My MORMON Timeline- How and Why I ESCAPED!!!

escaping the Mormon Church is no simple task now it's not a literal compound in these days it's it's pretty much the same level of cult enos as most other religions with a few small feature exceptions being Mormon is a state of mind just as much as it is a type of membership and it is something very hard to escape so today I'm gonna share with you my Mormon timeline and how I escaped Mormonism I'm mister atheist let's do this now in this episode I'm gonna refer to leaving the church but leaving the church to me is just basically publicly acknowledging that I don't believe in it I'm not going to contribute to it that sort of thing I'll start off with a confession I recently found out that contrary to what I believed I actually am still technically a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints a friend of mine reminded me I could sign into my online Mormon account and I'd be able to see and sure enough I'm still there I'd honestly thought at this point I had been excommunicated or that someone in my family had forged a resignation letter to make it make it official and so I want to run through but if you're wondering will I now seek to be removed from the records no I won't if the Mormons would like to remove me as a member I wish for them to do their normal excommunication process which includes a hearing a hearing at which I would have several questions questions about things that I was taught versus what apparently was reality and questions about the things that it has taken me years and years to deprogram from and likely there are still things I am working on though I could no longer feel any less Mormon let me give you a bit of my backstory here I grew up with a father who always had local prominent roles for my entire life he was either a bishop a member of the high council a member of the stake presidency which is kind of like the level above bishop it's a they're in charge of a larger region as opposed to just one congregation and he was either often or perhaps even always a seminary teacher seminary and Mormonism isn't like what you might have seen in Catholicism it's where you go before or actually during school some schools allow you to go for a period and it's basically daily Church and daily indoctrination as a kid we also moved around quite a bit my father worked my mother was a stay-at-home mom she too would sometimes have roles in the church but things like head of the Relief Society she was young women's president at one point too she's also British and why I hit my T's so hard hit that like button too to give you a mindset of how Mormon my family is I have 12 siblings yeah 12 6 of them are biological 6 of them are adopted my father does have only one wife a lot of people make the mistake of thinking mainstream Mormons do the polygamy thing they do not not anymore anyway and according to their beliefs they will again in heaven but of these 12 siblings five of them are older than me seven of them are younger for the most part though my childhood was actually surrounded by my biological siblings four older brothers two younger sisters and last bit of information before I get into this sort of timeline of memorable Mormon events for me while I wasn't the literal middle child all of my other siblings had another sibling within 1 to 2 years of their age however for me I had an age gap of 3 years on one side and four on the other so not while not a literal middle child I was very much isolated from the rest of the group and to tell you the truth while I didn't like that as a kid I think it is probably why I became the most independent thinker of the bunch at least the soonest so to begin the timeline my earliest memories all have religion and Mormonism attached to it for example my family did daily scripture reading and daily prayer usually in the evening the entire family would gather my dad would read a chapter usually out of The Book of Mormon we'd have a prayer and dispersed in my earliest years I can remember sitting on my dad's lap and having him whisper the words into my ear so so I could read the Book of Mormon to everyone as a matter of fact I can remember him doing that with my older brother so he probably been 5 or 6 if my dad was still prompting all the words for him so I at this time would have been at the youngest 2 or 3 and those again are some of my earliest memories I actually remember learning about Noah in what is called nursery which is where the kids go before they turn 5 years old when they join the rest of the kids now I can't give you details obviously that young they're not that strong of memories but just to let you know these are the things that are strongest in my brain the earliest thing so this is something that from the onset from my birth this is stuff I was hearing I was also a very curious kid I asked a lot of questions and I annoyed a lot of people I got in trouble a lot because that often put me at odds with my siblings and the first time I remember expressing anything that resembled kind of critical thinking would have been around 7 years old in the living room with my brothers in a house in southern Tennessee I floated the idea that while I know the church is true I wondered if maybe out there was a church that might have even more truth than our church did so you definitely see there at seven I'm already programmed with this concept of I know the church is true which is obviously BS and then what happened in reaction was basically being berated by three of my older brothers for even floating such an idea and what trouble I would be in and how wrong I am to even suggest something like that not a very long time thereafter I would be interviewed in that same living room by my bishop about whether or not I knew the church was true this was my baptism interview and at eight years old I said it's true and I took a covenant to uphold the religion for the rest of my life at eight years old as though it is possible for an eight-year-old to make that kind of commitment as an informed decision and when there is so much social pressure to do it and you haven't developed those critical thinking skills to pretend like this is all people's choice and not just deep childhood indoctrination that's absurd now I put a lot of thought into the ages some of these things happened I technically could be wrong on some of these but because we moved around so much and I can remember where we were I think I actually got pretty close especially with some of the younger days so another memory I have of being shamed as a child for thinking freely and then years old one of my brothers happen to be passing by my bus stop for school as I was getting off the bus so I got in the truck with him and I told him about how I have this crush on this girl who's on my bus who actually also lived on our street but in Florida the streets are like super long at least where we lived anyway I've told him we lived in a small area he knew she wasn't Mormon once again berated for my terrible choice this one being something I wasn't even remotely aware of at the time I was truly baffled that he was telling me I couldn't like her because she wasn't Mormon and I remember protesting saying something along the lines of I don't get how the church could tell us who we can love something I wish I would have applied to the LGBT community much sooner but I was quickly informed I was wrong and given all these reasonings of why if I do that I won't be able to to go to heaven and and become exalted and become a god and all of all of these things that was was a really a child telling another child what the secrets of the universe were and the level to which I'm being indoctrinated is growing and growing around this time my curiosity sort of stifles and I just start except things at 12 years old I am ordained a deacon that is the kind of lowest level of priesthood if you ever go to a Mormon sacrum they're the kids handing out the bread in the water come sacrament time this is also when puberty is starting to hit me like a ton of bricks and I sort of figure out how to masturbate so now begins these terrible terrible guilt cycles things that actually got much worse because the whole talk about how masturbation is evil was actually something I got after I had already begun don't get me wrong I already knew sexuality was something to be ashamed of and I already knew I had already figured it out but as far as like this specific action is something you're not supposed to do no I was literally just so stoked and excited as any 12 to 13 year old kid is at that time then at 14 I'm ordained to be a teacher now I'm not teaching anything it's their next level of priesthood you are who prepared the sacrament basically you put the bread in the water in the little things they hand them out on and that makes you a teacher around this time is when I remember having my very first really significant doubts attending church one Sunday a woman was given up and giving a talk if you don't know Mormons most of the Thaksin and things during the main service are actually gave by members you will be asked at some point to publicly speak and and give a lesson on such-and-such and her message was something about blessing she was receiving and she starts to tell the story about how chores and things were being done in the house and and no one apparently was doing them and that she at first thought she had a guardian angel then at a certain point after talking to her children about someone they had been playing with she comes to the conclusion that there is a homeless person living in her house and they just can't figure out where whether it's in the crawlspace or the attic or whatever her and her husband ultimately decide that this can't continue and so they go around the house yelling we're going to leave we will be back in this many hours and when we come back you have to be gone and and giving like a little explanation we have a family we can't have some oh and she talks about coming home and all of the chores were done everything was clean as can be and then they never heard from this individual again they believed that they had left and then she starts to break down and cry and talk about what a blessing this individual was in her house I believe they identified it as a man because of the the kids so this that this man was in their house and how they knew that he had still been sent by God so while he wasn't a guardian angel he was still kind of a guardian angel and I am sitting there just flabbergasted the first thing I do is I move to look at my dad because my dad is outside of his religion a rather sceptical person and sometimes within he just shuts off it a lot for a lot of Mormonism and we also have similar dark senses of humor and so we kind of exchange this I look of what is going on here but then I panned and I looked around the rest of the room and there were a significant number of people dabbing their eyes with their tissues they were touched by this story of a stranger living in the walls helping out with chores playing with their kids and I remember the doubts I had after because I felt so guilty because I actually said a swear word in my brain in my mind I uttered the phrase oh no this could be [ __ ] and basically for the first time I had a recognition that people who believe this who really deeply believe at least a significant portion of them just believe they aren't people questioning things anything they can attribute to being the good of God they will attribute those things and so while I maintain that no okay overall it's true I had begun to recognize that most believers don't believe for good reason which would put me on my path to realizing the church isn't true because that's about the anchor point where I started deciding I needed to prove the church true using empirical methods we would hear stories all the time of all these great and wonderful and obvious proofs of it but the moment you go to question it that's when the apologetics begin nothing's ever is grand no miracle is ever as miraculous as they first claimed everything just comes back down to feelings and recognizing God's hand where frankly there wasn't now at this time I'm still feeling incredibly guilty and I'm having thoughts like did I wash my hands since I masturbate because now I'm handling the sacrament which they had stuff in there to sanitize it was it was still like it created that urgency of like oh no I don't want to be doubly impure let me just wash the sin sin his splooge off of my hands now if puberty hit me like a ton of bricks at twelve thirteen at this point I'm being hit by several buses in a row I'll tell you a little too much about me I as an adult but even more so as a teenager have an incredibly high libido it is ridiculous and when it's paired with all these terrible religious ideas about the roles of men and women and what genders even exist in what genders you're allowed to be attracted to it was toxic and disastrous at best so at 16 I am ordained a priest but at this time I'm also having a secret Catholic girlfriend who I'm having very sexually explicit and sexually charged experiences with in the front of her Chevy Nova sometimes the back but both both are just basically big long benches and if you move to the back that's that's 22 seconds you're not touching each other so we usually just stuck in the front and there are several occasions on which I was caught with this girl not doing the sexually explicit stuff just dating just spending time together going to movies I think I think someone reported on me kissing them my brother had a Mormon friend who came up and she was really bored all the time so I invited her to an activity with us and she saw us together she ratted us out so there were several occasions on which my relationship with her was exposed and it was a huge problem for a few reasons one Mormon I'm not supposed to date a Catholic that was probably the big one second the house rule was don't date seriously until you get back from your mission though they understood at 18 they couldn't do anything to enforce that but as long as you were still going on a mission no matter what they they were fine with you having a Mormon girlfriend who was going to leave you when you go on your mission but this too is where a lot of my questions start to show up this is where I am saying I don't understand how this is hurting people I know that the shame I feel about myself for doing something that apparently hurt no one else that was extremely consensual how it could be that I am a bad person for this and how once again the church could have policies surrounding who to love so then in the coming years I would turn 18 at this point I already know I'm out on a lot of fronts I know I don't want to go on a mission I still believe the church is true and proposition eight is happening proposition eight if you don't know is that California legislation that basically annulled all marriages that weren't between a man and a woman and the Mormon Church was heavily involved in it these were the discussions we were having every week they were asking for volunteers and they were asking for money as well as dipping into the having money for it too and this is one of those situations I was very conflicted on I didn't support Proposition 8 but I supported the idea of civil unions and I would say crappy things like well listen marriage is a religious thing and it's a Christian thing so you have to let it be itself but we should we I think we should give you something like marriage we just can't call it marriage the same kind of [ __ ] you see all over the place but internally I'm very conflicted I have some gay friends I don't think there's any problem with them also as a teenager leading up to this point I'm having sexually charged experiences getting more and more sexually to our doing more and more sexual things as I get older with more and more people and so there's also the underlying hypocrisy of I am going out and having the sex life I want to have and yet I am saying other people shouldn't have that sex life the way they want to have it or with whomever they wish to have it I definitely haven't addressed my own sexual orientation at this point sure there were times I had noticed that people other than who I was supposed to be attracted to I was attracted to one of which was a boy in another Ward that we would have group activities with and I would always be very flirty with to the point I sometimes got some talking's too but because of the wide nature of the spectrum of my sexuality and liking thoroughly the people I was identifying as girls at that time I had no problem suppressing the rest and staying bigoted toward those individuals and this is where the timeline gets fuzzy because I can't tell you the exact moment what what age I was it was somewhere between the ages of 19 and 21 I think it was probably closer to 19 in fact I'd almost include 18 and on how early it is the only thing I know is that at this time I'm dating a woman that I almost married but I also know my Eureka moment happens at a time I am back living with my parents so I really think around really early nineteen years old I have still been having lots of debates I've been having lots of arguments I've gone through these phases of okay the church the church is still true but the membership isn't Joseph Smith was definitely a prophet but I'm not even sure about Brigham Young or anything thereon I mean it starts earlier than that I start kind of fiddling around with alternative spirituality he's trying to figure out if there's other things from Christianity I want to borrow but then there is just this day where I've been doing this and I've been caring so much and there's all this stress I haven't been able to prove to myself it's true beyond things like feelings of confirmation the things they tell you are the Holy Ghost which which are feelings you can recreate doing totally non-religious things it certainly is happening in your brain I'm not able to confirm those things and one of the things for my teenage years that I left out that was very important to me was that at one point probably around 12 or 13 I am praying a lot and praying a lot and I'm asking God to let me be the person who translates the rest of the Book of Mormon if you don't know that story I can't get into it now for times sake but to translate the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon and I had received on multiple occasions what I thought was confirmation that that was my destiny the most powerful feelings of the Holy Ghost were that thing that never happened and so now at probably 19 years old I'm going and I'm deciding to do a thought exercise and the thought exercise is essentially this here is everything I cannot reconcile if the church is true and Joseph Smith was a prophet okay I look at it here's the level of uncomfortable I am now if I take all of those things and I take everything I know about the world and I run it through the filter of Joseph Smith was the charlatan that he was convicted of being and that he was a liar and that the church wasn't true did that make more sense and a big part of that was just giving me permission to even consider that and within a few minutes I had given away Mormonism completely in my mind because it did fit it held up to that much much better it conformed with reality it fixed all of these scientific issues that the church had it explained why God was so deaf to suffering but if you were paying your tithing you might get a reward like some clothes you were looking for being on sale but people in other countries get to starve to death because they weren't paying their tithing and from there I would even say I probably was an atheist from that I definitely did some experimenting with other levels of spirituality a little bit through that Christianity which I was already kind of doing at that point then to some things that are just spiritual things on 2d ISM as part of my journey to figure out what what I thought existed basically whether or not I thought the rest of the world was correct that this supernatural realm exists at all but it honestly didn't take long I probably played around as a deist for a good year or so but I wasn't talking about it I wasn't defending you as soon as I had to defend my position and think it out and articulate it the atheism fell right behind it now I hid my atheism from pretty much everyone except my girlfriend the one I referred to earlier she had similarly lost her faith and probably a little faster than me I couldn't tell you who lost theirs first but we didn't explore what that meant much we just kind of went to a state of now this is a non-issue for us but you might have heard me talk about how I am a better person out of the church than I was that wasn't a quick transition the impulse to pray doesn't go away quickly the feeling of superiority over other genders doesn't go away quickly I maintain being a Republican for quite a while after leaving and then I I went in on an adventure through libertarianism during all this I'm going through a hard identity crisis it hurts it feels like crap I am lashing out I'm not telling anybody the truth about anything my entire life is based on lies so all I do to everyone is lie I would ultimately lose that relationship I was in because of it which I don't regret now the relationship ending I just regret a lot of my actions when that relationship ends my identity crisis goes through the roof I am manipulating people I am treating people like crap and around 21 22 I am outed by my brother who I had trusted with the information that I was atheist he outs me to my parents and a lot of conflict and a lot of crap follows they figure out I'm not a virgin that's a big problem I don't believe in the church that's a big problem and there's more fighting and there's more arguing and there is no level of harmony until I start taking a hard attempt to adjust myself and stop trying to be all versions of myself at once that I had ever been there's still anger there's still a fire to debate I still have that fire now but it took a lot of getting over myself it took some therapy even it took a lot of Tears it took a lot of time it took a lot of community it took a lot of research it took meeting myself for the first time and then being myself and there's a lot of hard bumps with being yourself because at first you start to be kind of crappy so you have to have values about being a better person and and deciding that the truth is good for you and I can promise anyone watching going through it themselves those things go away the fear of Hell or Mormons it's not quite hell but but what you will the consequences of you not following that goes away I don't remotely fear an afterlife anymore the urge to pray went away but at one point I did this thing where I still prayed but I acknowledged I was talking to myself and I would just say these are the things I want out of life these are the things I'm happy I have out of life here's what I want here's what I wish would happen and that that wasn't a bad exercise for me but it's not one I still feel the need to do I do recommend meditation to anybody I don't always do it I'm not I'm not currently using meditation much but I go through phases where I do where it helps me quiet the world and focus on things that I want it just makes me feel good I don't I don't know if it has extreme long-term effects like some people claim it does so if you are going through it I recommend you find that community and you find those people who communicate concepts and information that you want to learn more about you now value skepticism find those skeptics that bring that down to your level or up to your level depending on who you are and I can tell you that personally I went through some of the worst adversities in my life after I left Mormonism but as a person even during those when I had found myself when I began to identify as atheist when I became a secular humanist and I felt good about me and myself with all of that adversity in tow I have still been the happiest I've ever been in my life and as a Mormon I was genuinely miserable because shame is a terrible motivator but in the Mormon Church and frankly most religions shame isn't just the name of the game it is the game I'm gonna end it there for today now a quick announcement there's a new channel to subscribe to it is mine but it is where my live shows will take place that link is down below and I'll put an icon up at the end of the episode as well that you can hit if this is your first time here and you think you'd like to see more go check out some of my video responses but do hit that subscribe button ring that bell and if you liked this episode I'd love it if you would hit the like button also remember to share and leave a comment I can tell you that with this episode I'm gonna be spending a lot more time in the comments than I usually do I try to read as many as I can but this one I'll be very interested especially to hear from some of you other ex-mormons follow me on twitter and instagram at dear mr. atheist social media links are below as well as all the ways you can support the channel and now here is my list of amazing patrons patrons who I love because they invest in this channel and I appreciate the hell out of them is also a video recommendation as well as the link to that other channel that I really appreciate it if you would hit the subscribe button on as well today's patron of the day is the lives pantyhose addiction Thank You lives so much for your support and to all of you with love I'm Jimmy mister atheist wasn't my father

Channel: Jimmy Snow

Views: 689,451

Rating: 4.8926616 out of 5

Keywords: book of mormon, joseph smith, lds church, mormon church, book of abraham, latter day saints, dear mr atheist, mr atheist, mr atheist mormon, what's wrong with mormonism, My Mormon Timeline, How and Why I Escaped, My Mormon Timeline How and Why I Escaped, mormon, the book of mormon, mormonism, lds, the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints, brigham young, mormons, latter-day saints, 3 mormons, mormon stories, jesus, cult, religion

Id: 6rRjW6VXk5k

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/soapdoodles]

Homeschool mormon here. I’m still hoping it gets better in the future.

[u/garcie]

This YouTube channel hasbeen helping me to understand all the brainwashing techniques my parents and their religion used to keep me believing things that disgust me now.

For a healthy, progressive Christian view on sexuality, I’ve gotten into the God is Grey channel. Brenda, who runs this channel, is proudly an unmarried, pregnant Christian. She is good friends with Mr. Atheist. They both make videos critiquing purity culture. Sometimes they call out other YouTubers with toxic ideas, and there’s actually some Christian YouTube drama I find really funny. Go down the rabbit hole!

[u/WildlyAwesome]

I was raised in a homeschooling Christian family. Not as nuts as mormonism, but still pretty crazy.

[u/GorseHag]

Having not being raised in a religious family I do not relate to all of this, but I overall still found it a really helpful video to watch. I can certainly see the overlaps it has with many aspects of home school.

[u/Hurricane_Mady]

This was really good! Thanks for sharing :)