The last few weeks/months of conversing with my brother regarding his standing in the church has introduced me to an entirely different perspective on what the church membership has evolved/devolved to.

When I was raised in the church, I was taught that WE, and only WE had the truth. The Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Baptists, etc were all "led by the devil". When I left on my mission and gained my testimony, it was based on that black and white version of truth. Either it happened or it didn't. Joseph saw God, he translated the BoM by the "gift and power of God", yada, yada, yada...you know the rest.

Well....apparently "given all this new shit" (the real historic details) as Jeffrey Lewbowski so famously said, I, we just took things too literally. That's right fellow ExMo's we just took things way too seriously. And by things, I mean the restoration, the BoM, the temple, etc.

It's been well over 10 years since my wife and I left the church. Over the years, I've been frustrated with family members and friends who just refuse to look at the true history of the church. However, given what I've just recently been exposed to, this new faction of "mystic Mormons" have eclipsed that "head in the sand" approach and taken mental gymnastics to a whole new level.

I'm not sure how many of you had the pleasure to listen to Greg Prince's latest podcast with John Dehlin, but what a mindblowing experience. I learned all kinds of things. The apostles and prophets are just normal guys "doing the best they can", Joseph's revisions were as Prince says "....giving it flesh as he goes along. If you want to call that making it up, alright he made it up. But he didn’t make up the essence. He was working on the form of it, but the essence was there from the beginning."

I'll spare you the other crazy responses. It's available if you want to check it out. What I'm getting at, and my brother and I have shared several laughs since about this, is that somehow in all of this, we're the fundamentalists. Silly of us, those who were raised in the church or converts who took the discussions from missionaries who bought into the whitewashed version of the restoration. Price and others like him don't necessarily fault us for leaving, but they certainly imply that we just don't get the nuances of how all this works.

Why in the world would anyone want to give 10% of their income, make the sacrifices serving callings, going on missions, cleaning the ward buildings, going to the temple, etc if the Mormon church is no more true than any other? Don't these guys get it? You cannot have it both ways.

Most people choose a church because it suits their needs and offers services they like. They contribute to it because it serves them well.

They also likely think that other churches serve differing needs. None of them can be proven "true" or not.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2016 05:48PM by Cheryl.

I absolutely contributed to the church because I believed them when they taught me that it was the only true church on the face of the earth, with the one and only prophet, and the only one with authority and true ordinances to get us back to God. That belief was the basis of me serving missions, serving in callings that required many hours of preparation, giving untold amounts of tithing, paying for children's missions, and happily teaching my children and investigators the lies that were taught to me.

If I had been taught that it was a nice church, as good as any other, I'm not sure what I would have done.

But normal non-mormons pay for the value and services they receive from their less dictatorial churches. Those churches respect most other churches as true and good and think everyone will go to heaven if they live reasonably good lives or if they believe in grace.

But that's the point! They pay almost nothing! There is no tithing--voluntary payments only, with no one checking up on you. Public Radio guilts you far more to pay up. Church is an hour a week, with additional meetings if you want. No callings to adminstrative duties. If you want to read texts in church you can do that. No enormous, life encompassing cultural commitment. You don't want to go to Cornbellies, root for the Y, or eat at the latest Mormon fastfood franchise? You don't have to. No one expects it out of you--oh, and you can shop on Sundays too

There also exists the reality of brainwashing...when three year olds are told what to say at f and t meeting it has a very real impact on thought for years after...almost permanently in most cases...most children live for parental approval..and the church primary program efficently keeps up the rhetoric..as you can see by the age of posters here...even when youve figured the scam its still gota certain hold on your thinking except now its to unstudy the bs and hopefully help others to see it...many comments reiterate that most of tsccs growth now is babies...and mormon moms are hell at brainwashing...i know mine was...toss in the flds dressing and youve got a salad will burp on you the rest of your durn life..and it doesnt help you sleep better when family you care about is still sniffing the glue

Apparently, Prince has taken the dishonest position of many "liberal" christian denominations. And for the same reason.

When confronted with the abundant evidence that, for example, the whole "Adam & Eve" thing never happened (we evolved over billions of years), there was no flood (as geological and archeological evidence clearly shows), no Hebrew captivity in Egypt or exodus or wandering in the wilderness for 40 years (evidence clearly shows the Hebrews emerged from within Canaanite culture, they didn't come from without and take over)...
The "liberal" christian denominations pretended (dishonestly) that they never took any of that stuff literally, that it was always considered "metaphorical," that it's just stories to teach us lessons, and that anyone who takes it literally is the one with the problem.

Prince does the same thing. Faced with ample evidence that what makes up the foundations of mormonism is demonstrably false, he declares it's all "essence," and that nobody should have ever taken it literally -- how silly of you if you did that!

It's either that or abandon entirely his belief. And he doesn't have the intellectual will or courage to do that. So he lies to himself and to us, and pretends those who believed it all are the ones with the problem, not him.

Ouch, Hie! I still love you anyway!

I agree with the OP. Many of us who were converts took it seriously and literally. The Boner.

+1

And the church did nothing but constantly threaten us to take it seriously and literally.

Same here!

My pal Boner, let me point out that those who come to such liberal denominations today often don't know the history, and only know what those churches say today. They're not really participants in the hypocrisy.

Others, however, do know, and are dishonest about it. I once had a long 'discussion' with a catholic priest, who gave stated the positions I mentioned above (that the catholics never were bible literalists, and anyone who was didn't understand the bible, etc.).

I asked him if Galileo and others were tried for heresy for agreeing with the church's position that the bible wasn't literal fact...

He ignored the question, and started saying things like, "But we accept evolution, and accept the old age of the earth, and..."

I let him run on for a bit, then repeated the question, pointing out that the church NOW advocating "metaphor" doesn't mean they always did. At which point he admitted they had changed their approach, and did formerly take it all literally. When I asked him why he represented that they DIDN'T used to take it literally, he simply said, "Hardly anybody knows the history..."
:)

What? You say you believe that the revelations published in the
D&C are the literal words of God? You believe the Book of
Mormon is a real history that was translated from actual gold
plates?

I'm going to turn you in to the Bishop!


Evidently the New Mormon Approach is "I see through all the lies
and still believe."

Yeah! What ever happened to the sin of being a "cafeteria mormon"? You were a fool to not embrace every jot and tittle, but now you are a fool for believing what you were commanded to believe.

Does this mean he's really going to lose his $#!% when lots of people start showing up wearing the recently popular "Hinkie died for our sins" t-shirts?

> "....giving it flesh as he goes along. If you want to call that
> making it up, alright he made it up. But he didn’t make up the
> essence. He was working on the form of it, but the essence was
> there from the beginning."

I sincerely and genuinely would like to know what he means when he said "[...] alright he made it up. But he didn't make up the essence"? My view of the evidence is that there was nothing from the "restoration's" beginnings that remained intact by 1844. The BOM's nature of God, our nature and relationship to God, the nature of Christ, the purpose of life... Was there any single substantive "restored" truth that remained intact by the time that Smith's sock-puppet god fell silent on June 27, 1844?

The thing that I think that these NOMs and intellectuals don't get is the further abuse that their more nuanced and enlightened perspective does to the already troublesome nature of Smith's god for one-dimensional fundamentalists like me. My "fundamentalist" perspective of Smith's ever evolving self-serving god reveals a character too hideous to be deserving of belief, let-a-lone worship and adorations. In their attempt to justify and rationalize the Mormon god's many misdeeds, intellectual blowhards like Prince, Givens, Bushman, Wotherspoon, et al. have done more damage than good as they add their own pet features to JS's hideous sock-puppet god.

In short;

When the Mormon god isn't hiding from his LDS prophets and allowing them to talk out their arse in ways that will later need to be repudiated, he's commanding them to engage in immoralities that would make a gangsta blush. Who in their right mind could or should believe in a god like that?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/20/2016 10:29AM by westerly62.

There is no such thing as a Fundamentalist Exmormon.

"Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man."

The Dude

Thanks for this post!!!

A member who was once my bishop gave something of this approach to me when I discussed the errors in the PofGP and the translation of the Egyptian scrolls. He laughed at me for believing in those things literally. He had some convoluted explanation for why Joseph even put them in at all. It seems it was some kind standard practice years ago to put things like that in books as an "example" but not to represent the real thing. I was dumbfounded by this guy's analysis of the whole procedure and how I was so naive as to have believed it was all totally true. Now I get where this all came from.

If Mormonism, the way we were taught it, is no longer true then we were dip sticks for being sucked in and believing it. But they are somehow superior because they can toss out the ridiculous and keep on believing by justifying the lies.

This is all just a fancy way of saying they will jump through any hoop to make Mormonism legitimate. But heaven forbid that they were taken in by it. We are the stupid ones for not being able to turn our minds into pretzels in order to make it still true. Yikes!!

As much as it was the discovery of the true history of Mormonism that made me leave, it was more importantly the disgusting behavior of Joseph Smith. If my old bishop is willing to ridicule me for seeing Mormonism as literal, how does he explain away the detestable behavior of Joseph Smith? If it was all God's will then I reject God as a sadist and a very evil being that I choose not to follow.