My favorite part of the Mormon belief system is the end goal: y’all get to become gods and have your own planets. Neat.
The Church of LDS is hardly unique. Just about every major religion has a closet full of skeletons.
I was born and raised Roman Catholic. Went to twelve years of parochial school, got the T-shirt, etc. I now look back and realize so much of it was BS.
While I’m not an atheist, I despise organized religion. When you strip away all the BS, you discover it’s nothing more than people trying to control other people. I don’t like to be controlled.
I suspect that if someone refuses to answer the summons, the excommunication will proceed without the apostate defending himself. I will go if I am summoned, and would gladly accept excommunication as a badge if honor.
I’ve never heard of someone being “billed” for tithing. But a friend who didn’t know I was apostate sent me an email with instructions to conveniently direct-deposit my 10%.
Skald had a thread about it when his wife divorced him for their religious differences. I posted in his thread that I was an apostate hiding from my wife. To some extent, it’s the ex-Mrs-Skald’s fault that I remained in hiding for so long.
If she had doubts, they were well concealed. She was uncomfortable with polygamy and disagreed with Prop 8, but she was otherwise the perfect undoubting Mormon housewife.
Well, to be fair to the LDS, I think any strongly-held belief can interfere with the smooth operation of a marriage. I laugh to look back on it, but when I met my husband I was a lapsed Catholic and he was an atheist. I told him we couldn’t really move forward because I couldn’t marry an atheist. I just knew that someday I would be able to get back into Catholicism and it would all click for me and I would no longer be made uncomfortable by the very idea of religious observance. I was just being immature and lazy or something.
We got married anyway. After a couple of years, I realized I was also an atheist. He had never tried to make it a big deal, and neither Catholicism nor atheism were actively trying to get in between us, but it was still a rift. A minor, temporary one as it turned out!
checks to see if Rhodes is in Utah
Rhodes is not
Whew! Dodged a bullet there! If you lived in Utah you’d be forced to move. Seriously. It’s like once you leave, you’re Shunned. No one will talk to you outside of pleasantries. I lived in Utah for most of my childhood and I had many ex-Mormon friends, specifically because their Mormon “friends” stopped associating with them after they announced they were leaving the church.
Now that you’ve left, have you thought about going to a different church or are you going the agnostic/atheist route?
True. This process would have been more difficult if we still lived in Utah. The Wife persuaded me to take a job in Texas in mid 2008. So when we distanced ourselves from the LDS church in late 2009, we were able to do so without having to put up with criticism from our Utard friends and families. After we had some time to get used to the changes, and before a summer visit to family in Utah, we made an announcement to all of our friends and family. There’s been a lot of crying, and my nutty brother jumped on the next plane to Texas to try to fix things, but overall people have been pretty understanding.
Before my wife had decided to leave the church, we planned to keep attending for the kids’ sake. Even when she learned that the LDS church was false, we tried for a few weeks to act as if nothing had changed. But we felt like frauds, pretending to be believers. And it was just not right for us to continue in our assignment teaching the 5-year-olds.
The kids attended a Methodist preschool who waived tuition when I lost my job. So we considered joining them out of gratitude. By then, I was nearly decided as an atheist and my wife, while still trying to believe in a God, had rejected any form of belief in the OT Yahweh. So the Methodists would have been a good community, a good support group, and a good source of moral instruction for the kids. But we decided that it would be better for the kids to learn morality for morality’s sake, not morality to impress a wrathful God. So we decided to avoid religion altogether.
If we decide that we need the social structure, we will consider the Unitarian Universalists (or is it Universal Unitarians?). I saw on Wikipedia that they identify more with atheism, agnosticism, and humanism that with Christianity. Sounds like they would be interesting and not too pushy with the supernatural bullshit. We’ll check them out sometime when The Wife is not working a weekend night shift.
But regarldless of what social club we join, I am firmly decided on atheism and my wife is slipping from some vague deism to atheism.
Wow. What a PITA to have to jump through all those hoops to resign from a church. I’ll keep your family in my thoughts and prayers as you decide what to do next.
ETA: Okay, I see what you have decided to do next. 
I’ll still send good thoughts and prayers for you, and hope everything works out for the best for you. I hope they take that letter seriously and leave you alone. I also hope that they rethink their procedures for leaving. That stinks.
She didn’t divorce me; she just left. And we reconciled.
Oops. Sorry for misrepresenting your situation.
I am thrilled to learn that you have reconciled. Even though I don’t know you, I really felt bad for your loss. And I’ve even felt a bit of guilt sometimes that my situation had worked out so well while yours (as far as I knew) had not, even though you apparently had been honest with your wife and I had waited for my wife to bust me.
Congratulations for working it out.
Congratulations Rhodes. It cannot have been easy for you and your wife to make the decisions you did and actually follow through with it.
What I know about Mormonism probably wouldn’t even cover the head of a pin, so I’m not sure about its dovetail points with mainstream Christianity, however, I do find it humorous when Protestants, or members of the various other flavors of Christianity popular in America, deride Mormons as though theirs, with its more than 2000 years of nonsensical wackyness, is somehow superior.
My brother was an atheist, but his wife, a devout Catholic, never, ever realized it. We would occasionally discuss it. The night he died, she claims and angel appeared at his bedside. I don’t know how they lived that way, but somehow they managed.
I have known hardly any Mormons, nor anything about the sect save for their rather far right political views, but I congratulate anyone, atheist or not, who realizes that the benefits of organized religion accrue mainly to the organizers. (That’s not original with me, but I don’t know who said it first.)
Good luck on that … we are talking about a group that is unusual
Heck, I found out recently that I was “married” to and baptised by an ex boyfriend. i am thrilled he doesn’t want me to burn, but it would have been nice to have been asked first.
This is true: they are extremely unusual. I can hope, though.
And I think I would not be happy if I found out someone had been baptized for me. I have been baptized, and I believe my baptism was good enough.
Hey that’s weird but pretty cool. But how did he manage to do proxy ordinances for you? Are you officially dead? Or 110 years old (the age at which the LDS assume you’re most certainly dead and therefore ready for proxy baptism)?
Congratulations, Rhodes… although I wouldn’t call it closure until you get your final letter from Greg Dodge! (You get a letter from Church HQ Member Records division.)
I resigned a couple of years ago when I found out my wife was pregnant. Like you, I baptized way too many nine-year-olds on my mission and vowed I’d never have missionaries coming over and eyeing my children and wife as potential converts.
If you have any trouble with your stake president, one call to Greg Dodge in Member Services usually gets the ball rolling fast. He was very nice when I had to call.
Greg Dodge sounds like a pretty reasonable guy. Apparently some people have been able to resign recently simply by sending him an email. I was unaware that he’s reachable by phone too. I’ll wait a few days for the bishop or stake pres to respond, and if I don’t hear from them I’ll give Dodge a call. Thanks for the info!
Can you elaborate on this? That sounds like something out of a d-grade horror movie.
For what it’s worth, my mom used to go to a UU church in Boston, and their minister himself was an atheist. It was more a place for people to gather as a community to discuss social justice issues than to practice a faith (although they also included prayers and hymns in their services, when they were suggested by members of the congregation).
I just sent a follow-up email: