Seems to me that the typical exit story on this board is where someone discovers "the rest of the story" with regard to the church's historical claims, which leads to them leaving the church. Sometimes they join another church, sometimes they end up deconstructing Christianity and God the way they deconstructed the Mormon church and become atheists or agnostics.

I approached things from the opposite direction. During my upbringing and mission years, my mind was so poisoned against all things anti-Mormon that I quickly dismissed any information that challenged Mormon historical claims. Any time someone tried to tell me non-faith-promoting facts, I simply blew it off as anti-Mormon lies.

My first major doubts were about the existence of God and the Mormon method of "knowing" (epistemology). This started during Biology 100 at BYU when we discussed evolution. My journey concluded a few years later when I read Dawkins' "The God Delusion." Long story short, God and Jesus went the way of Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. I continued to attend regularly for nearly two more years out of consideration for my believing wife, but intellectually and emotionally I was out as soon as I stopped believing in the supernatural.

Absent a belief in God, my belief in Mormonism evaporated. Since then, my curiosity has led me to investigate Mormon historical claims and find out what really happened, but this was not a critical part of my exit. I don't know if any of the traditional "issues" would have led me out of the church if I hadn't first deconstructed God. I didn't even find this board until 18 months after I stopped believing.

Did anyone else here leave the way I did, by first deconstructing their belief in the supernatural and only later deconstructing the historical claims? Or am I unique in taking that approach?

Your answers will be much appreciated.

You're singing my tune. I started abandoning magical thinking first, as a result of studying evolutionary biology and basic astrophysics. God, as the philosophers say, is an unnecessary hypothesis. I realized, to my shock and dismay, that the origins of gods were very clearly historical as an attempt to explain natural phenomena. People would point to the sky and ask "What the hell are those?" Nature clearly had a major impact on the course and quality of their lives, so they did what all simpletons and children do to things they don't understand: they anthropomorphised them.

The Adam and Eve story was the first thing to go, for me, and everything else fell in fairly rapid succession. People were inventing gods much further back than 6000 years ago, so it stood to (my) reason that the god I had inherited was simply a continuation of this tradition, not divine knowledge gloriously revealed.

Believe it or not, I actually had a mental block for a few months against questioning Joseph Smith. He was the last thing to go, even after I was already an atheist. I see now that I had a great deal of Mormon cult fear burrowed deep into my subconscious, like compulsive barnacles preventing me from facing reality, even after my conscious intellect had already faced the truth.

But yes, I dismissed the idea of god first, and everything else followed suit.

After I realized that the invention of god was the wrong answer to the questions about the heavens, it occurred to me that there was no reason at all to hold onto those wrong answers now that we have the right ones.

If no one had ever heard of Gawd up until now, in the space age, and after Darwin and Kepler led us into the space age, people would require a great deal of evidence before believing claims of the existence of an all-powerful being. A prophet would have no converts if the traditions were not already deeply rooted. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, yet theists demand that atheists prove god's non-existence, and that is their proof.

I don't remember if I first heard from my grandpa that there was no god or I thought of it on my own, but I remember thinking about the unlikelihood of the invisible all-powerful man-god at a very young age.

At the time I was having a nice normal Salt Lake Jack Mormon kid life, only attending Primary after school on weekdays. It seemed more like a social thing--just something some of us did, my neighborhood being a mix of active, inactive, and non-LDS families with a lot of kids my age.

Then, when I was 15, my family moved to Colorado and the forced churchgoing started. That's when I realized it was a religion. I questioned a lot of it and specifically remember thinking that Joseph Smith could have made up the Book of Mormon. To me that's first-thought material.

But my parents made out like they knew what they were doing and my dad had a particular problem with disagreement, so I went along and tried to believe, but the wheels were always turning and I suspected it wasn't true.

If I believed any of it, it was the guilty stuff about sex and substances.

Learning about the "questionable" aspects of church history was an interesting development AFTER realizing fundamental problems with LDS epistemology. I was long out intellectually before I realized the dishonesty of so much of the church's dealings and the morally-reprehensible characters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

I had been sitting through church meeting after church meeting where people said things like "I know the church is true" and "I know this..." or "I know that..." and I picked up on the equivocal use of "know". It started to bother me and I started to think about what people really meant, or were entitled to mean, versus what they were actually saying. Then I realized that there was something screwy, philosophically, with Alma 32 and then I realized that there was REALLY something screwy about Moroni 10:4.

It was a short trip from there to realizing that I wasn't justified in believing any of it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2010 11:44AM by angsty.

Yes, I did it backwards too. Even though I had already abandoned the idea of supernatural beings, I still thought the Mormon church could be "true" historically, if nothing else. I read "Wife No. 19" and it led me to many other books. It was downhill from there. I think reading Dawkins and other scientific books allows us to open our minds to more rational thinking with every area of our lives.

When applied to specific doctrines, dogma, theology or other religious nonsense, "WWGDT?" suggests that if a sound and reasonable answer is not forthcoming, the model fails.

If, for example, one takes the statement "We are all born sinners" then asks "WWGDT?" ... well, you get the idea!

As far as mormon god goes, I found myself asking "WWGDT?" more often than not. Not a good sign.

Timothy

me to believe there were issues with history. I thought we were just an ordinary church.

I didn't entirely give up on God for a while, but the LDS version of a human like creature who liked to be worshiped and loved controlling people just didn't add up. Those characteristics are indicative of mental illness.

He's omnipotent and omniscient and this life is the best He can do for a plan?

I spent an evening in prayer and contemplation and decided there were other better Gods out there and they would protect me from the vengeful Mormon God that I feared.

That is what I went through sixty-one years ago in examining with care the foundations of myth, epistemological leaps, Descartes' Discourse on Reason and the green baboon on the other side of the moon to ask how do you know what tells you the truth. How does one know that those feelings that are supposed to validate your will to belief as knowledge come from God instead of evolved biological feelings to survive and reproduce? I didn't even need to deconstruct God to arrive at my skepticism. Why not a will not to believe?

Only incidentally did historical evidence count for me. Later, there was evidence from history that the Mormon corporation became sacred and empty, like a Ponzi scheme, but not at first. Why does one presuppose that one kind of warm feeling is evidence of some truth rather another? Why discount sexual feelings? Why does one presuppose that a spirit you want to believe is supposed to tell you magically what some particular truth is? Santayana says by participating in a myth we act as if it is true. One philosopher who captured my skepticism at the time was Albert Camus who wrote, in paraphrase: "I want to know whether I can live with what I know and only with what I know."

and it went from there. WHen his stack of cards fell, so did the rest of everyone else's. They were all build out of the same general deck.

I spent years trying to make faith a reasonable thing to believe in.
Can't be done. Faith CANNOT be a good enough reason to believe.
Once faith is discarded, God, Smith, and magical thinking in general go with it.

Yes.

(And now I am going to copy and paste my answer from another thread.)

Whatever I learned in my first year at Utah State University in 1960-61 made me realize that the mormon god did not exist.

That was all it took for me to get out.

I have never gotten over, for some reason, the sense of betrayal about being lied to about the nature of god.

I did not know about any of the other lies until I got onto the Internet a few years ago.

Just in case you are wondering: my position now on god is that, if IT is, then the human mind has no way of ascertaining ITS nature, ITS properties.

A couple of years before I found out about the church being false, I was becoming rapidly Agnostic. I think it began with some creationist/Evolutionist arguments, really, because I never took a 6000 creation story seriously- I loved fossils as a kid.

But what really hit me was the beginning of the movie DaVinci Code where the Prof is showing slides and the students incorrectly attributed a picture to Mary and Jesus. From there I googled Mithras, and Osiris, and Jesus and came away fairly convinced that Jesus was a myth. And I did not believe most of the Old Testament anyway. Pretty soon I was the only Bishopric member I knew who was 75% Atheist.

But the church was still true, or at least there was too much at stake to consider it false. Apparently I am just too prideful, no?

So anyway, I did have serious doubts about the Jesus story, and sometimes I found myself hoping that there was no God because life would have so much more meaning and that it would be better to just not be than to go to my grave expecting the worst or being denied the prize for some small imperfection as yet uncured.

However, there was always in my memory a couple of very powerful experiences which I believed and still believe to be genuine. Experiences that transcend the church, and indeed when the church turned out to be false, those events caused me much turmoil, and much comfort as I sorted things out, and I came to believe that they were completely indepedent from the church.

So, as a fully active and anxiously engaged member, I doubted the existence of God, but my testimony of God was restored after I finally found out the truth.

And I think that that is because the focus is so heavily placed on duty after duty, and constant worry if enough is being done, and the constant worthiness interviews remove God from the LDS equation. As members we submit all of our will and faith to men, and because of this, we believe that Gods love for us is determined by a Bishop who may or may not be a loving person.

How does one stop a question from occurring? As black sheep we are sometimes criticized for having “questioned”. How do you control your own mind from churning out questions? Especially those subconsciously broiling below the surface? I suspect those in the fold think we went out of our way to find fault. When in truth, for those of us with many years in the church, the etchings had cut deep neurologic pathways of thought. The questioning was resisted in many cases for years.

The way I visualized my own cognitive dissidence became this analogy- I had put all things critical of God, Joe, and Jesus on a shelf in my mind and would not allow myself to look at them. But they were teetering and called to me to be examined. For years I kept putting issues up there until eventually I had a whole book shelf clamoring for attention. So I found myself mentally putting up sheet rock then plastered and painted over the whole mess. But they would leak through the paint in an ugly oily stain like poltergeists through the veil of hell. For instance, I was tortured with the reoccurring improbability that such a small group as God's true Church through the ages, could be that special and yet on a global scale be so unsuccessful. God had virtually ignoring the rest of the world or his church was in reality just another bunch of goofy people. And I'd have to add more plaster and paint.

The way of adding more paint and plaster in my physical world was to be active in the church. Recall being surprised by someone who you thought was a rock solid saint suddenly leaving the fold? Their public image may have been like mine and others- frantic efforts, desperate attempts at keeping things on a shelf, covering up the truth.

Of course I wouldn't be writing if I had not at some point recognized a moment of intellectual honesty and taken a hard look at Joseph, then Jesus, then God.

But I still "returned with honor". That final 6 months left my sanity circling the drain. It wasn't until years later, when I discovered this site, that I put any additional thought into just WTF was going on with JS & friends to start the ball rolling. I had fallen back on "one of many products of what US History teachers call the second great awakening" as my explanation of the origin of Mormonism. But now I have a few details. And nobody who cares to hear them :)

I put myself in God's shoes. If I were God, would I want people praying for me? Would I want all of the "glory" (Jesus's plan in the preexistence)? Would I want people worshipping me? The answer to all of these questions was a resounding no. The Mormon God has some major character flaws, in my opinion...