Yes Earl I was born LDS and grew up in an active LDS home in Bountiful Utah, in the bosom of the church so to speak. My journey to adulthood in the church was probably pretty typical. I went to the three meetings on Sundays, primary, MIA, scouts, seminary, FHE’s, etc. I participated by accepting callings and advancement in the priesthood. I would listen to hours of General Conference talks with my family. I accepted a mission call to Scotland in December 1975 and completed an honorable mission.
Outwardly I was LDS. Inside at the spiritual level I was troubled and felt like I was missing something. I would listen to the testimonies of the other kids and adults and wonder why I felt uncertain and doubtful. I would read, fast and pray but never seemed to get the witness that others testified they had received. In my teenage years the WHERE-DO-YOU-WANT-TO-GO-ON-YOUR-MISSION discussions started. It troubled me that I would be testifying to strangers that I knew the church was true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet and saw God. I didn’t know. I hadn’t received an answer. But there is tremendous pressure for every young man to serve a mission. So I started to prepare to go.
I don’t remember what leader said it but I remember the idea that if you don’t have your own testimony, believe on someone who does until you get your own. So I chose a general authority that when he talked, I felt something that I believed must be the spirit of truth, Paul H. Dunn. I loved his stories and his near miraculous experiences, they were truly inspiring. He was my anchor, my hinge-pin for my belief system. If he says it is true, it must be so. I finally had a way to know when I was feeling the spirit. If the feeling was similar to the feeling I got when I listened to Elder Dunn, then that must be the spirit.
I thought as many young men do that once in the mission field, I would find my testimony. So I finally left and went to the Scotland, Edinburgh mission. In the middle of my mission, my companion and I tracked into a Church of Christ minister’s home. He knew a lot about LDS church history, blacks and the priesthood, the Book of Abraham and many other trouble spots for the church. We didn’t convert him. We left a Book of Mormon and our testimonies and he left me with new questions about the church. But because of my anchor, I was able to shelf these new questions and continue with my mission.
I returned home at the end of 1977 and started to think about school and a career. My shelf of questions was dusty and almost forgotten. Then in September 1978 when the church lifted the priesthood ban, I started looking at the shelf of questions again, especially concerning the doctrine of blacks and the priesthood. I taught in the mission field that the reason they could not be ordained was due to their behavior in the pre-existence. This idea never answered this question for me. 1979 I married my present wife in the temple and joined the Navy. I soon forgot about the shelf again.
September 1989. My hinge-pin is placed on Emeritus status because of “health concerns”. I soon learned the truth that Paul H. Dunn, general authority and special witness, had been lying to me. Everything crumbled to dust in an instant. I could understand that he could make a mistake, I could accept that. But what I could not accept is that the feeling I got when I was listening to his lies, was the same feeling that I equated as the spirit at other times. This was impossible. God would not make me feel good about listening to lies.
After that all the shelved questions avalanched on me. I started to read and study trying to lay a new foundation. I had a true-believing wife and kids that were looking to me to be the spiritual leader for them. I hid my disillusionment for years. It seemed that the more I looked, the bigger the problem spots became. New ones surfaced as well. I was drowning in doubt and could find no answers in prayer. I could not confide in my wife or family. I didn’t dare approach the bishop. So I started to lie to my family, the ward and the bishop during temple interviews to keep up appearances.
In 1993 when my youngest daughter was four, she contracted leukemia. We spent the next few years living half the time at Primary Children’s Hospital, fighting desperately to save our child. There were many nights we would stay with her while she fought the illness. At times I would walk the halls of the hospital, with other parents just as worried and helpless. The hospital had a meditation room that I would use to ask God for help and I was not alone. There were many parents asking God to save their child. Some children did recover, my daughter included. Other parents that we came to know quite well had to bury their precious children who had lost the fight and that God had not intervened to save. God answering prayers seemed extremely random to me. That experience brought a new and very terrible question to my mind. What if the reason prayers sometimes go unanswered is because there is no God. These parents that lost children were just as sincere and deserving as I was. Why save some and let others die? Matthew 7: 7-11 says that God does better about giving to His children than we are with our children. Sometimes the answer is NO? That didn’t seem to makes sense considering that scripture.
In my mind there came to be two reasons for God not answering a prayer; He is unwilling to respond or he is unable to respond. I doubt that God would be unwilling to answer a sincere prayer. So that leaves He is unable to respond. Is there any power or condition that could keep God from doing whatever He wanted to do, especially something as simple as answering a prayer? That is when it came to me that it made more sense that the reason He hasn’t made Himself known to me, a witness, is because there is no God to do that. It makes more sense that God is not ignoring me, there is just nobody there. So I became a closet atheist.
Now the problems that the church was trying to conceal and distort made sense. This is all man made. The contradictions in the Book of Mormon, the changes in the D&C, the racism in the early church, polygamy, polyandry; it all made sense that it was just Joseph Smith and other men, not God. Last December of 2013 the church, for me, confirmed as much when they published their “Race and the Priesthood” essay. When they stated that the church “disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects actions in a pre-mortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else”, they just disavowed the Book of Mormon and many early church leaders and so-called prophets.

Today I am no longer a member of record. My family knows that I am not but would like me to be re-baptized. They all still believe. I live in two worlds now, part time investigator for my family and part time non-believer. Neither place is comfortable or secure. So I live one day at a time and hope that tomorrow will bring a solution.