What if the issue that took you out of the church were to be resolved to your satisfaction? Would you consider going back?

Say, if the Church were to somehow produce the golden plates and they were unquestionably authentic. Would you consider?

Or if some of the still missing papyrus turned up and did indeed have the text of Abraham on it?

What if Monson were to finally act like a prophet and predict an earthquake to the location/time/magnitude exactly correctly.

Or if the Brethren announced "we acknowledge that women administered blessings in Joseph's time, and effective immediately they can again."

Or if evidence surfaced that Joseph really did go around in 1820 telling everybody he saw God?

Could any scenario such as these, or any other, bring you back?

Maybe if I woke up from a three year coma and every critical or negative thing I've read about the church turned out to be wrong and all thesilly stupid things I've realized about christianity in general were proven illogical then, perhaps.

No.

As I stated in my resignation letter last year....

"After today, the only contact I want from the church is a single letter of confirmation to let me know that I am no longer listed as a member of the church. There is no need to have anyone come by to talk at me about why I am leaving. It would just be an exercise in futility. I am not going to debate my leaving of the church, nor will I ever consider coming back without having a lobotomy first."

> "Say, if the Church were to somehow produce the golden plates and they were unquestionably authentic. Would you consider?"

It wouldn't matter if the golden plates turned up and were authentic. Joseph Smith still wouldn't have been able to translate them with his magic rock. He would have made something up that didn't even remotely match the source document, just like he did with the Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook Plates.

> "Or if some of the still missing papyrus turned up and did indeed have the text of Abraham on it?"

Then God on his throne would still be Min with a gigantic erection, and the Goddess Isis would still be neither Abraham nor Pharaoh.

> "What if Monson were to finally act like a prophet and predict an earthquake to the location/time/magnitude exactly correctly."

Or hey, what if Monson started wearing clown makeup, learned to make awesome balloon animals (maybe tapirs and cureloms), and started passing out cotton candy on Temple Square?

> "Or if the Brethren announced 'we acknowledge that women administered blessings in Joseph's time, and effective immediately they can again.'"

So what? Why would that be any different than when The Brethren™ gave black men the priesthood in 1978?

> "Or if evidence surfaced that Joseph really did go around in 1820 telling everybody he saw God?"

Still wouldn't make it true.

The thing is, there's not just one problem. People don't just have one issue. Because Mormonism was a fraud from the beginning, there's a whole big pile of problems, inconsistencies, and outright lies. Solving one wouldn't make the rest of them go away.

Honestly, there is this one gorgeous cowboy I worked with years ago - the one that helped me realize the Mormon Family Dream was a crock - who I would avoid like the plague if we were ever both single at the same time. Because he's still TBM and if it were a package deal - him and Mormonism - I'd start stupidly finding reasons to believe being a Mormon wasn't all that bad. Except that it is.

Short of that impossibility, I'd never go back and if I'm tempted, I just remember garments, tithing and how nasty the members can be and how difficult it would be to trust even the nice ones because of it and that temptation is over in the blink of an eye.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2014 01:34AM by CA girl.

No. No. No. And NO.

Nothing is worth it to me.

Even if the lds church did a complete 180, I still would not choose to be a part of it.

Because at the end of the day a lie is still a lie.

At this point even if the church were 100% true I would not go back because it would confirm to me that the God that created us is a complete fool and his comprehension of right and wrong is still out of line with mine. I would not be happy in the celestial kingdom in that case and would take a lesser degree or outer darkness happily with like minded people rather than the blindly faithful.

Nothing could bring me back. The LDS church is a fraud. It has cost me my family and two fiances (took me awhile to stop using Mormonism as a social club/dating pool) and I wouldn't go back for anything. I know the truth now. Nothing can change that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2014 01:56AM by Jesse.

Sure. If they brought back polygamy like they had in the first place, I'd be there like a shot.

$20 million would bring me back. But just long enough to get the $ invested. Then I'd get ex's again and LMFAO while leaving again.

Two million dollars a year, paid out in daily direct deposits, with the right to quit any time I'd decided I had enough money.

If the lost tribes returned on a highway of ice and the city of Enoch appeared and the three nephites gave talks at conference, I might consider it.

Three Nephites...delivering their conference talks in broken English with a thick Hebrew accent, reading from a special teleprompter adapted to Reformed Egyptian characters. Surely that would be a sign of the times.

They might even announce their names in conference.

You can buy anything in this world for money.

How much will they pay me?

It all stands or falls on the Book of Mormon and there is overwhelming evidence that it is not real. Hoax artifacts won't persuade me, pseudoarchaeology won't convince me and feel good testimonies are meaningless to me. No, I will not go back.

But let's pretend that DNA is found in human remains from Mesoamerica dating to 500 B.C. and it matches with a Near Eastern haplogroup from that same time period. Would I go back? Absolutely not. Not until some revelation explained why up to 90% of America's indigenous peoples perished after the arrival of Europeans when only a small isolated colony had been guilty of rejecting god.

I will not worship a vengeful god who takes such a vast number of human lives from a land mass so large it is second only to Asia. I can accept biology and lack of immunities being the greatest cause of deaths in the Americas after Columbus. But I refuse to believe that a god used those diseases in his wrath against indigenous peoples as described in 1 Nephi 13.

It doesn't matter what they produce. I'm not religious any more, at all, so there would be no point in going to a church.

There's just no way that any of the things you've mentioned are going to happen. The Church is demonstrably false.

If any of those things happened, it would be more than proof of the Church's truth. Some of them would be evidence towards the existence of God, which for me would be a huge thing.

It would require a major shift in my thinking, so it's rather difficult to get my head around any of those possibilities.

Which would it be--that they had the answers to turning my ex straight so that we could live forever as a forver family?

That they accept gays and they can marry, etc., and be forever families?

Which is more likely? The second? And where does that leave me? AND my kids?

They have no answers for me and they had no answers before. They fucked up our lives and they really don't give a shit. It was obviously MY PROBLEM.

The actions of the bishop, church friends and family made it quite clear that the church isn't worth anything. No, everything you really need to know about the mormon church can be found by leaving them. There is no degree of truth that can make them palatable enough to endure.

What would it take for me to accept that Star Trek is the truth? Perhaps if Spock beamed into my living room or the starship Enterprise filled up the sky.

Maybe. If it changed to become a charity organization and lost all its religious components, I'd probably get involved again.

"Say, if the Church were to somehow produce the golden plates and they were unquestionably authentic. Would you consider?"

That would bring up some new problems. For one thing, they'd also need to produce somebody who was an accredited expert in "reformed Egyptian." That might be harder to produce than the plates.

Even if the BOM could be proven, that still might not be all that good for the TSCC--almost nothing that is unique about the LDS church is contained in the BOM, and there are passages in the BOM that directly conflict with the D&C.

It is way too late for the list you wrote. The list would be much longer at this point.

First you have to prove that the existence of God is more likely than unlikely and that the God you claim exists is not a misogynist.

No.

Nothing.

Ever.

Even if the missing papyrus showed up God would still be a dick.

Maybe if they found the hidden cavern in the hill cumorah full of ancient scriptures as described by j.s., I'd be willing to take another look at the church.

The only way I would go back to the Mormon church would be if one of two things happened. But pigs will fly first.

1.) God and Jesus show up in their glory and talk to me the way Joseph Smith says they showed up and spoke to him, and they tell me to go back.

2.) The church admits to the world that they don't have divine authority any more than what other churches have also. They say that they are just men who are doing their best to make the world a better place, and that they are sorry for their fraudulant, and racist past, and then I can see over time that they walk their talk.

Since neither of these is going to happen, no I am not going back.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2014 11:04AM by azsteve.

Nope. I always held the view that while I knew the church was true, I never liked it. It was a relief to find out it was not true. I recently attended the baby blessing of my niece. It had been so many years that I had forgotten that these things happen in conjunction with fast & testimony meeting. I find it galling to see 8 years stand up and say 'Í know the church is true'. They're not old enough to know one way or another. (Of course, I find it galling that ANYBODY would say that they think Joseph's Myth is true.)

LDS, inc. would have to pay me 10% of their annual profits, come and clean my house weekly, answer every ridiculous question I have no matter how private the subject matter, drop everything at a moments notice to be at my beck and call...and I would have to see rainbows shooting out of the prophets ass.

There wasn't any one issue, it was many, many issues. History was a small part of it.

IF (big if) indeed all those things were true, I still wouldn't want to join the mormon church, because the mormon god is a jerk. I want no part of that.

To get me to come back to the mormon church…well, it wouldn't be the mormon church anymore. They'd have to disavow all their teachings and doctrines, they'd have to admit AND apologize that they were wrong (never ever going to happen), they'd have to treat men and women equally, letting each serving in any role. They'd have to quit preaching about sin and worthiness and instead focus on love and service to fellow man. Tithing would be voluntary, with no tithing settlement. Church would not be THREE frickin hours long. It would consist of an uplifting talk on love or other human virtue by a good speaker, then an hour of socialization (with coffee and snacks), then it would be over. You'd come home refreshed and in a good mood instead of tired, hungry, and cranky.