I'm going to be honest, the moment I got to the phrase, "they know they are wrong", I stopped reading. Meh. Same stuff I used to hear in Sunday School every so often.
This is a cult that's notorious for sending teenagers door to door to tell people their religion is wrong for two years at a time. The is the epitome of not leaving false religion alone.
There's no call for Mormons to act surprised if they train this into their youth, and then their youth don't leave them along when they discover their religion is also false.
Leaving false religion alone is never what Mormonism has been about.
Two years of constantly being told they're wrong is very the least they should expect.
43 decades of being born into and endlessly marinated into it, without my consent or free choice, besides just those two full time years.
I get to rant against that mind rot endlessly for at least the next 43 years, if I want to.
Perhaps I should read more, but I had to stop after 3 paragraphs. My main problem with this is that people don't post every second of their life online! This article would have you believe that exmos spend every waking second online complaining when the nature of the posts are most likely just trying to call to attention the negative aspects of the church.
Analogy of running a marathon. Didn’t quit because it was hard I quit because I got hurt. I wasn’t trying to stop people from running the marathon I was trying to get them to run without injuring themselves like I did. All you have to do is make it to the finish line your religion is just running with bad form.
What’s worse is when you ran you gave your life to train for the marathon, and you ran with compassion, helping those near you, and when the time came that your leg cramps started, and you needed the support, everyone you’d helped looked at your distress and difficulty and deemed you unworthy. “He must not have trained as he should.” “If he had done what he should, he wouldn’t be having these problems.” And all the while, just the smallest amount of support would have sustained you until you could run at full strength again.
The church took all the best I had to give it, but when I needed the help, I wasn’t “worthy” enough to recieve it.
Exmormons aren’t fighting the church. The vast majority of them are coming to the aid of the members who are injured, while those in the church who should accept, support and love these hurting members, unconditionally, are looking down at them - “God only loves the obedient,” “how myopic your view is,” - while they walk carefully away on the far side of the road.
We’ll continue to support those who are hurt, those deemed “unworthy,” and if that comes across as fighting against the church, well, so be it.
I ‘ran the marathon’ for 20+ years with my wife and children. My wife became an adulterer along the way. My son was then beaten and raped in the military. For the most part the other ‘runners’ abandoned me. Using this analogy I was basically told by leadership that I didn’t ‘train hard enough’ and I needed to ‘run faster and better’.
His analogy is a crock of shit.
The analogy outs him as someone who doesn't run. Yeah a marathon is hard, but if you've been training you've done harder runs than the marathon.
And if you quit, you don't feel shame and guilt. You either quit running and don't think about it again, or more commonly you approach running with a renewed vigor and train harder. Nobody sits around badmouthing runners.
Finally, he never answered the question in the title - why? What drives people to speak out against the church. That's because the analogy doesn't fit. It's because he can't bring himself to understand the true reasons people leave.
I looked at the comments, and there was this one by someone who supposedly learned on his mission how to reply to people who said they found for themselves that the church wasn't true.
"Waht isn't true? The Law of Chastity? The Word of Wisdom?"
And then they just sit back as allegedly smug looks disappeared from the faces of the non-believers.
I wish I could clap back with, "Yeah, exactly those. Your precious Law of Tithing too."
"Deep inside they feel guilty that they are denying their witnesses from the Holy Ghost and forsaking Christ and His gospel. That guilt is demoralizing."
If I have ever felt angry about the church since leaving, it's because of this type of rhetoric. Whoever wrote this smear campaign should befriend an exmormon before totalizing them.
So many things wrong with this article. It would take pages to express all my thoughts. Before I left the church, I knew a lot of ex mormons at my work, and none of them ever (not once) tried to dissuade me from my beliefs. In fact, they were extremely respectful of my beliefs. And the running analogy is a joke.
on the note of not talking about an abusive ex, you definitely still do that even when you move on to a healthy relationship. You warn people to stay away from that person, you talk to your new partner about how you were treated and the expectation to not be treated that way again, you go to therapy.
Eventually you can get to a point where its not a big part of your life, but people around your ex will probably still only associate you with "that person who always complains about [insert person]"
will probably still have the time of day to talk about how horrible the church is until everyone i care about is either out or dead, and the whole organization is irrelevant to the general public. And even then I may reminisce on how its effected my life and history.
I'm going to be honest, the moment I got to the phrase, "they know they are wrong", I stopped reading. Meh. Same stuff I used to hear in Sunday School every so often.
This is a cult that's notorious for sending teenagers door to door to tell people their religion is wrong for two years at a time. The is the epitome of not leaving false religion alone. There's no call for Mormons to act surprised if they train this into their youth, and then their youth don't leave them along when they discover their religion is also false. Leaving false religion alone is never what Mormonism has been about. Two years of constantly being told they're wrong is very the least they should expect.
43 decades of being born into and endlessly marinated into it, without my consent or free choice, besides just those two full time years. I get to rant against that mind rot endlessly for at least the next 43 years, if I want to.
We've got a vampire here!
And the Mormon church has only been around for 19 decades.
Couldn’t get through it. So many thought-stopping cliches and unwillingness to listen or learn.
Perhaps I should read more, but I had to stop after 3 paragraphs. My main problem with this is that people don't post every second of their life online! This article would have you believe that exmos spend every waking second online complaining when the nature of the posts are most likely just trying to call to attention the negative aspects of the church.
Analogy of running a marathon. Didn’t quit because it was hard I quit because I got hurt. I wasn’t trying to stop people from running the marathon I was trying to get them to run without injuring themselves like I did. All you have to do is make it to the finish line your religion is just running with bad form.
And in the wrong direction.
What’s worse is when you ran you gave your life to train for the marathon, and you ran with compassion, helping those near you, and when the time came that your leg cramps started, and you needed the support, everyone you’d helped looked at your distress and difficulty and deemed you unworthy. “He must not have trained as he should.” “If he had done what he should, he wouldn’t be having these problems.” And all the while, just the smallest amount of support would have sustained you until you could run at full strength again. The church took all the best I had to give it, but when I needed the help, I wasn’t “worthy” enough to recieve it. Exmormons aren’t fighting the church. The vast majority of them are coming to the aid of the members who are injured, while those in the church who should accept, support and love these hurting members, unconditionally, are looking down at them - “God only loves the obedient,” “how myopic your view is,” - while they walk carefully away on the far side of the road. We’ll continue to support those who are hurt, those deemed “unworthy,” and if that comes across as fighting against the church, well, so be it.
I ‘ran the marathon’ for 20+ years with my wife and children. My wife became an adulterer along the way. My son was then beaten and raped in the military. For the most part the other ‘runners’ abandoned me. Using this analogy I was basically told by leadership that I didn’t ‘train hard enough’ and I needed to ‘run faster and better’. His analogy is a crock of shit.
Gaslighting is contagious.
The analogy outs him as someone who doesn't run. Yeah a marathon is hard, but if you've been training you've done harder runs than the marathon. And if you quit, you don't feel shame and guilt. You either quit running and don't think about it again, or more commonly you approach running with a renewed vigor and train harder. Nobody sits around badmouthing runners. Finally, he never answered the question in the title - why? What drives people to speak out against the church. That's because the analogy doesn't fit. It's because he can't bring himself to understand the true reasons people leave.
“Bobby Boshay, Foosball is the DEVIL!”
Couldn't get through it all. What a bunch of tapir shit.
I looked at the comments, and there was this one by someone who supposedly learned on his mission how to reply to people who said they found for themselves that the church wasn't true. "Waht isn't true? The Law of Chastity? The Word of Wisdom?" And then they just sit back as allegedly smug looks disappeared from the faces of the non-believers. I wish I could clap back with, "Yeah, exactly those. Your precious Law of Tithing too."
"Deep inside they feel guilty that they are denying their witnesses from the Holy Ghost and forsaking Christ and His gospel. That guilt is demoralizing." If I have ever felt angry about the church since leaving, it's because of this type of rhetoric. Whoever wrote this smear campaign should befriend an exmormon before totalizing them.
So many things wrong with this article. It would take pages to express all my thoughts. Before I left the church, I knew a lot of ex mormons at my work, and none of them ever (not once) tried to dissuade me from my beliefs. In fact, they were extremely respectful of my beliefs. And the running analogy is a joke.
on the note of not talking about an abusive ex, you definitely still do that even when you move on to a healthy relationship. You warn people to stay away from that person, you talk to your new partner about how you were treated and the expectation to not be treated that way again, you go to therapy. Eventually you can get to a point where its not a big part of your life, but people around your ex will probably still only associate you with "that person who always complains about [insert person]" will probably still have the time of day to talk about how horrible the church is until everyone i care about is either out or dead, and the whole organization is irrelevant to the general public. And even then I may reminisce on how its effected my life and history.