I grew up in a Mormon family in Southern California. My parents taught my siblings and I about how God is our Eternal Father and Jesus is his Son who atoned for our sins. However, things such as Church leadership structure, various rituals, and various other Church details weren’t really emphasized in our home, but more on that later. We went to Church on Sundays and attended cub scouts (and later boy scouts) during the week. I remember being in Primary (the youth Sunday school program) and my favorite part was singing time.

I remember my parents going inactive from the Church about the time I turned 12. For some reason I felt like I needed to remain active, my father would drop me off at Church and pick me up when it ended. I remember this continuing for a couple years until my parents started attending again. When I turned 16 I received my driver’s license and a lot of times I would go to my friend’s house and play video games instead of going to Church.

When I was 18 or so I went to Church one day and my bishop asked me if I would be a primary teacher. I said I would. I taught the 7-8 year old primary class. I actually loved teaching it. The stories in the manual were a mix of stories from the Book of Mormon and Bible but simplified for kids. I would try to tell the stories in funny voices, or with a couple exaggerated details just to keep the kids engaged and entertained. For example I would tell them the story of Lehi sending his sons to get the brass plates and say in an old man voice: “Sons, go and get the plates while I lay back in my chair, watch the game, and drink my Sprite.”

It is customary for 19 year old Mormon males to serve missions and preach the gospel of the Church for two years. While I felt some pressure from tradition I really didn’t have the desire to serve a mission. When I reached 20 years old I realized that I needed to make a change in my life. I was still living at home and I realized that I needed to leave to progress. I decided that I had two choices: either go on a mission or go to college. I still had no desire to go on a mission so I decided that I would apply to college for the fall semester. However, my plans changed when I had a dream. The dream was a pretty awesome dream, it would probably make a good movie, or at least a good episode of 24. In the dream I singlehandedly fought terrorists, a hundred black ninjas descending on fast ropes from helicopters, stopped a Nuclear bomb… and at the end I got the girl… or so I thought. Right about the part where I’m supposed to go for the kiss and cue the victory music she says to me: “No one is going to be really interested in you unless you fulfill your duty and serve a mission.” Then I woke up.

I had this feeling in my stomach that I thought pretty much told me what I needed to do. It was Sunday morning, about 5AM. I filled out my mission papers and waited for 9AM when I handed them to my bishop. The next thing I knew I had a letter that said that I was headed to Brazil in three months, in August 2003.

I remember my mom tearing up as I boarded the plane in Burbank headed to Denver, then to Chicago, then down to São Paulo. As we landed in Denver the stewardess told us about the connecting flights. There were two flights to Chicago, one at gate C36 and the other at C37. I thought that I should get my boarding pass out and look to see which gate I should go to when I received the impression that I shouldn’t look at my boarding pass, I should just go to gate C36. I thought again to myself, no I will just look at my boarding pass to see which gate to go to. Again the impression to go to C36. Finally I reached into my bag to grab my boarding pass and I thought I heard a voice say STOP! JUST GO TO GATE C36. So I zipped up my bag and when the plane landed I went to C36. Some other missionaries were already there waiting for their connection. I was hungry and asked them to watch my bag while I went and grabbed some food. When I returned there was a man talking on the phone (this was a pay phone, cell phones were just starting to become common) in front of where I had left my bags. When the man got off of the phone he turned around and saw me and said: “Where are you from, Elder?” I told him the city I was from and his eyes widened. “I served my mission in that city! Do you know…” He proceeded to name a bunch of families. I knew them all and was able to tell him what had happened with them in the past 20 years. The last family he named was my bishop’s family. I gave him the contact information for my bishop and we noticed that a line had formed behind us and it was time to board the plane. As we approached the flight attendant he told me that he had not had any contact information for anyone who lived in my city and he had been praying to know what had happened to the families he baptized into the Church. He told me that the Lord had sent me there to answer his prayer. He wanted to know more and he said he would find me and sit next to me on the plane as he gave his ticket to the flight attendant and boarded the plane. I handed my ticket to the flight attendant. “I’m sorry,” she said, “You’re at the wrong gate, your flight is across the way at gate C37.” She pointed across the terminal. I shrugged and picked up my bags and went to the other terminal.

When I arrived at the MTC I experienced a faith crisis. I didn’t know if I could teach people something that I did not know was true myself. I had not received an overwhelming witness confirming to me the truth of the Church. The teachers at the MTC, themselves former missionaries, told us that we had living apostles and prophets. I admit that General Conference was not a big deal in my house growing up. It was the Sunday that we had Church on TV and I was able to do anything I wanted, including take a nap. I honestly can’t remember ever actually watching a session and understanding who was speaking or what their role was while I was growing up and no one ever bothered to explain it to me. Well now I was finding out at the MTC that those guys were actually living apostles of Jesus Christ. The MTC teachers went the extra step of telling us that this meant that they literally talk with Jesus Christ, as the apostles in the New Testament, face to face. I didn’t know if I believed that. I mean somehow I could believe that Jesus could appear to the original apostles, or Joseph Smith, or anyone else in the past, but someone who is alive today that I could theoretically actually meet and talk to? I thought that I should just go home, I was never going to be able to believe this.

Then there was an announcement that Henry B. Eyring was going to make a visit to the MTC. I thought that this would confirm to me that the Church was true. I prayed to God to let me know somehow when he spoke that he was a true apostle of Jesus Christ. The only part of his talk I remember is that he said that he had to pray every day about the Book of Mormon to know that it was true, or else he begins to forget that it is true. (This actually has much greater meaning to me today than then, but more on that later). I received no confirmation that the Church was true. I still felt the same. I started thinking that I should go home, but I didn’t want to be an Elder that went home early… I would probably never get married… although maybe if I got really sick or broke my leg… I decided I would figure it out by the time I left the MTC. I started studying the scriptures, specifically the New Testament. I pondered Acts 10:39-43 for days.
39 And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree:
40 Him God raised up the third day, and shewed him openly;
41 Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.
42 And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead.
43 To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.

Finally I reached a conclusion. I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that Jesus was real. If Jesus was real then I wanted to believe that he had appeared to people today as well as in the past, and I decided that if the Church’s apostles were bold enough to make the claim that they were true apostles then it must be true, because it would be crazy to claim something like that and not be true… and deceive the millions of members of the Church… deceive the entire world!

I arrived in the mission field barely able to understand anything that anyone said. It was a miserable and humbling experience. I couldn’t tell anyone that I was hungry or that I needed to go to the bathroom. Today I relate the experience to that of a child that is learning to speak… They know how to make some sounds and gestures but end up crying because they failed to communicate. I found out that I learned the best by talking with kids. They didn’t seem to care as much that I spoke like a 3 year old and were willing to correct me and teach me the correct words to say. Other than that I would just follow my Brazilian mission companion around all day while he talked to people.

I remember meeting my mission president for an interview and he asked me if I had trouble with girls in the mission. He was Brazilian and knew how to speak very little English. I’m pretty sure I told him in English that I didn’t even know how to speak to them and he didn’t understand anything that I said to him.

Things changed on my third transfer when I was made senior companion to a brand new to the field Brazilian missionary. I remember that first night I was so tired from following my previous companion around all day that I fell asleep kneeling by my bed to say my prayers. I woke up the next morning and I was still kneeling. My new companion told me later that I had scared him, and he wondered what was going on that I would be that tired. The next day he asked me what we were supposed to do. I had no idea. I was only following my Brazilian companions around the whole time. I realized I was going to have to start doing something. There was never a shortage of people to talk to so I took him out to the street and started talking to people. I realized that they were half understanding what I said and luckily my Brazilian companion was there to fill in the gaps. We actually became really good friends. He helped me so much in learning Portuguese. We worked hard together and had a good time. Tragically a few days after I was transferred from that area, his twin brother died in a motorcycle accident. He decided that if he really believed in the afterlife he was going to stay in the mission and teach people about it. Today I have some regret about having the same feeling and believing the teaching in the Church that missionaries should stay in their mission no matter what. I was able to visit him a couple years later in Brazil. I was only able to spend a few days with him because of his work schedule, but he only made a few hundred dollars a month I was tempted to tell him to just quit his job and give him the money to come tour Brazil with me. I should have because a few months after I visited him, he died in a car accident. I still miss him and leave his phone number in my cell phone contact list as a memorial.

I spent a year in my mission studying the Bible in Portuguese. I found all of the scriptures that indicated that Jesus church would be taken from the earth and an apostasy would occur. The message of the restoration made so much sense to me in terms of the Bible. It is obvious that Jesus set up some kind of Church and the Church in that form is no longer around today.

I was later assigned to work in the mission office as the financial secretary. As the financial secretary of the mission I worked in the mission office during the day, and taught people at night. Being in the mission office allowed me to get close to the mission president. I saw that my mission president really believed in everything that he taught us, and believed with all his heart that the Church was Jesus’ true church on the Earth and it was his duty to shout from the rooftops if necessary that Jesus is Lord and that he has restored his church to the earth. He sincerely believed that the gospel would help his fellow Brazilians, get them out of poverty, and give them goals to work towards and become better people. I know of a couple people that I keep in touch with on facebook that are significantly better off in their lives because we encountered them in the street and gave them something positive in their life. I wish them all the best in their spiritual journey.

Our mission president taught us that if we sanctified ourselves we would have more success. These two years would be the only time that we would have to be able to clear our minds and focus on attaining the spirit as other obligations and commitments to work and family would get in the way of dedicating a significant amount of time to spirituality in the future. While this sounds harsh, I am grateful for his teaching (and it turned out to be true, I don’t think I will have time to focus solely on spirituality until I retire). I started focusing on spirituality, clearing my mind of things not related to the task I was focusing on, meditating, studying the scriptures in Portuguese (I actually know the scriptures much better in Portuguese than English), praying and fasting. While I was trying to focus on spirituality I had a dream. It was kind of like the vision described by Nephi in the Book of Mormon where the Spirit comes and answers his questions. In this dream I am walking with a man dressed in white, who I assume is the Spirit, and he says to me, “What is it that you want to know, and I will answer.” I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to know. He replied, “ You will want to know more, I will return later”. Then I woke up.

One day we had a mission conference and a member of the area authority presidency was going to visit us. We were specifically instructed that he was a special witness of Jesus Christ and we were not to ask him if he had actually seen Jesus Christ. These experiences are sacred and should not be talked about. I was curious why a witness of Christ wouldn’t be able to talk about it, but I figured that maybe he was instructed to do so in the same way that Jesus healed people and told them not to tell anyone about it. I honestly don’t remember anything about that meeting other than the night before I had to hide in a hotel with my companion before I took him to the airport to go to another mission. Apparently, before we were companions he had thought that it would be a good idea to go preach repentance to a former stake president that had left the Church who “was connected” and he now had some kind of death threat / hit order issued against him.

I remember a group of new American missionaries came. My mission president still didn’t know how to speak English (I don’t think he does to this day, or ever will). He told us to tell the missionaries not to get involved in anything political and if they saw a crime being committed to not become involved and not get involved with any kind of reporting to the police. One of the office missionaries turned around and told them, “You are going to see people shot and stabbed. Find dead bodied in the street. Maybe you will be robbed. When you see this, just turn around and run. Drop everything and run away!” I will never forget the look on those missionaries faces. I will also never forget what happened next. My mission president, wanting to drive the point home (and having no idea what was just said) pointed to the office missionary and said in his broken English “Listen… to…. This… elder… he… knows…” The sad part is that both were telling the truth.

I had an experience with my companion that had been sent to another mission that completely changed my outlook. We were in the favela one day when tons of cops showed up. There were probably 20 SUVs that rolled up. There were some men playing soccer in a field and they started to run away the cops pulled out their AKs and started shooting. I have no idea if they were actually shooting the people or just firing warning shots, but we dove into someone’s house until the shooting stopped. Then we ran out of there when no one was looking. I told my companion that we were never going back there again. He just looked at me and said, “Elder, we have to go back there. I grew up in a favela. All my friends were in gangs, and now are either in jail or dead. The missionaries came and baptized me and I changed and it saved my life.” I spent the rest of my mission walking around favelas trying to take teenagers to church. I figured that if I could get just one kid onto a better path that would lead him out of the favela and it would have all been worth it.

When I got home from my mission I wanted to find my eternal companion. All the girls that I knew before I left had gone and seemed to have been replaced by ones that seemed too young and immature for me to be interested in. I got back in August 2005. In February 2006, a friend in Las Vegas invited me to join the IT consulting business that he was starting. I went out to visit him and told him that I would join him. The dating scene was pretty flat and it seemed like a fresh start in a new town was just what I needed. However when I returned home I prayed and fasted about it and felt that it was a good option, the most logical option, but I wasn’t supposed to go join him. It really didn’t make any sense to me until June 2006 when I met my wife.

We met at a young single adult conference. All of the YSA activities had become pretty dull, focusing on indexing, or some other church theme. I decided I wasn’t interested in going, but changed my mind at the last second. My wife had a similar experience which is more interesting because she actually lived 60 miles away. I remember a guy seeing her and telling me, “She’s the prettiest girl I’ve seen at Church.” I turned around and looked at her and said, “yep” then went over and sat next to her and tried to figure out how to engage her in conversation. I was out of practice and wasn’t successful. She left the conference with her friend, whom I knew. That night there was supposed to be a dance. I figured I would try to engage again at the dance. A thought occurred to me that she might not come back because the activity had been so lame. I thought I should call her friend and ask them to come back, but then I decided that I would not, as that conversation might be embarrassing. I felt the same strong impression as I had before when I was on the airplane headed to my mission and thought I heard a voice say, “No you should call her right now.” So I gathered my courage and called her friend and asked if they were coming back and she said no. I told her to come back because I wanted to meet her friend. I’m pretty sure she told me they weren’t planning on coming back, but to my surprise, they did.

I ended up getting my wife’s phone number and calling her later and asking her out. She told me that she wasn’t interested. I hung up and thought, “Then why did you give me your number?” A little while later she called me back and said she was sorry, she had a bad day, and that she would like to go out. On the way home from that date she told me her story. She had been in a bad marriage and was in the process of finalizing her divorce. She had been very naïve and the Church had conditioned her to say yes to authority. Her former husband had tricked her into marrying him by telling her things like, “God revealed to me that we’re supposed to get married and if we don’t get married the children that we’re supposed to have will be mad at you.” (I would later find out that this is the exact thing that Joseph Smith went around doing, but I’ll discuss that later). Her marriage had pretty much gone downhill from there as he used his “priesthood” to tell her that she was supposed go to work to support him, and do many other things that were subservient to him. His family was in the stake presidency and completely supported him and agreed with everything he said and were just as manipulative as him. He got an accident that put him in the hospital for some time and she was finally able to get away and think about things. She knew things weren’t going to change and filed for divorce.

After telling me all of this she was sure that I wasn’t going to want to see her again. However, I felt a feeling that I had never felt before. I felt that she was being completely open and honest with me, and was telling me everything without putting her guard up. No one had ever been that way with me before and I felt a feeling deep inside that this was the girl that I was going to marry. That was the moment that I fell in love with her and we were together every day after that. There was only one problem. She was living 60 miles away at her parents house.

I had to make a 120 mile round trip every day to go see her. Sometimes she would come down and see me, however I soon got a job at a TV station that was 60 miles south. I would have to make a 120 mile round trip to work and then 120 mile round trip to see her. Driving 200+ miles per day was getting tiring. I knew I wanted to marry her so I asked her and she said yes in September 2006. I wanted to get married in the temple (since that is what I had been taught all of my life) so we had to file a request for a cancelation of sealing with the Church. Finally, in November 2006 the response came back that the previous sealing was canceled and we were giving permission to marry in the temple. We got married a couple weeks later and that day I felt like I was on top of the world and that I had married my sweetheart.

Several months later we were expecting our first child and I walked down to Human Resources at work to ask how much it was going to cost to add family benefits. It was way more than we could afford, so I started applying for other jobs, but the first question I was always asked by recruiters was where I had my college degree from. I hadn’t graduated yet so I started looking at applying to school. I had always wanted to go to UCLA and had friends there but when I calculated the costs 1 semester of UCLA would cost about as much as 4 semesters of BYU-Idaho. So we went to BYU-Idaho.

Honestly, for as much as I heard about the Honor Code at BYU-Idaho, I felt like 95% of the restrictions were directed at single people and not at me. The only things I did on campus was go to class and then leave and go to work, so I never really had time to get involved in anything else so the only restrictions that really applied to me was that I had to wear a shirt and tie to the testing center. I had a family to support and wanted to get school over with so I busted out my degree in 2.5 years, so I never really had time to get upset about not being able to wear shorts or flip flops on campus.

After I graduated we moved a few times for work. Every ward we were in I was called to be in the Young Men’s organization. My wife didn’t like it because it took me away from helping with our kids, she didn’t feel it was right. I should have listened to her and made her happy first, but I thought that I needed to fulfill my duty to God by serving in the Church… even if it displeased my wife. Looking back I can’t believe that I didn’t put her first, but I guess that making mistakes is how you learn in life… (if your wife lets you live after you make them).

After 7 years of being married we now had three boys and hadn’t lived near family the whole time so we moved back to California to my wife’s hometown to be near family. A couple months after we moved back my wife didn’t feel right at Church. She resigned from her calling in the Young Women and stopped going to Church. I believe that everyone has their own faith journey and must find their own path to spirituality so I just rolled with it. I felt bad for not going to church on Sunday, but eventually I noticed that we were actually spending more time together as a family and how relaxing it was to have an extra day in the weekend.

My wife wanted to start drinking coffee, which I was also fine with. However, she wanted me to start buying it for her and I wasn’t comfortable with that. I was fine with her acting on her beliefs but I didn’t want to go against something that I believed. I decided that I needed to reexamine Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants. When I read verse 17 I did a double take:

17 Nevertheless, wheat for man, and corn for the ox, and oats for the horse, and rye for the fowls and for swine, and for all beasts of the field, and barley for all useful animals, and for mild drinks, as also other grain.

So mild barley/grain drinks are OK? I could only assume that meant mild alcoholic drinks since verse 5 refers to strong drinks. Basically this was saying that beer was ok. That didn’t jive with what I was taught. So I went to google to find out when the interpretation changed to include all alcoholic drinks and thus was the beginning of the end.

Researching word of wisdom interpretation changes just led me to a host of other problems with church history that convinced me that I have been deceived. I wouldn’t even say that I had to be convinced, the truth was as plain as day and the truth was that the church has been lying, lying by omission, backdating documents from its inception. The worst part is that a majority of all of this information comes from official church documents like Joseph Smith papers, History of the Church, Journal of Discourses, etc.

I had encountered anti-mormon material before, but usually it was in a book that touched a few issues and contained bizarre doctrine such as Brigham Young claiming there were men on the moon. However, in the information age and with google it is much easier to correlate information than ever before. Where before I would have to be a scholar and spend days, weeks and months in search of the information in libraries, travel to Salt Lake, etc now I can access it in minutes without traveling anywhere.

I read the CESLetter which pretty much is one guy who’s family had a connection to the director of CES and he wrote about the issues and asks for an explanation. No reply was ever received. The following issues are found in official church sources:
• Joseph Smith married 34 women, some as young as 14, and hid most of the marriages from Emma while preaching that polygamy was wrong, and even had some of his “wives” sign an affidavit stating that he did not practice polygamy. Some of these marriages were even to women that were already married to other men. Joseph married his wife while he sent Hyde on a mission to dedicate the land of Israel for the preaching of the Gospel.
• Joseph Smith never used the plates to translate the Book of Mormon, he used a rock in a hat. Elder Nelson actually mentions this in a 1992 talk. Why go through the effort in the entire Book of Mormon to get the plates and preserve them, Moroni come back as an angel, if Joseph didn’t even use the plates?
• A book called View of the Hebrews was published by Oliver Cowdery’s former pastor before the
• Book of Mormon that has the exact same story lines as the Book of Mormon.
• None of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon confessed to actually seeing the plates. When pressed David Whitmer said that he “saw them under a cover” or “saw them with his spiritual eyes”. There is no record of them ever signing a statement, only a paper with their names on it in Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting.
• There are 4 recorded accounts of the first vision that Joseph gave. In one he says he sees an angel, then a host of angels, and then it morphs into he saw God and Jesus.
• The Book of Abraham is a complete fraud. They found the original papyri that Joseph Smith used to “translate” it. Both LDS and non-LDS Egyptologists agree that it says nothing about Abraham and relates to Egyptian burial rituals.
• Joseph was duped into translating made up plates called the Kinderhook plates
• There’s no record of the restoration of the priesthood until 5 years after the Church starts. David Whitmer then says that Joseph has never told him about until about 1834 years… 5 years after the church was restored.
There are many more issues. Read for yourself if you want to discover the truth. It will set you free! No wonder Henry B. Erying has to convince himself everyday that the Book of Mormon is true!

I have come across some of these issues before. Individually they might be dismissed and forgiven as transgressions, however collectively they can not be dismissed because they paint the picture that Joseph Smith was not honest in his dealings with other men! That means that he is a false prophet.

I could also understand how a prophet could fall. David had many wives and fell, but there were other true leaders that followed him. Surely our modern-day prophets and apostles would never lead us astray!

After reading CESLetter I consented to reading the exmormon forums. There you will find the ugly truth. We have been deceived for almost two hundred years and the brethren have been perpetuating the lies, covering up sins, and obfuscating the truth. There are accounts there from former bishops, stake presidents, temple presidents. Stories of abuse, lying, cheating… like I said it is the ugly truth.

I read the account of Tom Philips, the guy suing Thomas S Monson for fraud in England. The church gave him his “second anointing”. They asked him not to tell anyone about it, not even his own family. The ordinance that is supposed to seal you to the celestial kingdom. It’s supposed to be the same ordinance that Jesus performed for his apostles by washing their feet. It’s also supposed to be done by Jesus, instead he says it was performed by Elder Ballard. They then asked him to name other people to receive the ordinance. He thought why are men choosing who gets to go to the celestial kingdom or not? They later told him to lie if anyone had ever asked him if he had seen Jesus. They told him to say, “we have been instructed by the Brethren not to talk about such sacred experiences” He couldn’t live a lie and perpetuate the lie.

Then I wondered if any church leader other than Joseph Smith had ever admitted to seeing Jesus Christ. The only account I could find was an obscure second hand account by the granddaughter of Lorenzo Snow who said that he pointed out the spot in the temple where Jesus appeared to him, however every other reference I could find was the same “I know because of experiences to sacred to mention” line. In fact all of the accounts I found where someone directly questions an apostle if they have seen Jesus or not say that the leader gets really angry and reprimands them and calls them impertinent for asking. Really? A modern apostle of Christ can’t respond as the Apostles did in the Bible where they say they know he lives because they actually saw him, touched the prints in his hands and feet, and ate with him?! Can’t even say that they had a vision of him?! Why is Joseph Smith the last church leader in the past 200 years in THE ONLY TRUE AND LIVING CHURCH to say that they saw Jesus Christ. If Jesus appeared to me I would be shouting it from the rooftops, I would be getting laughed at by the Greeks, I would be testifying in Rome. These church leaders do none of these. They know it is false, they know they are false, and they choose to perpetuate lies that have real effects on real people. Relatives are unable to attend weddings. My own sisters have been waiting to find a good returned missionary to marry, completing ignoring other opportunities. Families are torn apart when someone finds out the church is a lie, but the other family members feel that the need to beat them into submission to the church. The Church does not want you to look at unofficial Church sources because they do not want you to discover the truth.

There is also an account of a special fireside in Sweden. You can find it by searching Swedish rescue on google. Many of the members there read things on the internet including area authority Hans Mattsson. L. Tom Perry showed up with the church historians for a special fireside. L. Tom Perry said that he had a special manuscript in his briefcase that would explain everything. Hans asked to see it, he said it was impertinent to ask and never showed it to them. The Church historians were not able to deny that the horrible things they read about church history. L. Tom Perry basically told the Swedish members that if they had a problem with the church that they should leave.

I am understandably angry about being deceived. I am even more angry that I walked around Brazil for two years teaching people that we had living Apostles and Prophets. In one town I lived in an apartment above a different Church. One day we came downstairs and the pastor of that church told us that we were walking around deceiving people. I thought how wrong of him to say that to us, but it turned out that I really was the one walking around deceiving people! However, I think the reason I was deceived is because of the truly wonderful people that are in the church. People like my parents, my inlaws, my mission president, my leaders growing up. I believed because they believed.

I believed in Santa Claus when I was little. I believed because my parents told me he was real and because the other kids believed too. Even when other kids told me he was false, I still believed because I wanted to believe that there was a jolly old man that brought me presents every Christmas. Eventually, as every kid does, I realized that there is no evidence to prove that Santa is true, and the majority of the evidence proves that Santa is a myth. I wanted to believe the Church is true, I wanted to believe in Jesus that comes to America, in the first Vision, the Book of Mormon, and living Apostles and Prophets. However it seems as though the majority of evidence is proving that this is all myth.

The church really isn’t doing itself any favors either by declaring from the pulpit that the church can only be true, or it can only be false. Joseph Smith can only be true or he can only be false. The Book of Mormon can only be true or it can only be false. Either it is all true or it is all false. Well, I have found enough to convince me that at least the parts that matter to me are false and I must conclude that it is false. In all it took me about 2 days to read all of the information and about a week to process it and come to my conclusion. What really gets me though, is that now that I do not believe that the organization that taught me honesty and integrity practices either. Now I question, is Jesus even true?

The Apostle Paul said Christ is married to the Church but the Mormon church is a cheating spouse. She keeps lying and coming back. For the good of my family we need to divorce, we need to move on with our lives. You can keep the tithing, time, talents and effort that I gave you. You can keep the two years in Brazil. Mormon Church, good luck, you’re going to need it to survive.

Lastly, I think about some of the spiritual experiences that I’ve had. I had interpreted them as signs that I was on the right path in the church, but maybe it just means that I’m on the right path in life? When I met that guy by going to the wrong gate at the Denver airport, maybe that was just karma’s way of paying him back for the good that he’s done in his life? When I followed intuition or spiritual promptings in dreams and it led me to good things like meeting my wife maybe that was just the universe’s way of doing me a solid? Everything seems a lot more miraculous now that I can’t explain things. I wouldn’t change anything about my experiences, they have made me who I am today and I wouldn’t trade my wife and three sons for anything else in the world. I love them more than anything and I wouldn’t have them if I had not traveled this path. I’m looking forward to continuing the journey and discovering the Truth with them.