Hi!

[Anonymous]

Hi!

Here is a little bit about me. I was born and raised in the church. In fact, my family goes way back to the pioneers on both sides of my family tree. My dad was even bishop while I was growing up, so I had the very typical in the church upbringing. There were things that I questioned and wondered about while I was growing up like polygamy, but I figured it didn’t really matter because the church does not practice it now. The young women program also bugged me growing up with its emphasis on marriage and modesty. I also felt that the activities were pointless and way too time consuming.

I went to college and there I really felt that I needed to serve a mission. I put my papers in and I was sent to France which was hard mission but also rewarding. When I got home I finished college and tried to do all the so called right things, but all the problems that I had pushed aside onto a shelf throughout my life came crashing down. I researched church history more and I just felt so betrayed that so much of church history is whitewashed in the church.

What shocked me the most was finding out about Joseph Smith and polyandry. It got to the point where if I saw an image of Joseph Smith, it would make me feel sick to my stomach. On my mission, we often taught that by his fruits we could tell if Joseph Smith was a real prophet. His fruit in our teaching was the BOM, however studying his whole life I have found that his fruits to me have become bitter and rotten.

I also realized that polygamy is still in practice today. Men can be seal to more than one wife when a spouse dies and women cannot. This makes me extremely uncomfortable because it just highlights the doctrinal inequality that exists in the church. Women must submit to the will of men and that has never felt right to me.

There are other things that bother me, especially that we are required to give obedience to our leaders even though they are fallible men.

I don’t know if I can stay, but I also don’t want to devastate my family. I am the youngest of 6 kids and all of my family is extremely active and very much believing members of the church. I also worry about having relationships and getting married. I am single and I feel like if I date anyone at church in my singles ward I am falsely advertising myself as something I am not anymore.

I am really grateful for this site though, where I feel that I can finally express all my thoughts freely without being judged by others.

[Anonymous]

Welcome. Thanks for sharing your story. These things aren’t easy to navigate through. Hope you find some support here as you work slowly through it all.

[Anonymous]

Welcome! You are among friends here. Feel free to ask questions and chime in wherever you like. This site has helped me look at things in ways that I probably would have never considered otherwise – ways that show the church and its members in a more charitable light. We don’t need to whitewash, but I’ve discovered if I want to receive the benefit of the doubt I should be as willing to give it. Things will never be perfect, but they can get better. I hope you also find some value here.

[Anonymous]

Welcome. It sounds like you are probably in about the same stage of your life as I am.

nomdeplume wrote:

I also worry about having relationships and getting married. I am single and I feel like if I date anyone at church in my singles ward I am falsely advertising myself as something I am not anymore.

I just started a thread about this a few days ago. This has been a concern for me in my faith struggle as well.

nomdeplume wrote:

all the problems that I had pushed aside onto a shelf throughout my life came crashing down.

All of us on this forum had different issues that brought us to this point, but I think almost all of us can remember the moment when the shelf broke. It hurts. A lot. I have hope that it will get better though.

[Anonymous]

Welcome nomdeplume! There were a lot of things you mentioned in your introduction that I found myself identifying with. Especially when you said,

Quote:

What shocked me the most was finding out about Joseph Smith and polyandry. It got to the point where if I saw an image of Joseph Smith, it would make me feel sick to my stomach. On my mission, we often taught that by his fruits we could tell if Joseph Smith was a real prophet. His fruit in our teaching was the BOM, however studying his whole life I have found that his fruits to me have become bitter and rotten.

I also realized that polygamy is still in practice today. Men can be seal to more than one wife when a spouse dies and women cannot. This makes me extremely uncomfortable because it just highlights the doctrinal inequality that exists in the church. Women must submit to the will of men and that has never felt right to me.

This was one thing I really struggled with. Why would God command something that was so secret and brought more harms (at least that is how I see it) than good? In time I have found a belief system I feel comfortable with. In fact I no longer feel the same feelings of anger, betrayal, confusion etc. I felt before. I hope you will find comfort here. Look forward to hearing more from you!

[Anonymous]

welcome to StayLDS

i think you have hit upon the key issues that affect most.

On StayLDS, our purpose is to help ourselves and others find a way to remain in the Church, having sorted out these issues of history and practice. I think this requires us to determine for ourselves our personal statement of belief, then to find a middle, common ground between our beliefs and the church’s, and anchor on that.

we have a choice of three alternatives, maybe more.

1. The Way of the 14 Fundamentals. We can continue to magnify the words of the prophets, thinking every word is inspired and mandatory, and live our lives ever measuring ourselves against that standard.

2. The Way of disaffection. We take the words of the prophets, and magnify the defects in them to point out how they are false, and focus on those inconsistencies to condemn the church.

3. The Middle Way. By shedding the extremes of the words, we seek to find the Word that is at the core of the words of the prophets. As Dieter Uchtdorf recently wrote in the July 2012 Ensign, “We are always in the Middle“.

The Word is truth: all truth. only truth. words are only the shadow. living in the shadow is no life at all. he who once said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” lived and taught in a church that was all about the words of the law and nothing about the Word. He challenged those caught up in the words, “Ye search the scriptures, thinking they are the Word, but they are they which testify of Me (the Word).” words point to the Word. they are not the Word, nor are they the Way.

The Middle Way is not the way of mediocrity, nor is it the ways of the extremes of idolatry of the words of scripture or prophets. the Middle Way is to find the truth and light that exists behind the words, to find the Word, Logos, Reason to which the words point. That Word is not found in magnifying the defects, but in seeing the golden nuggets of truth amidst the defects. That’s the beauty of the Church: truth is there, but a bit of discernment may be required.

The truth of the church is in restoring the idea that God continues to reveal His will through the heart and mind of those who listen to that still, small voice. God is not to be found in the creeds and orthodoxy, but rather, in the one to one personal experience that we call testimony. And this testimony is not the rote version so familiar to us, but rather the discovery, line upon line and precept upon precept, that God is nearer to us as humans than we think. The truth of the church is that we have a divine nature explained by a plan of salvation that uniquely lays out pre-mortal existence and the possibility that all may be in a realm of glory. These things cannot be proven, and truly are unknowable in logical terms, but they can be felt. To know that God is one of us leads us to a higher knowledge that we can be one with god in many unique ways. God is not so distant, but as one of us, fully knows our weakness and has more compassion than we possibly can realize.

[Anonymous]

Welcome Nomdeplume, this has been a good site for me to ask lots of questions & give a few answers.

The process has helped me along the way. I know it will help you too.

Keep coming back. We want to hear more from you.

Mike from Milton.

[Anonymous]

Welcome.

There is hope and light and beauty and truth in the Church – lots of it. Sometimes the cultural chickens*** covers it and dulls the shine, especially in some local wards and branches, and even our prophets have contributed to that covering process, but it’s there. I really do love pure Mormonism, and when you can find your own understanding of it, dust or scrub off what’s covering and tarnishing it, and then mold it into what shines and brightens and illuminates your own soul . . .

That’s what it’s all about, imo – and it can happen if you’re willing to tackle it as your own individual journey. It’s not quick and easy, but it’s SO rewarding.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the welcome and support everybody. I really appreciate everybody’s words of wisdom.

I really liked this sentiment.

wayfarer wrote:

The truth of the church is in restoring the idea that God continues to reveal His will through the heart and mind of those who listen to that still, small voice. God is not to be found in the creeds and orthodoxy, but rather, in the one to one personal experience that we call testimony. And this testimony is not the rote version so familiar to us, but rather the discovery, line upon line and precept upon precept, that God is nearer to us as humans than we think. The truth of the church is that we have a divine nature explained by a plan of salvation that uniquely lays out pre-mortal existence and the possibility that all may be in a realm of glory. These things cannot be proven, and truly are unknowable in logical terms, but they can be felt. To know that God is one of us leads us to a higher knowledge that we can be one with god in many unique ways. God is not so distant, but as one of us, fully knows our weakness and has more compassion than we possibly can realize.

At the same time I feel that I have been conditioned my whole life to just accept whatever the church tells me as truth. It is still somewhat difficult to rebel against what has been ingrained and etched into me during my upbringing. Right now I am in process of really examining how I feel and think about things without the church tinting my views. Many of my views do not line up with the church’s, however there are some views that do. I’m hoping I can conserve some kind of middle ground without compromising myself in the process.

leavingthecave25 wrote:

Welcome. It sounds like you are probably in about the same stage of your life as I am.

nomdeplume wrote:

I also worry about having relationships and getting married. I am single and I feel like if I date anyone at church in my singles ward I am falsely advertising myself as something I am not anymore.

I just started a thread about this a few days ago. This has been a concern for me in my faith struggle as well.

I’m glad that I’m not the only one with this concern. Thanks for the heads up on the thread, I will definitively go check it out!

Thanks again to everyone for the welcome, I look forward to our future discussions.

[Anonymous]

nomdeplume wrote:

At the same time I feel that I have been conditioned my whole life to just accept whatever the church tells me as truth. It is still somewhat difficult to rebel against what has been ingrained and etched into me during my upbringing. Right now I am in process of really examining how I feel and think about things without the church tinting my views. Many of my views do not line up with the church’s, however there are some views that do. I’m hoping I can conserve some kind of middle ground without compromising myself in the process.

i think its an important and healthy process. I laid out a statement of belief (referred to in previous posts or on blog below), and once done, then church beliefs are more tenable in my opinion. Not everyone lands there, and I’m not sure i’ve completely ‘landed’ yet.

Important to know that the process of learning truth is gradual. Paul put it in very important terms:

Paul, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verses 9-12, wrote:

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

So as ‘truth’ comes to us, then we need to reevaluate. Where do we put this belief we had before? Let’s take the creation story, and old testament cosmology in general. The creation talks of ‘the waters’, a ‘firmament’, ‘lights set in the heavens’, and in the flood’ the ‘windows of heavens’ and the ‘fountains of the great deep’. These are not casual terms — they refer to the mesopotamian cosmology where the world was like an egg or tortoise shell, the INSIDE of which was where we lived on a flat surface about 1/3 up the egg. Underneath us is the ‘great deep’ or ‘underworld’, hell, sheol, where the dead go. Above us is the firmament, a ‘hard shell’, literally, upon which the sun, moon, and stars are ‘lights set in the firmament’. When rain came down, god opens up a window in the firmament and rain pours down, because outside the shell is ‘the waters’, as in, “god moved upon the face of the waters”. When the flood came, the egg shell was opened up fully, and the windows of heaven (firmament) were opened up, and the fountains of the great deep (below the surface of earth) were opened, and ‘the waters’ poured in from the outside.

Literally, that is the description of the cosmos in Genesis. Today, no-one believes this because it’s just false. Yet there are those christians that hold on to literal belief in the bible, saying that every word God put there. As well, Mormons believe that the bible is god breathed in its original language (whatever that was), and the only errors are mistranslations. Uh, you can’t get a translation to convert any degree of true cosmology into the mesopotamian cosmology, except if the original was based upon the incorrect cosmology. The bible isn’t just mistranslated…most of it was myth and mythologized history to start off with.

Holding onto the myth as literally true is a bad thing to do. But rejecting myth entirely is also a bad thing to do. As you come to a realization that the book of mormon was never translated from the gold plates (god given props???), that the book of abraham has absolutely nothing to do with the papyrii from which it was ‘translated’, that most of the historical stories about Joseph Smith in church history are mythologized and sometimes outright fabricated — hell it all seems like it’s too much to handle.

But here’s the kicker — it’s all make-believe. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The most powerful statement of all scripture, the first and great commandment, is introduced in the book of Deuteronomy: Sh’ma Ysrael, adonoy (JHVH) eloheinu, adonoy ehad!!! “Hear o Israel, the lord our god, the lord is ONE”…and thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart….

If any scripture is inspired, it would be the Shema (above). It’s the essence of monotheistic religion. Guess what? The book of deuteronomy was made-up. it was make-believe. It was invented by either Josiah in his ‘reforms’ just before the captivity, or by Ezra after the captivity. The story goes that one of them went into the temple (or ruins thereof), and found a scroll ‘written by moses’. He then read the scroll to the hosts of israel and made it the law of the land. does this sound familiar? Scholars like Wellhausen and many others call Deuteronomy a “Pious Fraud”.

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot!!! You mean what Christ said is the most important commandment in the Law was Pious Fraud????

Bingo. That coffee really smells good when we finally wake up.

Here is the absolute one principle we have to learn: inspiration comes through the mind and heart, it isn’t a precise process. And inspiration and knowledge don’t come in the form of trees of knowledge of good and evil that nicely package up ‘truth’. Truth has to be learned, line upon line, and precept upon precept.

[Author]

Posts