Ex-Mormons - Why We Left Mormonism

[Music] secret stuff in the Mormon Church as well so if you are remember the church that's fine but then you can be a more vast member so if you follow all the rules all the time you can be a temple going Mormon and you have to have a temple recommend and Mormons don't believe that I can go to the highest level of heaven unless they have a temple recommend and then you can go to the Mormon temple and practice the [Music] ordinances right and so you get the blessed and anointed and they had these these rituals they perform where your blessing anointed be to become a God someday and they have endowments where you learn the the secret signs and passwords and handshakes to get into heaven because after you die you're gonna go to the veil you're gonna have to present yourself at the veil and you're gonna have to give us the secret signs and tokens to the angel at the veil so they will be admitted to heaven signs and tokens that you learn in the temple they give you a secret temple name you're not allowed to share with anyone and then you have to give that as well after you die so I mean they're very very secret II kind of for a very large religion there's a lot of good things about being in the Mormon Church in a Mormon community that there is a large woman either there they tend to be family-oriented they have like really belonging in communities so church is long right it's three hours on Sunday and then you have other meetings during the week and you have cultural activities and gatherings all the time and you everybody has large find links and there's there's a lot of good that comes from that Mormons tend to be high achieving highly educated hard-working the reputation for being very kind and open there's a bad that comes from that as well Mormons youth have a really high suicide rate and it comes you constantly tripping that to be perfect to be pure to be right and so every once in a while you get in the news that some young man kills himself because he's been masturbating he doesn't feel like he can control it and so there's no way out he can never be okay and so he kills himself or you find in the homosexual community thought that being homosexual is a sin if you have the same social attraction and you can't beat it you feel like if I pray God will help me if I pray God will help me and I can't beat it and they end up either leaving somehow and having this transition out or they end up killing themselves and they're they're getting better the church had the dress in some of these issues but it's still very very painful for people to leave my wife had a very different experience than I did in Mormonism because I was a boy and she was a girl and Mormonism it's a very patriarchal society there's God man woman right the man talks to God before the woman women can have leadership roles in the church but only be in charge of other women and children there's always a man in charge and this father and as a cabin she was growing up she felt left out all the time cuz the boys got cool things I got to go on scouting out this audience they go out into the bush and toast marshmallows and yeah and camp and she had to learn to make bread and and it's like chant do you remember the young woman's still yes what is it long-wear daughters have a Heavenly Father who loves us and we love him we all stand as witnesses or without at all times and all things in all places as we live the men women values which are faith to find the insured individual worth knowledge choice and accountability if we believe has become to me except upon news his laws ability will be prepared to making keep sacred covenants receive the ordinances of the temple and enjoy the blessings of exaltation it's not quite the same but lots of lots of guilt like people say Catholics have like a monopoly on guilt it's not true and so yeah Mormons pushed really big a van der Dunkel Christians talk a lot about being safe and about Jesus and like Jesus is gonna let us go to heaven you know he died for us he saved us and I've accepted Jesus my personal Savior and so I'm saved and Mormons don't really have that they they believe that they make errors and that they can repent for it through personal atonement which is usually as simple as it may be fault and not doing it again we're going and talking to your please Jessica leader it's like halfway between personal penance and confession you have to go talk to your leader and they're really big on sexual purity they did some other issue about being a girl in the church if you have impure thoughts you're supposed to go talk to an old man about it it's again so there's there's good and bad but it's as far as it's our thoughts leaning so I I would define myself before leaving ahead is the very very Mormon like extremely Mormon that I read The Book of Mormon all the time I've heard it dozens of times I used to have it almost memorized and I was very very keen on prayer and going to church and I didn't it wasn't as social for me as it was kind of an obligation as well growing up it was what you had to do and I remember thinking back to like well what was I gonna do when I was a teenager when I was in high school when I was I was jyllian gonna join the Marine Corps and do all this stuff and I figured out one day I was like oh well what do I need to do to be happy in life well I figure I needed you is I have to do all the stuff the church says and that was like a big decision for me I mean I have to do what the church says I'm gonna get Mary on that kids and it's gonna be this great thing or where that's what I've got to do and that kind of locked me on as well my way and I served in an LDS mission and I went to Brazil and I lived there for two years and taught people about the right Jesus Frank like we had Jesus and I'd say well no that's the wrong G then I didn't say that I didn't say your God is wrong but that I did I did say that just gently and tried to explain to them that the hookman was true and we talked about the vision of Jesus or Joseph Smith when he saw God the Father and God the Son or we'd read from the book when we have people pray and then tell them well how do you feel me pray you know they go I felt nice I'm like well that's God telling you you felt nice when you pray so God's telling you that this is true that Joe's the Book of Mormon is true and the Joseph Smith did restore the gospel in modern time so that's that's what's going on and then top people and and baptize them and maybe the members of the church and got married in a security Temple ceremony to Christie when when I was 22 years old and we went to church took our kids to church our kids sang songs we shared faith promoting stories it was very and Christie is different from me Christie asks why she wants to understand things I've been something bothers her she wants to find out and she wouldn't bug me about things about the church and because I made it such a part of my life for so long and it's done so much within Mormon Church study I felt like I had answers and usually I did they were she was complaining about something of the church and I give her some right don't try to answer right and I was in the Army National Guard I got sent to Iraq in 2003 and while I was in Iraq my brother's wife who is not LDS asked talk to Christy one day about Norma temple ceremonies and explained that a lot of the Mormon temple ceremony had been derived from the Masonic secret rites and Christy asked me about that I was like I don't know I'll find out so I did I looked around until I found an answer that I felt explained it and that was just that well you know what there was a temple in Jerusalem and there were Knights Templar that had gone over there and they've learned some stuff that was temple and so I'm saying that the Mormon temple rights the Masonic rights really are taken from the Temple in Jerusalem or they'd been revealed partially from God to people people that had the light of Christ upon them okay received some truth and it just been corrupted over time and so the Masonic rites for the true rites were they changed with time and been lost and they're not right anymore quite and Joseph is fixed it because God told him to and so the Mormon temple certainly is the truryde ceremony and somehow I believed that that's what they used in the Temple in Jerusalem was these three portions and anointings and weird handshakes and stuff but yeah anyway I found that answer but in doing that I found other things that had bothered me and because I was at war I was either scared for my life where I had lots of time to read and to think and interestingly enough I had internet access and so then later I came back and started looking at other issues and things that I even been exposed to before about multiple versions of the first vision like Josephus mother wrote down to Joseph Smith had his first patient that he'd seen an angel and that went in her journal and I seen that before and I was just like whatever I can't deal with it town and I actually had a pamphlet someone well me personally given me and I just I tore it up and threw away and I was like I can't worry about that right now I mean Brazil and a mission and what hurts doesn't matter because I was right and came back to some of these and learn more about that and then found stumbled on it's a book of Abraham and so Book of Abraham when Joseph Smith was in Abu somebody came through that had a mummy displayed this is just a popular day you go over Egypt you loot the tombs you take the money is out you drag him around and people pay money to see him right and so this guy had six mummies and papyrus scrolls that he was showing around and members of the church were like hey we have a prophet he can read this stuff they're like nobody can read Egyptian right it's mysterious and strange like our prophet can do it and so they got together and they bought his whole display they bought his mommy's papyrus and gave it Joe Smith and Joe Smith did not translate it like he did the Book of Mormon he didn't just sit there and tell someone I would have said with his face in the Hat he actually sat down and he worked out meanings for the symbols and he wrote them down very meticulously so we take an Egyptian symbol and he thought that each symbol was like a sentence and so he'd write down that symbol and his notes and he would write out what I meant and he did this for the Book of Abraham and he took a funeral Texts funerary textbook of readings and he interpreted it to be a lost text of the Abraham had written while he was in Egypt and it's a story of the creation of the world it's a rewrite of Genesis Joseph said that Abraham wrote with his own hand on papyrus and he took there's that seal that goes behind the person's head when they bawl and put him in the casket he had one of those seals and he interpreted it to be the universe and he's like here's God in the center and this is the star Kolob that he lives by and there's a son he'd written all this meaning into this thing there's a charm to protect the dead person right and this whole thing this is this whole book of Abraham and it was really really odd that there's this this wealth of evidence that he just totally made up all this stuff right and and you have the pictures and they were in the Mormon Church those papyrus were lost and the Mormon Church broke apart and then later they were found again and they were purchased by the Mormon Church in Utah from the reorganized Church which was one of the big chunks that stayed behind the Mormons were last that's where Emma Smith's they and her kids and they're now called the community of Christ but in case they bought this stuff wrong and then they printed them in full-color in the 60s and then people came back and looked at ever like that's not what that is everybody knows I figure agent ology knows what the citizen so now because I grew up reading the Book of Mormon and the doctrine covenants which used to be called the book of Commandments they're the revelations that Joseph Smith's received after the church was formed and they all got documented I read those and I read the pearl of great price which is the Book of Abraham and in a retranslation that Joseph Smith made of the book of Moses which is another creation version right and I was very familiar with the Egyptian hieroglyphics wrong and so now whenever I see just from hieroglyphics I think as The Book of Abraham and the Mormon Church it's just some of that stuff became weird and took me personally I'm finding all this stuff and I'm reasonably smart and so I will find really weird ways for stuff to still be right I breathed it Joseph Brigham Young said this Brigham Young said if if a white woman gets pregnant by a black man but the only way for them to go to heaven is if you kill them and spill their blood onto the dirt because their sin is so rate that it can only be atone for by blood sacrifice right and how did I go okay bring me also said that Adam is God the Father and he's our only God and so I am hopeful it's fine that's easy because you know Adam because we're all gonna become God's the good Mormons anyway so I hope to be good Mormon someday and I'll become a god and Adams the first man and he's a god now and so he's gonna help judge us and we're gonna have to go through him to get to the big head God write something okay that's fine that works and no we call a mental gymnastics trying to make things fit and after a while it became overwhelming and I would talk about this with Christy all the time there's this and there's this and and she loves to understand things anyway but still and one day I was like well it's getting exhausting trying to make everything still fit because there's so much we talk for days and I was like well okay the thing that it comes down to the very thing that they thought let me start at the beginning it's like how do I feel about this why do I believe it's true why am I going to the Subrosa because that's how I feel when I pray and so let's do an experiment and so I prayed to something not God why I'm gonna pray to that rock right there I'm gonna pray to Christie that's in Utah well I'm not here in Iraq as a chef I'm gonna pray to the Virgin Mary and I start running these experiments and I have the same emotional response when I'm praying to the rock that I do when I pray to God or when I'm singing music in church it's the same emotional response I'm like oh this is what I've been taught and what I have taught other people to do is to associate with God confirming truth and so then if that's true God's confirming this right to pray to the rock like oh I can let it all go and it was so weird to me that it's such a switch after so much effort and so much time that there's this kind of the switch combined throwing the N and be like oh I'm gonna let go and then I told her and she's like what like Christie Christie good news it's not true she's like what is wrong with you oh my what do you mean you've been bugging for years about this Stephanie if you're like I don't want to go to church it's a pain or why is this why is this feeling this why is it true women like this why am like I thought you'd be happy she's like no you crazy you can't you can't just say it's not true you can't not do it and that that became a big thing and then she ended up having do our own research and some things that were a bigger deal for me weren't for her right so like the Book of Abraham or even the Kinderhook plates where which I didn't mention before Sheila Smith when that the Mormons kicked out in penance say they built a legion that we're gonna go out and free them and I'm not happening and while they were out he found somebody pointed out and said oh there's an Indian burial site over there and he went up there dug it up he found a skull and some old plates and they were brass and they looked old and aged and he explained that the skull it belonged to a white lady midnight names elephant that he'd written this record and they may be translated someday and it's scratched on of these plates and then other people later came out and said oh dude we did that to play a joke on him we got these plates and we we cut him in out they look kind of weird and scratch some marks into them and instead of up to see what happened it was a joke right and the Mormon Church has had the tetes plates tested at one point somebody came in a metallurgist and measured them and look at him they're like yeah this is totally 19th century World bronze there's nothing else it could be but things like this kind of story it's the language he used a second ago I'm intrigued by you said if God gave me God wanted me to play pray to the rock was that just a contradiction in you fellows funny therefore not true or was that was that an important step for you that God was in the facts that he believed in God God was not giving you permission to practice no that was not yeah so no that was that was making a point that because as a Mormon you're taught the Mormon Church is true and the more churches false and and I looked at early history in the Mormon Church yeah and then I couldn't find a difference between it in any other Church that I'd always known was wrong sure right and so if I look at like the Branch Davidians they has a compound in Texas David Koresh charismatic leader they got all these people the guns he had all sorts of kids with different women and ended up going up in flames they at the end after they'd released most of the children they went down and executed all of David's children for the ones they didn't release shot him in the head and said they don't fire right and I look at groups like that I look at other groups that there were lots of religious groups and sprang up in the western United States in the 19th century tons of them most of them didn't survive um some of them did right the Mormons are perhaps the most unusual of those that are still around but it's so no it wasn't God getting permission to talk to a rock it was like so the Mormon Church everything that's wrong with every other Church that makes it wrong is also wrong with the Mormon Church it's kind of where I got to and the basis wasn't sure anymore because if I could only get I prayed to God I felt good and if I asked God it's true I felt good but I got the same response from doing things that were totally wrong and this and I reached I guess the point where I wouldn't say well it's just Satan making me feel good to trick me cuz that's the place you could go yes that could be a lot of place it's like well I afraid to rock my friend to God so then Satan can get in the way and he can trick me and make me feel good because the best lie is when it looks like truth yeah Satan's the throne coach that's right it's but I didn't go there and then Christy had to do all of her own reading and her own research and I'm on the church and her issues were kind of tied back again to polygamy into women and all the lies that Joseph Smith would tell to women to get them to have sex with him when they were still married to someone else and that my biggest issue was really the Mormon Church always claimed that everything fell on Joseph Smith it either is true or isn't true based on Joseph Smith because either he is the prophet that restored basically the line from Christ and the correct church or he didn't if that makes sense like he either is what he claims to be or he's a fraud and so for me I'm very very much analytical so praying or emotion on how I felt didn't really play into it I literally took out basically pro/con lists and started making everything I could confirm true about Joseph Smith and everything I had been taught and started making lists and where is the truth and where does it lie and finally the list of what I had been taught was so in factual compared to what I can confirm in the world around me had you listened have been arrested for this was he a con man previously you know all these things started adding up to where it just was Joseph Smith is not who he claimed to be and for me that's all I needed at that point nothing else in the church could be true then because it all rested on him being the person who restored the true gospel of Christ if he didn't do that then nothing Church matters so that's really so it did matter what he claimed to be in the polygamy and things but it was more for me just is he who he claims to be I have a question as well this these processes you went through seem to dispel belief in this particular Church in your case in Joseph Smith and in your case that the church in general compared to others what about the falling away from believing in a god or a deity in general one of the things that became really apparent to me very quickly when I started associating with in an ex-mormon type community people that were raised Mormon never change churches I'm sure you can find someone somewhere but as a general rule because they're all raised from the time their babies that every other church is wrong right and so as soon as the church armatures wasn't true you'd want something to follow people that are some sort of other Christian or faith and leave and join them or matures usually go to another faith now this is so she has a cousin for example him and his wife are fundamentalist Christians now like in a coastal and they they've left more church and now they're they're very excited about Jesus and so it's not always true but in general because as soon as you can pick the part at the Mormon Church you've picked apart everything else and you don't have this background to fall on it's you got something like oh well this other church was good cuz you've always known it was bad you would have to start kind of from scratch discovering that this other church might have something good there there might be a god or there might be your your left like without any kind of supporter in a religious everything yeah I didn't believe that any Christianity was true at that point I do the kind of point oh well then everything is up for question and so from there I did do research no we'd spent and we together we did a lot when we decide the Mormon Church wasn't true we did set out to find out whether we thought the Bible was true whether Christianity was true so we did go through all these steps we did and more together than we did because you work across the world when you were to the Mormon thing but we definitely did research later but for me it just was instantly then there's nothing yeah well and it's hard to make a case right because if you don't have this automatic well if the more mature it's true though because Jesus is still right you don't have that that's somebody they grew up Mormon and so then you are am I gonna make a base for Jesus from scratch and that's hard to do I'm intrigued or the the it's like a dual narrative here of you we saw much like the turkey together I've had this whole life where I gather you you burn in separate Mormon communities and then you come together and then you've both been questioning from different viewpoints but reaching a similar conclusion which I mean I just want that on the one hand if you'd have been if you're not met would you reach the same point and also coming to that conclusion together how they make you both feel because if I'd suddenly look random from well the last 20-30 however long years of my life I've been living a lie I don't mean I don't know bitter angry sad lost no it's lost I think yeah and it's hard because that the Mormon Church was so important to me and I was so when you pleasure living together in rocks um I think actually ironically I think he was a more practicing Mormon I think he was more committed to the religion than I was I think I actually had a harder time when we decided to leave because when he told me that that reaction is exactly what I had I was like you're crazy this can't be because the segment said that I felt like that I think you'd have been pulled out from underneath me everything that I could felt my entire foundation on in life was gone and I wasn't raised to think anything was as important as church that that is the Paramount always if you ask my dad what he wanted in life it would be so my kids are active Mormons that's it there's nothing else I don't care you know and so everything was like that and I was like so many people I would disappoint so many plus I who am i if I'm not a Mormon like what do I believe what do I stand for so for me it was it was very very scary yeah very that's that's kind of takes it back into people that we talk to or some Mormon after we left they would they were very concerned what are you gonna do like why are you not gonna kill people or nothing tell you what to do why why would you not just kill people or do you have something else that haven't found something else in other books or something that tells you how to behave you know we had more smoking outdoor ask me ask questions like this it was very all but I think at the same time what that did was when I came to the conclusion that I was ok and I had to go back to what I was before I knew I was like you you don't know what Mormon means when you're a little kid what did I love before that what do i like what do I enjoy doing in life what could I build my life around um then I realized how many possibilities they were to me that just like blew open a door like I don't think most people in life really experience was I was like anything I want I could be anybody I could do anything and I felt like there was an enormous amount of information out there to discover and research and possibilities of who I could become so when you when you eventually that is that is that you and woman's done is there you are you outside the community you grew up in there flow there's so that happens some people I get very very isolated because and I've seen marriages split over leaving Mormon Church as well and I've seen people leave together and I've seen people where more impersonal leads and they stay together I've seen all sorts and in a sense the community breaks and we don't have really bad families our families aren't like don't talk to my kids don't come over no but nobody does that but there's still a weird distance that's there all the time nested in the church yes and so and so she has a brother and a sister that are not and I have an older brother that is not and so he left and her younger brother and younger sister for very different reasons it was never I'm gonna study I'm gonna learn about this church it was never a deliberate thing it was just more like I don't I'm not gonna do it and my older brother did did it kind of like I don't like that I don't want to do what I wanna do other things so things that I would have looked down on is in Iraq tomorrow I was like oh you don't you're just you just want to drink and smoke you're a bad person right yes and my older brother kind of did that he was away from the church and then later came back and did a lot of reading and research and he's like there are things that I don't agree with he believes very different and for us to be active Mormons and then research her way out is not that unusual but it's different than other people that we know that aren't in the church or something we're not like shunned we are allowed to speak or associate with people in the Mormon Church that kind of thing yes yeah so there were there were lawsuits a while back and court cases because people trying to leave the Mormon Church and eventually that his lawyers figured out it was better just to let people exercise their right to not be a member anymore and so for a while they were like you can't leave and then if you want to leave we're gonna excommunicate you and so you're you're an apostate you're you're going to hell you're excommunicated and now there's a process called name removal and the church decided that's fine we won't excommunicate you for wanting to leave you can just have your name removed from the rules of the church yeah what Jeff's dudes do that is you have to write a letter to your religious leader explaining to them that you realize you're forfeiting your eternal soul and if you want your name in the rules of the church yes it is very similar what is something like and what they do is they take every member it has a membership record they keep track of everything event in your life you're a baptize where you're born your next of kin all of it in your record and they mark it as name to members requests and they send it to evolve at headquarters and it goes in there right and so your name's not really removed but you're just not a member of record anymore and that's how they sort it out legally if you don't do that they your number ship record follows you and so we left after my worship record followed us England because we're like we didn't ask for that there they're old volunteers old people over there serving a mission they're serving Jesus and they will take membership records and we'll call people I so if someone leaves a congregation area and they don't know where they went they send their membership record back to church headquarters in Salt Lake there are people installed like that try to figure out where the person Wayne by calling their next of kin and so they can find out their address and send it to that congregation and then that congregation now has that membership record and they will try to contact that person to bring them back into the full bar and active life and said that's annoying and the only way to not do that is to formally resign your membership that's one of the reasons we decided to formally and just to make the statement counted to be able to say we're not Mormon when people that are Mormon would come up to us they would say oh you are Mormon though you're just in acting you're not attending and we want to be like we're not Mormon so we wanted to be able to make that statement I guess so that's why we chose to do it that way if you wanted to be Mormon again um like II was saying it's undone everything that they kept track of in our life so like when you're a baby your father blesses you with a name I don't have that any longer that church doesn't recognize that my baptism is undone so I would have to be rebaptised my marriage is not a void according to the Mormon Church we're not married because we were married in their facility so that's not I know yeah we'd have to redo that ceremony so we would have to go you could re-enter the moon dress but it is quite difficult you would have to go through a lot of steps and you would have to prove a lot before they would allow you to do that anyway it would take years to get back to where we were you [Music] you

Channel: Talk Beliefs

Views: 327,951

Rating: 4.4088912 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, atheism, agnostic, humanist, secular, skeptic, debate, religion, bible, god, jesus, evangelicals, evangelical, christianity, freethought, jehovah's, witness, mormon, hare, krishna, Scientology, scientologist, creationist, creationism, evolution, darwin, cult, beliefs, faith, science, scientific, apologist, apologetics, brainwashing, indoctrination, climate, Creation, Science, Darwinism, Fossils, Joseph Smith, LDS, Latter Day Saints, Book of Mormon

Id: lxWE17ZdoIw

Length: 32min 37sec (1957 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018