A Short Essay

It was 2009 when I started studying my religion, doctrine, and scriptures more seriously.  Really seriously.  God called my name out of bed one night and a spiritual connection I had never had before was opened and available to me.   

In 2010 I devoured everything I could and came to know my guide better than before.  I discovered He likes to talk and persuade and counsel.  If I felt prideful or knowledgeable or better than others, I was gently knocked down.  He isn't distant and isn't unapproachable.  He definitely isn't silent.  If truth was to be found it would be through Him (or other angels, messengers, teachers that He works with -- higher beings with more experience and love than we have). 

  

In 2011 my shelf broke.  Everything about Mormonism I had stuffed away and not looked at because I knew if I did I would be horrified, came crumbling down.  I looked.  I dared to look.  I read an essay by Margaret Toscano and in that very moment I knew my crack would lead to a massive crumble.  I curled up and covered my head and it came.  It came.  All my beliefs and perspective were shattered over the course of a year or two until nothing was left but dust and I immediately wanted to rebuild.

I am an analytical person and can study and view things from an unbiased perspective.  I have a journalism degree and know how to look at facts and opposite sides of stories to ensure that what is presented is fair – or at least acknowledge that it’s not.  I looked at the works of Mormon apologists who work tirelessly to defend white-washed history and I looked at what Anti-Mormons were saying.  I came to believe that both of them were pretty much full of it.  Somewhere in the middle though, on a thin razor edge, was some truth. 

On one side were apologists desperate to explain and cover up lies and on the other side were angry, hurt people inflating truth.  In the middle was a spot where God interacted with humans and tried to offer light and a higher way, but mostly was rejected and repelled.  There was definitely something there but humans were usually too dim-witted to grasp it and especially to keep it going.  Truth and light brought here from a higher realm seemed to atrophy away pretty quickly. 

I had already known that nothing is what it seems in life and was true of the media, government, the food industry, the medical field, business, schools, politics.  There is always a financially vested interest by a few powerful at the top that controls the information, the access, the mindset and beliefs.  I was shocked, and then not so shocked, to learn that my religion was the same. 

So, as I revolved through the steps of grief, I also embarked on a quest for truth.  There was nowhere else to go but into the light at this point.  I no longer could hide behind what I felt or knew or wanted to be true just because it was my family tradition and cultural identity and I wanted to fit in.  I had to embark into uncharted waters.  And I literally could not believe that I was one of the first among my close family and friends to do so.  

How was it possible that no one else cared enough to perform an expansive search for more truth?  Don’t we know the story of the Nazis and how their strict obedience to powerful leaders whom they feared led to the massacre of millions?  Have we ever looked at what attributes identify a cult?  

I suppose that my generation was the first to come into the Google-age and there will be myriads that follow in my footsteps with so much free access to info these days.  I devoured history and doctrine and scriptures and the truth could still only be found on that razor edge.  So thin, so sharp, so hard to see and find.  I realized I had been more than incredibly naive.  I had spent three decades of my life not looking outside my culturally-built box where everything was clean and neat and smelled like roses – or eventually would be if I obeyed and endured to the end.  

I learned this existence we are having right now is actually dark and dirty and gross. Suits and short haircuts, covered shoulders and knees, these things actually weren't the mark of righteousness. Following the biggest radical of all time - Jesus - instead of man-made organized religion, was actually the real path.

At present time the rabbit hole with my former religion has proven to be too deep and too dark for me to continue following it down. I'm not willing to see where it leads or if it ever ends.  I've learned of too much darkness and lies, murder and adultery.  The Mormon church has made themselves into the most irrelevant thing in my life.  I’m bored by their antics and predictability.  I roll my eyes at the latest discovery that they’ve been using and exploiting members and missionaries and donations as resources. 

I have immense love in my heart for the hundreds of people I know who are heavily involved in the Church and carry no ill-will for them.  But for the actual structure, the corporation, the church - I do take issue with and I do speak harshly of.

It has been 3 years since we had our names officially taken off the Church rolls.  I have had family and friends tell me in person that they fervently know we will realize our mistake and return to the Church.  We will regret screwing up our family and kids and being deceived and enticed by the devil. People are so very sad for our poor children.

I still have people tell me that a family member has had a dream or revelation that we will return to the Church, or has been in the temple and had knowledge given them that we will be okay.  Hope abounds for people who believe our life is one of disobedience and sin.  It truly baffles me.  How can others see my wonderfully happy and enriching life and believe I am chasing misery and will someday realize the Mormon church is the only place that I can find happiness?  Why does anyone even care?    

We watched a General Conference talk the other day given by a woman several years ago telling a story of a pioneer woman who drank coffee and couldn’t give it up.  Eight of her ten children then grew up to drink coffee and they were all kept from the blessings of the temple and exaltation in the afterlife -- which blessings are a bit ambiguous if we’re being honest.  The story goes on to lament how all of this woman’s posterity were lost to sin and apostasy because of their mother’s tragic and disobedient choice to drink a single cup of coffee. 

I found this story to be highly disturbing.  In fact, it made me spit out my coffee.  Since I know Church history quite well, I knew that it was common for church members to drink coffee at the time the story was set in.  So at best the story was fudging quite a bit, and at worst it was a fabrication like so many other stories we have heard at Church.  

But also, what type of Christian minister, as this woman claimed to be, would use fear and sorrow over a simple drink to control its congregation into obedience?  To ensure they paid the church money and only wore special panties approved by old white men and kept a specific diet?  It was all too absurd.  It was laughable.

So, I wanted to address why I will never return to the Mormon church, despite some people still insisting that I will.  (I also highly doubt that my anti-Mormon husband or Exmo and Nevermo children will return to or join the Mormon church given how much knowledge they have about it).

 *I outgrew the Mormon church a long time ago.  Yep, I'm puffed up in pride and I lack humility.  But, as someone who craves learning new things and deeper spirituality, and has had connection with other realms and beings, the Mormon church has absolutely nothing to offer me.  They recycle and regurgitate the same vomit over and over again.  In the last General Conference, out of 29 speakers, only 2 were women.  And let's get real - women are the very definition of wisdom.

If we are being honest, even the lifelong faithful members of the church finds it excruciatingly boring to endure and sleep through General Conference.  The fear of it being the only way to happiness and heaven and to ever seeing your family again must be a big part of what keeps people involved.

*I will never pay the Mormon church any more money.  I know too much.  It’s plain and simple.  It is a corporation that takes money from the poor to support not only their massive and expansive business and real estate ventures, but also to pad their own coffers and live rich on the widow’s mite.  Their own scriptures warn against their current practices extensively, but their blind guides just keep on sniffling through talks, emotionally manipulating people into staying and paying.

This is simply not stuff that I can un-know.  This is not stuff that I can rationalize away and have a change of heart about.  I won't ever come to a place where I suddenly believe it is okay for them to grind the faces of the poor and let their own members die of starvation while they dine in fine restaurants and fly around on private jets to private vacation spots because they are best friends with Jesus.  

There is nothing that could happen or be revealed that would change these very open practices and hefty paychecks that anyone with access to Google can learn for themselves. I also know hundreds of people in a similar position to myself.  Many work for the Church still.  Many have and can verify all of these secret works done in darkness.  While local congregations can remain pure and unadulterated, honest people truly trying to follow God, the top leaders and Church structure are just rotten from the inside out.

*They won’t let us back in.  When you resign from church membership, you have to get First Presidency approval to be re-baptized into the church.  In order to be baptized into the Mormon church you have to swear allegiance to their leaders as prophets, pay tithing, confess private sins, etc.  We won’t do any of that and they won’t have us anyway.

*If they would have us, there is nothing in the Mormon church we want or care about.  None of their leaders claim to have any sort of heavenly contact or knowledge that can be taught. (They do teach each other in their private meetings that they are special witnesses purely because of their office in the church, not because they actually have a witness of anything).

If they did claim to have actual contact with God which is their very definition of salvation, they still have never demonstrated any gifts of the spirit that would witness to this or given any message that bestowed pure knowledge and helped others also rise up and gain salvation.  It’s that whole situation explained in the scriptures where the priests don’t enter in themselves, and they also don’t let others enter in.  Blind guides leading the blind into the ditch with loads of false hope.  The Mormon church is just a huge face palm to me.

 

I have seen time and time again how they exploit their members and use them for gain - mostly financial - to build up their power and control.  They literally offer salvation in their temples for a hefty price of 10% of one’s income.  (History repeats itself. Martin Luther, can you believe this?  Yes, you can.)

Some members have now paid millions of their hard-earned bucks into the church to ensure they go to Mormon heaven and aren’t ever separated from their families.  While temple patrons sit on ten-thousand dollar couches in the Celestial room with feet on 100-thousand dollar foreign rugs, homeless sick beggars slouch outside the temple gates desperate for help. 

*I have heard plenty of stories in General Conference and in Church publications that describe how a precious soul decided to live a life of sin and laziness and after thirty years of misery and realizing they had had destroyed their entire life, returns to the Church in complete humility and brokenness and are welcomed back with open arms and the sentiment of “Come back to us, precious daughter.  Your life has been one of sin and disobedience, but there is still time to make things right and enjoy the holy fellowship of God’s only chosen people”.  

I fear that my friends and family may think back to these stories when they think of me.  They may lament that she is full of pride and sin and misery now, but someday she will tire of eating the corn husks with the pigs and will return to the light.

 

I hope that’s not true. But I also hope people will stop receiving revelation that I am going to come back to the Mormon church.

If you could put me at one end of a spectrum with my life values, my knowledge, my spirituality, my connection to heaven, my inner conscience and light – the Mormon church with their practices, doctrine, rules, fear, uniformity, are at the complete other end.  For me to join up with the Church again would be for me to no longer exist. 

And lastly, please hear me, really hear me.  I am happy.  I am content.  I am growing.  I am evolving.  I know God.  I feel at peril at every moment that I will fall from His grace.  But I know Him as my Dad and I trust Him.  He does good work.  He is capable of saving every single person, even you.  And when I say “saving” I mean – educating us.  Helping us grow and progress and evolve into higher beings of light and love that have the capacity to serve and lift others. 

To judge someone is to essentially say that their life is wrong or broken or sinful and your own is in order. That mindset is not only scary since it limits your own growth, but is also kind of offensive. The best thing I have ever learned is to assume that everyone else is doing fine, and I am the only one who needs forgiveness and help and growth.  I should extend mercy for everyone else and expect justice for myself.  I believe that God’s judgment of me will be just and I completely accept it.  He is literally my Dad looking out for me.  I trust Him.

So yeah, I’m lazy.  I’m sinful.  Aren't we all?  I definitely was disobedient to Mormon leaders by leaving the Church.  But I didn’t leave because I’m too dumb to know there is no happiness to be had elsewhere.  I left because my pursuit of happiness, but mostly of knowledge and truth, human decency and morality, wouldn’t allow me to remain.

Please accept each other.  Please stop hoping your friends and family will change until they align with you and your seemingly flawless beliefs and ways.  Please have respect for others who live differently than you.  Jesus isn’t going to ask you if drank a cup of coffee.  But He might ask you if you’re ready to be judged the same way you judged others.