A friend married too soon, divorced; married a divorced woman with 3 children of her own, now they have 6. she is pregnant. He is 26.

He started his own business, as a desperate attempt to get out from under the crushing financial burden that an indefinite life of poverty would bring. The business is struggling as he has no credit, assets or time.

He came to me for a loan. I turned him down seeing the inevitable: any money that he gets will have to go to feed kids, pay bills and get out of debt, and pay back tithing, before it does any good to the business.

As he left my office, I could not help but see so many Mormons in the same predicament. Way over their heads, too young, under-educated, close minded, out of touch, broke…broken.

My best friend, my brother, countless friends and acquaintances, burdened to the point that only the church can help make sense of the madness that they have gotten themselves into.

The church manufactures problems so people will drown in them, and then offers sappy platitudes, corner store wisdom and superficial social support in order to keep them alive.

What business does a 23 year old that makes 25K a year have having a 300k house and 5 kids? What man with 6 children and a wife falling apart at home decides that if he spends 30 hours a week working for his church, that his family will be better off, and when he does get two free hours a week, decides to spend those in the temple praying for his family.

How can a woman be better off in a religion that treats her as a sack of dismissed feelings that is predestined to be a servant to her husband? She will begin to compare her worth to what she sees in others, and find the constant reinforcement that she is less will mutate her into someone she’d never recognize from a distance. How can she be of any worth to when her grandmother was treated as cattle, and everyone pretends she wasn't?

How can a gay person feel like that the satisfaction found in obedience will replace the joy of having lived a full life?

How can a person of color ever truly feel their potential, self-worth and cultural pride when the silenced whispers of racist doctrine echo down the hallway?

How can a black man, with any self-respect explain the curse of Cain to his son?

How can you look yourself in the mirror and know that your are OK being in a racist, murderous, lying, conniving, predatory, bigoted organization and tell yourself that is it your tribe and as long as you get to object to some details on a web forum, that you are OK staying? Why open that wound so only the church can treat it for you?

How can you be better off with less time, money, self-worth and education? You can’t. You become the kind of mess that the church is more than happy to sell to others as happy.

Mormons are often crippled by the very religion they claim as a miracle cure. They rejoice that their crushing burdens are relived 3 hours a week by being able to sit down and listen to emotional junk.

The church is a burden of the poor, the uneducated, women, time, money, government, taxes, our minds, science, history, honesty, freedom, equality and truth.

I denounce it.

Mormons don’t realize that most of the burdens in their life are direct or indirect results of their involvement in the church.

You don’t ever have enough money?

Feeling inferior because of your race or because you are a woman?

Not enough time with your family?

Feeling bombarded with the threat of “them” (non-members, the world, coffee drinkers!)?

Are you depressed about keeping up with the Joneses?

You are confused that no matter how much you try, the promised blessings never come as promised?

Are you tired of living in the past or the future?

Are you crushed by your inability to have kids or find a “worthy” spouse?

Are your weekends too short?

Tired of looking the other way on facts, science and history?

Guess what, these burdens are placed on you by the church. They dissolve immediately upon exiting it.


Life has it own, real, magic, you do not need to walk around life with a 100 lb backpack filled with magical thinking in order to soften it and make it bland enough to swallow.

I challenge you, if you have not already done so, to drop those crutches, bandages, razor blades, Xanax pills, mental hoops, and mental poison and join us in the free world. It is the greatest joy you can experience as a human, and, it happens to be 100% real.



Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2017 01:45PM by sb.

Forget the BoA and the Polyandry and polygamy, and horses and chariots and tapirs, and sundry versions of first visions. This. This essay is the heart of what is really wrong with the lie of Mormonism.


This should be read by every Mormon everywhere. This, should be in the top drawers of the hotel rooms.

The Mormon church is the very definition of Munchausen by Proxy.

Great post. If the church were true, when would life start getting better rather than worse? As it is, only the excuses seem to get better...

"If the church were true, when would life start getting better rather than worse?"

The insidious nature of Mormonism is that it's less interested in a better life than a promised, and unproven, afterlife. In fact, I have Mormon relatives imply, if not actually say, that the blessings in heaven are inversely proportional to the suffering in life, particularly if they suffer in the furtherance of Mormonism.

I could not agree more.

I don't care about tapirs. Mormonism exits where there is no light or air, like a mold.

They are so caught up in the past and the after life, where they can hold on to the POSSIBILITY that it may be true. Too often we follow them there to argue, when in reality the church can be proven totally false with what is going on TODAY and what it does not contribute TODAY.

instead of arguing the mold, we need to walk them over to the lab of facts and put their formula to the test in daylight.

It will always fall short as no one can prove a lie.

This post should be archived! Well said and succinct.

The trick is getting those who are in desperate straits (like those you describe) to read and evaluate the message before going further down the rabbit hole.

Thank you for sharing

Thank you!

I think that we as a community needs to stop spending so much time debating on their terms (is the WOW a law or not, for example) and bring them to the light of reasoning and the actuality of their lives (there is no WOW)

so not to throw a grenade in the room ( I'm exmo) but I'm seeing a lot of younger tbms doing just fine in Utah valley.. draper to provo and beyond in Utah... things are booming and it bothers me as I don't see a slowdown in it. At lease it appears to me.
I'm not saying the tscc has anything to do with it but are all these young people driving new cars and buying up these expensive homes all doing it on debt ? Go to Costco and get a look at whos buying this stuff.

I just don't know.. I'm a retired senior that thought I'd seen it all till now and most of these tbms consider these " Blessings"..and most are paying tithing I suppose.

Seems like a economical time bomb to me.

BTW- I hate the fuggen LDS Church and despise it and it ineveryway and it does make people poor and it is a burden but when..when.. Im waiting

They are not doing fine. They are laser focused on the gospel of prosperity and they leverage debt to obtain it. Utah county has one of the highest bankruptcy rates in the nation.

Having been in finance for years, I know this type. They don't understand that loan applications do not ask about tithing or missions, so unknowingly they borrow more than than they should and use "faith" to accept it, since they will be blessed for doing what the church tells them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2017 02:16PM by sb.

Corner-Store Wisdom.
!

I think mormons could save decades and hundreds of thousands if they were to go to Walgreens and buy all the chicken soup for the soul books available.

Are just as crippled by the same time limits/emotional limits. In fact the way LDS inc works, it seems the more wealthy doctors, dentists, CEOs are the ones who end up being Stake Presidents, Bishops, High Council.

So, the rule, rather than the exception is that the older children end up raising the younger children. The grandparent time that should be spent with helping young mothers and grandchildren is used as couple missionary time, temple worker time, etc...

Even though the more financial stable people may have the finances to pay for their children's schools/missions; they usually end up being just as bad or worse parents than the Custodian who only has to spend one weekend a month at the temple.

I also would add, the "necessity" to create the façade of beautiful Mormon families...leads to why Utah, and the Mormon Belt leads in things like anti-depressant use and plastic surgeries. https://www.realself.com/blog/salt-lake-city-breast-implants

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,657224



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2017 11:14PM by dydimus.

Here in CA, with exception of one family who moved to Idaho, the mormons seem to be doing just fine. I can't figure it out; is it the discipline of being an RM or coming from a big family? And if it's ticking time bomb of credit, how do they manage to keep the big houses and all that stuff? How do their parents afford to help them out? All the older mormons I've known seemed well-settled and super mellow.

I guess, for many, the smiles only come out for Christmas card pictures.

Utah had one of the highest rates of home foreclosures during the great recession. That tells me that there was more than the usual number of families living above their means.

I remember one of them. The husband was a young guy, a friend of an acquaintance. He had a big Utah house, nice cars, and a lavish lifestyle. He was all go, go, go. I used to wonder how he pulled it off. When the recession hit, it all went up in smoke. It was at that point that I realized he had been putting up a fake front all along.

In my part of CA, many Mormons were hit hard by the foreclosure crisis and recession. It was enough to where the wards that met in the building I once attended were combined into a single ward several years ago. Last time I checked, it's still one ward, named for the street the church building is on. My guess is that families had to move out of the stake, and some I'm sure, moved out of California for the Morridor and other places with a lower cost of living.

I'm sure those Mormons who weren't hit by the foreclosure crisis and recession are still doing fine. I have no idea how full the parking lot is on Sundays, as that building is in a residential neighborhood, and not a street I normally drive on.

I saw the other side of the "move to the morridor" story:

We had 7 California families move into the ward within 5 months, most of the knew each other (Orange Co.)

They had sold average homes (250K-300K) for well over 700k, within 5 years of buying them.

They decided they would move to Zion and but 400-780K homes in my neighborhood.

All of these families were Hispanic and decided to attend the Spanish branch. They were received as saviors in the branch, and not as nicely in the neighborhood (north salt lake)

Within 3 years 4 had their home foreclosed. @ had bought an additional home as an investment in the neighborhood and lost it. 2 moved to a different hood and one stayed.

Their temporary delusion of prosperity was met with the harsh reality of the market, property taxes, and costly maintenance and HOA fees.

I'm also in a part of CA where the local Mormon population 'seem' to be doing just fine. In fact there are some really wealthy families and for some odd reason the area I'm in is super-saturated with Mormons (yuck). I often wonder how a lot of them are doing it, while being 'full tithe payers'. But, in Mormonism it's all about how things appear I suppose.

That is my point, there are families who thrive IN SPITE of Mormonism, not because of it. There are some cultural aspects to Mormonism that align with with certain cultures well. The well to do California family is one.

Often these families thrive at the expense of silencing a drug addition in the family or suppressing a gay child.

These people would be just as happy outside of Mormonism, but they sure as hell would have more time and 10%.

Sb, I worked for a Utah bankruptcy attorney, and I think what you have written is very accurate and insightful.

I hadn't thought of it that way before, but when I read your post, it was like a light turned on, and I thought, "Yes, of course!!"

It breaks my heart to see some of my Mormon friends suffering because of the expectations the church puts on them. You can directly draw a line from the problems they are facing to the teachings of the church they are trying to obey. And they can't see it. They pour more "church" on their problems but it's like pouring gasoline on a fire. They become more and more TBM and less and less happy but they can't see the correlation. I don't know, maybe they feel some sense of relief and not having to decide things or some sense of satisfaction from jumping thru the hoops. Maybe that's some consolation. But I want to shake them and say "wake up."

So much truth in your post. I have relatives who have been stunted by Mormonism and are not capable of paying their own way in life.

<<What business does a 23 year old that makes 25K a year have
<<having a 300k house and 5 kids?
Excellent observation, these beloved and well favored members of society are in over their heads in homes they can't afford. When I see these things I naturally assume it's an inheritance that financed the luxury. But everyone wants the good life, And no one wants to work hard for the assets. Mormons usually don't accept manual labor, they despise uncredentialed work (like what I do). Those that hold Mormon leadership tend to be engineers, lawyers, and HR kinda folks, that sit comfortably on those that do the actual work on the factory floor in industry.

And they testify that they can sit on everyone else because the lord blessed them, because they refuse to work on sundays, because they put the temple first. I heard one credentialed gentrified member say that he bargained with god that if god would give him lots of money in "white" collar work he would have as many kids as possible, and keep his wife pregnant. (And it seemed to work in his case?)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2017 06:19AM by poopstone.

I fell into this when I returned from my mission. My 1st biggest mistake was thinking I had to get married IMMEDIATELY. 2nd biggest mistake was doing all these things you speak of here that my friends were doing to "make money," and supposedly having great success. Although one of those friends became a founder of NuSkin and is filthy rich--on the backs of many others who are not, I assume--all the rest fell into financial problems just like me. Anyway, I was never wise in this area, and after sinking into financial despair soon after my marriage, I had to drop out of university and go to California to get a real job in a mine making real money in order to bail myself out. Then I had a military and finally a civil service career. I finished university while serving in the military. I'm not rich, but neither am I in frivolous debt. I pay a mortgage and drive two 2005 cars, each with 110,000 miles on them. That's the ticket.

Cludgie,

It pains me to hear experiences like yours. Its like, as Mormons, we are given bad advice, like being told 2+2=6.

We go around with this treasured information, making all types of bad decisions (like if I give 10%+ I will have more money for myself!).

Eventually the bad math gets us a rut that may take years or even a lifetime to get out of, because we continue to bang out head on the wall.

Meanwhile back at Wasatch front, church elite collect a cool 6 figure tax/tithing free allowance, vacation retreats, hunting retreats, etc.