I like to look at my exit from the church as having taken place in stages.

My first doubts emerged in seminary, that oh so wonderful place I had to get up at 5AM to drive 15 miles to every morning. I will never forget the day we learned about the discovery made by early church members of a white lamanite that Joseph Smith said had the name of Zilf or something like that. My immediate thought was that it sounded like a name made up on the spot, but he was a prophet and I was a high school student.

The next big event occurred on my mission. It was a p day, and we all went to an LDS bookstore ( Seagull or Deseret can't remember). I picked up a book with pictures of the papyrus used for the Book of Abraham. I had never heard of them being found, and said to my companion, "why don't they just translate it now that they have it and show the world it is true?". He explained that someone did, and it was not the Book If Abraham. That was a shock. It took me a couple transfers to put it in the back of my mind, but I continued. I loved my mission, best time of my life.

Now fast forward many many years, I am living in Beijing China, and I read about how the church is working so hard to appease the communist party in order to gain legitimacy. They basically cut off the local Chinese members access to information. There is a lot more to all of this, but I started to notice some parallels between the communist party, and the church. We the members are the stupid masses that don't know how to run our daily lives without direction from our leaders. They tell us what is safe to watch and listen too (this is really funny because they basically have the same beliefs about media). We do not have a voice when it comes to who our leaders will be, we simply sustain them. Rewriting history to fit the narrative is common to both groups. It goes on and on.

In either case, I see the church leadership as little more than the religious version of the Chinese government. Maybe the CCP could even learn a few things from them. Either way, I decided I was done with being LDS. I will have to give more detail about the reasons later, but the church's assistance of the communist party against its own trusting members acted as a major catalyst.