed" to him, just not the way he claimed.

So that also makes him a liar.

When you discredit the prophet, everything falls like a house of cards.

Oddly enough, I never learned about most of the historical things until a few months ago when I joined this site. The dealbreakers for me were:

1) Priesthood being "called of God." My dad was a "worthy" priesthood holder, BP, Bishop, Stake high Council, etc... but he is a pig who treats his wife and 5 daughters like trash, is verbally and physically abusive, and other that that, is an all-around as$. God would NEVER call him to do anything. If he isn't called of God, then the Bishop has no inspiration, neither does the SP, and on up the chain of command, all the way to the top.

2) Shunning your children and family for any reason the Church deems necessary (apostates, gays, sexually active, smokers, etc...) Never, ever believed in a God who was supposed to love you like a Father, but hates you if you're gay, and makes you come to the Earth to pass some test to be able to live with him. As a parent myself now, this whole idea seems like whoever made up "God's Parenting Rules" was never a parent -- or at least one who loved their children.

3) Complete lack of true compassion, love, or empathy. At a young age, I remember reading the New Testament stories of Christ and thinking "If we are Christians, why don't we love those people instead of shunning them? This seems like the opposite of what we say we believe..."

These are the things that led me away at 17. Since joining you wonderful people and being enlightened to all of the actual historical....malarkey...I would add: JS being a sex-crazed maniac, BY being a power-hungry douchebag, and the BofA, BofM, and D&C being completely false.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/2013 02:12PM by saintdorothymantooth.

This is one of the best threads I've seen...Does anyone have some evidence or proof of the GA's lavish homes? Photos, real estate records, etc?

I'd really like to share that with my wife if there is such proof...I'm actively trying to break her out of the cult and I think this would be very damning evidence.

Search Grant Palmer on this site and read about his meetings with the General Authorities this year.

He tells there how each GA received a million dollars upon accepting the calling in order to allow them to clear debt and "focus" on their new assignment.

And it gets better from there.....


Anagrammy

My husband's paternal grandma was a Polish immigrant. She came over with her parents in the early 20s.

The TBM MIL once showed me pictures and telling me memories of the lady, who passed on before I had a chance to meet her. MIL said how she brought the most wonderful Polish Christmas traditions to her children and grandkids, like making delicious jelly doughnuts and potato pancakes, and "crackerball soup".
And she'd give some little treats and presents every day for the whole week, including little wrapped candies that the kids could win back and forth with her "addition game", which could be played by spinning a top with "Polish" letters on each side.

I flipped over one picture of this grandma and read that her surname was Shapiro. This, combined with the 'Christmas' traditions of doughnuts, latkes, matzo ball soup, and dreidel for the kids led me to ask, "So she was Jewish, right?"

"Oh no," MIL insisted, "she was a gentile. She never would get baptised, though she attended sacrament with the family and of course Grandpa insisted that your FIL and his sisters be raised LDS."

SO...we go on looking at pictures and sharing memories. I found one of Grandma Gentile posing with two seriously handsome young men (like two Daniel Craigs standing together in 1930s business suits). Dated 1939, the back of the picture IDs these men as Grandma's cousins, Saul and Sam, on the day of their arrival in Utah, on their way to California, after leaving Poland.

"They had to leave Poland," MIL said. " They got in trouble with the law or something."
"The Nazis!" I blurted. "They had to get out to avoid the Holocaust."

"No," MIL insisted, "they were all gentiles. Grandpa kept trying to get Grandma to be baptized and her whole family kept telling him to leave her alone about it."

It was then that I realized that regardless of your name, your traditions, your family's obvious Jewishness, that MIL truly, completely believed, in accordance with Mormon teaching, that you were a Gentile if you weren't baptized LDS. That she believed her Scotch-Irish self to be truly Hebrew, and the only real kind of Jew living today.

A fake Jew calling a real Jew a Gentile (and a strong, brave woman who held on to her culture and beliefs and refused baptism until the day she died) just blew my mind SO COMPLETELY that something in my psyche shifted. From that day on I realized the mental conditioning I had been subjected to was turning me into a mindless fool. That family history session was the beginning of my trip out of the cult.

Turns out MIL had the honor of dead dunking, endowment, and sealing of Grandma. I hope that Grandma Shapiro still exists somewhere just so she can have a good laugh at how many times she celebrated Hanukkah right under Mormon noses and they were so fixated on baptizing her they didn't even notice.

Juxtaposed against what I was taught my entire life (60s, 70s, 80s) about Native Americans.

And the worst of it was that as DNA science gained momentum, the LDS church slowly (almost imperceptibly) began backing away from the notion that ALL Native Americans are of Hebraic descent to the notion that just a few of them are of Near Eastern descent.

So, god reveals new things to the church leaders, but he does so at a pace that is around 10 - 30 years behind the science and cultural curves of society.

How freaking convenient.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/2013 02:27PM by schlock.

I couldn't care less about the doctrine. It is just another version of magical weirdness that we see in all religions. There is no difference. It is interesting but I just can't be bothered to care much or to be angry about it.

Here are the issues that were my deal breakers:

1) I was unhappy
2) The concept of a Christian God didn't make sense


#1 was much more important.

They're liars and thieves. Always have been, always will be. That's all I need to know.

For me, it was the sexism and homophobia that goes on, as well as how controlling the church really is. I saw that control when my TBM ex and I decided not to spread our flu to the ward, they sent people to find out why we weren't in church. There's also the fact that you aren't able to chose your ward, and that garments mean they tell you what underwear to wear, regardless of the weather.