From Knowing to Denial to Evidence  - I consider myself lucky.  When I see people around me allowing themselves to be controlled and used by others, I look back and search for the turns my life has taken which have made me the strong, independent person I am today.  Writing this story has been a part of that search.

My mother and stepfather converted to Mormonism when I was three.  My stepfather was doing a lot of drinking, neither he nor my mother had received much religious instruction in their homes, so I guess it seemed like a solution to al least some of their problems.  But it became a cause of others later on.  During most of my childhood I daydreamed in church, and as I'm sure a lot of you did, I wondered why grownups cared so much about things that couldn't be seen or heard.  The church was all about pleasing and worshipping God, not much emphasis was put on respecting others.  Cruelty toward others, especially your subordinates, did not seem to be much of a sin.

I can remember some very unpleasant times in my family as a child.  My stepfather was often arrogant and controlling, verbally and sometimes physically abusing my mother, myself, and my sister.  He knew how to hurt my mother and how to use it to control her completely.  And he frequently used the superior status Mormonism gave him to justify his behavior.  He had put himself up on such a high pedestal that the emotional distance between him and my mother ultimately lead to divorce.

Money had never been plentiful while my stepfather was with us, but after he left, my mother was not very well prepared to provide.  The bigoted climate of Utah did not value her work very much and this was reflected in her salary.  But unfortunately, she did not leave the Mormon church.  When you are going to bed hungry because your mother is giving 10% of her already pitifully inadequate salary to the LDS church so that baptism rituals can be performed on behalf of the dead, this is a definite sign to even a child that something is seriously wrong.  In the meantime, I was becoming mature enough to understand some of the church's doctrine.  Two aspects of it particularly intrigued be.

I was fascinated by the existence of the different worlds, or degrees of glory, in the afterlife, particularly the Terrestrial Kingdom.  Maybe God was more tolerant than the church wanted us to believe?  Perhaps someone who could not or did not want to live up to the church's high standards could still have happiness in the afterlife.  I was also fascinated by the idea that people could know in this world, not just believe but KNOW, that God exists.

One day I quietly asked God for such a revelation.  This revelation happened quite unexpectedly, after I had almost forgotten about the request, when I was walking home from school.  The joy and love I felt from God's presence was overwhelming, but I also realized that this was a God who had nothing to do with the Mormon church!  This was a God who didn't expect me to pretend to be someone I wasn't and be miserable in the process.  A God who didn't love me any less because I was a girl.  I knew that I would leave the Mormon church when I got older because I did not want to live by it's laws, but I would probably still believe in the Terrestrial Kingdom.  I knew God would not have made all of those worlds other than Heaven if he hadn't intended for them to be filled.  For the sake of family tranquillity I said nothing about this experience.

Because they tend to be more numerous, bad experiences tend to overwhelm the positive ones.  I had moved from Utah to a city in the near south that was populated mostly by Protestants.  Occasionally I would be asked by Protestant friends to go to a church meeting, usually a Wednesday night meeting.  I was horrified by what I heard!  The basic gist of the message was that all those who didn't believe in and worship Jesus Christ, even those who had never heard of him, were going to be tormented forever in hell, regardless of their behavior.  These people were loving and worshipping this monstrous, horrible god, who they knew would torture family members, friends, neighbors, even the poor, naked bastards in Borneo, out of arrogance.  The Mormon afterlife doctrines seemed liberal in comparison.  I also saw the same financial abuse I had seen in the Mormon church.

I had also become aware of some of the more disturbing aspects of the Mormon church, especially it's bigotry toward women.  I learned that I supposedly had a Heavenly Mother, who was never worshipped, talked about, or sung about, and for all those years in the church I didn't even know she existed.  She was apparently only there to make babies (why couldn't god, being omnipotent, figure out how to reproduce without a lowly woman?).  She didn’t matter, and because I was made more in her image than in god's, I didn't matter either.  And why did there need to be such an authoritarian power structure to transmit god's wishes, if he supposedly could communicate directly to us, such as to tell us that the church is true?  Why was the Terrestrial Kingdom never talked about?  With it's comparatively liberal eschatology, the LDS church should be one of the most liberal and tolerant of the Christian churches, it is instead one of the most rigid.

I saw many people in the church, especially poorer people, using Heaven as a kind of consolation prize for not having done better in life, which wasn't doing them any good at all in real life.  As a result of the hypocrisy and nonsense I saw around me, I had become a staunch atheist by my late adolescence.  I enjoyed arguing with Christians over the non-existence of God and the ulterior motives of religious organizations, so much so that I was angering and embarrassing my family.  I had an air of superiority because I could face the truth and most couldn't.  Very often that is the easiest and safest thing to do when you have had bad experiences with religion, just convince yourself that it doesn't exist so you won't have to deal with the all issues it presents.

I might have been happy for the rest of my life being an atheist, but the universe was not going to allow this to happen!  My transformation began not in scripture but in fiction.  As some seek escape in drugs and alcohol, I sought escape in movies, TV, and books.  I especially liked science fiction.  I was drawn to a film called A Clockwork Orange.  I could identify with the lead character Alex, although I was not evil.  A lot of people around me thought I was, and I felt they were trying to control me.  I began to read other books by the author, Anthony Burgess.  I found Tremor of Intent (an eschatological spy novel), a book which hit me like a ton of bricks!  This was a story of an aging spy who had chosen early retirement, and was sent on one last mission to retrieve a scientist who had defected to Russia.  But the mission is just a ruse by his agency to get him away to a remote location so they can kill him.  He had a very strict upbringing in the Catholic church and had rebelled against it completely.  He had lived a very selfish and disconnected life, caring about little else but sex, food, alcohol, money.  His agency does not trust him not to sell it's secrets.  His assassin tells him he is about to "possess the only knowledge worth having".  He realizes that his life has been completely without purpose, and utterly meaningless, and he is afraid of what is to come.  He escapes the assassin and winds up going back to the Catholic church, even becoming a priest.  But happiness eludes him as he still has physical desires.

In Tremor of Intent we see Hillier swing from extreme physical self-indulgence to extreme physical self-denial, and he is miserable at both ends of the spectrum.  Ignorance kept him at one end, fear at the other, and society would not allow him to find that middle ground between the spiritual and the physical where he could find satisfaction of both as a human being.  This served as an ominous warning to me that if I did not deal with these issues of life beyond death and life's meaning, that I would most likely return to the church as well.  Who can grow old, not only facing possible annihilation, but the ultimate meaningless of life with nothing greater than yourself to believe in?  I recently learned that my stepfather could not find that middle ground either.  After he left us he had sunk into a life of excessive drinking and promiscuous sex, and these proved to be a round-trip ticket back to the Mormon church.  Unfortunately, my mother is still in the church as well.  I also wanted the "only knowledge worth having", and I knew I was not going to find it in traditional organized religion.  I began to seek it in the bookstore and library.

The first book on reincarnation I read was Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine.  I read other similar, philosophical books.  But still not satisfied, I went after the hard stuff - the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson and Hemendra Banerjee, objective scientific investigators of cases of past life recall.  I was astonished at how widespread, numerous, and strong the cases showing evidence of reincarnation really are.  I studied cases of near death experience also, learning to separate what is truly happening to the experiencer from the experiencer's culturally bound impressions of what is happening to him/her.  I have come to the conclusion what is really happening here is something very different from what traditional religions teach us.  If reincarnation happens (which I think is more likely than not), this means that we can all have the middle ground, the true Terrestrial Kingdom (Earth), and God loves us enough to give us evidence of this.  This means also that God accepts us as we are - true human beings!  For if we do not belong here, what are we doing here now?

I still struggle with the stigma of inferiority the Mormon church has put on me and it's damage to my self-esteem.  I have allowed men to take advantage of me in relationships and have backed away from academic and work challenges because of doubts about my intelligence, but I have recognized these tendencies and have improved much over the past few years.  Because of the evidence I found the courage last January to mail that letter asking to have my name removed.  I have come to realize that my experiences, even the bad ones, have happened for a reason.  If my stepfather had been kind and loving, if there had been plenty of money, I might have never become uncomfortable enough in the church to have left it.  And I know I am much better off today than I would have been otherwise.

I know that the spiritual path I have taken is not for everyone.  But the main point I want to get across to you is this - no human being or human organization has the need to intervene between you and Higher Powers, whether these be God(s), Goddess(es), Jesus, Angels, Beings of Light, or departed human beings.  Those who claim this need are at best deluded themselves, and at worst corrupt and dangerous liars.  There are a lot of groups out there using this premise to take advantage of people, some even worse than the LDS church.  Be cautious, but I would urge you not to let your bad experiences cause you to turn your back on religion altogether.  If you lack anything spiritually meaningful in your life, this void may lead you to return to the church later.  Not all religions are controlled by rigid, authoritarian organizations, some are not controlled by organizations at all.  While I am not 100% convinced of reincarnation, I do believe in it strongly enough to know that I will never return to the LDS church.  I am convinced that even if we do not yet reincarnate, our will to survive is so strong and our capacity to evolve is so great that we will eventually find away to do it.  This is real hope.

My e-mail address is  monicazl@uswest.net