For those who stay. Do you still follow all the teachings of the church?

Yes and No.

I do not pay tithing.

I often work on Sunday.

I watch rated R movies.

I do not have a TR…do geneology… go home teaching very often.

I abstain from alcohol, drugs, and to a lessor extent tea and coffee. (these latter I avoid mainly out of habit and expectation)

I am sexually and emotionally loyal to my wife.

I wear garments much of the time.

I hold a calling in the cub scout program.

We are good neighbors and involved citizens.

I weigh my conscience, the pros and cons of each “commandment” individually, and how my choices may impact those around me (Spouse, children, extended family, and church community).

I am kinda going for the slacker Mormon vibe. “Have you done your home teaching or Genealogy?” I might respond, “That is not something that I feel passionate about right now. I am just trying to prioritize my time as best as I can.” If they continue to press, perhaps by bearing their testimony or giving me a “challenge”, I will smile, nod, thank them for their interest, and give a non-committal response like, “I will have to work on that.” :thumbup:

It is impossible to follow all of the teachings and commandments of the church. They have changed too many times to have full consistency. Therefore, everyone (literally everyone) follows those that resonate with them. All Mormons are cafeteria Mormons in that sense.

(stealing from Roy’s convenient list)

Almost everyone in my ward would assume I am a TBM. Just about 3 years ago I was in the bishopric.

I do pay tithing, but that is to help keep my marriage. My preference would be to back off to “a generous contribution commensurate with what benefits I receive.” I do think while my kids are going to church I have some responsibilities to pay my share to keep the building maintained and operating expenses. I want to do my part to fund the LOCAL ward. I have proposed to my wife that on “my part” of our income I wanted to switch from gross to net and take the difference and apply it to other charities. I pushed too soon and I got a bad response, so I backed off (for now).

I often work on Sunday, but just in little spurts.

I skip SS and Priesthood about half the time. I hold a stake calling that often has me away on Sundays, so people just assume I am off on official business.

I watch rated R movies, but not for the naughty stuff. I want to see good movies that happen to be R. Saving Private Ryan and that sort of stuff. But my wife is 100% against seeing these.

I have a TR but I am not sure I will be renewing it. I have only gone to weddings the last 3 years. There were times I was going at least once a month, but that was me trying to “get the spirit”, but never feeling anything. After doing that for a year, I kind of lost interest and any guilt about not going. It just wasn’t working for me and seemed silly. THEN I actually found out about the borrowing from Masonic and it all just seemed the adult equivalent of childhood “clubs” where we would do pinky swears for stupid stuff.

Genealogy has always put me to sleep. I do like reading history of my ancestors. But going back more than a few generations I just don’t feel any connection. I don’t feel like people a few generations from me in the future need to know all about me.

I don’t do formal home teaching very often, but I have worked to get some older sisters that love having a “Mr. Fixit” to help them and I do make about a trip a month to each of their houses to help them. I actually really like doing that. I enjoy that kind of service. I have an inactive family that I have known since they were a kid that has no interest in church. So they are a DNC, but I stop by when I am walking the neighborhood and chat with them (Never about church as they said they are not interested).

I abstain from alcohol, drugs, but I drink WAY too much caffeinated soda (trying to curb that). I don’t have much of a desire to smoke or drink. I wouldn’t mind moving from cola’s to coffee as science tends to indicate that is much more healthy.

I am sexually and emotionally loyal to my wife. Not even something I struggle with.

I wear garments, but I do take them off to mow the lawn. I live where it is HOT and HUMID and a larger than normal yard – I can fully wet 2 t-shirts while doing the lawn. Even at my most TBM it seemed disrespectful drenching them. I do have a desire to stop wearing them, but for now I wear them to help my marriage.

I hold a stake calling, but don’t think I will stay doing it much longer.

We are good neighbors and involved citizens and I actually want to back off spending so much time on church and spend more time in my community.

But I am probably in the process of disengaging and the answers above might be very different in a year from now. A bunch depends on what my wife can tolerate without lots of stress. I figure if it is gradual and I show her I am still a good person then she can better accept it vs one day saying, “I don’t want to pay tithing, wear garments, go to church, …”.

And as Dande mentioned, I just feel comfortable doing what I want to do. I don’t look at the church as my moral reference point. I have to figure that out.

I avoid alcohol and recreational drugs because of my family history. I am careful in the medicines I take – a little goes a long way with me, and I like being in control of myself. I drink Crystal Lite Caffeinated drink when I need a caffeine boost (usually the day after I am up late from attending the Pathways program). We follow a lower sodium diet in my household, and are working on eating fruits/veggies, and saying hydrated.

I don’t gamble. Noise and smoke bothers me at casinos, and it does not bring me joy.

I try to think long and hard about what I do and why I do it. I am still in the process of figuring out who I am now that I understand that “Aspie” is a description that fits me and something I should be mindful of. I don’t want to use it as an excuse, at the same time, there are common characteristics that are helpful to know about. For example, I can be mindful of the fact that I as an Aspie have a horrible balance problem, and should probably avoid high spiky heels because they are a recipe for me falling and twisting my ankle or worse.

I am physically and emotionally faithful to my husband. We are working on being closer together. It helped that he is choosing to challenge himself to be more humble, charitable, and respectful towards us as his family members.

I keep in touch with my VTee’s. I am working at staying in touch with family and extended family. I donate stuff we no longer need when I can. I try to be a good friend.

We pay tithing in spurts. I have taken to wearing my garments less often then I traditionally did (while I can still say that I wear them day and night, it’s not all the time. I am thinking long and hard about my personal choices in this area now – I HATE feeling frumpy and having to constantly monitor random points of my body to making sure nothing is showing. Also, I now include in my cost-benefit analysis whether a specific activity will make them more sacred or more mundane.).

Regarding Sundays… We wind up staying home “sick” about 1x a month/6 weeks now – and I am ok with that. My husband is the branch executive secretary, and I am currently calling-less. We don’t go shopping on Sundays. I wind up doing more chores on Sundays. There is certainly room to “Trade Up” in this area, but recovery time is a blessing.

I don’t watch R-rated movies, mostly because I can’t stay awake during movies anymore, and don’t need see a need to change.

We haven’t been to the temple since December 2014 for a wedding, and I am ok with that. It used to be it just wasn’t a priority. I also wondered periodically if the blessing of the temple was a place to rest in solitude and think about ideas outside myself – and I am working on seeing if I can build more places like that in my life. Now, the weird parts of the temple and the history I know of it don’t fit on the shelf I had for them very well… Also, the next probable wedding is easily 2-5 years away.

I don’t swear – mostly because I wasn’t raised to swear. I also like finding creative non-swearing words to use for the circumstance – and am trying to look at whether the circumstance really requires any words at all.

I used to be interested in family history, but not right now.

Do you still follow all the teachings and commandments even if you disagree with them? For example, if you don’t believe the Word of Wisdom, do you still keep it?

Yeah, because I’ve got nothing better to do.

Bear with me. This is lengthy! I’m sorry!

This is a good discussion. I am now 40 years old with boyish face and served a mission from April 1998-April 2000. I experienced a faith crisis in March 2010 before my 33rd birthday, which led to my faith transition. I strive to live all the teachings of the church, even though with my faith transition I have mixed beliefs about them now. Before my faith transition I used to believe everything taught by members of the church or the leaders came from God, even though I sometimes I read or heard something that said that wasn’t always case. I hardly ever took that seriously, though. I remember first hearing that on my mission, but I couldn’t handle having a faith crisis on my mission if I took that too seriously. Now, after my faith transition, I believe many of the teachings of the church might be from God, some not, some a mixture, or sometimes the way they’re taught, enforced, or implemented may not be inspired. I’ve come to realize that the church is divine, but it isn’t perfect. Just like anything that exists in this world, I believe the church is a mixture of good and bad of all sorts. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out some of it. I believe it’s up to us, if we believe a teaching is from God, to figure out through inspiration how to live by it, and each person’s situations are different. And that how it is with everything else in life. I know the church does teach that, and we can all agree with that teaching. I have OCD, so I used to suffer with scrupulosity very badly. With scrupulosity, I would often go to the extremes to avoid sinning in any way, especially when it came to avoiding pornography, lustful thoughts, and masturbation. That type of OCD started before I served my mission. It wasn’t so severe then. That didn’t get so severe until after my mission. A year after my mission, my scrupulosity began to get so bad I was having panic attacks often. So, now thanks to Jesus and Heavenly Father ( and anxiety meds), I hardly get panic attacks and my scrupulosity is cured.

I normally wear garments, except for showering (of course), working out, and mowing my parents lawn when it gets too hot and humid. Summers here in northern Illinois can get extremely hot, so many times I have to remove my t-shirt and garment top to keep me from overheating when mowing my parents lawn. Even though my parents are more traditional members of the church, I get no judgement from them mowing the lawn like that.

I normally don’t swear, although I used to a lot more often when I was in high school and afterwards, but once I became more spiritual before deciding to serve a mission I tried to quit swearing completely. (Most of the time, I didn’t swear around my family or people from church.) Hahah. A couple funny stories about that. When I was getting ready to bless the sacrament as a teacher, I couldn’t get the new microphone to work at first. So I accidentally sorta blurted out, “What the f!” My friend blessing the sacrament with me and nobody in my ward brought it up to me afterwards, but I still embarrassed. Hahah. Sometime before my mission when I went out on a young man’s camping trip, a friend and I were canoeing and we almost got hurt by a tree log and I said to him, “I hate this effing crap! Something like that. Hahah. Now, as I mentioned, I normally don’t swear, but I do swear when the technology I use doesn’t always work right.

I do watch R-rated movies, although when I was preparing for my mission, I tried to stop, but I couldn’t stop completely. Too many gray areas in even PG-13 movies and even in some PG and G movies. Even all the Jaws movies are PG and have some pretty graphic violence in them. I’ve come to realize uplifting movies can have any rating really. What uplifts or offends is different for each person. Some adult humor in movies and tv shows doesn’t bother me, although the adult humor in some tv shows like Family Guy and Two Broke Sisters is too much for me to want to sit and watch through. I know some people watch movies that movie editing companies have edited, and while I say do what you believe it right, but for me that’s taking things to extremes.

I live by the law of chastity as best as I can. I’m a virgin, single, and, since I haven’t dated anyone seriously, I haven’t even made out with anyone. I did date a few girls from my young single adult branch and a friend that wasn’t a member of the church, but none led to anything serious. I own some porn movies, although I don’t watch them as often as I used to. I used to have a serious addiction to that and when my scrupulosity started to develop, that made the guilt worse to my addiction to porn and masturbation. I’ve studied from the church’s addiction program and did used to go to my friend’s Christian addiction support group, but after awhile going to the group got to be too much, as well as trying the follow the church’s addiction recovery program to the letter. In some ways, I think it was starting to get my scrupulosity to relapse. My friend used to have scrupulosity much worse than I did, so that wasn’t helping me. And the church’s over-emphasis of becoming perfect wasn’t helping either. What’s helping me keep it under control is addiction hypnosis, my libido having died done some being in my 40s (I just mean I just don’t constantly bombarded with it anymore), and realizing nobody keeps the law of chastity perfectly. Even the prophets from the scriptures didn’t. Joseph Smith might have broken the law of chastity with some or all of his polygamy or polyandry practices. Who knows. When I find my future eternal companion, I’ll have to talk with her about it and prevent our kids from being exposed to anything too graphic or suggestive.

I live by the word of wisdom, even though it might have been meant to be just good advice. If the Lord just wants it to be good advice, I’ll still take it! I don’t drink alcohol, coffee, or tea (although I drink herbal tea occasionally). I don’t smoke. I don’t drink caffeinated pop anymore. It can give me panic attacks. I try to eat healthy, although I could do it more often. I take medication for generalized anxiety, panic attacks, and sleepwalking.

I’m not active in church at the moment. I can’t afford a car and my parents haven’t been able to drive me, because my dad is having some health problems. However, I normally study scriptures daily, even though I view more in a more comprehensive, nuanced type of way, and I listen to my addiction hypnosis MP3.

If I could feel at peace doing all the things I don’t do, I’d do them. My life got so much better on this new plan, it seems. I am so much happier!!!