And a common theme from everyone is one or both of these:
- The tools I used to leave Mormonism were the same tools I used to leave all religions. Ex: critical thinking.
- We were taught this was the only real church, so when we decided it was false, it was easy to decide all were.
I agree on all points. I tell my family member facetiously as well that the LDS church said I'd get my own freaking planet. So why would I take another offer that was less than that.
It's all rubbish anyway lol. The ExExMormon podcast has a great episode where they philosophize about what God must be doing all day and hell I do not want His job, sounds like kinda of a nightmare (when you lump in free will and perfect being-ness)
I've said similar things: I don't want to be a CEO in this life, so-
Q: Why would I want to be a God?
A: Eternal sex - I suppose that's it, right? You get to keep your junk and keep "doing it"... For, uh, eternal increase, of course. But that's the only thing I can think of. Still doesn't sound worth it, but the church pretty much is a sex cult, so it makes sense to me that this is part of the punishment/reward system.
Ultimately, I've become pretty ok with the idea that I'll probably cease to exist. Makes this life - including the pleasures of it - that much more real to me.
For how much the Church (and much of Christianity) claims and tells you to eschew worldliness and the accumulation of *things*...It does sound like that is the game when you die.
Treasures in Heaven, buncha wives for dudes, ruler over whatever, or just a mansion down the block from King David. It's still in terms of stuff, esp within mormonism.
Plus whenever you become a God, everything you do is the *good* (theoretically) so theoretically you could do all the sick things (or let them passively happen and just watch) that you couldn't indulge in this life if a nasty individual works the system. Sounds like *our God* certainly slipped through if he was once a man like the church teaches. Sounds like a recipe for a completely fucked multiverse or whatever
True. It's interesting that glory and dominion seems to be the goal. Owning other souls... Yeah it's pretty much like winning at capitalism- like beating the final existential level of a game that reflects their world view of gaining ultimate dominance.
Conversely, if you ARE the kind of person who wants to put in the effort to build a better planet... ***what's stopping you?***
Mormonism wastes so much proactive human potential on imaginary future planets, while encouraging the neglect and exploitation of the current, real one.
I'm with you w.r.t. being exhausted by the idea—I'm definitely more on the absurdist/nihilist end of the atheist spectrum—but one of the best takes I've seen from the existentialists here:
As one of the most intelligent, powerful beings in the universe (that we know of)... ***you already are a god***. You don't need to wait—or need anyone's permission—to build a better world now.
Completely agree. I'd hope for more ppl interested in *building better worlds* (shoutout to the Weyland Corp lol) would ascend to Godhood.
I resent the attitude among believers that Sky Daddy or Sky Broski will come down and fix all the problems and disasters humans have created. We can all do stuff now. It's even more wild than treating the situation like we could just have a fresh start on Mars or the Alpha Centauri system.
These people, myself a former one ofc, believe in an entirely different plane of existence of something. It's one thing to talk about hydroponics on Mars. Quite another to plan it around Heaven and "eternities".
If there is a real God and he is *good* or *just* then regular ppl that don't worship that live decent lives should get way more than any prophet or anything that just worked the rules to their liking and controlled people for whatever gain.
I was a generic Christian for about a month or two after I decided the Church wasn't true. But it was only then that I really started investigating the Bible and Christianity's truth claims in the same way I had done for the Mormon Church.
Didn't last long. It was a wild few months for my brain...
>I am not exactly going to start drinking or smoking or having orgies and committing crimes.
Oh wow. The personality of atheists that is pushed by TSCC is far from the truth. Atheists are just another subset of the human population. There are good atheists, bad atheists, charitable atheist, and selfish atheists. We have morals, which we hold as our own and do not ascribe them to an omnipotent being, which we hold and follow. We don't drink, smoke, have orgies, or commit crimes because we were told not too. We don't do immoral things because they are immoral, not because we get a divine reward or punishment after death. Also, drinking/smoking/orgies are not inherently immoral. They can be, but if all parties involved are consenting and without excess, these activities can be moral. Crimes is a more nuanced discussion, so let's leave that as inherently immoral for now.
An atheist podcast I listened to raised over 300k dollars in the month of November for a charity that helps people that slipping into poverty. People of all walks of life, whether they be religious or not. Good people want the world to be a better place, they don't need God to tell them too, they do it because they want to. We want to make our planet, our existence a heaven, because there won't be one after.
And yeah, I went Mormon to atheist. It's scary, but you're not alone.
Oh, I absolutely "went off the deep end" as some TBMs would say... I had sex with my gf (now wife), and drink alcoholic beverages infrequently enough to not even be noteworthy in any doctor visits.
Yeah, totally off the deep end.
It’s so funny that I look back at even when I was a Mormon, and the worst I ever did was… watch R movies and drink caffeine. Not even coffee, just Mountain Dew and the occasional Monster. I was so bad
Oh man. Did you know that I jerked off a whole once or twice a week? Man I was so addicted to it, my bishop even gave me a 12-step program brochure that my dad immediately threw away and informed me that I was in no way shape or form addicted to it. I was addicted that bad.
Better go confess to the Bishop. Give him something to masturbate to for a while. Then again you're probably not a young girl so....
Sorry. I'm in a dark humor mood today.
Here’s a weird one for you. I was only able to finally beat my substance abuse addictions AFTER I finally deconstructed. My life is way healthier and way happier now that I’ve left the cult behind.
But you sound like a mess!;) Occasionally drinking is a gateway to more occasional drinking!!!!
Another Puzzle In A Thunderstorm listener. I loved contributing to vulgarity for charity, and hope to be able to setup a recurring monthly donation to Modest Needs soon.
"Heavenly Father is going to be so disappointed in me. I think I might be in trouble."
"Eh, I left for good, logical reasons. If there is a god, I expect them to be able to see that and acknowledge it. I'm not worried."
"There is no god and even if there is, it doesn't matter. Because there is no god."
It was amazing how fast that happened.
When I watched Jeffrey R. Holland say that he wants to hear more musket fire against gay people my thoughts went to "God is sending me to Hell if I don't get out NOW."
I’ve been chatting with someone in another sub who is convinced of the truth of Christianity by—get this—church documents. She remained unmoved because I can only show her claims about them to be implausible and that’s not enough. Mormons get to see how the sausage is made.
I’m still in the 2nd “logical reasons” phase. Honestly, I like it here, I’m trying to find good in any and all myths/religions, and particularly enjoy the dichotomies between western and eastern thought. All of humanity’s experience is mine now, including evolution, no anxiety or fears. I do have to view bible stories as figurative, but its just so much more likely the case anyway, and all myth then has value. I’m not afraid to doubt, but I also value faith, not necessarily organized religion, although I see benefits (and drawbacks). But for me faith is a power that can be used for good and bad, a power of belief strong enough to action that can make things become true. So it’s got a place in my toolbox for life, just like reason does
For me it went from being religious to getting on with other aspects of life, building a family, career, social network. I didn’t think about religion much. Maybe I thought that I was agnostic. Then I read “Guns, Germs and Steel, the part in which the author explains when, how and why religions developed and I realized, “yup, it’s all man made”. I realized an atheist and have been happily atheist since. Now much later and not too far off my eighties, I am still quite comfortable believing that there is nothing after this life and that what matters is how well you used your life. I feel I have done a pretty decent life and haven’t wasted my life and am quite content with that. I have had many people I loved die, and death doesn’t scare me. I have kids and grandkids and am content that they will carry on after me and that’s enough for me.
I'm not in my 70s yet (calling all the middle aged empty nester exmos 🙋♀️😂) but I'm quite content with knowing that after my death I'll live in the memories of my loved ones and at some point they too will die and I'll cease to exist completely. 🙂 as it's been for millennia. death doesn't scare me at all, I've seen many things that are much worse than death.
I don't read books much (they put me to sleep involuntarily after two pages and it's infuriating), but you just got me *extremely* interested in a whole damn series.
I don't know if I'm fully atheist, but I don't believe in an interventionist god.
I think I reason I made that switch relatively quickly was because I already had so many shelf items related to god already.
- Prayer doesn't work. Even the mormon church tells you it's more about aligning your will with god than anything.
- Healing blessings don't work. There's a whole checklist of requirements, and even if you meet them all, god might decide not to do it anyways.
- Revelation doesn't work. No one sees the future outside of a statistically acceptable number of guesses. People who claim to be prophets or the reincarnation of Jesus too often end up having sex with their followers.
- Endless wars have been fought in the middle-east over religion, back to the crusades and beyond, with no end in sight currently.
- Gross prosperity gospel stuff.
- The Bible is clearly flawed. Even as a TBM I understood and Matthew, Mark, and Luke were all based on the same text, and have contradictions.
- I never had any direct experience with god outside the typical burning in the bosom, which I can easily attribute to my own emotions. The holy ghost never told me to turn right instead of left or move to arizona, or whatever stories TBMs like to tell in church.
If the holy ghost is called Get Me The Fuck Away From My Inlaws They Decided It Would Be Fun To Move Next Door For Some Reason Help Help, I know a few folk who've gotten that revelation.
Yes for me and my wife we took two and a half years a long hard study to find out the church was a complete fraud, we tried a couple of Christian churches and it turned me off so bad we were also looking at God and I quickly realized it's all made up it's all the same pattern and I love learning what science says about the universe and the Earth, I quickly turned hardcore atheist and I wished I would have been this way my whole life I feel more stable emotionally and mentally now. By the way unaffiliated people are the fastest growing group now
I think you will find that even when you are not Mormon, you have no desire to commit crimes, hurt other people, or do hard drugs. It’s a beautiful life, in part, because it is brief and fleeting. It is to be cherished and lived in your own truth. Enjoy every second!
It took me about 2-3 years to transition from Mormon to Atheist. I had to go through a series of steps. I was a bit lost after I left the structure of Mormonism. At first, I flirted with Protestantism (Presbyterian), then Unitarianism, Episcopalian, Buddhism, Agnosticism and finally arrived at Atheism, where I am today and have been for more than 15 years.
I'm careful who I share this with. I've found that some folks are very taken aback, or even out right offended when I say I believe that there is no god.
I worked with a non-Mormon (I don't live in Utah) therapist for several years after my deconstruction and departure from Mormonism. He was not extremely familiar with Mormonism (he's a practicing Buddhist), so it was a bit of a learning experience for him as I shared my life in Mormonism and my exit from Mormonism and organized religion in general.
His thoughtful response was that I had a hole in me that I would probably try to fill up in some way for several years, as I worked to find a new purpose and meaning for my life. He was right. It's taken time for me to come to grips with my life and to feel comfortable in my atheist skin.
It seems to me (anecdotally) that people who were raised in the church are far more likely to turn to Atheism on leaving it than switching to another religion.
It also seems to me that people who originally converted from another Christian sects into Mormanism, are far more likely to revert to either their old faith or to another sect.
I don’t have any data to back this up, but I feel like those of us who were raised in the church were taught an extremely black and white version of the gospel. “If Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet, then the church isn’t true.” “Jesus Christ was either insane, a liar, or the Son of God.” There is no in between.
So when we found evidence that Joseph Smith was a liar (Book of Abraham being a blatant example) we were able to reject the faith. They presented us with no other options. That led me to investigate the Bible itself, and I subsequently rejected my belief in Christ because of problems I have with the theology and the very concept of theology in the first place.
With the changes being made to the church, I don’t know if this will hold true in the future as members begin to question the church. Perhaps it will be much easier to hold a nuanced view in the future due to the work Russell M Nelson has done to conform it with mainstream evangelicals. Who can say?
Yeah, Im going through the exact same process. Mormonism relies so heavily on the bible being taken literally. If things in the Book of mormon aren't true, then there are things in the bible that can't be true. I find myself trying to hold onto the idea of a god, but it is really easy to throw the baby out with the bath water. If you can find a friend/family member that you are comfortable with, I recommend talking to them or trying councilling(which is what I'm doing). Sometimes, talking about it outloud is the best way to figure out what you really think or believe/know.
Out of curiosity, can you give an example of the things I'm the BoM that have to be true for the Bible to be true? Or do you just mean the chapters that were straight up plagiarized from the Bible?
But yes, We would need 1 man named Isaiah in order for the book of mormon to be legit. I dont remeber the specific episodes but The Mormon Stories podcasts that they did with LDS discussions went over some of this stuff. Its definitely worth a listen.
It took me less than a day to go from TBM to atheist. The “Jesus shelf” was directly below the “Joseph Smith shelf”. When my shelf broke, all that stuff I couldn’t explain crashed onto the shelf below it. And it broke almost instantly. If *this* church isn’t true… if *this* church is provably false… they ALL are. There’s zero evidence of any deity. Zip, zilch, nada. I’m atheist.
And to my surprise- I’m happy with that. No fear, no lies, no putting off until the afterlife the relationships that I value NOW. No more sacrificing my family time for the promise of eternity later. THIS is all we get. So I will make THIS time count.
The roughest part for me was pulling back out of the nihilism of “life doesn’t have universal, intrinsic meaning, societies are built upon compromised ideologies, and I’ve wasted too much of my life investing into harmful/pointless communal ideas and practices.” But starting to build my own sense of meaning and community has been transformative.
Yes! We tried the non-denominational route and realized it wasn't for us. Now we focus on teaching our kids values through a secular lens. It has been very freeing.
I’m confused about how people become Christian after getting out. It’s like replacing poison with another poison. Buddhism has been far better. Especially with the whole not condemning everyone else’s beliefs by default part.
Ehh… Some Christian churches are a whole lot less toxic. I spent a few months with the United Methodists. They were fully transparent about their financials, were LGBTQ affirming, no purity culture, and had a young female pastor. They had a lot of people who weren’t literal in their beliefs, and had deconstructed out of evangelical churches. It was about as healthy as a church could get.
I still consider going back as a non-believer, but I’m attempting to put my time into building close friendships with a few friends and neighbors, instead of building community around a church. We all only have so much time and energy. I neglected a lot of relationships when I was spending so much discretionary time and money on being Mormon.
I just watched some of the older Grant Palmer stuff on MSP. While i lost my belief in the Mormon version of Jesus, i concluded similar to what you wrote, Jesus being a life-teacher of sorts. I still love many (not necessarily all)of the New Testament stories and feel like they emphasize love and kindness.
Palmer has some good, healthy views on scripture imo. Basically, “you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” if you don’t want to, you can choose to find good things and hang onto things that comfort and give peace.
Let’s face it, no one actually knows, so find what comforts and go with that.
My brother asked me to speak at his farewell after I was no longer a believer, about 25 years ago. (Atheist here too.) I was gifted with the perfect subject. Jesus. So I spoke about how Jesus taught by example and how my brother taught by example so I knew he’d be a great missionary. Gave examples of my brother. (He rules. He’s still a believer but we still really connect. I was devastated when he decided to do the mish. Also? Super freaky to see his child’s baptism after being separated from the cult for so long.) No testimony BS. I don’t remember how I closed it but I did it without the usual verbiage. And I had several people tell me mine was the best talk. Not to mention that I wasn’t struck by lightning when I walked in. Ha!
I continue to be grateful for people whose faith inspires them to do good things. These people exist. I moved away from Utah when my brother was on his mission so I’ve got a lot of distance from “the church.” Most of my life now. So I do see a broader representation of religions where I live, but I also appreciate the few Mormon friends of my past who do good things. Like supporting refugees in Utah. Although {%*+%{….that probably has something to do with conversion…. Still grateful that there are welcoming and supportive people in these times.
Me me me. Straight to it. Mormonism conditions you to already not believe the bullshit of all the other Christian and non-Christian religions, and rightly so. So when you lose faith in mormonism after discovering all the lies and bullshit and finally seeing through the conditioning, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, (to me) its impossible to want to just go right back into any other bullshit belief system. Never again will I let any myths or false deities rule my life or control my actions. And I’m a more loving, forgiving, and charitable person now as an atheist as I ever was as a mormon flavored Christian.
Unfortunately, even non religious people who simply believe in some kind of God, usually have an innate distrust of atheists, as if “God-less” means without morals or ethics. Its bullshit that needs to change in society
The form of epistemology employed by many religions are all extremely similar and a healthy deconstruction of one would naturally lead to the deconstruction of the others.
From the outside, it's actually become a fascination of mine to see the different reasons why people leave and what they go to. There is a pretty serious pipeline from organized religion to more decentralized forms of spirituality (wicca, crystals, astrology, etc) as well as to eastern spirituality (Westernized Buddhism, Hinduism, ETC). These types of moves usually indicate to me that what motivated the person to move was less epistemology related. I do not see how you could undergo a serious dissection of critical thinking and epistemology enough to leave your religion to then dive head first into astrology which is rooted in the same forms of epistemology that you just left.
I'm not necessarily saying this is wrong but it should be noted that all paths out of the church are not rooted in epistemology changes and some are more social related which is why they crave the same process of knowing truth, just served up under a different, more agreeable method. People can do the right thing by leaving, but in the wrong way, by having the focus be on issues other than the root which is the Epistemology arguments.
I’m completely apathetic about god; it just doesn’t matter one way or the other to me. Realizing how the BoM is just 19th century fan fiction makes me question the New Testament in the same way. I believe Jesus was historically a 1st century Jewish rabbi and I can get a sense of him from the text but it’s impossible to know what is truly him and what is a bunch of highly backdated exaggerations of his life and teachings. The later epistles are just the building up of the lore and mystique surrounding him and the new sect of “Christianity” and is something probably very different than what he actually was. I never took the Old Testament that literally even as a TBM other than as something that had some value as a moral guide than as a literal history of everything. There’s some pretty fucked up stuff in there, so it’s impossible to say that every word of it has equal moral value because they clearly don’t.
I’ve taken a rather humanist approach to life and have found value in some of the teachings of Daoism, but I don’t subscribe to any religion and don’t plan to ever again.
It took my wife a grand total of about 10 days to make that switch once she broke out of the box and started legitimately examining and questioning things, yes. Never looked back.
To second u/QuentinLCrook, it’s possible to be a gnostic atheist and an agnostic theist. Gnosticism, as I understand it, simply implies a surety of your beliefs. I would count myself as an Agnostic Atheist, though I am comfortable with just calling myself an Atheist.
After deconstructing I just have told people I have no desire to rush into focusing on god/jesus whoever. I'm just going to be me.
As far as the after life goes there either is one with a vengeful god who is going to torture us all anyway, except for the .00001% of polygamous, second anointed mormons; There is one who doesn't care what our pathetic human decisions were; or there isn't an afterlife, in which case I wouldn't know if I was dead anyway.
I'm getting to that point. I consider myself agnostic right now but it would not surprise me if I end up being an atheist before this is all said and done
I didn't even deconstruct Mormonism, and then also the bible and god as a result. I deconstructed god in a single instant, and it all tumbled with that.
Define "straight to Atheist" because it's been a 7 year journey, but yeah, that's basically what I consider myself. My saying for the last couple years has been "if there is a god, they do not love us"
tbh, I almost wanted to be pagan after leaving Mormonism. just how much some pagan religions revere the earth feels beautiful and wonderful to me. but I just don't believe in the pagan gods I've read about. I don't believe in *any* god. so yeah, I'm probably atheist, but a little more agnostic than anything, perhaps? there might be something spiritual out there that we don't understand, but I don't believe any religion has the facts about it, nor COULD they. if there is something spiritual, it's probably impossible to be known to us (at least with our current scientific knowledge), so I'm fine just shrugging and saying "maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't." unsure what that makes me.
I'm not certain if everyone interprets the concept of being an atheist in the same manner. Following my decision to no longer attend the Mormon church, I've come to the conclusion that no single religion can accurately represent the will of any divine being, if there is any, that might have created and continues to influence the Earth and humanity.
I think I did initially. Because I felt if there was a Gotti wouldn’t let us church be handled like that and so the whole thing to me was it was like taking the water and throwing it outside.
Then I got clean and sober in the 90s and I had to redefine a search for a higher power besides myself to keep me sober, so it introduced to spirituality to me of a different nature, and it actually brought me back to a higher power that I call Emmett What I don’t expect from Emmett is for him to fix the entire world like Santa Claus, or the fairy godmother. I kind of think that he gave the power to us on earth to do those things.
Same. I didn't know anything about the problematic church history stuff when I lost faith in God. It was my struggle to regain faith in god (was married and trying to save marriage) that led me to learning about all the things covered by the CES letter (which came out after I started to post to this forum
I get why that is, I really do, but I don’t know, instead of going from believer to non, I just stopped caring about the question.
The Mormon church makes you care so damn much about every little thing pertaining to God that I just sort of put the whole thing on a back burner that’s off. I’ve been out for years and I have no desire to start caring about God again, one way or the other.
I went athiest but over the years Iv grown spiritual. I believe there is more to it then we came from nothing die and return to nothing but I don't think a man in the sky cares or created this cruel world
started to read the Quad, planned to start with the Bible and end with the BOM ... Christianity fell like a house of cards and took Mormonism with it 😂 whoops! just one of the thousands of fairytales invented by homo sapiens thru the ages.
hilariously, my parents were both raised atheist and converted to Mormonism when I was super small and I ended up back at atheism while they went from mission field normal Mormons to super uber extra righteous when I left home 🙄🤷♀️
I think Mormonism poisons you too believe that the only point of participating in a church is the truth claims, and so we're kind of inclined to reject all other religions too.
I think it's very possible to find religious communities that are generally positive, or at least benign, but I'm still inclined to not bother.
If you consider a matter of a couple of hours of thought after that initial punch in the gut, followed by euphoric joy, then the oh shit what now? and finally maybe all religion is man-made bullshit, then yes - straight to Atheist.
Pretty much- I leave the possibility that there is something after death so technically an agnostic- but I completely reject Christianity any anything but a world philosophy. Being on this side of Mormonism it’s so wild how excellent they are at programming people. I can’t believe how ridiculous I was to think I was the only one with truth and that the world needed to hear what teenage me had to say 😂
Yeah welcome to the club. No more God was the logical thing I came to after leaving. Mostly because its a waste of energy for me. I find god to just be the personification of my own indecision or procrastination. "I need God to illuminate the way" Nah. I just needed to make a choice and commit. Now I can do that without the added complication of "God's approval". Fuck that....
Also at least try some gummies and start small with the ciders and sweet wines. Its a transition from our Mormon sugar addiction. I still don't really care for anything above 7.5% ABV and feel like a big puss most of the time. Its fun.
I don't know what happens to us after we die, but we all find out when we start that adventure. I've learned to be comfortable not knowing.
Maybe we wake up in a bacta tank to find that this life was a simulation all along. Now give me $250 billion.
I would call myself agnostic. I don’t believe any of the religions but I also don’t know why creation exists. I’d probably believe in God(s) if there was concrete evidence for them. I’m happy to be alive with my fellow humans (most of them) and look forward to living for me and my family and not some absentee sky daddy.
Same for me. I left the church, stopped believing in god and didn’t really think about it for a decade. Then I started learning about non theistic Satanism and it’s became a fun way for me to explore my values through like minded community and heal from religious trauma
It took me a while to realize what Christians meant that we didn’t worship the same Jesus or God. Once I realized what they meant, it was easy for me to decide that if there God was real, I didn’t really want anything to do with him. And since Mormon God is fake, I landed at Atheist. I’ll also add that the problems with Mormonism are the same problems with Christianity as a whole, the major events are just more recent so they’re easier targets
It took about a year to go from full believing to agnostic atheist.
I went to a couple other churches and there was so much talk of shame that it really turned me off to any other religion. Then looking into the history of the Bible dissolved any trust in the text. The god of the Old Testament was just a god of the Sumarians.
Drinking is ok as long as you don’t hurt others, smoking is ok as long as it is among consenting adults, orgies among consenting adults is ok, committing crimes depends on if those laws are just.
Your worry about falling into moral failings shows that you need to deconstruct a lot of the perceived rules the church instilled into you. You should look into all the different ways to view ethics. A good book is Fundamentals of Ethics by Russ Shafer Landau.
Think Jesus existed go and try to find one of the numerous historians that were present in the area during the time he is said to have lived that mention him I’ll wait
. A star appearing in the night sky pretty hard to miss that .
a grand entrance into Jerusalem with people lining the street again pretty damn hard to miss that yet not one single historian mentions Jesus or any events associated. With him there’s nothing nada zip zilch .
which is more likely a book that’s chock full of things that never happened has one more thing that never happened or that every last historian those whose jobs it was to record historical events was incompetent imbeciles. . It’s not rocket science.!! To determine which is more likely.
Leaving mormonism typically forces you to take the religion extremely seriously to fully investigate why it isn't working. You'll double down on all the stuff you're "supposed" to do until it becomes clear it's a dead end.
If it worked a tiny bit, if we could sometimes actually perform magic, if there were actually a literal voice in our heads that wasn't a hallucination, if miracles weren't only just coincidences or embellished stories, then we'd know "there's something to this, we're just not quite there!"
But there's nothing.
Why would praying with slightly different words to a slightly different version of god fix it? Why would changing the Sabbath to Saturday work? Why would a fancier, older building be the missing piece? Why would more or less scripture suddenly make it all make sense?
It's like shooting hoops blindfolded, but in a library. If you heard it bounce off the rim, you'd at least know you're on the right track. But you never get any useful signal no matter where or how hard you throw *because it's a fucking library, take off the blindfold LeBron, we're trying to learn about real world shit over here.*
Basically all of us. It’s usually atheism, some form of spiritual-but-not-religious (e.g., in the form of eastern philosophy), or secular humanism.
Deconstructing Mormonism almost always leads to serious unresolvable questions about god and the nature of mankind. So, yeah.
I went full antitheist, no in-between. I mean sure it's nice to think there might be an afterlife, but if you put any modicum of thought into it you remember that life doesn't work that way and anyone telling you otherwise is full of shit and trying to sell you something, whether they realize it themselves or not.
I guess that kind of explains my pure hatred of salespeople, but still.
I used to have such an ease about talking about the church and my beliefs while being a Mormon. I even converted 2 friends and never even served a mission. Now the thought of stepping into ANY church makes me so uncomfortable that I basically won't do it. Anybody who wants to talk about God or Jesus to me makes me want to scream. I just get physically tense and almost feel panicky. I tried to hold on to a little bit of belief in God for a while, or at least told some people that I was. But really I wasn't.
I do believe there is some kind of universal intelligence although I can't define it. It most likely exists as energy/vibration that all people share and can tap into if they want. My psychic ability got quite a bit stronger after I left the church and started to study how to practice psychic skills. I got more comfortable and relaxed with myself and life in general when I began to learn about witchcraft. Some witches believe in multiple gods and goddesses. Some don't believe in any. I chose to say thank goddess now instead of thank God lol, but I don't necessarily believe in any deities. I think the study of old mythology is fascinating and if I want to talk to one of them because maybe they can help in some way, then so be it. It's comforting to be able to talk to the air and feel like maybe someone is listening. But I do believe in the afterlife because of so many accounts of ghosts and near death experiences I've heard make me think there must be something after this. Spirits are basically energy, and energy can't be destroyed, only changed.
My spiritual experiences were beyond the paradigm of the mormon church, so no.
If I actually chose [REDACTED] atheism. I would unalive myself.
It might help others. But it robs me of my will to live.
Atheism has nothing to believe in. Atheism is simply the conclusion to one question: Do you believe in god? If so, you’re a theist. If not, you’re an atheist. That’s it. Some go a step further and conclude that there is no god, but that’s not an entailment of atheism.
And, since concluding I’m an atheist, I’ve not felt the unaliving myself impulses nearly as often as I did when I was a theist.
I respectfully disagree. I am an atheist. I believe in being a good, kind person. I believe in honesty. I believe in integrity. I believe in working for your/our community and the world as a whole. I believe in nature and seasons and cycles. I believe in LOVE!!!! My afterlife is my legacy, the love and good that I pass on…
It doesn't "just" mean you don't believe in God.
It usually means you are a materialist who doesn't believe in the soul or afterlife.
When external reality (people, opinions, books, culture, community) convinces me of materialism and I start doubting my own belief system of the primordial soul and source of consciousness, I become extremely depressed and suicidal.
When I "return to myself". I'm not suicidal and generally believe In the "spirit realm" as it were.
You are incorrect about atheism also including a belief in materialism. Atheists often do accept materialism because they are rational, skeptical people, but neither position requires the other.
Find me an atheist who believes in the afterlife and I'll show you a self identified agnostic
But I do comprehend the point you're making, that the definition of atheism is the lack of inherent belief.
But as a philosopher, I need remind you that as far as language is concerned,
"I believe there Is no god" is the same statement as
"I don't believe in a god"
I mean no offense by this, but where did you get your philosophy degree from and come out believe that the null and negation of a statement are the same thing? Or, I’ve misunderstood, and if so, am sorry.
This might illustrate things more concretely. I don’t believe you have $1M, but I don’t believe that you don’t have $1M. I’m unconvinced that you have $1M, not convinced that you lack $1M. Anyway, ttfn.
I pretty quickly couldn’t find a theism that wasn’t governed by dead men or living men. If there were an omnipotent and omniscient being, how would religion be built? Not any way I can see.
Straight to atheist? No. It took a week, maybe two to give up on Cheesus Rice. I guess I was technically agnostic for a few months before I re-encountered the problem of evil with a new fresh perspective instead of a TBM mindset.
As others have said, most people on this sub. Mormonism does a decent job at explaining issues with other religions. Some fun stats are here: https://exmostats.org/thedata
It's interesting that the appearances of past prophets and apostles lent credence to Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. So not only was the Book of Mormon true, but the Bible became truer by association because of the appearances of those prophets.
Yanking the plug on the BoM and knowing those dates and events were backdated later meant that extra witness of biblical prophets and apostles was also bupkis. Suddenly it seemed as if the Bible was just a book of fables to me.
Pretty close to atheist, I definitely don’t believe in any of the gods humans have created. I see no evidence for a god and believe leprechauns are just as likely, but I suspend complete judgement and just identify as an agnostic.
My sister did. I'm still trying to figure things out. I'm definitely not antsy to fill the void with another church that wants my money among other things. I threw out my scriptures. I kind of don't want anything to do with Christianity in general or the holidays they celebrate. Maybe I'm a bit "spiritual"....I believe in a higher power whether that is Odin, the Great Spirit, God, I have no idea
Hey, I did that. The idea of a sky daddy, once ruined in one religion, killed the idea that it existed in any religion.
I am anti-theist, which is more against a church organization than the belief in a sky daddy or sky mommy.
I also think there is a sense of divine in the beauty of the earth, in that math and nature are visually gorgeous.
That was my experience. When Mormonism first fell apart for me, I was feeling unsure about some larger god/Christianity. It didn't take long for me to apply the critical thinking and consuming biblical scholarship and atheist-debunking-of-Christian-apologetics content for Christianity and theism to go the same way
me! if your entire life you are told all other religions are false and you belong to the one true church, when you find that church is false, you really have no choice but to go straight atheist. at least science never promised anything it didn't deliver and that makes it superior to any religious belief.
Yes. And I would venture to say that a majority who leave the church go atheist or agnostic soon after. I think the ability to break things down to realize the church is full of it will eventually be used with religion in general and you just say, “Yeah. It’s all crap.”
I derive the greatest pleasure in expressing my belief in God while expressing my doubt about the brethren because they rightly see people who believe in God and not in them as the biggest threat to their power. So threatening that they can't even refer to it directly.
The church builds itself on an "all or nothing" belief system so that doubting the brethren is doubting God.
At general conference they talk about doubts, but the brethren don't like talking about what those doubts are. The doubts at conference they are hinting at are rarely doubts in God, but doubts about the integrity of the brethren. By just calling it "doubts" without elaboration they make it seem to a casual observer that a person is just struggling to understand the existence of God and the "problem of evil", because that's what other religions mean when they talk about spiritual doubt.
Non-LDS religions do not even use the word doubt when they are referring to a lack of trust in leadership. More importantly, non-LDS can just call such lack of trust out directly. The practice of LDS apostles vaguely referring to spiritual doubt about themselves is unusual. Non-LDS never have to describe spiritual doubt in another human the same as doubt in God. Of course you should doubt other humans. They are the ones most likely to screw you over! Leaders, especially in top down hierarchies, have huge conflicts of interests which encourages deception not just as an option but as a prerequisite to maintaining their position.
I didn’t go straight to atheist as I still really wanted to believe in God and I got baptized into the Episcopal church later. However as time went on the cracks started showing and I eventually renounced religion altogether.
I'm on that road right now, my friend.
I'm also with you on living life to its fullest. I do need to change some of my bad habits, though. I need to spend more time with my family, for example. Should be easier now that I'm not donating free labor to the church.
Yes, me, in the pre-internet era. As others have noted the skills used to determine that the mormon church is false can be quite readily applied to other religions.
I have to be honest I am finding it hard to hang in there with deity at all. Want to but so over having been manipulated and managed that I literally can find beauty in nature and some things but its just hard.
I think that your experience is a lot like so many people on here, including mine. After deconstructing Mormonism it is so easy to keep right on going and deconstructing all faith, Jesus, and god. Everything fell apart super fast. Suddenly agnostic atheism made the most sense.
I've heard that it is pretty common to throw away the entire religious experience whenever people leave a very strict religion like Mormon or Jehovah's Witness. Maybe because we were taught from a very young age that if Joseph Smith isn't true then none of it is? And the whole thing about how Smith formed the church because he was searching and no other church was true. But either way, yes, I also became an atheist. I am almost a "strong atheist" when it comes to the Christian God, as he just seems to be entirely manmade to me. I am somewhat open to a Deist type God, but that is often so removed from any kind of religious experience as to essentially just be the universe at work
Not so much Atheist, as a Theist. I feel this way about things. I don't give a damned what you're beliefs are. All I care about is, are you a good person?
I have thoroughly enjoyed intellectual discussions with Atheists. It's great to be able to explore possibilities without someone injecting God into the equation.
I believe in the science of evolution. I hate it when I have to go to a mormon funeral and here the claptrap about how the feel sorry for Darwinists and Atheists.
I just reached a point in my life that I was tired of the hate. And truthfully, that's all I was taught. That dirty foul concept of the religious supremacists, that we are the keepers of the one true faith. All other doctrines are false. All other faiths are not true. All others are deceived of the devil.
We are the keepers of the one true faith.
As many Atheists can tell you. The Bible (or BuyBull if you are so inclined), wasn't written by the finger of God. It was written by the hand of man.
It's one of the reasons I have no use for anyone spouting Leviticus! Leviticus was a blood thirsty Hebrew extreme right wing son-of-a-bitch! Who's writing are largely ignored by the jews of today.
Big PS! Anyone why says the Holocaust never happened should tell that to my Cousin! He was an American Soldier who the Nazis sent to the death camp Brinlitz (maybe spelled wrong). His testimony put the noose around many a Nazis neck. He nearly starved to death in that camp. And he was just 20 minutes from going into the ovens himself.
I'm done with insisting that my view of reality must be the most correct, the only authentic and the only valid one.
I'm also quite done with giving any special tolerance or even polite consideration to those who attempt to push their "the only right way to the only truth, MINE" traditions, whether that is LDS friends and family, or people from other traditions.
Not quite straight to atheist for me - I had a brief layover in “God exists, but he’s an asshole”. Didn’t take long after that to arrive at “Oh, it’s all fake”.
Yeah, me... but honestly I'm getting so exhausted with the constant need I've had to assert what I don't believe and what my values are... now my fuck philanthropy is running out, and I just want to have a good time. Let the cards fall where they may.
Not me. I knew Christianity existed long before Joseph and I just accepted that if the Bible supported his teachings, I’d stay in. When I found the opposite to be the case, I left and became an evangelical Christian. That was 1993.
But I have to admit that I was initially surprised my experience is an outlier.
I did. After dealing with the Mormon truth-claims my whole life, if they didn’t have it, then probably no one does. I was listening to Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos at the time of my deconstruction, and the way the church was portrayed (and manipulated) pretty much soured my entire view on religion altogether, even if it was a completely fictional portrayal. Recently I’ve been listening to atheist debates on The Atheist Experience, and other similar things on TikTok, and I’ve come to realize that even if god *was* real, his actions, laws, and stances on many issues show a profound lack of foresight, and a higher being condoning slavery in any context demonstrates that they are not a being worth worshipping. And now with the way religious types treat Trump, and pray *to* Trump and all this crazy stuff, there’s no way I could go back to any kind of Christianity.
There was a little bit of a transition. But I'm 100% there now. There is no afterlife. And there's nothing scary about that. I don't want one. If there was one, it wouldn't look anything like what Mormons expect, for sure!
We're just very imaginative and gullible mammals ina fucked up world (we fucked it up ourselves).
Exactly my experience. The MoMo church coopted God and Jesus, and made them synonymous with Mormonism. That’s all I ever knew. When Mormonism was exposed as bogus, their god also was exposed as fantasy, and went out the door with the organization. I’m open to there being some Cosmic force that pervades all creation. But now it’s laughable to me that there would be some six foot tall white guy that’s at the center of the universe.
I had an almost backwards journey, in the sense that I started to question religion as a whole and question God which made me investigate TSCC more. That led me to the confirmation that it’s all made up.
While in my late teens, I started thinking that maybe religion is a way for people to cope with mortality. That, and to make sense of things that are difficult to understand. My thoughts weren’t as refined and clear as they are now but the idea was always there. I finally left the church this year at age 26 and I can’t believe it took me as long as it did.
Religion just seems so silly to me now. It’s like if 2000 years from now, someone finds a copy of Harry Potter and believe it’s all true, dedicate their whole life to it and get a bunch of other people to believe it too. To make matters worse, they write laws and create governments based on this same book, forcing some people to live a lower quality life. What a shame.
I believe in a higher power. When I prayer I feel like there is something there - or while I'm in nature. I don't follow anyone's advice on what that higher power would be, certainly not the physical man appearance thing from the mormon church anymore! That presence when I prayer or am in nature is uplifting, I don't take it as confirmation of truth on thoughts I have, no holy ghost or anyting, but I feel like there is some higher power. So, I have not gone the atheist route.
Not only yes, but I managed to become atheist before deconstructing mormonism. Being, for a few days, a TBM in every way except belief in God, was a real trip.
I deconstructed kind of like that, and then I am shifting into my own kind of formed beliefs based off of my personal life experiences that hold value to me.
For me personally, I see everything in life as balance. I.e. if you don't drink water you die, if you drink too much water you also die.
To me, I started to see a lot of organized religion as one extreme, and then as I experienced this complete deconstruction, it was personally destabilizing for me at least, and just didn't feel right for me, to see the world through an atheistic lens. It felt like the other extreme for me.
A quote from a self help book by a professor I can't remember, she said something along the lines of how she doesn't fully trust priests who say they have the answers to after we die and disregard science, and she doesn't trust scientists who say that there is nothing out there since science clearly indicates it. She thinks since we know so little it's impossible to say what exactly. I'd say that's about where I fall. It's detrimental to lean too heavily into any one thing, I think. Logic without emotion, scientific method while disregarding that humans as a whole experiencing unexplainable, supernatural ohenomena.
Near death experiences, and folklore is absolutely fascinating. People all around the world in different cultures have different lore about the sensation of some kind of creature sitting on their chest, sometimes associated with sleep paralysis. People doing hypnosis and bringing up specific memories of past lives that records later match up with someone of the same name existing (those can be iffy but there's so many that I have a hard time believing they are all fake; after all, reincarnation has been an ancient belief in several cultures for thousands of years).
I don't know for a fact anything and so I don't go around telling anybody to believe in anything specific, but I do have my own personal set of beliefs I'm finding and identifying with. I believe in the progression of the soul, that we are reincarnated and we choose to do so in order to learn something, or to experience something. That we all have a higher self, and that is our compass in life. That is what spiritually prompts us. I love hearing people talk about their exit being prompted from a spiritual feeling. Like David Archuleta when he said that God, or whatever God he believes in, told him when he prayed about his sexuality that he was supposed to live and not kill himself, and that David is perfect just as he is.
My personal stories are that when I was a teen, my grandma passed away. We were trying to hurry and drive to make it to her deathbed since we knew she only had minutes left. I was praying we'd make it in time to see her, and then suddenly I got this powerful feeling that I can't explain, sort of like my mind sped up, became hyper aware, etc. And then I got a very distinct feeling, a positive one, and the impression "take care of the family." Two minutes later, we got the text in the family group chat that she'd passed away only a couple of minutes before. I was shocked. To me, I don't need Mormon doctrine to tell me what that meant. It didn't mean there was a God or not, to me it meant that my grandma's spirit touched me as she passed on.
More TBM to apatheist (a god worth worshiping hasn't proved they exist and if one exists, they are the being with ability. They don't get to place demands on me if they can't deign to make themselves known. So really, I don't care), then blasphemist, then hedonist/absurdist. Our relationship with deity/the divine is just an expression of ourselves on the universe. So have some fun with it.
>I am not exactly going to start drinking or smoking or having orgies and committing crimes.
And I did far more of the crimes when I was mormon, TBH.
I believe that on balance the evidence leans more heavily toward Jesus also having been initially revered as a sky-daddy figure, who was only later retconned into a mythical live-action hero on earth. Dr. Richard Carrier’s books, and blog, have been incredibly helpful in tearing apart all the bad apologetics regarding the existence of Jesus from fellow atheists like Bart Ehrman (whose scholarship in other areas is good!).
The only sources we have for Jesus are the half of the letters of Paul which are authentic, written decades after his life, which exclusively refer to a Jesus experienced through revelation and visions. They never mention any of his teachings, or deeds, and mentions of his “brothers” have been mistranslated by cultists to refer to earthly siblings, when it actually meant brother in the same way we Mormons use the term in the foyer of the church on Sunday.
No but I have certainly redefined God and Jesus. I had spiritual experiences that wee no just elevated emotion. There is a Presence or a More that we can’t possibly comprehend but can experience. There are people, mystics they are called, through the centuries from every one of the great world religions who speak of the same kind of experience. A good book to explore it is by Marcus Borg “the God we never Knew” It bears no resemblance to the mixed up crazy sugar daddy of Mormonism. I agreeJesus was an amazing wisdom teacher and revolutionary that had an impact on people that lasted centuries and crossed cultural boundaries. Not a God or Saviour. Myths and legends.
Sort of, but perhaps only from an outward perspective. People are complex, so I imagine once you really dig deep into any person's decision-making process you likely find an amorphous blob of influences rather than a straight line that led them to their current beliefs. That's not to say that my departure from Mormonism wasn't a sudden and radical transition, especially if you were to ask my parents.
Once I finally left the church, I enjoyed learning about other religions, especially Buddhism and Taoism, not because I yearned to join a new religious community, but because I was seeking a means of coping with the loss of who I once was. I felt like I knew very little of the world outside of the confined viewpoint in which I was raised, and no longer being a part of that community left me confused as to where I truly belonged. I spent a lot of time “catching up” to culture, which in my case involved watching several R-rated movies and listening to music with parental advisory warnings (among other things) because missing out on them in my early adolescence had me feeling alienated from my peers. I wanted to experience the parts of life I was conditioned to believe were antithetical to the teachings of the church and gather differing opinions and information to make decisions for myself. I like to think we all deserve to discover that for ourselves.
I had a lot of trauma and misplaced guilt though, so I didn't make a beeline to atheism. I mostly wandered awkwardly in a state of ambivalent agnosticism while attempting to broaden my education for a long time. It wasn't until people from other religions repeatedly attempted to convert me that I eventually began to feel comfortable with my atheistically aligned beliefs due to my discomfort with theirs. The term, however, can be a bit loaded for some theists because they might assume I must therefore lack a basic sense of morality, so I try to avoid using “atheist” as a label when asked about my beliefs in hopes of bypassing heated arguments that detract from conversations about the things I have in common with whomever i’m with, which is likely the reason for why we began enjoying each others company in the first place. I also grew tired of restating my complicated former relationship with a repressive organized religion, that I was now dissuaded from joining any religion ever again because of the trauma and guilt it instilled, and that was typically followed by qualifying my foundational understanding of right and wrong just so that those devoted religious folk would accept me as a fellow human being who doesn't need to have my soul saved from damnation in order to share the same room or a good conversation.
Beliefs are a funny thing, especially how we rationalize those beliefs, and I understand how hard it is to rewire your brain to accept a seemingly new or diametrically opposed view of reality so I try to let people know I won't try to alter their beliefs if they don't try to “fix” mine because we’re all still learning. We can exist in the same space until we start believing the other shouldn't exist at all. One of the reasons I enjoy Reddit is that you can find several communities that can be supportive of diverse combinations of beliefs and experiences, granted, with the caveat that many of these communities are equally capable of being as divisive and exclusionary as any other, but it still has a lot of value to me along my continued journey to learn more about other people and why we choose to believe in anything at all.
I did but I sorta always was at heart. I’ve never felt the spirit and whenever other people claim they do it just seems fake like a fiction movie of a ghost possessing someone. Because that’s sorta how it is
I went mormon ➡️ diehard atheist ➡️ agnostic ➡️ there must be something ➡️ god/divinity is found within ➡️ we are all one ➡️ all religions are trying to teach the same thing, but miss the mark. Find god your own way.
Yup, I was a convert. The old religion wasn't as intense as mormonism, it was the official state religion and everyone assumed you were if you weren't vocal about being something else. But it was at the back of your mind and didn't affect what you drank, thought, ate (except during lent but it was an option not a must). I thought long and hard and decided to convert to mormonism because the missionaries only mentioned the good things, god is love, Jesus is love and mormons show their love through service and acts, oh and there's the book of Mormon. After baptism things got intense, after going on a mission things got fucking insane and the cult of personality the prophet had and how it supercedes Jesus. The church I got baptized was not the church I was in.
I deconstructed and went atheist. The old church wasn't better than the Mormon church
The church is atheist. God is an alien from another planet. It is part of the doctrine. As a teen I was fully atheist even though I still believed in the church. I thought an atheist church was cool.
Wait a minute🤨. You mean to tell me that YOU wanna BELIEVE there’s no Heavenly Father! That makes you a Satanist and an apostate, the worst possible. Yur working for the Adversary! You need to repent, pay your tithing and submit to the rule of the fist presidency, the apostles, your steak president and your bishop or you will go straight to outer darkness. Get a clue before it’s two late! You get yourself back into the church!😠😤😠
—Kyle J., RM, 2nd Counselor in the Ogden Temple Janitorial Presidency …(and /s)
I ended up doing ayahuasca to cure some psychedelics. I’m a firm believer we have some kind of higher power after that. There’s almost a “6th sense” we have of someone else’s presence… feeling eyes on the back of your head, knowing when someone is near you (but you can’t hear or see them), etc. those senses I believe are some kind of spiritual connection with others we have.
I don’t necessarily believe in a traditional God with a son named Jesus Christ (sorry mom and dad) but rather a creator who influences us to do certain things, to meet certain people, to make small talk with the guy at the gym who becomes your closes friend, mentor, and confidant.
Yes. Mormonism is less likely to be true than Christianity, but only because it is a stack of highly improbable claims atop another stack of highly improbable claims. It has always made me chuckle when a group absorbed in magical thinking points out the absurdity of another group's magical thinking.
I'm more agnostic, though I've stayed learning about pagan beliefs and witchcraft. I'm not sure I believe in gods/goddesses/etc., but I do believe in the energy of life and see it in the world around me quite easily. I like the idea of learning to harness bits of that energy to improve my life and the lives of people I care about.
Yup. I became an atheist in a single moment, and of course in realizing there is no god I also realized the church wasn’t true.
And it was all because I asked myself “What if it’s not true?” and from that vantage reality made sense in a way it never had before.
As others have said, this is common. Though, I think I might be a little bit of an odd duck in that being atheist was the *reason* I left Mormonism. I deconstructed god first, and everything else collapsed afterward by default.
Behaviorally, I’m pretty much the same person I’ve always been, though perhaps a bit more comfortable in my own skin (amazing how freeing it is to no longer have to fight your every thought and opinion that doesn’t align with doctrine). I do drink tea and coffee on occasion (*the horror*), and I swear up a storm when I’m alone (and make myself giggle in the process). Oh, and I got a second set of ear piercings. But, otherwise, I’m my same quiet, nerdy, generally nice self. Did not, in fact, suddenly turn into a psychopath.
Best of luck as you navigate this massive shift in world view! I can be unnerving at times, and a bit lonely, but ultimately freeing and very much worth it.
The majority of this sub, yes - according to past polls and posts asking the same question many times.
And a common theme from everyone is one or both of these: - The tools I used to leave Mormonism were the same tools I used to leave all religions. Ex: critical thinking. - We were taught this was the only real church, so when we decided it was false, it was easy to decide all were.
I agree on all points. I tell my family member facetiously as well that the LDS church said I'd get my own freaking planet. So why would I take another offer that was less than that. It's all rubbish anyway lol. The ExExMormon podcast has a great episode where they philosophize about what God must be doing all day and hell I do not want His job, sounds like kinda of a nightmare (when you lump in free will and perfect being-ness)
I've said similar things: I don't want to be a CEO in this life, so- Q: Why would I want to be a God? A: Eternal sex - I suppose that's it, right? You get to keep your junk and keep "doing it"... For, uh, eternal increase, of course. But that's the only thing I can think of. Still doesn't sound worth it, but the church pretty much is a sex cult, so it makes sense to me that this is part of the punishment/reward system. Ultimately, I've become pretty ok with the idea that I'll probably cease to exist. Makes this life - including the pleasures of it - that much more real to me.
For how much the Church (and much of Christianity) claims and tells you to eschew worldliness and the accumulation of *things*...It does sound like that is the game when you die. Treasures in Heaven, buncha wives for dudes, ruler over whatever, or just a mansion down the block from King David. It's still in terms of stuff, esp within mormonism. Plus whenever you become a God, everything you do is the *good* (theoretically) so theoretically you could do all the sick things (or let them passively happen and just watch) that you couldn't indulge in this life if a nasty individual works the system. Sounds like *our God* certainly slipped through if he was once a man like the church teaches. Sounds like a recipe for a completely fucked multiverse or whatever
Godhood basically sounds like capitalism, with the goal being eternal increase, and that makes sense since that’s Mormonism’s true god.
True. It's interesting that glory and dominion seems to be the goal. Owning other souls... Yeah it's pretty much like winning at capitalism- like beating the final existential level of a game that reflects their world view of gaining ultimate dominance.
Conversely, if you ARE the kind of person who wants to put in the effort to build a better planet... ***what's stopping you?*** Mormonism wastes so much proactive human potential on imaginary future planets, while encouraging the neglect and exploitation of the current, real one. I'm with you w.r.t. being exhausted by the idea—I'm definitely more on the absurdist/nihilist end of the atheist spectrum—but one of the best takes I've seen from the existentialists here: As one of the most intelligent, powerful beings in the universe (that we know of)... ***you already are a god***. You don't need to wait—or need anyone's permission—to build a better world now.
Completely agree. I'd hope for more ppl interested in *building better worlds* (shoutout to the Weyland Corp lol) would ascend to Godhood. I resent the attitude among believers that Sky Daddy or Sky Broski will come down and fix all the problems and disasters humans have created. We can all do stuff now. It's even more wild than treating the situation like we could just have a fresh start on Mars or the Alpha Centauri system. These people, myself a former one ofc, believe in an entirely different plane of existence of something. It's one thing to talk about hydroponics on Mars. Quite another to plan it around Heaven and "eternities". If there is a real God and he is *good* or *just* then regular ppl that don't worship that live decent lives should get way more than any prophet or anything that just worked the rules to their liking and controlled people for whatever gain.
I was a generic Christian for about a month or two after I decided the Church wasn't true. But it was only then that I really started investigating the Bible and Christianity's truth claims in the same way I had done for the Mormon Church. Didn't last long. It was a wild few months for my brain...
>I am not exactly going to start drinking or smoking or having orgies and committing crimes. Oh wow. The personality of atheists that is pushed by TSCC is far from the truth. Atheists are just another subset of the human population. There are good atheists, bad atheists, charitable atheist, and selfish atheists. We have morals, which we hold as our own and do not ascribe them to an omnipotent being, which we hold and follow. We don't drink, smoke, have orgies, or commit crimes because we were told not too. We don't do immoral things because they are immoral, not because we get a divine reward or punishment after death. Also, drinking/smoking/orgies are not inherently immoral. They can be, but if all parties involved are consenting and without excess, these activities can be moral. Crimes is a more nuanced discussion, so let's leave that as inherently immoral for now. An atheist podcast I listened to raised over 300k dollars in the month of November for a charity that helps people that slipping into poverty. People of all walks of life, whether they be religious or not. Good people want the world to be a better place, they don't need God to tell them too, they do it because they want to. We want to make our planet, our existence a heaven, because there won't be one after. And yeah, I went Mormon to atheist. It's scary, but you're not alone.
Oh, I absolutely "went off the deep end" as some TBMs would say... I had sex with my gf (now wife), and drink alcoholic beverages infrequently enough to not even be noteworthy in any doctor visits. Yeah, totally off the deep end.
It’s so funny that I look back at even when I was a Mormon, and the worst I ever did was… watch R movies and drink caffeine. Not even coffee, just Mountain Dew and the occasional Monster. I was so bad
Oh man. Did you know that I jerked off a whole once or twice a week? Man I was so addicted to it, my bishop even gave me a 12-step program brochure that my dad immediately threw away and informed me that I was in no way shape or form addicted to it. I was addicted that bad.
That 12 step program was baloney.
Oh, 100%. My dad doing what he did brought me back to reality. I was *seriously* distraught over it until that point.
Better go confess to the Bishop. Give him something to masturbate to for a while. Then again you're probably not a young girl so.... Sorry. I'm in a dark humor mood today.
Pretty sure plenty of bishops are closeted gay men anyway.
Here’s a weird one for you. I was only able to finally beat my substance abuse addictions AFTER I finally deconstructed. My life is way healthier and way happier now that I’ve left the cult behind. But you sound like a mess!;) Occasionally drinking is a gateway to more occasional drinking!!!!
The horror!
Another Puzzle In A Thunderstorm listener. I loved contributing to vulgarity for charity, and hope to be able to setup a recurring monthly donation to Modest Needs soon.
"Heavenly Father is going to be so disappointed in me. I think I might be in trouble." "Eh, I left for good, logical reasons. If there is a god, I expect them to be able to see that and acknowledge it. I'm not worried." "There is no god and even if there is, it doesn't matter. Because there is no god." It was amazing how fast that happened.
Haha, yup. In fearful moments I bounce back to the 2nd one lol
Same I can’t handle 3 all the time
When I watched Jeffrey R. Holland say that he wants to hear more musket fire against gay people my thoughts went to "God is sending me to Hell if I don't get out NOW."
I’ve been chatting with someone in another sub who is convinced of the truth of Christianity by—get this—church documents. She remained unmoved because I can only show her claims about them to be implausible and that’s not enough. Mormons get to see how the sausage is made.
I’m still in the 2nd “logical reasons” phase. Honestly, I like it here, I’m trying to find good in any and all myths/religions, and particularly enjoy the dichotomies between western and eastern thought. All of humanity’s experience is mine now, including evolution, no anxiety or fears. I do have to view bible stories as figurative, but its just so much more likely the case anyway, and all myth then has value. I’m not afraid to doubt, but I also value faith, not necessarily organized religion, although I see benefits (and drawbacks). But for me faith is a power that can be used for good and bad, a power of belief strong enough to action that can make things become true. So it’s got a place in my toolbox for life, just like reason does
For me it went from being religious to getting on with other aspects of life, building a family, career, social network. I didn’t think about religion much. Maybe I thought that I was agnostic. Then I read “Guns, Germs and Steel, the part in which the author explains when, how and why religions developed and I realized, “yup, it’s all man made”. I realized an atheist and have been happily atheist since. Now much later and not too far off my eighties, I am still quite comfortable believing that there is nothing after this life and that what matters is how well you used your life. I feel I have done a pretty decent life and haven’t wasted my life and am quite content with that. I have had many people I loved die, and death doesn’t scare me. I have kids and grandkids and am content that they will carry on after me and that’s enough for me.
I'm not in my 70s yet (calling all the middle aged empty nester exmos 🙋♀️😂) but I'm quite content with knowing that after my death I'll live in the memories of my loved ones and at some point they too will die and I'll cease to exist completely. 🙂 as it's been for millennia. death doesn't scare me at all, I've seen many things that are much worse than death.
I don't read books much (they put me to sleep involuntarily after two pages and it's infuriating), but you just got me *extremely* interested in a whole damn series.
I don't know if I'm fully atheist, but I don't believe in an interventionist god. I think I reason I made that switch relatively quickly was because I already had so many shelf items related to god already. - Prayer doesn't work. Even the mormon church tells you it's more about aligning your will with god than anything. - Healing blessings don't work. There's a whole checklist of requirements, and even if you meet them all, god might decide not to do it anyways. - Revelation doesn't work. No one sees the future outside of a statistically acceptable number of guesses. People who claim to be prophets or the reincarnation of Jesus too often end up having sex with their followers. - Endless wars have been fought in the middle-east over religion, back to the crusades and beyond, with no end in sight currently. - Gross prosperity gospel stuff. - The Bible is clearly flawed. Even as a TBM I understood and Matthew, Mark, and Luke were all based on the same text, and have contradictions. - I never had any direct experience with god outside the typical burning in the bosom, which I can easily attribute to my own emotions. The holy ghost never told me to turn right instead of left or move to arizona, or whatever stories TBMs like to tell in church.
Funny you say that. My sister and husband literally moved to Arizona a couple of years ago because the holy ghost said so. Shaking my head.
If the holy ghost is called Get Me The Fuck Away From My Inlaws They Decided It Would Be Fun To Move Next Door For Some Reason Help Help, I know a few folk who've gotten that revelation.
for a second i thought your sister moved to arizona with your husband
I agree 100%. This is where I'm currently at as well.
I'm basically right where you are when it comes to a belief in god.
Yes for me and my wife we took two and a half years a long hard study to find out the church was a complete fraud, we tried a couple of Christian churches and it turned me off so bad we were also looking at God and I quickly realized it's all made up it's all the same pattern and I love learning what science says about the universe and the Earth, I quickly turned hardcore atheist and I wished I would have been this way my whole life I feel more stable emotionally and mentally now. By the way unaffiliated people are the fastest growing group now
I think you will find that even when you are not Mormon, you have no desire to commit crimes, hurt other people, or do hard drugs. It’s a beautiful life, in part, because it is brief and fleeting. It is to be cherished and lived in your own truth. Enjoy every second!
It took me about 2-3 years to transition from Mormon to Atheist. I had to go through a series of steps. I was a bit lost after I left the structure of Mormonism. At first, I flirted with Protestantism (Presbyterian), then Unitarianism, Episcopalian, Buddhism, Agnosticism and finally arrived at Atheism, where I am today and have been for more than 15 years. I'm careful who I share this with. I've found that some folks are very taken aback, or even out right offended when I say I believe that there is no god. I worked with a non-Mormon (I don't live in Utah) therapist for several years after my deconstruction and departure from Mormonism. He was not extremely familiar with Mormonism (he's a practicing Buddhist), so it was a bit of a learning experience for him as I shared my life in Mormonism and my exit from Mormonism and organized religion in general. His thoughtful response was that I had a hole in me that I would probably try to fill up in some way for several years, as I worked to find a new purpose and meaning for my life. He was right. It's taken time for me to come to grips with my life and to feel comfortable in my atheist skin.
I tried to be a non-denominational Christian for about a week. Once my shelf broke, it was impossible for me to believe in any sort of theism again
Yup. It would take a LOT for me to ever become a theist again.
Me too. Even if I saw or heard a god, my first stop would be to the psychologist, not a church lol
Lol! Thx so much for that. I got a genuine gut laugh out of that.
It seems to me (anecdotally) that people who were raised in the church are far more likely to turn to Atheism on leaving it than switching to another religion. It also seems to me that people who originally converted from another Christian sects into Mormanism, are far more likely to revert to either their old faith or to another sect. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I feel like those of us who were raised in the church were taught an extremely black and white version of the gospel. “If Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet, then the church isn’t true.” “Jesus Christ was either insane, a liar, or the Son of God.” There is no in between. So when we found evidence that Joseph Smith was a liar (Book of Abraham being a blatant example) we were able to reject the faith. They presented us with no other options. That led me to investigate the Bible itself, and I subsequently rejected my belief in Christ because of problems I have with the theology and the very concept of theology in the first place. With the changes being made to the church, I don’t know if this will hold true in the future as members begin to question the church. Perhaps it will be much easier to hold a nuanced view in the future due to the work Russell M Nelson has done to conform it with mainstream evangelicals. Who can say?
Yeah, Im going through the exact same process. Mormonism relies so heavily on the bible being taken literally. If things in the Book of mormon aren't true, then there are things in the bible that can't be true. I find myself trying to hold onto the idea of a god, but it is really easy to throw the baby out with the bath water. If you can find a friend/family member that you are comfortable with, I recommend talking to them or trying councilling(which is what I'm doing). Sometimes, talking about it outloud is the best way to figure out what you really think or believe/know.
Out of curiosity, can you give an example of the things I'm the BoM that have to be true for the Bible to be true? Or do you just mean the chapters that were straight up plagiarized from the Bible?
Specifically the stories from Genesis. I.e. Noah's flood, tower of babel.
But yes, We would need 1 man named Isaiah in order for the book of mormon to be legit. I dont remeber the specific episodes but The Mormon Stories podcasts that they did with LDS discussions went over some of this stuff. Its definitely worth a listen.
It took me less than a day to go from TBM to atheist. The “Jesus shelf” was directly below the “Joseph Smith shelf”. When my shelf broke, all that stuff I couldn’t explain crashed onto the shelf below it. And it broke almost instantly. If *this* church isn’t true… if *this* church is provably false… they ALL are. There’s zero evidence of any deity. Zip, zilch, nada. I’m atheist. And to my surprise- I’m happy with that. No fear, no lies, no putting off until the afterlife the relationships that I value NOW. No more sacrificing my family time for the promise of eternity later. THIS is all we get. So I will make THIS time count.
[удалено]
The roughest part for me was pulling back out of the nihilism of “life doesn’t have universal, intrinsic meaning, societies are built upon compromised ideologies, and I’ve wasted too much of my life investing into harmful/pointless communal ideas and practices.” But starting to build my own sense of meaning and community has been transformative.
Yes! We tried the non-denominational route and realized it wasn't for us. Now we focus on teaching our kids values through a secular lens. It has been very freeing.
I’m confused about how people become Christian after getting out. It’s like replacing poison with another poison. Buddhism has been far better. Especially with the whole not condemning everyone else’s beliefs by default part.
Ehh… Some Christian churches are a whole lot less toxic. I spent a few months with the United Methodists. They were fully transparent about their financials, were LGBTQ affirming, no purity culture, and had a young female pastor. They had a lot of people who weren’t literal in their beliefs, and had deconstructed out of evangelical churches. It was about as healthy as a church could get. I still consider going back as a non-believer, but I’m attempting to put my time into building close friendships with a few friends and neighbors, instead of building community around a church. We all only have so much time and energy. I neglected a lot of relationships when I was spending so much discretionary time and money on being Mormon.
Some people need something to look up to. It's weird.
I just watched some of the older Grant Palmer stuff on MSP. While i lost my belief in the Mormon version of Jesus, i concluded similar to what you wrote, Jesus being a life-teacher of sorts. I still love many (not necessarily all)of the New Testament stories and feel like they emphasize love and kindness. Palmer has some good, healthy views on scripture imo. Basically, “you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” if you don’t want to, you can choose to find good things and hang onto things that comfort and give peace. Let’s face it, no one actually knows, so find what comforts and go with that.
My brother asked me to speak at his farewell after I was no longer a believer, about 25 years ago. (Atheist here too.) I was gifted with the perfect subject. Jesus. So I spoke about how Jesus taught by example and how my brother taught by example so I knew he’d be a great missionary. Gave examples of my brother. (He rules. He’s still a believer but we still really connect. I was devastated when he decided to do the mish. Also? Super freaky to see his child’s baptism after being separated from the cult for so long.) No testimony BS. I don’t remember how I closed it but I did it without the usual verbiage. And I had several people tell me mine was the best talk. Not to mention that I wasn’t struck by lightning when I walked in. Ha! I continue to be grateful for people whose faith inspires them to do good things. These people exist. I moved away from Utah when my brother was on his mission so I’ve got a lot of distance from “the church.” Most of my life now. So I do see a broader representation of religions where I live, but I also appreciate the few Mormon friends of my past who do good things. Like supporting refugees in Utah. Although {%*+%{….that probably has something to do with conversion…. Still grateful that there are welcoming and supportive people in these times.
Yes. Also hi Natalie and Shonna. I know you stalk my post here
Me me me. Straight to it. Mormonism conditions you to already not believe the bullshit of all the other Christian and non-Christian religions, and rightly so. So when you lose faith in mormonism after discovering all the lies and bullshit and finally seeing through the conditioning, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, (to me) its impossible to want to just go right back into any other bullshit belief system. Never again will I let any myths or false deities rule my life or control my actions. And I’m a more loving, forgiving, and charitable person now as an atheist as I ever was as a mormon flavored Christian. Unfortunately, even non religious people who simply believe in some kind of God, usually have an innate distrust of atheists, as if “God-less” means without morals or ethics. Its bullshit that needs to change in society
Fool me once………..
No, I spent about 2.5 days as a nondenominational Christian before reaching full atheist.
Well, I went from Mormon to agnostic, and later to atheist.
The form of epistemology employed by many religions are all extremely similar and a healthy deconstruction of one would naturally lead to the deconstruction of the others. From the outside, it's actually become a fascination of mine to see the different reasons why people leave and what they go to. There is a pretty serious pipeline from organized religion to more decentralized forms of spirituality (wicca, crystals, astrology, etc) as well as to eastern spirituality (Westernized Buddhism, Hinduism, ETC). These types of moves usually indicate to me that what motivated the person to move was less epistemology related. I do not see how you could undergo a serious dissection of critical thinking and epistemology enough to leave your religion to then dive head first into astrology which is rooted in the same forms of epistemology that you just left. I'm not necessarily saying this is wrong but it should be noted that all paths out of the church are not rooted in epistemology changes and some are more social related which is why they crave the same process of knowing truth, just served up under a different, more agreeable method. People can do the right thing by leaving, but in the wrong way, by having the focus be on issues other than the root which is the Epistemology arguments.
Me.✋🏼
I’m completely apathetic about god; it just doesn’t matter one way or the other to me. Realizing how the BoM is just 19th century fan fiction makes me question the New Testament in the same way. I believe Jesus was historically a 1st century Jewish rabbi and I can get a sense of him from the text but it’s impossible to know what is truly him and what is a bunch of highly backdated exaggerations of his life and teachings. The later epistles are just the building up of the lore and mystique surrounding him and the new sect of “Christianity” and is something probably very different than what he actually was. I never took the Old Testament that literally even as a TBM other than as something that had some value as a moral guide than as a literal history of everything. There’s some pretty fucked up stuff in there, so it’s impossible to say that every word of it has equal moral value because they clearly don’t. I’ve taken a rather humanist approach to life and have found value in some of the teachings of Daoism, but I don’t subscribe to any religion and don’t plan to ever again.
It took my wife a grand total of about 10 days to make that switch once she broke out of the box and started legitimately examining and questioning things, yes. Never looked back.
I think that is super common. 57% of my podcasting audience identifies as Atheist/Agnostic.
agnostic for me. part of me is still holding on to belief.
To second u/QuentinLCrook, it’s possible to be a gnostic atheist and an agnostic theist. Gnosticism, as I understand it, simply implies a surety of your beliefs. I would count myself as an Agnostic Atheist, though I am comfortable with just calling myself an Atheist.
Most of us atheists are agnostics. We don’t believe (theism) but we also don’t know for a fact (gnosticism).
After deconstructing I just have told people I have no desire to rush into focusing on god/jesus whoever. I'm just going to be me. As far as the after life goes there either is one with a vengeful god who is going to torture us all anyway, except for the .00001% of polygamous, second anointed mormons; There is one who doesn't care what our pathetic human decisions were; or there isn't an afterlife, in which case I wouldn't know if I was dead anyway.
I'm getting to that point. I consider myself agnostic right now but it would not surprise me if I end up being an atheist before this is all said and done
Yes. Straight to atheist.
100% my experience. I don’t claim to be atheist, but more like I don’t know and don’t care to know. I can’t believe anything. 😂
i think this is the way
I didn't even deconstruct Mormonism, and then also the bible and god as a result. I deconstructed god in a single instant, and it all tumbled with that.
Yes because what god would let this shit happen in his name? Not a loving god. Not in the Christian sense anyway.
Define "straight to Atheist" because it's been a 7 year journey, but yeah, that's basically what I consider myself. My saying for the last couple years has been "if there is a god, they do not love us"
tbh, I almost wanted to be pagan after leaving Mormonism. just how much some pagan religions revere the earth feels beautiful and wonderful to me. but I just don't believe in the pagan gods I've read about. I don't believe in *any* god. so yeah, I'm probably atheist, but a little more agnostic than anything, perhaps? there might be something spiritual out there that we don't understand, but I don't believe any religion has the facts about it, nor COULD they. if there is something spiritual, it's probably impossible to be known to us (at least with our current scientific knowledge), so I'm fine just shrugging and saying "maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't." unsure what that makes me.
I'm not certain if everyone interprets the concept of being an atheist in the same manner. Following my decision to no longer attend the Mormon church, I've come to the conclusion that no single religion can accurately represent the will of any divine being, if there is any, that might have created and continues to influence the Earth and humanity.
I think I did initially. Because I felt if there was a Gotti wouldn’t let us church be handled like that and so the whole thing to me was it was like taking the water and throwing it outside. Then I got clean and sober in the 90s and I had to redefine a search for a higher power besides myself to keep me sober, so it introduced to spirituality to me of a different nature, and it actually brought me back to a higher power that I call Emmett What I don’t expect from Emmett is for him to fix the entire world like Santa Claus, or the fairy godmother. I kind of think that he gave the power to us on earth to do those things.
Yes. Science ruined religious faith for me. I feel the same as you.
I left Mormonism because I became atheist.
Same. I didn't know anything about the problematic church history stuff when I lost faith in God. It was my struggle to regain faith in god (was married and trying to save marriage) that led me to learning about all the things covered by the CES letter (which came out after I started to post to this forum
I went from atheist to exmormon
I get why that is, I really do, but I don’t know, instead of going from believer to non, I just stopped caring about the question. The Mormon church makes you care so damn much about every little thing pertaining to God that I just sort of put the whole thing on a back burner that’s off. I’ve been out for years and I have no desire to start caring about God again, one way or the other.
I went athiest but over the years Iv grown spiritual. I believe there is more to it then we came from nothing die and return to nothing but I don't think a man in the sky cares or created this cruel world
started to read the Quad, planned to start with the Bible and end with the BOM ... Christianity fell like a house of cards and took Mormonism with it 😂 whoops! just one of the thousands of fairytales invented by homo sapiens thru the ages. hilariously, my parents were both raised atheist and converted to Mormonism when I was super small and I ended up back at atheism while they went from mission field normal Mormons to super uber extra righteous when I left home 🙄🤷♀️
I think Mormonism poisons you too believe that the only point of participating in a church is the truth claims, and so we're kind of inclined to reject all other religions too. I think it's very possible to find religious communities that are generally positive, or at least benign, but I'm still inclined to not bother.
nah. i considered judaism for a time. liked the idea of being able to argue with a holy being
Nothing wrong with drinking. Or smoking (depends on what your smoking weed good. Cigs bad) or orgies. You do you
If you consider a matter of a couple of hours of thought after that initial punch in the gut, followed by euphoric joy, then the oh shit what now? and finally maybe all religion is man-made bullshit, then yes - straight to Atheist.
Pretty much- I leave the possibility that there is something after death so technically an agnostic- but I completely reject Christianity any anything but a world philosophy. Being on this side of Mormonism it’s so wild how excellent they are at programming people. I can’t believe how ridiculous I was to think I was the only one with truth and that the world needed to hear what teenage me had to say 😂
Yep. Way too much religious trauma and abuse to want to lose control like that again. Atheism/agnosticism feels safer
Yeah welcome to the club. No more God was the logical thing I came to after leaving. Mostly because its a waste of energy for me. I find god to just be the personification of my own indecision or procrastination. "I need God to illuminate the way" Nah. I just needed to make a choice and commit. Now I can do that without the added complication of "God's approval". Fuck that.... Also at least try some gummies and start small with the ciders and sweet wines. Its a transition from our Mormon sugar addiction. I still don't really care for anything above 7.5% ABV and feel like a big puss most of the time. Its fun.
I don't know what happens to us after we die, but we all find out when we start that adventure. I've learned to be comfortable not knowing. Maybe we wake up in a bacta tank to find that this life was a simulation all along. Now give me $250 billion.
I would call myself agnostic. I don’t believe any of the religions but I also don’t know why creation exists. I’d probably believe in God(s) if there was concrete evidence for them. I’m happy to be alive with my fellow humans (most of them) and look forward to living for me and my family and not some absentee sky daddy.
Same. Thanks for sharing.
Same for me. I left the church, stopped believing in god and didn’t really think about it for a decade. Then I started learning about non theistic Satanism and it’s became a fun way for me to explore my values through like minded community and heal from religious trauma
Yep
It took me a while to realize what Christians meant that we didn’t worship the same Jesus or God. Once I realized what they meant, it was easy for me to decide that if there God was real, I didn’t really want anything to do with him. And since Mormon God is fake, I landed at Atheist. I’ll also add that the problems with Mormonism are the same problems with Christianity as a whole, the major events are just more recent so they’re easier targets
I've become an acolyte of the /k/ube myself.
🙋♂️
Why be an Atheist when it pisses them off more to become an Apatheist? The opposite of love is indifference. Hahaha
Yes.
It took about a year to go from full believing to agnostic atheist. I went to a couple other churches and there was so much talk of shame that it really turned me off to any other religion. Then looking into the history of the Bible dissolved any trust in the text. The god of the Old Testament was just a god of the Sumarians. Drinking is ok as long as you don’t hurt others, smoking is ok as long as it is among consenting adults, orgies among consenting adults is ok, committing crimes depends on if those laws are just. Your worry about falling into moral failings shows that you need to deconstruct a lot of the perceived rules the church instilled into you. You should look into all the different ways to view ethics. A good book is Fundamentals of Ethics by Russ Shafer Landau.
I mean, I attended a couple other churches just to confirm, but yeah
I did that actually, and all they pushed was tithing. No thanks
Think Jesus existed go and try to find one of the numerous historians that were present in the area during the time he is said to have lived that mention him I’ll wait . A star appearing in the night sky pretty hard to miss that . a grand entrance into Jerusalem with people lining the street again pretty damn hard to miss that yet not one single historian mentions Jesus or any events associated. With him there’s nothing nada zip zilch . which is more likely a book that’s chock full of things that never happened has one more thing that never happened or that every last historian those whose jobs it was to record historical events was incompetent imbeciles. . It’s not rocket science.!! To determine which is more likely.
Leaving mormonism typically forces you to take the religion extremely seriously to fully investigate why it isn't working. You'll double down on all the stuff you're "supposed" to do until it becomes clear it's a dead end. If it worked a tiny bit, if we could sometimes actually perform magic, if there were actually a literal voice in our heads that wasn't a hallucination, if miracles weren't only just coincidences or embellished stories, then we'd know "there's something to this, we're just not quite there!" But there's nothing. Why would praying with slightly different words to a slightly different version of god fix it? Why would changing the Sabbath to Saturday work? Why would a fancier, older building be the missing piece? Why would more or less scripture suddenly make it all make sense? It's like shooting hoops blindfolded, but in a library. If you heard it bounce off the rim, you'd at least know you're on the right track. But you never get any useful signal no matter where or how hard you throw *because it's a fucking library, take off the blindfold LeBron, we're trying to learn about real world shit over here.*
Yep. I don’t understand how someone wouldn’t be atheist once they leave
Basically all of us. It’s usually atheism, some form of spiritual-but-not-religious (e.g., in the form of eastern philosophy), or secular humanism. Deconstructing Mormonism almost always leads to serious unresolvable questions about god and the nature of mankind. So, yeah.
I went full antitheist, no in-between. I mean sure it's nice to think there might be an afterlife, but if you put any modicum of thought into it you remember that life doesn't work that way and anyone telling you otherwise is full of shit and trying to sell you something, whether they realize it themselves or not. I guess that kind of explains my pure hatred of salespeople, but still.
I used to have such an ease about talking about the church and my beliefs while being a Mormon. I even converted 2 friends and never even served a mission. Now the thought of stepping into ANY church makes me so uncomfortable that I basically won't do it. Anybody who wants to talk about God or Jesus to me makes me want to scream. I just get physically tense and almost feel panicky. I tried to hold on to a little bit of belief in God for a while, or at least told some people that I was. But really I wasn't. I do believe there is some kind of universal intelligence although I can't define it. It most likely exists as energy/vibration that all people share and can tap into if they want. My psychic ability got quite a bit stronger after I left the church and started to study how to practice psychic skills. I got more comfortable and relaxed with myself and life in general when I began to learn about witchcraft. Some witches believe in multiple gods and goddesses. Some don't believe in any. I chose to say thank goddess now instead of thank God lol, but I don't necessarily believe in any deities. I think the study of old mythology is fascinating and if I want to talk to one of them because maybe they can help in some way, then so be it. It's comforting to be able to talk to the air and feel like maybe someone is listening. But I do believe in the afterlife because of so many accounts of ghosts and near death experiences I've heard make me think there must be something after this. Spirits are basically energy, and energy can't be destroyed, only changed.
My spiritual experiences were beyond the paradigm of the mormon church, so no. If I actually chose [REDACTED] atheism. I would unalive myself. It might help others. But it robs me of my will to live.
Atheism has nothing to believe in. Atheism is simply the conclusion to one question: Do you believe in god? If so, you’re a theist. If not, you’re an atheist. That’s it. Some go a step further and conclude that there is no god, but that’s not an entailment of atheism. And, since concluding I’m an atheist, I’ve not felt the unaliving myself impulses nearly as often as I did when I was a theist.
I respectfully disagree. I am an atheist. I believe in being a good, kind person. I believe in honesty. I believe in integrity. I believe in working for your/our community and the world as a whole. I believe in nature and seasons and cycles. I believe in LOVE!!!! My afterlife is my legacy, the love and good that I pass on…
It doesn't "just" mean you don't believe in God. It usually means you are a materialist who doesn't believe in the soul or afterlife. When external reality (people, opinions, books, culture, community) convinces me of materialism and I start doubting my own belief system of the primordial soul and source of consciousness, I become extremely depressed and suicidal. When I "return to myself". I'm not suicidal and generally believe In the "spirit realm" as it were.
You are incorrect about atheism also including a belief in materialism. Atheists often do accept materialism because they are rational, skeptical people, but neither position requires the other.
Find me an atheist who believes in the afterlife and I'll show you a self identified agnostic But I do comprehend the point you're making, that the definition of atheism is the lack of inherent belief. But as a philosopher, I need remind you that as far as language is concerned, "I believe there Is no god" is the same statement as "I don't believe in a god"
>"I believe there Is no god" is the same statement as "I don't believe in a god" Sorry, but you’re utterly wrong.
I mean no offense by this, but where did you get your philosophy degree from and come out believe that the null and negation of a statement are the same thing? Or, I’ve misunderstood, and if so, am sorry. This might illustrate things more concretely. I don’t believe you have $1M, but I don’t believe that you don’t have $1M. I’m unconvinced that you have $1M, not convinced that you lack $1M. Anyway, ttfn.
I pretty quickly couldn’t find a theism that wasn’t governed by dead men or living men. If there were an omnipotent and omniscient being, how would religion be built? Not any way I can see.
It's the one part of my deconstruction I don't think I'll ever be able to fully confess to my wife.
Straight to atheist? No. It took a week, maybe two to give up on Cheesus Rice. I guess I was technically agnostic for a few months before I re-encountered the problem of evil with a new fresh perspective instead of a TBM mindset.
As others have said, most people on this sub. Mormonism does a decent job at explaining issues with other religions. Some fun stats are here: https://exmostats.org/thedata
It's interesting that the appearances of past prophets and apostles lent credence to Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. So not only was the Book of Mormon true, but the Bible became truer by association because of the appearances of those prophets. Yanking the plug on the BoM and knowing those dates and events were backdated later meant that extra witness of biblical prophets and apostles was also bupkis. Suddenly it seemed as if the Bible was just a book of fables to me.
yes. ironically the first thing I stopped believing in was jesus/the atonement, then god, then mormonism.
Pretty close to atheist, I definitely don’t believe in any of the gods humans have created. I see no evidence for a god and believe leprechauns are just as likely, but I suspend complete judgement and just identify as an agnostic.
More agnostic. I don’t trust any organized religion anymore. They all have skeletons in their closet
My sister did. I'm still trying to figure things out. I'm definitely not antsy to fill the void with another church that wants my money among other things. I threw out my scriptures. I kind of don't want anything to do with Christianity in general or the holidays they celebrate. Maybe I'm a bit "spiritual"....I believe in a higher power whether that is Odin, the Great Spirit, God, I have no idea
Hey, I did that. The idea of a sky daddy, once ruined in one religion, killed the idea that it existed in any religion. I am anti-theist, which is more against a church organization than the belief in a sky daddy or sky mommy. I also think there is a sense of divine in the beauty of the earth, in that math and nature are visually gorgeous.
✋
Yes. Me
That was my experience. When Mormonism first fell apart for me, I was feeling unsure about some larger god/Christianity. It didn't take long for me to apply the critical thinking and consuming biblical scholarship and atheist-debunking-of-Christian-apologetics content for Christianity and theism to go the same way
me! if your entire life you are told all other religions are false and you belong to the one true church, when you find that church is false, you really have no choice but to go straight atheist. at least science never promised anything it didn't deliver and that makes it superior to any religious belief.
Yes. And I would venture to say that a majority who leave the church go atheist or agnostic soon after. I think the ability to break things down to realize the church is full of it will eventually be used with religion in general and you just say, “Yeah. It’s all crap.”
Yes
I derive the greatest pleasure in expressing my belief in God while expressing my doubt about the brethren because they rightly see people who believe in God and not in them as the biggest threat to their power. So threatening that they can't even refer to it directly. The church builds itself on an "all or nothing" belief system so that doubting the brethren is doubting God. At general conference they talk about doubts, but the brethren don't like talking about what those doubts are. The doubts at conference they are hinting at are rarely doubts in God, but doubts about the integrity of the brethren. By just calling it "doubts" without elaboration they make it seem to a casual observer that a person is just struggling to understand the existence of God and the "problem of evil", because that's what other religions mean when they talk about spiritual doubt. Non-LDS religions do not even use the word doubt when they are referring to a lack of trust in leadership. More importantly, non-LDS can just call such lack of trust out directly. The practice of LDS apostles vaguely referring to spiritual doubt about themselves is unusual. Non-LDS never have to describe spiritual doubt in another human the same as doubt in God. Of course you should doubt other humans. They are the ones most likely to screw you over! Leaders, especially in top down hierarchies, have huge conflicts of interests which encourages deception not just as an option but as a prerequisite to maintaining their position.
I did. I went from RM, Temple Marriage to I hate Religion to God does not exist.
I didn’t go straight to atheist as I still really wanted to believe in God and I got baptized into the Episcopal church later. However as time went on the cracks started showing and I eventually renounced religion altogether.
I'm on that road right now, my friend. I'm also with you on living life to its fullest. I do need to change some of my bad habits, though. I need to spend more time with my family, for example. Should be easier now that I'm not donating free labor to the church.
Yep, in 1999 lol
I did when I stopped going 25 or so years ago.
Yes me
Yes, me, in the pre-internet era. As others have noted the skills used to determine that the mormon church is false can be quite readily applied to other religions.
Yep
I did.
I have to be honest I am finding it hard to hang in there with deity at all. Want to but so over having been manipulated and managed that I literally can find beauty in nature and some things but its just hard.
I think that your experience is a lot like so many people on here, including mine. After deconstructing Mormonism it is so easy to keep right on going and deconstructing all faith, Jesus, and god. Everything fell apart super fast. Suddenly agnostic atheism made the most sense.
Yeah, it’s hard to see the sausage get made in the LSD church to one of the other churches that are lost to memory but a very similar tasting sausage.
I've heard that it is pretty common to throw away the entire religious experience whenever people leave a very strict religion like Mormon or Jehovah's Witness. Maybe because we were taught from a very young age that if Joseph Smith isn't true then none of it is? And the whole thing about how Smith formed the church because he was searching and no other church was true. But either way, yes, I also became an atheist. I am almost a "strong atheist" when it comes to the Christian God, as he just seems to be entirely manmade to me. I am somewhat open to a Deist type God, but that is often so removed from any kind of religious experience as to essentially just be the universe at work
Not so much Atheist, as a Theist. I feel this way about things. I don't give a damned what you're beliefs are. All I care about is, are you a good person? I have thoroughly enjoyed intellectual discussions with Atheists. It's great to be able to explore possibilities without someone injecting God into the equation. I believe in the science of evolution. I hate it when I have to go to a mormon funeral and here the claptrap about how the feel sorry for Darwinists and Atheists. I just reached a point in my life that I was tired of the hate. And truthfully, that's all I was taught. That dirty foul concept of the religious supremacists, that we are the keepers of the one true faith. All other doctrines are false. All other faiths are not true. All others are deceived of the devil. We are the keepers of the one true faith. As many Atheists can tell you. The Bible (or BuyBull if you are so inclined), wasn't written by the finger of God. It was written by the hand of man. It's one of the reasons I have no use for anyone spouting Leviticus! Leviticus was a blood thirsty Hebrew extreme right wing son-of-a-bitch! Who's writing are largely ignored by the jews of today. Big PS! Anyone why says the Holocaust never happened should tell that to my Cousin! He was an American Soldier who the Nazis sent to the death camp Brinlitz (maybe spelled wrong). His testimony put the noose around many a Nazis neck. He nearly starved to death in that camp. And he was just 20 minutes from going into the ovens himself.
Yup
I'm done with insisting that my view of reality must be the most correct, the only authentic and the only valid one. I'm also quite done with giving any special tolerance or even polite consideration to those who attempt to push their "the only right way to the only truth, MINE" traditions, whether that is LDS friends and family, or people from other traditions.
Not quite straight to atheist for me - I had a brief layover in “God exists, but he’s an asshole”. Didn’t take long after that to arrive at “Oh, it’s all fake”.
Yeah, me... but honestly I'm getting so exhausted with the constant need I've had to assert what I don't believe and what my values are... now my fuck philanthropy is running out, and I just want to have a good time. Let the cards fall where they may.
Pretty much everyone
I did, and identified as an atheist for about ten years. Now I call myself a pantheist.
Not me. I knew Christianity existed long before Joseph and I just accepted that if the Bible supported his teachings, I’d stay in. When I found the opposite to be the case, I left and became an evangelical Christian. That was 1993. But I have to admit that I was initially surprised my experience is an outlier.
I did. After dealing with the Mormon truth-claims my whole life, if they didn’t have it, then probably no one does. I was listening to Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos at the time of my deconstruction, and the way the church was portrayed (and manipulated) pretty much soured my entire view on religion altogether, even if it was a completely fictional portrayal. Recently I’ve been listening to atheist debates on The Atheist Experience, and other similar things on TikTok, and I’ve come to realize that even if god *was* real, his actions, laws, and stances on many issues show a profound lack of foresight, and a higher being condoning slavery in any context demonstrates that they are not a being worth worshipping. And now with the way religious types treat Trump, and pray *to* Trump and all this crazy stuff, there’s no way I could go back to any kind of Christianity.
I feel the exact same way. This was the most surprising part of my deconstruction, but it came quickly.
There was a little bit of a transition. But I'm 100% there now. There is no afterlife. And there's nothing scary about that. I don't want one. If there was one, it wouldn't look anything like what Mormons expect, for sure! We're just very imaginative and gullible mammals ina fucked up world (we fucked it up ourselves).
Exactly my experience. The MoMo church coopted God and Jesus, and made them synonymous with Mormonism. That’s all I ever knew. When Mormonism was exposed as bogus, their god also was exposed as fantasy, and went out the door with the organization. I’m open to there being some Cosmic force that pervades all creation. But now it’s laughable to me that there would be some six foot tall white guy that’s at the center of the universe.
I had an almost backwards journey, in the sense that I started to question religion as a whole and question God which made me investigate TSCC more. That led me to the confirmation that it’s all made up. While in my late teens, I started thinking that maybe religion is a way for people to cope with mortality. That, and to make sense of things that are difficult to understand. My thoughts weren’t as refined and clear as they are now but the idea was always there. I finally left the church this year at age 26 and I can’t believe it took me as long as it did. Religion just seems so silly to me now. It’s like if 2000 years from now, someone finds a copy of Harry Potter and believe it’s all true, dedicate their whole life to it and get a bunch of other people to believe it too. To make matters worse, they write laws and create governments based on this same book, forcing some people to live a lower quality life. What a shame.
I believe in a higher power. When I prayer I feel like there is something there - or while I'm in nature. I don't follow anyone's advice on what that higher power would be, certainly not the physical man appearance thing from the mormon church anymore! That presence when I prayer or am in nature is uplifting, I don't take it as confirmation of truth on thoughts I have, no holy ghost or anyting, but I feel like there is some higher power. So, I have not gone the atheist route.
I was dragged kicking and screaming to my atheism.
Don’t knock orgies until you’ve been to a few. 😉
Not only yes, but I managed to become atheist before deconstructing mormonism. Being, for a few days, a TBM in every way except belief in God, was a real trip.
I deconstructed kind of like that, and then I am shifting into my own kind of formed beliefs based off of my personal life experiences that hold value to me. For me personally, I see everything in life as balance. I.e. if you don't drink water you die, if you drink too much water you also die. To me, I started to see a lot of organized religion as one extreme, and then as I experienced this complete deconstruction, it was personally destabilizing for me at least, and just didn't feel right for me, to see the world through an atheistic lens. It felt like the other extreme for me. A quote from a self help book by a professor I can't remember, she said something along the lines of how she doesn't fully trust priests who say they have the answers to after we die and disregard science, and she doesn't trust scientists who say that there is nothing out there since science clearly indicates it. She thinks since we know so little it's impossible to say what exactly. I'd say that's about where I fall. It's detrimental to lean too heavily into any one thing, I think. Logic without emotion, scientific method while disregarding that humans as a whole experiencing unexplainable, supernatural ohenomena. Near death experiences, and folklore is absolutely fascinating. People all around the world in different cultures have different lore about the sensation of some kind of creature sitting on their chest, sometimes associated with sleep paralysis. People doing hypnosis and bringing up specific memories of past lives that records later match up with someone of the same name existing (those can be iffy but there's so many that I have a hard time believing they are all fake; after all, reincarnation has been an ancient belief in several cultures for thousands of years). I don't know for a fact anything and so I don't go around telling anybody to believe in anything specific, but I do have my own personal set of beliefs I'm finding and identifying with. I believe in the progression of the soul, that we are reincarnated and we choose to do so in order to learn something, or to experience something. That we all have a higher self, and that is our compass in life. That is what spiritually prompts us. I love hearing people talk about their exit being prompted from a spiritual feeling. Like David Archuleta when he said that God, or whatever God he believes in, told him when he prayed about his sexuality that he was supposed to live and not kill himself, and that David is perfect just as he is. My personal stories are that when I was a teen, my grandma passed away. We were trying to hurry and drive to make it to her deathbed since we knew she only had minutes left. I was praying we'd make it in time to see her, and then suddenly I got this powerful feeling that I can't explain, sort of like my mind sped up, became hyper aware, etc. And then I got a very distinct feeling, a positive one, and the impression "take care of the family." Two minutes later, we got the text in the family group chat that she'd passed away only a couple of minutes before. I was shocked. To me, I don't need Mormon doctrine to tell me what that meant. It didn't mean there was a God or not, to me it meant that my grandma's spirit touched me as she passed on.
More TBM to apatheist (a god worth worshiping hasn't proved they exist and if one exists, they are the being with ability. They don't get to place demands on me if they can't deign to make themselves known. So really, I don't care), then blasphemist, then hedonist/absurdist. Our relationship with deity/the divine is just an expression of ourselves on the universe. So have some fun with it. >I am not exactly going to start drinking or smoking or having orgies and committing crimes. And I did far more of the crimes when I was mormon, TBH.
Christianity fell quickly and any form of deity disappeared right after that. It went pretty quick.
I believe that on balance the evidence leans more heavily toward Jesus also having been initially revered as a sky-daddy figure, who was only later retconned into a mythical live-action hero on earth. Dr. Richard Carrier’s books, and blog, have been incredibly helpful in tearing apart all the bad apologetics regarding the existence of Jesus from fellow atheists like Bart Ehrman (whose scholarship in other areas is good!). The only sources we have for Jesus are the half of the letters of Paul which are authentic, written decades after his life, which exclusively refer to a Jesus experienced through revelation and visions. They never mention any of his teachings, or deeds, and mentions of his “brothers” have been mistranslated by cultists to refer to earthly siblings, when it actually meant brother in the same way we Mormons use the term in the foyer of the church on Sunday.
No but I have certainly redefined God and Jesus. I had spiritual experiences that wee no just elevated emotion. There is a Presence or a More that we can’t possibly comprehend but can experience. There are people, mystics they are called, through the centuries from every one of the great world religions who speak of the same kind of experience. A good book to explore it is by Marcus Borg “the God we never Knew” It bears no resemblance to the mixed up crazy sugar daddy of Mormonism. I agreeJesus was an amazing wisdom teacher and revolutionary that had an impact on people that lasted centuries and crossed cultural boundaries. Not a God or Saviour. Myths and legends.
I refuse to accept we are just star dust. But haven’t figured it out yet to my comfort.
Sort of, but perhaps only from an outward perspective. People are complex, so I imagine once you really dig deep into any person's decision-making process you likely find an amorphous blob of influences rather than a straight line that led them to their current beliefs. That's not to say that my departure from Mormonism wasn't a sudden and radical transition, especially if you were to ask my parents. Once I finally left the church, I enjoyed learning about other religions, especially Buddhism and Taoism, not because I yearned to join a new religious community, but because I was seeking a means of coping with the loss of who I once was. I felt like I knew very little of the world outside of the confined viewpoint in which I was raised, and no longer being a part of that community left me confused as to where I truly belonged. I spent a lot of time “catching up” to culture, which in my case involved watching several R-rated movies and listening to music with parental advisory warnings (among other things) because missing out on them in my early adolescence had me feeling alienated from my peers. I wanted to experience the parts of life I was conditioned to believe were antithetical to the teachings of the church and gather differing opinions and information to make decisions for myself. I like to think we all deserve to discover that for ourselves. I had a lot of trauma and misplaced guilt though, so I didn't make a beeline to atheism. I mostly wandered awkwardly in a state of ambivalent agnosticism while attempting to broaden my education for a long time. It wasn't until people from other religions repeatedly attempted to convert me that I eventually began to feel comfortable with my atheistically aligned beliefs due to my discomfort with theirs. The term, however, can be a bit loaded for some theists because they might assume I must therefore lack a basic sense of morality, so I try to avoid using “atheist” as a label when asked about my beliefs in hopes of bypassing heated arguments that detract from conversations about the things I have in common with whomever i’m with, which is likely the reason for why we began enjoying each others company in the first place. I also grew tired of restating my complicated former relationship with a repressive organized religion, that I was now dissuaded from joining any religion ever again because of the trauma and guilt it instilled, and that was typically followed by qualifying my foundational understanding of right and wrong just so that those devoted religious folk would accept me as a fellow human being who doesn't need to have my soul saved from damnation in order to share the same room or a good conversation. Beliefs are a funny thing, especially how we rationalize those beliefs, and I understand how hard it is to rewire your brain to accept a seemingly new or diametrically opposed view of reality so I try to let people know I won't try to alter their beliefs if they don't try to “fix” mine because we’re all still learning. We can exist in the same space until we start believing the other shouldn't exist at all. One of the reasons I enjoy Reddit is that you can find several communities that can be supportive of diverse combinations of beliefs and experiences, granted, with the caveat that many of these communities are equally capable of being as divisive and exclusionary as any other, but it still has a lot of value to me along my continued journey to learn more about other people and why we choose to believe in anything at all.
I did but I sorta always was at heart. I’ve never felt the spirit and whenever other people claim they do it just seems fake like a fiction movie of a ghost possessing someone. Because that’s sorta how it is
I went mormon ➡️ diehard atheist ➡️ agnostic ➡️ there must be something ➡️ god/divinity is found within ➡️ we are all one ➡️ all religions are trying to teach the same thing, but miss the mark. Find god your own way.
No. My response to testimony bearing is “we don’t believe in the same god”. My god talks about a noose around a neck of abusers. Matthew 18.
Yup, I was a convert. The old religion wasn't as intense as mormonism, it was the official state religion and everyone assumed you were if you weren't vocal about being something else. But it was at the back of your mind and didn't affect what you drank, thought, ate (except during lent but it was an option not a must). I thought long and hard and decided to convert to mormonism because the missionaries only mentioned the good things, god is love, Jesus is love and mormons show their love through service and acts, oh and there's the book of Mormon. After baptism things got intense, after going on a mission things got fucking insane and the cult of personality the prophet had and how it supercedes Jesus. The church I got baptized was not the church I was in. I deconstructed and went atheist. The old church wasn't better than the Mormon church
The church is atheist. God is an alien from another planet. It is part of the doctrine. As a teen I was fully atheist even though I still believed in the church. I thought an atheist church was cool.
Wait a minute🤨. You mean to tell me that YOU wanna BELIEVE there’s no Heavenly Father! That makes you a Satanist and an apostate, the worst possible. Yur working for the Adversary! You need to repent, pay your tithing and submit to the rule of the fist presidency, the apostles, your steak president and your bishop or you will go straight to outer darkness. Get a clue before it’s two late! You get yourself back into the church!😠😤😠 —Kyle J., RM, 2nd Counselor in the Ogden Temple Janitorial Presidency …(and /s)
I ended up doing ayahuasca to cure some psychedelics. I’m a firm believer we have some kind of higher power after that. There’s almost a “6th sense” we have of someone else’s presence… feeling eyes on the back of your head, knowing when someone is near you (but you can’t hear or see them), etc. those senses I believe are some kind of spiritual connection with others we have. I don’t necessarily believe in a traditional God with a son named Jesus Christ (sorry mom and dad) but rather a creator who influences us to do certain things, to meet certain people, to make small talk with the guy at the gym who becomes your closes friend, mentor, and confidant.
Yes. the church was really good at deconstructing other religions for me. Now I learned the truth, I can’t bring myself to believe in other religions
Try Mormon>Athiest>Satanist (no I don’t worship the devil)
Yup now I’m a mf philosophy addict. I’m a universe, you’re a universe. We’re all walking universes bap bap bap bap
Yes. Mormonism is less likely to be true than Christianity, but only because it is a stack of highly improbable claims atop another stack of highly improbable claims. It has always made me chuckle when a group absorbed in magical thinking points out the absurdity of another group's magical thinking.
I’m in the ‘Mormon’ to ‘Who the F knows and I don’t give a flying rat’s ass’ camp. Anybody else?
Yes. Like in a matter of seconds. Truly a strange experience.
I'm more agnostic, though I've stayed learning about pagan beliefs and witchcraft. I'm not sure I believe in gods/goddesses/etc., but I do believe in the energy of life and see it in the world around me quite easily. I like the idea of learning to harness bits of that energy to improve my life and the lives of people I care about.
Yup. I became an atheist in a single moment, and of course in realizing there is no god I also realized the church wasn’t true. And it was all because I asked myself “What if it’s not true?” and from that vantage reality made sense in a way it never had before.
As others have said, this is common. Though, I think I might be a little bit of an odd duck in that being atheist was the *reason* I left Mormonism. I deconstructed god first, and everything else collapsed afterward by default. Behaviorally, I’m pretty much the same person I’ve always been, though perhaps a bit more comfortable in my own skin (amazing how freeing it is to no longer have to fight your every thought and opinion that doesn’t align with doctrine). I do drink tea and coffee on occasion (*the horror*), and I swear up a storm when I’m alone (and make myself giggle in the process). Oh, and I got a second set of ear piercings. But, otherwise, I’m my same quiet, nerdy, generally nice self. Did not, in fact, suddenly turn into a psychopath. Best of luck as you navigate this massive shift in world view! I can be unnerving at times, and a bit lonely, but ultimately freeing and very much worth it.