Howdy. Some questions were asked, so I'll try to get to them all in this reply.
As far as my membership status, I'm still a member on the records of the LDS church. I was baptised into it when I was 8, and haven't been excommunicated or voluntarily resigned. I probably will someday, but for now I've been content, due to social reasons involving my wife and family, to just go "inactive" and stop believing in it. I'm intellectually and spiritual an apostate, but technically still a member. My bishop actually knows my current belief status, but my impression is that he's willing to just leave the status quo as is so as not to force my hand and possible result in my wife and daughter both not going anymore.
If I were to go around spreading my apostate ideas with my local wardmembers (an LDS congregation or parish is called a "ward"), I would first be warned, and then be hauled in to a church disciplinary hearing and excommunicated for apostasy. As long as I remain unidentified and limit my public expressions of disbelief to the Internet, I think I'm safe. I don't think my bishop knows about my online apostate activity. I'm not going to volunteer that info though. I won't be hauled into a disciplinary action. If anything like that starts, I'll hand in a letter of resignation immediately.
As far as the coffee goes, you'll always, in any church, have some people who don't toe the line 100%, but in the Mormon church, amongst those who are considered "active" in the church, you'll find that by far the overwhelming majority of Mormons really don't drink coffee, tea, smoke, or drink alcohol. It's not unheard of for some LDS to fall off the wagon, as it were, in High School, and then repent and go serve their missions and be card-carrying members for the rest of their lives, but the standard is for none of these things to happen, and quite often they don't.
There are more ex-mormon forums and such than I know. I only participate in two Mormon-related forums. One is run by an ex-mo and one is run by a faithful Mormon. The mormon-run board is an apologetics site. You would at best get a very skewed view of what most Mormons actually believe from the apologetics site, because the more indefensible traditional Mormon beliefs experience a paring back of their claims when apologists get their hands on them. The ex-mo run site is www.mormondiscussions.com, and the mormon-run apologetics site is www.mormonapologetics.org.
I've actually turned into an atheist. I don't proclaim that there is definitely no God. I just believe that there is no good evidence supporting the existing of a God, there's no good reason why there being a God is necessary in the universe, and absent evidence that one exists, and absent any questions which cannot be answered except by invoking God, I conclude that there probably isn't one. Having lost my belief in Mormonism, which I thought offered "the Truth" about God, and a conduit for personal revelation from God to the individual, I regard the claims of pretty much everyone to having some kind of insight into the existing and nature of God to lack any credibility. I don't think anyone on Earth has any credibility about the God issue. Which makes sense, since I've come to believe that human beings almost certainly invented God.
God didn't make us in his own image. We evolved, and then created God in our image.
SethMo
JoinedPosts by SethMo
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greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
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Is Eve automatically resurrected?
by yknot in1tim 2:14-15 adam was not deceived, but the woman was thoroughly deceived and came to be in transgression.
15however, she will be kept safe through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and sanctification along with soundness of mind.. so how do yall interpretate this scripture?.
is it saying that it was eve's fault, that adam was not deceived.
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SethMo
"your alternate interpretations..........
Your wasting your time trying to make sense of nonesense, but you havent come to that realization yet."
Yeah, pretty much my take on it too. May as well argue about Gandalf and Aragorn, or whether Star Wars is more true than Star Trek.
It's my belief now that Adam and Eve, as described in the Bible, are mythological inventions.
The agricultural revolution had already begun before the Biblical timeline of Adam and Eve.
The first proto-civilizations had already appeared on the scene before the Biblical timeline of Adam and Eve.
Human beings had already migrated to the American continent, Australia, and over Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The first pre-written language system of writing using symbols had already happened. There were human beings on Earth who were already speaking a language which was the predecessor to proto-Indo European, the language family which English, and most other European languages, and some others, have descended from.
The natural history of this Earth, and the picture we're developing of this Earth and the the development on it of homo sapiens and our emergence as the people we are today, is a picture which quite simply doesn't have in it an Adam and Eve in the Biblical sense. It doesn't have a Flood of Noah either. These things appear not to have happened, period. -
49
greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
"First of all the Mormon church did not invent the term “apostate” any more than the JW’s, Adventist, or Scientologist did. They all just use it in their programming process to indicate a class of ex-members who pose a threat to the particular brand of god product that they are trying to sell. The concept and term apostate is as old as the god product itself. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9044116/Julian"
Yeah, I know we didn't invent it. That was tongue in cheek humor on my part. But, as you said, LDS sure act almost like they really did invent it.
What's funny is that to most LDS an apostate is a very scary thing, but ironically almost everyone the LDS missionaries convert is an apostate from whatever former beliefs they had. For some reason, this kind of apostasy doesn't seem to bother them. ;-) -
49
greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
Of course, what's really funny is it doesn't really matter at all what specific, "technical" differences there are between JW beliefs and LDS beliefs. It's all made up.
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49
greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
I thought you guys don't believe in spirits? LDS believe that we all existed with God as spirits before we were born into physical bodies. LDS belief is that 1/3 of God's spirit children rejected his Plan of Salvation and were cast out, and have forever lost the opportunity to experience having a physical body, being resurrected, and returning to live with God in Heaven. My understanding of JW doctrine is that you guys don't believe we have a spirit, that when we die we cease to exist, and that the resurrection consists in Jehovah restoring the righteous people (the faithful Witnesses, I presume) from backup, ie: recreating them again.
The LDS belief is that these 1/3 of the spirits, who fell, are actually our spirit brothers and sisters, but they have rejected God, and hate him, and us, and are trying to drag us down and ruin our faith, so we won't return to God with the heavenly reward that we could have. These evil spirits are supposedly all around us, and that as we commit sins, think "bad thoughts", and such things, we give them a little more power of us, to blind us from the truth, lead us astray, etc. -
49
greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
Thanks for the replies! And thanks to TheSilence for reformatting my original post. I think I had Automatic Cr/Lf turned off. I'll try again, with that on.
Open mind: I tried watching that YouTube video, but it's been removed for some kind of violation.
I'll look up the "Combating Cult Mind Control" book. Thanks for the recommendation.
Some other things I've noticed that I think are kind of funny. As Mormon missionaries we always referred to JWs as "J dubs" as well. I suppose it's a rather obvious short form, but I always assumed we'd made that up. Too funny.
We sometimes used the term "the Truth" in the peculiar way some of you seem to use it, but a more common Mormon jargon term was "the Gospel", meaning not just the story of Jesus Christ, but more particularly the Mormon Church. You'd hear people say "I am so glad I was born in the Gospel". The Gospel means the good news about Jesus Christ's atonement, but in your average Mormon setting, it'll tend to you get used a lot as a synonym for the Mormon church.
Tyrone van Leyen said: "I don't like using the term apostate. That is a word the witnesses invented to make you feel evil and ungodly. We are simply people who disagree with their teachings and policies and beleive in independant thinking. That sounds so much more civil."
Yeah, I know what you mean, except one correction: Mormons actually invented the term apostate in order to make apostates feel evil and ungodly. :-) Too funny, really, how so ingrained our focus on our particular religions becomes that we even think we invented the English language. In some settings now I'll throw it out there almost as a badge of honor, probably because I now recognize that renouncing one's false beliefs in an honest attempt at finding something closer to objective truth is nothing to be ashamed of, and on the contrary, something to stand up for.
Rebornagain said: "In my last posting I made the comment that there are numerous religions for the numerous varieties of people on this earth and nobody should criticize others for what they believe."
What's funny is that I once hypothesized that the reason there were so many different churches is because there are so many different kinds of people, and that Satan had created a counterfeit "truth" that would appeal to each and every person, in an attempt to keep them from finding the "real" truth, which was of course Mormonism.
Isn't it funny how it's all about the church, when you're in the church? I think JWs are similar in size to the Mormons in that maybe .5% or some of the world believes in it. Imagine the hubris of believing that literally thousands of religions and churches out there were created specifically to provide an attractive alternative for people, to keep them from Mormonism, or from the JWs. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Eclipse said: "Your story was very interesting to read! There is no difference between the feelings that mormons and JW's have. They have so many similarities, it's like the leaders went to the same ''brainwasher's teacher's college''. The same tactics are used, the only thing that varies is the information taught."
Here's the interesting thing. I'll tell it from the Mormon perspective, but I'm sure it's the exact same thing if you just replace Mormon with JW. A Mormon leader honestly believes it's true. Joseph Smith knew he was making it up as he went along, but his successors actually believed it, and they believe it to this day. What amounts to brainwashing techniques really are, from the perspective of the true believer, merely ways to reinforce the testimony of the Gospel (testimony of the church is more like it). The incessant admonition to be reading the scriptures daily, to pray constantly, to attend each and every meeting each and every Sunday, to serve in what Mormons term "callings", ie: job positions within the church, be it as leaders, teachers, etc. It's all drummed into our heads constantly, to "strengthen our testimonies".
Mormons even have a meeting once per month called "fast and testimony meeting" where the whole purpose is for people to stand up and proclaim their testimony of the church, the gospel, Joseph Smith's prophetic calling, the Book of Mormon, etc. It's as if without the constant repetition of such things, one would "lose" their testimony. And to a believing Mormon, there are few ideas as horrible as the prospect of "losing one's testimony". To lose your testimony is tantamount to being overcome and lead astray by Satan.
I've asked this on another board I participate on. What physicist has to constantly read and re-read Einsteins works or risk stopping believing in Relativity? The notion is absurd, and yet we take it for granted that without constant immersion in, and repetition of, our religious mantras, we'll somehow "lose the Spirit", "lose our Testimony", etc. I guess it's somewhat understandable when you realize that Mormons believe that 1/3 of God's spirit children (which you guys don't believe in) fell from God's presence and are in fact around us all the time as evil spirits, trying to tempt us and lead us astray. How is a testimony of The Truth supposed to survive constant badgering by invisible bogeymen?
I read a comment here in another thread by someone who mentioned their JW elders telling them that "the End" was almost at hand, and to hold on just a little longer. Kind of funny. Mormons no longer are into predicting when the Second Coming will occur, though Joseph Smith firmly believed, or at least taught as if he believed, that it would be during his lifetime. How many of us, both LDS and JW, thought that the Second Coming would occur during our lifetimes? Guess what? Our grandparents thought the same thing. Newsflash: ain't gonna happen.
Happy Harvester said: "It's really amazing how well denial operates, allowing us to accept scientific ideas while still refusing to reject irrational beliefs we hold dear."
On our exmo and critic boards we talk about compartmentalization. It's true there are brilliant people with massive IQs and PhDs in science and every other field who believe in the LDS church. What to do about the fact that the latest official teaching by the LDS church affirms the literal truth of the Noah's Ark story as a global catastrophic Flood, akin to the "baptism" of the Earth? What do you do if you're a PhD geologist teaching at a major university, and your church believes that 4000 years ago or so all of humanity was wiped out in a global, catastrophic flood, except one man and his family, and two of every kind of animal, onboard a ship that somehow contained them, and their provisions, for a year? There's not just a lack of evidence for a flood, but in fact there is strong evidence that directly contradicts the flood story, ie: it proves that it didn't happen. The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are good examples, where yearly snowfalls are recorded in layers of ice going back well over 100,000 years.
Well, if you're in that position, you know that the church is true, but you know the Flood didn't really happen, so you do all sorts of mental gymnastics and start filing away the "religious stuff" in one part of your brain, and "science stuff" in another part of your brain, and just act as if they don't conflict, and simply stop thinking about it. Or some Mormons will just throw their hands up and say "I don't know, but when I die God will show me how it all worked out, and then I'll know." And then we rationalize that hey, this isn't necessary to our salvation, so it's OK if the leaders are wrong about this - after all, they're only human. But when they're actually speaking as prophets, and not as men, then be sure it's the Word of God coming to us through them.
A pity that God has never seen a need to correct his Prophets on Earth in all the matters in which they're simply dead wrong, eh? Hey, who am I to second-guess God? Yeah, I've heard that before. In the end, nothing has to make sense, because God operates in mysterious ways, and who am I to tell God how he has to operate and what he has to reveal to us? Or so I'm told.
For me, it's always come down to the fact that I want to know what it is I believe, and I want to know why it is that I believe it, and I want to feel justified and confident that it's reasonable for me to believe it for those reasons. If it weren't for my commitment to these ideas, I'd still be right there, stuck in the mental flypaper of Mormonism. -
49
greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
OMG. All of my paragraph breaks were lost. Guys, I'm sorry, I honestly didn't just write a solid wall of text, but somehow I've misunderstood how to format the post properly. And I don't seem to be able to edit the post either. Arg, I apologize.
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49
greetings fellow apostates!
by SethMo ini should introduce myself, since this is my first post.
i'm actually not an ex-jw, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the mormon church.
i've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
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SethMo
I should introduce myself, since this is my first post. I'm actually not an ex-JW, but rather someone who has just lost his faith in a different church, the Mormon church. I've long suspected that in terms of the organizational aspects of our two churches, how they hook you mentally, how they condition you, how they socialize you and make it very hard to leave, from an abstract level there's really not a dime's worth of difference.
The more I read of you guys' struggles and experiences as you realized that the church you might well have been born into and grown up in wasn't really "The Truth" after all, the more I realize that if you just change some JW jargon for Mormon versions, a lot of you guys' stories would be exactly the same as ours.
I served a full-time LDS (mormon) mission, and where I went, I ran into a lot of JWs. At first I was more argumentative and confrontational, but eventually I took a different point of view. I realized that I was in a country (Switzerland and Germany) where really nobody wanted to hear what I had to say about my religion, and just about the only other people who understood that experience of constant rejection were the JWs. Sure, the JWs didn't have the "real" Truth like I did, but they knew what it was like to actually be a missionary and go through all of that. I actually had a more collegial attitude toward the JWs I would run into on the street after that. I daresay most of them regarded me as some kind of heathen though, not having the "real" Truth like they did. :-)
Anyhow, I'm in a situation that ought to sound familiar to you guys. I have come to realize that Joseph Smith was not one of the greatest men who ever lived, as I'd grown up being taught, but rather he was a fraud, a charlatan, a player who debauched women in the name of God, who set himself up as a light unto the world, but who, in the end, was making it up as he went along. The problem is, my wife still believes. Most of her family still believes. All of my family believe. We don't have the whole official shunning thing that you guys do, but there's a sort of de facto shunning that a lot of ex-Mormons will experience from members based on fear. It's fear that you've been corrupted somehow, and that it might rub off on them.
To a true-believing Mormon, the church is so obviously true, and lead by God, that the only way someone can lose that testimony is if they somehow are lead astray by Satan. Who wants to have anything to do with a guy who is under Satan's influence? Can we blame them? Yeah, from the outside, they're brainwashed fools, but from the inside, they're just protecting themselves from the wiles of the Devil.
So my wife's had a very hard time with this. More than once she's threatened me with divorce. She tells me that this isn't what she bargained for when she married me. She married a man who would lead her to the Celestial Kingdom (the Mormon conception of heaven), and now instead she finds herself married to a guy who not only has no interest in the Celestial Kingdom, but could well pull her down with me. Let me tell you, it's been pretty rough.
Unlike the JWs, since there's no officialy mandated shunning, we get web forums where defenders of the faith, ie: Mormon apologists, will argue with Mormon critics, including ex-Mormons, about the church, the evidence that shows it's not true, etc. I've been participating on a couple of these boards for some time, and I have to say, it's really amazing just how brainwashed the true believers really are. And that was me.
I had the strongest possible testimony that the LDS church was true. I knew it. I took it for granted. It was a bedrock value in my life which influenced my thinking about anything and everything. Small chinks in my belief system came up over the years because of things like the debate over Evolution, which I believe is a true description of how species developed, the Noah's Ark story, which I believe is pure mythology, etc. I believed in Evolution, and figured that the LDS leaders, whom we sustain as Prophets, Seers, and Revelators, were simply wrong about it. They were also simply wrong about Noah's Ark. But none of that really mattered, none of it threatened my faith in the church's truthfulness, because those details were not the important ones. They were not necessary to my salvation. What was necessary to maintain faith was believe in Joseph Smith's prophetic calling, which would underpin belief in his church, and a belief in the atonement of Jesus Christ.
After all, Noah's Ark may not have happened, but if Jesus's atonement didn't happen, then it was all wrong.
I lived my life with these little chinks in my belief, growing ever so slowly wider, until a couple of years ago. That's when I read some really damning material about Joseph Smith. My faith was threatened. I was scared. I know what it feels like to fear that the belief system one has lived his whole life by is actually not true. When you guys say this in your posts on this forum I know exactly what you mean. I felt it too. It was so hard to accept that I literally had to force myself, as a matter of will, to recognize even as just a possibility that the church might not be true, and let the chips fall where they may.
That was sort of like a threshold for me. Once I forced myself to acknowledge the possibility, hitherto impossible in my mind, that the church wasn't really true, the whole edifice of my faith crumbled rather quickly. I let the chips fall where they may, and they indicated to me that in fact the LDS church was just as not true, just as manmade, and just as lead by man, as any other church.
I was raised thinking the LDS church was special. We, alone out of all of the world's religions and churches, actually had The Truth, and that was a very special thing. I used to thank God that I'd been born a Mormon. I imagined, almost with a shudder, what my life might have been like had I not been blessed to have been born into the true church. I imagine a lot of you probably felt the exact same way about the JWs.
Now I realize that the LDS church is not special, literally. It's not the sole true church on the Earth. It's just one of thousands of non-true churches. It's just one more drop in the bucket of wishful thinking and institutionalized mythology that is the world's religions.
And you know what's cool? It's cool to realize that I really am just like you guys. There's no difference between us in a sense, because we're all people who've come out of two of the thousands of the world's false religions. My church isn't any more non-true than yours, and yours isn't any more non-true than mine. They're both completely and utterly not true, and now, rather than being "special" people, blessed with an honor most people in the world didn't enjoy (membership in God's one true church), we're all just human beings, trying to figure things out and make the most of our lives.
I guess if this post has much of a point it's that you guys should recognize that your experiences aren't unique to the JWs. As I've long suspected, these are the experiences that are pretty common to people who somehow manage to free their minds from the flypaper of false religion, or from religion in general. I listened to a podcast a year or so ago from a guy who had left the JWs, and he described his experiences, and I swear if you just changed a few jargonized words, and skipped the official shunning, this story could have been exactly like a guy leaving the Mormons. It's fascinating to me.
I can't promise I'll participate much on this forum. As much as we have in common regarding the nature of our experiences and the struggles our leaving our faiths causes us, still I don't have the exact same specific experiences that bind you ex-JWs together.