I finally submitted my resignation letter to my Bishop a couple of days ago so I thought now would be a good time to post my story on this board.

I am the 2nd child of 10. My mother was a convert to the church because of my dad's family but only stayed in the church for about 10 years before getting out. My dad was a non practicing mormon for most of my life but suffered from alchoholism and was never really able to get it together for very long periods of time. My dad was out of work mostly because of his drinking and my mom worked and took care of the kids. So needless to say we were pretty poor growing up. I stopped going to church when I was about 8 but I was still baptized back then. It wasn't a good experience for me and I didn't want to be there. I could tell that my mom was just doing it because of outside pressure from other people in my family and that her heart wasn't in it. I never felt loved at church as a child. Only judged because we were poor and didn't have nice sunday dress to wear or dues for scouting.

Fast forward to my teenage years. I had no interest in church at all at this point and never really thought about it although I thought about God quite often and prayed regularly. I had some pretty wild tendencies and my friends and I were a bit out of control. We never hurt anyone but there were a lot of girls and excessive drinking. I have two very distinct dealings with the church during these years that left an even more sour taste in my mouth. The first of which involved one of my friend's mom. She had went to church one day and overheard some of the "sisters" in the ward discussing how it was a well known fact that my brother and I along with all of the boys that we hang out with like to kill small animals. She of course knew that this was so far out of character for us that she got angry and told them off for spreading rumors like this(she is no longer a member either by the way). It was of course a blatant lie that makes me wonder what other types of lies were going around at that time about us. Like I said, we were wild and sometimes kept very late nights but we were totally harmless. The next occasion was a visit from the Bishop and two missionaries. They came to the door and asked to speak to our parents. My mom came to the door and spoke courteously to them for a few minutes. They then asked if they could come and take us kids to church on Sunday and my mom told them no. She wasn't comfortable with their church and would rather not have her children go. After a few more words were exchanged, the Bishop started preaching fire and brimstone and told her that if she kept her kids from the Gospel, she was going to burn in hell. That is LITERALLY what he said. All of us overheard this part and my dad got up and went over to the door very angrily and told them to get the heck out of there only he didn't say heck. He continued to make his fire and brimstone statements as my dad slammed the door.

I got married when I was 19 and after I had been married for a few years and had my second daughter, I was getting tired of the way I was living my life. I was still smoking and drinking occasionally. My wife started taking my kids to church and I decided to go with her. The people seemed to be really nice and I was making a pretty good living and had a decent house so I guess it wasn't as easy for them to judge me. I rationalized the past saying that just because people in the church made mistakes didn't mean the church was wrong. Not realizing at the time that much of the doctrine in the church promotes this bad behavior in it's members. After getting cleaned up and getting sealed in the temple to my wife and family I proceeded to try to live the life expected of an LDS person. I was truly deceived for a while. I myself became puffed up in the pride of the church. I started becoming the type of person that had disgusted me so many years before. I had always had a hard time reading the Book of Mormon. The logic and phrasing in it always seemed so juvenile and unbelievable. I would talk a good talk in testimony meeting but when it came time to open it up and read, I was right back in my sea of doubt because of the insane monotony. The same goes for the D&C, any time I would try to read it, I would constantly be filled with doubt because I found it hard to believe that the God that I know and love would waste his time with such inconsequential drivel. But of course, I had my spiritual witnesses which trumped everything for me. At least for a while. Until I started realizing that these same spiritual witnesses were had by people of all faiths and persuasions. I even experienced very similar feelings watching certain movies or seeing my children perform.

So one day I'm sitting in the break room at work discussing food storage and 'end of the world' type situations when someone asks me "What will you do if the prophet instructs you to turn all your food storage in to the Bishop's storehouse?" I answered "I would pray for confirmation that this was the right thing to do and if so, then I'd do it." He said, oh no, you have to obey the prophet, that's doctrinal, you obey first and ask questions later. We proceeded to argue about this for few minutes with no resolution. I then went home and studied and found that doctrinally, he was absolutely right. This was the beginning of the end for me. I realized at that moment that Joseph Smith and every prophet since him, had inserted themselves in some form or fashion between man and God which flies directly in the face of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and basically sets aside his sacrifice as insufficient. I remained in the church after this but not as stalwart. I knew something was wrong. I then started to hear things from my sisters about church history that startled me. Every time I would say "that can't be true", then I would look into it myself and find out that not only is it true, but it's worse than I thought. They told me about the Adam God doctrine Brigham Young taught and I found out that he didn't just teach it, he incorporated it into the temple ceremony and then later prophets disavowed it as false doctrine. They told me about Joseph Smith's polygamy and after looking into it, I found that it wasn't just polygamy, he also practiced polyandry. And lied about it the whole time. The church was quickly unraveling for me at this point and I was almost as good as gone. I stopped going to church and was feeling very bitter. I dove deep into church history and with every new issue I looked at it got worse and worse. I would talk to members of my family who were members of the church and they were very reluctant to investigate any of the information I was giving them. It was as if they knew what they would find if they looked into it so they would rather just continue in blissful ignorance.

My wife is actually still there. She no longer wears her garments and she knows that the church is most likely false but I think she likes the social aspects still. She may also feel some sort of obligation to honor her parents who have passed away by remaining in the church that they raised her in. But to her credit, she doesn't put any pressure on me to return to church and she treats me very well. Our marriage is actually much better now than it ever was before. I have much more time to devote to her and our children since I don't have time consuming callings any more.

I would like to conclude this with an excerpt from my resignation letter :

Whenever I have spoken to anyone about these inconvenient facts (which has only been people in my family for the most part at this point), their only course of action is to try to bear their testimony because all of this is derived from the church’s own historical record and can’t be repudiated factually. To this I ask why should I believe your testimony over the testimony of a member of any other organized religion? They bare theirs with just as much conviction and fervor as you do. They have the same stories of raising the dead and healing the sick. They were given the same wonderful feelings as you were. And they may even think that they have secret knowledge also. In short, they also have a firm testimony that they have found the truth. So the following is fundamentally important. The only thing that Christ asked us to have faith in was Him. Not a church. Not a prophet. Not a religion. So any testimony based on anything other than Christ is basically meaningless to me. Christ warns over and over again not to rely on the arm of flesh. God created us in His image, mind, body, and spirit. It is striking that these three things are the image of ONE God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They are one and function as a perfect being and the source of all truth. If we are to seek and find truth, we also must use body, mind and spirit. Only a foolish man that doesn’t understand God would say “even though all of the evidence says that this church is false, I’ve felt the spirit so I’ll believe anyway.” In Jeremiah 17:9 it says “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” We must use ALL our God given faculties to determine truth for if we rely on only one, we can easily be deceived. God did not give us a mind only to have us ignore logic and reasoning. He gave us intelligence so that we could use it to seek, serve and love Him. He didn’t put us into a physical world expecting us not to learn and experience everything around us, He put us here so that we would grow, learn, and develop tools to seek, serve and love Him. The Holy Ghost was given to corroborate the truth not as the source of all truth. The doctrine that the Holy Ghost is the source of all truth is a false doctrine. I’m not sure that the church teaches this false doctrine in written form, but they definitely teach it in practice. God is the source of all truth. The Holy Ghost is only one aspect of God.

I experienced many blessings as a latter day saint, blessings that I attributed at least in part to my membership in that church. Upon learning the truth I can only describe how humbling and joyful the feeling is to know that every time I paid tithing and was subsequently blessed, or “magnified my calling” and was rewarded, it wasn’t because I belonged to the one true church and was abiding by it’s precepts but rather, He blessed me because He loved me and for no other reason. Every story of healing and miraculous intervention that I had heard that was attributed to the priesthood was now understood to have had nothing to do with any fictitious priesthood but was rather a result of our Heavenly Father’s love for his children. What a lesson in love that is. Whether you’re muslim, Christian, lds, or any other religion, God loves you and blesses you according to his own omnipotent benevolence. There is no one true church, only one true God.