About the truthfullness of the Gospel?

For me it was accidentaly discovering that Joseph Smith had

multiple wives. I found it when I was doing my genealogy.

What was it for you that started you on the way out?

What was seen cannot be unseen.

Going through the temple. The ritual, the clothing, the nonsense utterances... especially remembering all the years of testimonies in which the specialness of the temple was declared... That phrase, "I always learn something new every time I attend!" was most certainly a self-deceiving lie.

It did more than put a doubt in my mind; it was crystal clear, at least to me, that nothing divine had had anything to do with the temple.

Why did I go ahead with my mission? Two words, "my bookie..."

They all say they learn something new every time for some reason. I remember taking their temple class but they just talked about symbols and nothing that went on in there. And then i just saw it on youtube and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. I gave it an honest chance though. The badass could never dress up like a pilsbury doughboy, even i have my limits on what i will do for the mormon gawd.

Mine was an intent study of the priesthood. The further I investigated--from the church's own books (including the K.J.Bible and Journal Of Discourses, 26? volumes)--the more the church's teaching re. the 'bestowal' of the pd on J.S. & O.C. became obvious nonsense.

That is to say, their claims and teachings were nonsensical.

Thats for sure Pollythinks... if you were like me, I faulted

myself for not being good enough to understand it.

I think the temple would have done it for me too... or at least

it should have... It was so bizzare and yet simple minded at

best, I mean the bakers hats, the ponchos and on and on....

It was sort of like the initiation for Pee Wee's play house.

and we were supposed to think it was so spiritual and special...

The joke was on us.

I never understood the concept of praying. Either God knows your needs, wants and desires and ministers to those according to his wishes or he doesn't. Why should I ask him to helps our high school football team win their game at the same time that evil, true evil was being dished out to innocent people?

All the simplistic notions didn't make sense to me. And the attempts to then deflect to "we can't know in this life" answers betrayed their notion that they were the true church with true answers. They didn't seem to be any better at this than paid psychics.

And then there was the temple. Whoooo-hoooo was that a scene behind the curtain to the dumbest OZ I could imagine. I was angry at the manipulation and the forced acting out of my own gruesome death. That was when I knew the church wasn't even close to being what it claimed it was.

I was 10 or 11 years old and something was just not right. It didn't feel right but I couldn't put a finger on it.

Somewhere along the line I read "The Golsen Bough" and learned of all the different religions that had God Kings that died and were raised from the dead. Mormonism and Christianity were not unique in this belief.

I shelved it by reading something that the old religions copied the true religion and hence were simular.

But I never could shake that childhood feeling.

Ok I can't spell Golden Bough

Heartless Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Ok I can't spell Golden Bough


You know I've been wanting to read that book forever.

Isn't it interesting that even as a child you knew something

wasn't right. You were very intuitive.

I felt something was wrong when i was a child as well. And i always remember that core feeling i had from the beginning because this was before the internet so it was just my pure instincts which is more powerful then anything in my opinion.

Badassadam1 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I felt something was wrong when i was a child as
> well. And i always remember that core feeling i
> had from the beginning because this was before the
> internet so it was just my pure instincts which is
> more powerful then anything in my opinion.


That shows that its really good to trust your instincts no matter what. We can't explain it but you're right, it is powerful.

I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I was sitting in Junior Primary listening to someone talk about Moroni's angelic visitations and I thought to myself that it must be a con. I couldn't ever really bring myself to believe after that, even though I really wanted to, and tried really hard to for way too long.

Similar experience here. I distinctly remember being a ten-year-old, sitting in sacrament meeting, pondering about the first vision (especially the widely-used painting of it used in the buildings) and thinking "How come this doesn't seem like something that would happen in real life?"
About ten years later, right after a mission and heading off to college, I left the church. My way of thinking caused way too much to pile up on the shelf.

I had been a very good little mormon girl and I wasn't finding that one and only. I was going to a singles ward in Logan. The mormon men (and nonmormon men) I worked with just couldn't figure out why I wasn't married. It was what I thought I wanted SO MUCH. Even the bishop told me that he couldn't figure out why I wasn't married as he said I was too pretty to not be married yet.

I did start to date nonmembers at age 20. Mormon guys just didn't seem to like me much. I dated a lot of nonmembers I had met at Thiokol (in Northern Utah where only heathens worked). I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong that God wasn't blessing me with a husband. All my friends were married and had several kids.

When I was 25, I started going inactive as it was just too depressing for me to keep this up. It is when I met my future husband. Once I knew he was gay, I thought they were the only ones who gave him any hope. HOW WRONG WAS THAT??? So I started going back to church again, but I never believed in it like I had before. It was just a slow slide into non-belief. We were always talking about problems we had with the lds church from then on. Once I knew he was cheating, it was a no-brainer. There was no way in hell I was ever talking to the leaders again about him being gay.

So it was a long slow slide out. If I had never met him, I may have left sooner. Who knows, though. But if I'm completely honest with myself it started in my early 20s.

I don't remember the first doubt, but I remember the crash. I wanted to be less ignorant about other religions, and started looking at the history of Christianity. The similarities between the claims of Constatine, Paul and Smith, essentially private revelations of long dead beings, just went "ker-chunk" in my head. Talk about a "revelation." It wasPaul, first, i think, whose story just screamed bs! at me. I don't think it ever registered before what his claim had actually been.... "Der I wuz, jus minin' my own bidness, and pop! Jesus hisself came ta have a chat, 30 years after he was strung up...."

That's how it sounded in my head, like some hick's fish story. It was not a leap to apply Monty Python being commanded by God when I got to Constantine, and I was plain angry by the time I got to JS, no humor about it at all.


Now, tonight, I have a story of *real* angels showing up. I'm disabled, a lot of pain, but keep working because I think if I quit, I'll quit. Work makes me get vertical everyday. But still. I live alone, have no family, nearing sixty. For the second time in a week, I forgot to leave my water dripping, and the pipes froze. $300 I didn't have to spare for the first thaw. So I got back in my car, went to walnart for the first time in years, and drove one of those carts to get heaters, a heat gun and extension cords. When I returned home, one of my neighbors saw me pull my car right up to the house, next to the spot where I was going to have to get into the crawl space. She called me, I told her what was up, she called another neighbor, and within a half hour there were four young men in pick-up trucks and a big gas heater. They babysat all those heaters in 5 degree weather for two hours, until the water did flow.

I'm tellin' ya, those guys had wings.

Very, very nice account of the capacity for goodness of our fellow men. I suggest a S/N change, to something with 'vertical' in it. I think a number of us would be both happy and humbled.

When i first learned about evergreen and what a disgusting program it was. As I learned more I really began to question a religion that claimed DOG as its head and would do something so despicable and claimed it was for the good of the victim. In a few short days it all cratered for me. I have since found peace and my soul is happy. I have very little to do with DOGs church as I realized what a sham it was and is.Good people-very few of them. DOGs chosen-he can have them.Useful to the world as a whole-haven't seen it happen yet.

southbound Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When i first learned about evergreen and what a
> disgusting program it was. As I learned more I
> really began to question a religion that claimed
> DOG as its head and would do something so
> despicable and claimed it was for the good of the
> victim. In a few short days it all cratered for
> me. I have since found peace and my soul is happy.
> I have very little to do with DOGs church as I
> realized what a sham it was and is.Good
> people-very few of them. DOGs chosen-he can have
> them.Useful to the world as a whole-haven't seen
> it happen yet.


My beautiful cousin attempted suicide because of that place... Goddamn the mormon church.

What is evergreen? Nevermo here

Read it and weep...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_International

There is also the events at BYU, when aversion shock therapy, as in wires taped to sensitive parts of the body, were used.

When time permits, those of you who haven't might peruse

http://www.connellodonovan.com/lgbtmormons.html

Well researched, well written, and, well, shocking.


La iglesia mormona, guided by a drunken, staggering deity.

I joined the Mormon church when I was 12 and went on a mission when I was 21. I pretty much believed everything until I entered the MTC, where for the first time I saw the very corporate side of the Mormon church. The MTC felt like a training center for sales people who were going out to baptize (recruit) new members. The general authorities were there to give us a pep talk and encourage us to sell, sell, sell! And it wasn't much different in the mission field... it was all about reporting our numbers: number of baptisms, people we were teaching, members we brought along to teach investigators, etc. The senior companion of each companionship had to stand up in zone conference and report numbers to the visiting general authority. I remember thinking that I didn't have to report to anyone expect God. I was disgusted at how numbers driven and unspiritual it all was. That was the beginning of my very slow exit. I wanted so badly to believe it was all true but I had to let it all go...

(convert me)

When I First heard the mish's explain 'the gospel', I thought it was nice how things (story of apostasy, restoration, etc. 'Fit Together', but that was only working with a clever, selective story, LDS contrived.


Now, with my New Eyes, I see that the story has been Slid Together instead.

When their lies began to hit me personally, that was The End.

Thanks to the wondrous Correlation program I have been well indoctrinated that the evil Satan is so awfully cunning. His track record on people allowing a Doubt to fester in their mind for even a single second is pretty abysmal. Thus I could not possibly allow a Doubt to enter my mind. If I were to do this then Satan would drag me out of the Church. Then I'd miss all the glorious blessings we have like tithing, chapel cleaning assignments, loving Middle managers who lovingly help remind me that I'm such a turd whose hopes are all subject to me being exactly obedient to these beloved overlords, and the opportunities to do missionary work.

Thinking of the latter, do any of you know where I can find some golden contacts? We are looking for honest people who would like to find out for themselves whether or not the beloved Church is true - i.e. a super honest/transparent organization full of super open-minded people :)

Well I got to be completely closed-minded about any Doubts about the Church so I really can't comprehend how you would ask such a question about what the first doubts were that any Mormons would have. Its unthinkable to have doubts. What we do is believe :)

I recall upon hearing,, again, in someone's testimony how much they loved coming to church and thinking,, I don't love coming to church at all. I was pretty young, like still Sunday School age. Dang, my memories are fading. Didn't we just call the kids Sunday School meeting just that? Children's Sunday School? Did we bear testimonies in Sunday School? Anyway, I seem to recall my first disillusionment happening in children's Sunday School, maybe it was a talk. I had to be less than 10.

My BIC mormon experience growing up in AZ was pretty mundane and drama free. I guess I'm just not wired to be a believer/joiner.

I was a basically typical mormon and on/off somewhat believer through most of high school, but I gradually just got to where I wasn't into it, basically questioned supernaturalism and the existence of god, not in an intellectual way, not even rebeliously, just didn't buy it.

What really told me the church is a crock was learning in church history class at BYU that the Smiths were dowsers. Small thing perhaps, but I just was and am of the opinion that dowsing is a crock. I do wonder if church history at the Y is as open now as it was in the mid 80s. Of course, it wasn't *really* open, but warts like the Kirtland banking scandal, the Nauvoo Expositor, etc were taught.

Junior Sunday School.

Yes! Jr Sunday School. It did eventually come to me. :)

My second year at BYU I was in a Pearl of Great Price class. I learned that Michael Chandler was traveling through the Midwest with mummies...

Hmmmm....God revealed scripture, written on mummies in Egyptian hieroglyphics, that just happened to be traveling in the Midwest where Joseph Smith was???

Oh well, I know the church is true!

And he picked just the right mummy!

The Lord works in mysterious ways!

I was surrounded by assholes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sen8Tn8CBA4

The BoA. The church had to know it was a fraud because they paid for the study. If they had the brass balls to keep it in the canon, what else were they lying about? (Hint: everything)

In 9 th grade biology, we were discussing the law of conservation of of energy, and how nothing can be moved without energy acting on it. I though about stories of the parting of the red sea, god moving mountains, and saving people from accidents. I knew god had to obey the laws of the universe, so it seemed suspicious to me.

totally inspired by the first vision story of Joseph SMith, I emulated it. I was 10 years old. I went to an available grove of trees. I prayed and asked god about the MORmON church and His preference on churches. My prayer was answered .....as NOTHING happened, in huge contrast to what Joseph Smith ( SUPPOSEDLY) had happen to him. I repeated this experiment several times up until I was about age 14. Still nothing happened. UNfortunately it took me another 24 years to fully process the answer that I had received.


it is important to listen to answers
it is important to listen to the PRofit of god

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K88-oo4VZXg

I don't think I ever really believed the whole story although I sure wanted to.

Milestones:

Age 8 baptized, thought I would feel different, but didn't

Age 12 got ordained a deacon. Was told I had "power". Never could quite figure out what that meant.

Age 19 temple ordinances before mission. Everything seemed wrong. So different from regular Church meetings.

Mission: All that Isaiah in the Book of Mormon didn't sound right. Archeology findings didn't fit. Gold plates story just didn't sound plausible.

Age 35 or so: Learned the truth about the Book of Abraham. This was a big one.

Age 40: Discovered Sunstone Magazine and seminars. Tried really hard to make things fit. Stayed active.

Age 45: Wife went back to school, took Anthropology class, came home one day and said she was done with religion. It was the excuse I was looking for and we went inactive and took 5 kids with us.

Since: Still can't leave it alone, but read a lot of Mormon history and Christian history. I now believe all religions are man-made and have done more harm than good. I see no evidence that God exists so I am comfortable being an atheist.

Learning about the Kirtland Safety Society.

Funny thing was, though, that as soon as I realized the so-called church was a business (and had been ever since Kirtland times), I realized that other experiences years earlier in my life had also put doubts in my mind; I simply had shelved them.

I was in the midst of dickheads, and they were irritated with me.

But I remember wondering why all the leaders were so old, and why they needed money.

I was never sure about the church. I was born and raised in the church, but far from Utah, so most of my friends were of other faiths. But the church was always part of my life and figured I would just have to accept that my faith would have to rest of the faith of my family.

Where my weak foundation began to crack was the Prop 8 battle. It was so mean spirited. I am an airline pilot and there is a reason for the stereotype of the gay male flight attendant. To be blunt, I work with a lot of gay men and frankly I think they are overwhelming nice people. The Prop 8 battle was embarrassing to me. Their ability to be married, and be treated with fairness and dignity, did nothing to diminish heterosexual people nor did it harm the church in any fashion. So it was at that point I began to distance myself.

Other doubts began to creep in, but I kept up the facade for several more years. But several things happened in quick succession that killed it for me. First off was the new 2015 LGBTQ policy that requires children of LGBTQ couples to declare their parents apostates. I now live in Europe and the three new apostles called in 2015 really was a blow as well. For a church that claimed to be global, and had more members outside of the U.S. than inside Utah, the idea the God would only choose rich, white, Utah men to be his prophets seemed not only ridiculous, but also downright insulting to every non-Utah Mormon. It was a clear sign that either God only cared about Utahns, or church leadership was chosen based on the right connections and wealth, not through any sort of spiritual means.

The last and fatal blow to my belief, the one that led me to Mormonthink, CESletter, exmormon, and other places, was an attempt to do the right thing and read the BOM with my seminary aged kids. We came across the scripture in 2 Nephi where the Lamanties were cursed with dark skin. I had just read the church essay on race a few days earlier. That one scripture did it for me. How on earth could the church reconcile its disavowing the "theory" that dark skin was a curse, with the passages in its "Keystone" scripture that state just the opposite. Either the BOM was true, and racist, or the current leadership were true prophets. But both could not be true. Of course it was obvious that neither were true. But that one event, reading the BOM with my kids, is what totally destroyed what little faith I had remaining.

Of course now I am bitter towards the church for all the lies over the years. What really gets me as growing up we were always told to ignore the anti-Mormon literature, that it was full of lies and misleading statements. Now the church essentially admits they are all true. Joseph Smith did stick his head in a hat, he was polygamous, he did not talk about the first vision until after the church was founded, etc. So after years of lying to me, how am I supposed to believe anything the church has to say? I certainly never got a spiritual manifestation of truth, despite years of trying. And when I do the "right thing", I find out the church has lied to me for 40 years.

The icing on the cake to all of this? My teenage daughter has come out of the closet and revealed she is attracted to girls. There is no way I can continue my association with an organization that views my amazing and wonderful daughter as "apostate".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2018 03:36AM by alsd.

My mission was the start of my doubting. I went out thinking that I would be an instrument in God’s hands to gather the righteous. What I found was that it was basically a high pressure job and a large number of my fellow missionaries were shameless ass kissers and phonies.

Of course, I didn’t allow myself to dwell on that (the gospel is perfect but the members ar not line of reasoning). But seeing how the stone cut from the mountains and rolling forth didn’t square with how it actually worked was the first big weight on my shelf.

I wish I had thought it through more. I could have saved myself a lot of anguish if I had left at that point. But it would take almost 20 years for me to finally admit to myself that it was all a fraud.

My mission was the first thing that caused me to question. Discovering the lies and the coverups of history was what drove me out. The Swedish Rescue episode and the essays which came out around the same time is what killed all possible hope of it being true.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2018 03:41AM by Strength in the Loins.

Definitely the temple. That was the stupidest bunch of horseshit I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t believe my family was impressed by that. It definitely lowered my respect for their intellect. The ne r thing was seeing the financial corruption working for the church. It’s just a big scam to enrich the founding families and the general authorities. Then I caught them in repeated lies and the bullshit of priesthood power. I actually do have psychic ability to read people so it was painfully obvious that the church leaders are completely full of shit. I think your average member is at least sincere but blinded by their cult brainwashing (similar to Scientology - watch Leah Remini’s show about it)




L

I sure wanted it to be true just like others here. I had all kinds of horrible church leaders while growing up in the church, yet somehow I continued to plow ahead in the church. It was towards the end of my mission, when it hit me.

We had just set a mega missionary goal to "flood" our area with copies of the BoM. So we reached our goal and had many to teach (this was the early 90s before Brother Google scared away the investigators~ lol). Unofficially, it was deemed a blunder because it didn't produce record numbers of convert baptisms. We did have some baptisms though. It just wasn't enough to impress the the higher-ups.

So we were told in June that the mission would not be receiving any more copies of the BoM until late Aug or early Sept. It got me thinking of how many of us were sacrificing so much to get people to Christ and yet the Church couldn't be bothered to send a small truck down with a bunch of BoM's that were probably gathering dust! Ultimately, it was this experience that I couldn't justify in my head. It really sagged my shelf to the point that other "corporate" decisions and policies brought it crashing down.

Here's my funny story about rationing our limited supply of BoM.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1925676,1925676#msg-1925676



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2018 04:17AM by messygoop.

I remember. I must have been around 9 or 10 at the time, which puts it 1972-73. Orem Utah. We had a set of 1969 World Book Encyclopedia that I used to browse at random in the evening. I happened upon the entry for world religions and saw a pie chart of adherents that to my consternation made no mention of mormonism, just the biggies, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, etc. I remember asking my Mom why mormonism was not listed in the pie chart and she said it's just a small slice of protestantism.
How about that? Mormonism didn't even warrant a mention in the encyclopedia. After that, I always tempered the hyperbole I heard concerning this "marvelous work and a wonder" with a sense of it's statistical insignificance.

For me it was Mark Hofmann, that whole case opened a right can of worms.....

So many things; but what comes first to mind is how the BoM was "translated" as explained to me by my then wife-to-be. I asked her about the current location of the plates. When she told me that they were taken to heaven by an angel, my immediate response was, "Well, isn't that convenient."

Early 1978.
I had some vague, unspecific "doubts" before then, never really intellectualized or thought about deeply.

But in early 1978, my ward scout leader (and really nice guy), who happened to be Tongan, found from his family history research that (gasp!) he had a black African ancestor. When he duly reported the find to the bishop, his detestable ancestry was run up to the SP, the area 70, and all the way to the top in SLC, where the decision was made: this man had no right to hold the priesthood, or to have been endowed, or to have been temple married. So they stripped him of all those things, declared his temple marriage null and void, removed him from his calling, and publicly shamed him. I was stunned.

Then a few months later, the profit-in-chief has a "revelation" (meant to let the church have converts in Brazil and protect it from civil rights lawsuits): people like my scout leader can now be full members! Oh glorious day!

So the bishop tells our local disgraced black-blood-bearing member that his shame is now lifted! He can be ordained a deacon, go through all the AP offices, and become and elder in a year or so, get re-endowed, and re-temple-hitched! Isn't it wonderful?

He, of course, told them to go stick their church up their asses.

That was the first time I actually considered the possibility that mormonism was a pile of made-up nonsense. To paraphrase founder Horny Joe, no "god" would be the author of such confusion (and heartbreak and pain and shaming).

I didn't leave over that, and I still let myself be talked into going on a mission. But that big huge doubt stayed with me, and started me doing reading and research to find out what else brought up doubts about the cult. And to ultimately leave.

Not the first thing. I was a doubter when I was a child because it just felt wrong to me, forced, no choice. As an adult and RM, the Tanners book reintroduced the doubts and what clinched it for me was a Greek mythology story I read for a class I took at BYU.

Seminary - junior year of high school.

Our seminary teacher seemed to spend an unusual amount of time on apologetics (though at the time I didn't know what apologetics were). As a less than perfect yet still totally brainwashed teenage TBM I was confused why my seminary teacher would try to defend all these weird things from church history (Jupiter Talisman, Quakers on the moon, etc, etc, etc).

Walking home from school one day I remember thinking that if we had the one universal truth why is the church so concerned about
these wierdo things from church history. It planted a seed that eventually grew enough for me to realize that the church had things to hide.

I was studying stellar evolution, (the birth life and death of stars) and began questioning why God's throne would be near the star Kolob. Why would the eternal God be in a living, mortal universe, sitting near a star that had a beginning and would have an end.

For me, it was a sunny April morning in 2015 and I was listening to the morning host of a local talk radio station. His program was titled "Changing Your Thoughts" and he said that he had come prepared to discuss current world events, and when he got to the station, he decided instead to talk about things that had been on his mind recently. He talked about how we are "programmed" from birth to be obedient and how it's drummed into our heads how we are never good enough, and never will be (especially to those who have been born into TSCC). It's difficult to rewire your thinking, but it can be done. He said that many LDS are going to be very surprised to find out that the next life will be nothing like what they have been taught. IMO, he was covertly trying to say that the church teachings are bunk. When his show was done at 9am, I then looked up "mormonthink" and it was like stepping into the sunlight after being in a dark cave.

The story that hie told was really shocking, but shouldn't be. I'm still shocked by things I hear.

My current and then (always nonmormon) boyfriend back in 1978 came up to my desk at work to tell me that the lds church had announced they would be giving the priesthood to the Blacks and what did I think about it. I told him I thought it was great as I never had understood that issue.

I read my answer above and I think how "simplistic," but as I read these other posts, i realize there were always these little things, like others say, that they put on their shelves for years and years. I only went to church because I believed, but I was never treated very well by the kids or the leaders. I can't believe I held out so long. Three of my siblings left the church before I did, as well as all my nieces and nephews.

It was a Fireside talk by the Prophet. For the life of me, I can't remember who it was, but I'll never forget what he said. He was speaking to the young women in the church and said that even if they were in college, if they had the opportunity to marry and have babies, then they should quit college. That their highest calling was to be mothers and their education isn't as important as that calling. This was the mid 1980s. I walked out of that Fireside and never went back.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2018 11:24AM by glassrose.

Each of you have touched my heart very deeply.

We all share a very important part of our lives with each

other. No one else who hasn't been a mormon can know how

it feels to have doubts about it and then have doubts about

ourselves for doubting.

I love you all for sharing. Your words are healing for all

because we all have a shared experience that will never leave

our hearts or minds.

Thank you, thank you, thank you... I so appreciate you for

telling what was in your hearts. You are all hero's to me.

Flipping though the BoM at the age of 13, I had the hunch something was wrong when reading the prophecies foretelling Joseph Smith. "Yeah right....the author wrote about himself..."

The second chink in the armor was my family's attitudes towards blacks and then finding BY's quotes on blacks and the priesthood. Living in the South, with many black friends, that really sucked.

Yeah.... they're all about the racism, bigotry and hate. Its sick.

When I was getting divorced, I stepped out of the box and "looked" at my soon to be Ex, my father, mother, siblings (especially my sister).

And how one talk with my SP, and one talk with my Bishop was a total waste of time, during my divorce. The Bishop and SP were just administrators, devoid of people skills

And I thought...There is something seriously wrong with these people.

So I thought that the were cultic, and the church must be a cult, but I still thought it was the one and only. But my research into Mormon cultism led me to doctrine and historical inconsistencies, ie lies.

Something tells me all your un-testimonies are true even if some of you may have embellished the facts a little.

I began to doubt (think and reason) because of a good friend (inactive) telling me there is much more to the church and its history than they are letting us know but wouldn't tell me any more.

This friend and I played music together in his studio. We also talked a lot about life. He is a PHD in philosophy and he helped me think outside of the box.

This got me digging for what he may be talking about. My digging lead to discovering of all the things the church has doctored and covered up to prop the "one true church" narrative.

Gerald and Sandra Tanners book "MORMONISM,SHADOW OR REALITY" is what caused my shelf to break. The dishonesty practiced by early church leaders bothered me a lot. When I reassembled the pieces I had a new principle of belief to live by: Honesty (to self and others who love and care about me) is a greater virtue than faith.

I was six. The god who said "thou shall not kill" couldn't possibly be the same one who commanded Nephi to kill Laban. I concluded there was the god of the Bible and also the god of the BoM, but our god was better than theirs. I was a pan-theist before I was even baptized, haha.