Relevant newspaper article: Mormon Mission Spin. (Also a great book about a third-world mission from an apostate’s point of view.)
Huh, I would have said the opposite. There are lots of terrible things about being male and raised Mormon, but I think female Mormons have it much worse. I’ve never read a Young Women’s lesson that didn’t give me the creeps.
I think it will take a long time for the culture to change. Although, the church itself moved this idea to the forefront by excluding a fair number of potential missionaries starting in the early 2000s by “raising the bar” (i.e. refusing to allow young men who had had premarital sex or taken antidepressants to go on missions).
TokyoBayer’s story is somewhat similar to my own, as a recovering Mormon. I was no pariah in the church, though, and it was basically my whole world and everything I thought was true was based in it.
Leaving the church after my mission was a very painful thing, which I don’t like to talk about. I think most Mormons (or anyone in any religion, really) face a very scary alternative. If practically everyone you know and love is in the clique, and you reject it, you’re also rejecting them.
I felt cheated and lied to, and without the fear of God to guide me, what guides are left? I did a little light reading of various religions and such to maybe find a way to heal the big rift in my heart, but it didn’t take long to realize that believing in any dogma took the same suspension of reason Mormonism did.
The people I converted were looking for community and a sense of purpose. I have no idea how many are still involved, or what it does for them. Mormonism survives scrutiny because, while the beliefs are laughable, the church makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger. It encourages big families, and actively seeks converts. It’s a lifestyle. You do practically everything with other Mormons, who are generally nice people.
Cults generally control all aspects of your life. Mormonism isn’t a 1-hour-a-week religion. It takes up so much more of your time. I can’t get that time back, and I can’t pretend to believe things that aren’t true just to be comfortable. I lost friends, or at least hurt friendships.
Once I was no longer a Mormon, I was a blank slate. That identity was gone, and I had to do the hard work of self-actualization without some “spirit” telling me what to do.
I’m (probably predictably) an atheist now, and, I like to think, a better person for what I endured. If there are any Mormons out there reading this, my experience was painful, but necessary. I couldn’t “fake it.” Maybe you can. Leaving the church is liberating, but it came at a price for me. It gets better with time.
Great post. I agree 100%.
Raspberry Hunter, I’m from Utah. I grew up in one of the 20 original wards in Salt Lake. Both parents were descended from pioneer stock. My father’s great-great-whatever-grandmother lost her legs to frostbite in the debacle of the Martin and Willie handcart companies. She was fortunate, and not one of the many who died because of the mistaken prophecy. My father grew up on a poor dirt farm in central Utah. He was a devote Mormon, but his psychosis over whelmed his teachings. His god was the god of the Old Testament, with the fire and brimstone.
My mother’s family came from Norway, also in the mid 1800s and moved to Utah. She grew up in Utah and Idaho, also on farms. My mother’s life still revolves around the Church. She’s literal and sees no symbolism in any of the teachings. She really likes the mystical side of Mormonism, on how to differentiate between angels and Satan (offer to shake their hand)
Up until I was in junior high, if you were to ask me to describe myself in one word, it would have been “Mormon,” ahead of “boy,” American, or even my family. In high school, I started to hang around with the D&D crowd a bit and my Mormonism slipped but I couldn’t think consciously about it.
When I did go, I bolted, without the ability to calmly think about it. It was only later that I was able to go back and really look at the issues.
Heh. Well, you’re right. Coincidentally, I spent last evening with a bunch of LDS women friends, a couple of whom were or are in the Young Women presidency, and they spent a good portion of the evening complaining about that very thing, using almost the same words. I think that my YW teachers must not have actually used the manual (one of my friends, the YW president, stated outright that she never used the manual, apart from occasionally getting lesson titles from it, because she just couldn’t deal with the creepiness) and/or that I wasn’t paying attention at the time. Probably both. I also read a lot – once I got into Heinlein, it wasn’t like I was going to take the Law of Chastity lessons super-seriously (I mean, it still marked me, but not any more than it would a good Mormon boy, either) – and my parents were determined that my sister and I would get advanced degrees and have careers, so that helped with not taking it too seriously as well.
(This also goes to show you that the ward I’m in is perhaps atypical – no one in the group was disagreeing, and most were emphatically agreeing, with the YW president who had issues with the manual – I imagine you get a quite different crowd in Utah, which is why I would never, ever live there. I know a ton of people in my ward who agree with me there, too – that was a subject of conversation last night as well 
)
…antidepressants? Really? Ouch.
Reynolds, I totally get what you’re saying – the only thing I disagree with is that I don’t think Mormonism is a cult – I put about five hours into it a week, which honestly is less than I put into other extracurriculars (and four hours of which I would have had to spend entertaining my kid anyway, so it’s actually much easier on me than it sounds), and people are fine with that. It’s true the majority of my friends right now are Mormon, but that has to do with not really having much in common with our old singles group once we had the kid more than it does with cultishness. I realize that it’s easy to get sucked in, but I think it differs from a cult in that you don’t have to get sucked in even if you’re a member.
I should also say that, in contrast to the ex-Mormons posting here, I’m not an atheist; I identify most strongly as an agnostic. So I don’t have quite the issues that y’all do with feeling like I’m living a lie. I’m willing to hope in the possibility of God and Christ and all that, and although I don’t believe in the BoM and all that, true, I am willing to entertain the possibility that I’m wrong (I’ve never been wrong before where literary analysis is concerned, but hey, could happen). And I do believe there’s something there when everything’s working the way it ought to, whether it’s God or the Holy Ghost or group hysteria-ecstasy or subliminal human cues or a psychologically heightened sensitivity to fellow human beings – take your pick.
Sorry this is a peeve of mine. Agnosticism and atheism are not properties along the same continuum. There are two religious axes: gnosticism and theism. Gnosticism defines whether you believe that, in principle, whether or not there are gods is knowable. If you make the argument “well, we can’t know for sure whether or not God exists” then you’re agnostic. If you believe with all your heart and soul God talks to you, then you’re probably gnostic.
A theist believes a god or gods exists. It’s difficult, but not uncommon to be an agnostic theist. Atheism has two subcategories – weak and strong. A weak atheist simply lacks a belief in gods, they do not think a god exists, but do not necessarily commit to saying a god can’t, in principle exist – just that there’s not enough evidence to say for sure.
A weak atheist may be gnostic or agnostic. An agnostic weak atheist will say that they do not believe a god exists due to lack of evidence, but admits they can’t know for sure. A gnostic weak atheist can claim that, in principle, we can eventually prove the existence or non-existence of a god, but at this point where we’re not certain, evidence points to there not being any gods.
A strong (aka hard) atheist believes that there are no gods, definitely. You could theoretically be an agnostic strong atheist, I guess, but IMO it’s not a defensible position. A gnostic hard atheist will claim that, for some logical or empirical reason, gods cannot in principle exist and thus he KNOWS that there are no gods.
The vast majority of “atheists” are “agnostic weak atheists.” In fact, the majority of so-called “agnostics” probably are as well (though a lot are wavering agnostic theists). It sounds to me like you’re an agnostic weak atheist.
Just in case it isn’t obvious, I didn’t know about any of this at the time I made that post. And it hadn’t happened yet when I had decided that Mormons were mostly good people.
Thing is, I still see that as the exception to the rule. Plus, based on past history, I believe they will reverse their opinion on this subject much more quickly that Fundamentalist Christians.
When ninety-five percent of the people you know are homophobes, it’s hard to get upset at the nice people who were such friends in college, all without ever once proselytizing.
I don’t think it’s hard to be an agnostic theist at all–I’m increasingly of the persuasion that there is no way to know that God exists in the scientific sense–that faith is just hoping God exists, and not entirely knowing.
It’s one of those things that’s probably easier the less you argue about it. I think that probably the vast majority of American Christians are agnostic theists, but they don’t argue about religion that much. It’s just that when attacked agnostic theism tends to collapse rather quickly. Gnostic theism might accept that science can’t prove or disprove god, but usually falls back on statements like “I know God exists because he reveals Himself to those who have faith.”
Agnostic theism doesn’t really have such a fallback. It’s possible to do what you do, certainly, and say “while there’s really no way to know, I think there probably is.” It’s just that I think, in general, it’s harder to hold onto that position when you’re under scrutiny than gnostic theism is.
See, I think the opposite: It’s harder to maintain the idea that I absolutely cannot be delusional. Plus I can’t deny the fact that I don’t want to die, which proves I’m not 100% sure of heaven.
It’s far easier for me to believe that one can’t be 100% sure than to believe that I’m defective.
Er… not to imply that you don’t argue about it BigT, I know you’ve posted in religious debates plenty. It’s just my experience that the combination of agnostic theist and debate tends to lead to quiet atheism a lot more often than gnostic theists and debate (though when gnostic theists turn atheist it’s usually rather spectacular to behold since it usually involves a much more radical dissolution of their world view).
ETA: You ninja’d me and snuck a post in there!
Eh, fair enough.
OK. Fair enough. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but that makes sense. On the other hand, I still identify much more strongly as agnostic than as atheist; on any given day I’m as likely to be a theist as an atheist, so I’m so weak on that axis as to be nonexistent when averaged over a couple of years or so. (I once described my position to, I think it was Skald, as “confused.”) So my statement still holds, even if I said it in error 
This is an interesting theory. Do you have a cite for this definition?
From Merriam Webster
And gnosis is defined as
From dictionary.reference.com:
Looks like Jragon is using definition 2, where gnostic is simply the opposite of agnostic, as opposed to capital-G Gnosticism, the early Christian cult.
It makes sense to define one’s theism as believing or disbelieving in gods, as well as another scale related to how confident one is in one’s belief. An agnostic may claim that the existence of god is unprovable, without necessarily committing to believing or disbelieving.
As it relates to the OP, modern scrutiny can prove that Mormonism is false. All you have to do is find two prophets speaking in God’s name but saying conflicting things. Or show that Joseph Smith’s interpretation of the papyrus in the scriptural Book of Abraham is total BS. So many ex-Mormons come out with a sure knowledge that Mormonism is false, and then have a pretty strong suspicion that all other religions, and god-belief in general, are extremely improbable as well. As the god hypothesis is not necessary to explain the origins and workings of the universe, I am an atheist. But since I can’t disprove it with the same conviction that I can disprove Mormonism, I retain just a sliver of agnosticism.
I don’t think this answer has come up yet in this thread:
I think the reason that there is no large-scale public questioning of the beliefs of Mormons comes down to one thing. Most people in the U.S. profess to have some kind of religious belief. Even though some of the belifs of Mormonism are ridiculous, they realize that as soon as they start pointing out problems with Mormonism, they will open themselves up for scrutiny of their own religion.
It’s not just Mormonism. You almost never see a Christian religious leader or denomination say anything bad about another Christian leader or denomination, even when they severely fuck up.
My Catholic friend and I always joke about this. The only difference between Mormonism and mainstream Christianity is that the really screwy stuff in Mormonism happened recently enough that there is a paper trail.
The handwriting is on the wall, and within a couple of decades, at most, Mormonism will be not that significantly different than many Protestant sects. Sure, they’ll still non -critically accept the Book of Mormon, knowing at some level it really didn’t happen, but not saying anything about it. Just like they do for the Jeridites part now.
I’m using the assumption that “gnostic” should logically be the antonym of “agnostic (def 1).”
To be honest, I didn’t know that dictionaries didn’t list this, I see these definitions of gnostic/agnostic all over the damn place in religious debates and videos. A philosophy professor of mine even used it in this sense. So it’s at least very common in a certain subset of English users, if not yet immortalized in the dictionary. Sorry for the inability to get a hard cite :/.
Damn, missed edit:
Here’s a Wikipedia cite: Agnosticism - Wikipedia
To be fair, it does also list “Apathetic agnosticism” which argues that theism/atheism aren’t really useful because God appears to be so disinterested in us (if he exists), that the question is academic, and “spiritual agnosticism” which argues that what you do is more important than what you believe. Which are probably closest to the “popular” definition of agnosticism. I’ve only ever encountered the agnostic atheism/theism and the weak/strong agnosticism*/atheism definitions (and ignosticism, but that wasn’t prudent to bring up in my post).
- Weak/strong agnosticism is the line between “in principle unknowable” and “currently unknowable but eventually provable” but I didn’t want to make the post longer than it needed to be.
It isn’t, and shouldn’t be.
“Gnostic”, “gnostics” and “gnosticism” are tricky enough terms as it is – we don’t need yet another definition muddying the already-muddy waters even further.