First let me preface this by saying I was never a member of the LDS church. But Just wanted to thank everyone here for their posts. I sort of "stumbled across" these posts and read a few, really hits home with me! The parallels for me and you guys from leaving what are essentially two very different religions are remarkably similar.

I was raised as a Christian in the rural South. I wasn't an average hour-on-sunday christian though. We were reform-penticostals. I attended chrurch 3 hours on sunday morning, 2 and a half hours on sunday night, and 2 hour on Weds. These were just the "required" services. I between there were any number of prayer meetings and services one was expected to attend. I now see that the mormon church is essentially the same. And as I see it, it's nothing more than a way to segregate your members from the rest of the world by taking up all their time, thus making the church their world. Members for whom the church is their entire world are unlikely to question it(at least publicly) and would certainly never leave it.

When I was younger I can truly say I tried everything to be a believer. I wanted it so badly. I wanted the happiness and belonging that everyone else claimed to be experiencing. I wanted to go to Heaven. I wanted the whole life, the whole culture for myself. But i was miserable. I didn't believe. I just couldn't.

Ironically it was my LDS best friend next door that is probably most responsible for this. When we were kids, around 10, we were very close. We played all the time since our houses were side by side. I knew he was a mormon but I didn't know what that meant. I don't know who started the conversation, but one day he started explaining what they believed and we started comparing our beliefs. His beliefs were so different than mine! I couldn't believe what I was hearing!

MY BEST FRIEND WAS GOING TO BURN IN HELL FOR EVER!!

I had to save him! I tried for a few weeks after that to "convert" him as best as any 10 year old could have tried! An adult might have tried to use logic, but even as a kid I knew that you couldn't use logic to explain religion, so I just kept telling him that my parents said he would go to hell if he didn't believe what we did.

But the funny thing was, his parents were telling him the very same thing(although I'm not sure if mormons believe in Hell exactly). They believed as fervently as mine did. They were just as devout. That got me thinking, what makes my parents right? Why can't his parents be right? They all seem so convinced, and I knew of other times my parents had been wrong about things. I tried to use logic to prove that my parents were right and his were wrong. But it was no use. It was then that I first had the thought that maybe both religions were equally absurd and it was only the fact that we were brainwashed with them at an early age that made us believe them at all. After that he and I drifted apart. He was a mormon. He was up 2 hours earlier to go to church before school every single day. He went after school too. And on weekends. We just didn't have time to be friends anymore. I'm sure now that this was just another control mechanism by the mormon cult to alienate their members from society.

From that day on I suppose you could call me a reluctant agnostic. I didn't want to be an agnostic, I wanted to believe. But I wanted to believe in Santa Claus and The Thundercats too. But you can never force yourself to truly believe something. You can, however, lie to yourself and just pretend. I did that for about the next 5 years. I remember countless times sitting in a sermon and hearing the pastor say things and my rational brain would virtually shout at me "That's completely impossible!". And I would clamp down on those thought and continue on as if they never happened.

I became extra-devout for a while, thinking that the reason I had lost my faith and my happiness was because I wasn't worthy of them in Gods eyes. Of course that had the opposite effect on me. I saw thousands upon thousands of prayers go unanswered in my church. We would lay hands on people as the bible commands and pray for their illness or burdens to be lifted. They would cry and smile and usually say they felt better, but next week they'd be back up there again for the same reason.

At about the age of 15 I finally told my Mom and Dad that I didn't believe in God. They were obviously not thrilled but as they are Christians and not Mormons they still love and accept me and we are very close. That's the one thing I feel for you LDSers the most on, is the fact that often your families disown you. To me this is about the most un-christian thing anyone can do and I can't wrap my head around it. If you know "the way" and your child is lost, would you not show them and not abandon them? It speaks of a weak and fragile faith that makes outcasts of anyone who leaves that faith. It's a control mechanism to scare people into staying when they don't want to, since they have no life outside of the LDS community and they don't want to be ostracized.

When people now ask me what religion I am, I say Agnostic. Now you might ask why I don't say "Atheist". And Agnostic is someone who doubts the existence of God. That's me. And Atheist is someone who knows God isn't real. To me, that requires just as much faith as knowing he's real, since in the end neither can ever be proven. I don't "know" that there isn't a God. I just don't believe it likely or even really possible. But I do usually clarify to people who ask that while I may not know for certain that God does not exist, I am 100% certain that he'd have no part in organized religion if he did.