Sister Lay and Sister Conoy stopped by my apartment today, great young people doing what they believe to be the right thing, to them it is the essential thing that could potentially change my eternal fate. How much more selfless can you get serving for two years and paying the bill? Missionaries are definitely annoying to people, not me. Most don’t understand where they are mentally coming from when they do visit. I do. I’m glad they knocked, but I’m not sure they are—especially when they mention my ex-communicated, heretical name to those members I once saw every week, some of whom I taught, led, played tennis with, hiked with, helped people move with, and a few who were so kind they actually picked me up from the psyche ward after my split and breakdown unlike the others who called me “creepy” and wanted to “bash my face in” when they heard I left the church and how. I somewhat regret telling them the story of the Bishop (my “advocate” at my excommunication court) was later picked up soliciting sex with a teenager in Florida while on a business trip. Nothing says “this is all bullshit” like a story like that and the Boyd K. Packer quote, “The truth is not always useful” he said to the entire church educational system.
I hope the most important thing these wonderful people take away (besides the Smarties I gave them) is that if and when they choose to learn the actual truth about the church—and they choose to not just ignore it as so many do—that they seek support and help from others outside of the Mormon cult so they don’t end up severely mental ill, running naked down the street until they can be straight-jacketed, or even dead from suicide from the overwhelming cognitive dissonance that will blow up their entire foundational world view.
Losing Jesus and Joseph as my close personal friends within my brain physically damaged me and made me nearly fetal and catatonic (though I never made it to the straight-jacket stage, that happened to someone else I know personally). No one can ever understand that without having passed through it. My ex wife certainly couldn’t. She said so. It’s the main reason I left and we divorced beyond all the other reasons. When I realized she would never be able to be okay in my presence again having realized the truth and never wanting to go back to the lies again she begged me to not “burst [their] bubbles.” I chose to leave in the worst way possible, by falling in love and cheating with a teacher who loved me truly unconditionally. My wife simply couldn’t. She’d been too programmed.
Thankfully, missionaries like this (and I have worked with hundreds of them having taught them at the MTC and led them as Assistant to the President on my mission) have a very well-established spiritual and psychological defense mechanism in place to protect them from a total mental break if they choose to use it, as so many do. It allows them to compartmentalize my accounts as lies, half-truths, sophistry or mental illness because of the well-constructed, self-preserving lies they have been taught themselves with cult-like precision. They would just tell me I’m the one deluding myself and there is no fighting faith, it is defined by lack of evidence, in fact, the less evidence the better and more faith-testing. They’ll say that I’m “past feeling” and unable to receive the confirmations of “the Spirit” any longer, or that “people are imperfect, even if the church is perfect,” or I’m “just an adulterer” because everyone who argues against the church is almost always an adulterer if you look hard enough (which in this case is true). So they’ll be fine.
And, if I really am the one deluding myself, I cannot wait to happily take my place in Mormon hell rather than agree to the evil bullshit that is Mormon doctrine. Hopefully, Jesus will at least grant me one question before shuffling me off to a “kingdom of lesser glory” than his: “Yo Jesus, what the actual FUCK?”
Mormon doctrine—and to a broader extent—religious fundamentalism of any kind is fucking bad for humanity. It has caused more pain and suffering than any other single cause including most of the bloodiest, ugliest wars in human history. That wasn’t “humans being humans” that was “humans following their god” allowing them to see other humans has less than human, animals, heathens, “savages” to be converted or decapitated per their god’s command. True evil cannot exist without God commanding it in His holy name.
“It is better that one man should perish than a nation dwindle and perish in unbelief, Nephi. So dress in black, wait for Laban to get drunk, decapitate him, steal his clothes (don’t worry, I’ll remove the thick, black, blood-clotted stains from them magically), dump the body, and threaten the keeper of the brass plates so you can steal them and force him and his family to follow you and your god, me, the one true God. Then for the rest of your days an entire nation and religion will be built up on the gruesome murder you committed to get them and kidnap the person entrusted to keep them safe.”
“Take that 13-year-old nanny to be your wife and don’t tell your wife, Joseph.”
“Command that man to give you his daughter to wife, Joseph.”
“Destroy that printing press, Joseph, so my servant will not be slandered!”
“Kill your son Abraham to prove you put me above all else.”
“Whore your daughters out rather than have your family killed.”
“Decimate every woman, child, and animal in this nation or else they will rise up again.”
“Kill that woman for not wearing a burka and tempting you beyond your strength to resist.”
“Destroy this plane and all the innocents on it for my great glory.”
“Kill and eat the flesh of these Jews that I have provided to feed you during your crusades in my name.”
Any God who would command any of these things is never worthy of adoration at any level. God is so much greater than any of that. One day humans will progress to eventually understand this. Just not today.