I was raised Mormon. Mormonism is somewhat unique in that it claims to have a modern prophet and leadership that are directly led by god, and it strongly encourages members to pray to god and ask god for confirmation that this is true. Mormons are also taught that god would not allow their prophet to lead them astray, and that your local leaders are also inspired by god in what they do in their official capacity.
I was a missionary when shit started to break. I had a nervous breakdown; I am on the autism spectrum (although that diagnosis wasn’t available at that time; it was almost 30 years ago, back in DSM-III), and being a missionary was a lot too much for me for many, many reasons. I became suicidal. My leaders–again, people who were supposed to be called by god and led through inspiration from god–insisted that I must be acting in some sinful way, and that it was sin that had led to me being suicidal. They encouraged me to read my scriptures and pray more–as if I wasn’t already doing that a lot as a missionary–and to repent of my sins (whatever they were, because I sure as fuck didn’t know). If I was not sinning in some way, then Satan never could have taken hold in my heart, and Satan was obviously what was causing me to be suicidal. Obviously these commandments did not help, because I wasn’t doing anything ‘wrong’ in the first place.
But that leads to a problem: I believed that these people were called by god, and acting under god’s instructions, because I had received a spiritual witness. However, it was clear that they were wrong; I was not acting in a sinful manner (certainly less so than other missionaries!), and I had nothing to repent of. So these things are clearly contradictory: if I have received a spiritual confirmation from god that these men are led by him, then what they are saying must be from god and therefore true. But I know my own actions, and I know that I haven’t done anything that is sinful under any remotely normal definition of sin. Therefore, the feelings that I believed were spiritual confirmation must not have been spiritual confirmation at all.
Once you realize that feelings can not be a reliable way of knowing if something is actually true or not (or True, for that matter), then all of it falls apart. You realize that ‘answers’ to prayers are just feelings, not communication from the divine. The bible is suddenly a book of myths. Miracles dissolve like fog in the sun. When you look at religion–not just Mormonism, but all religion, and you compare it against things that can be verified empirically, none of the claims stand up.
Even though the foundations of my faith cracked while I was a missionary, I was unable to accept the meaning for several years, because Mormonism is a cult, and it’s very hard to escape even when you know it’s garbage.
Well hello fellow exmo. I gave it up in my late teens. Found myself playing "devil's advocate" too much in discussions with my friends. Tried to pray about it all Joseph Smith style, but just got absolutely nothing. Realized that I had never enjoyed Church, never felt at peace there, and just generally came to the conclusion that the essential problem of free will and comparative religion and the extremely specific truth claims that Mormonism requires weren't holding up. I was also completely eeshed out by the thought of a patriarchal blessing, and I felt no calling whatsoever to go on a mission. I wasn't as traumatized as some, growing up in the Mormon hinterlands of the American south (NE Florida) meant the LDS were a little less high and mighty and I had a circle outside of the church, but the pressure to conform and stay is very real.
I only resigned formally when my mom sicced the missionaries on my never-Mo wife and me after I moved to Texas.
Ultimately, even as religions go, its theology is very silly and its most ardent adherents are real jerks.
True, but there is an almost childlike literalism to the small amount that is unique about Mormon theology, plus it all arose in the era of the printing press and governmental archives, so there are fewer excuses. It's also culturally very top down and high pressure, as you are keenly aware. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the mainline LDS church a cult, but it's definitely closer than, say, the Episcopalians.
When I look at Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE model for high-demand religions, the Mormon church ticks most of the boxes to some degree. Take behavior control: “4.Control types of clothing and hairstyles”. Okay, you don’t have to wear only white, and a specific model of white sneakers. But you are expected to wear opaque clothing that covers temple garments completely, and wear clothing that is free of an ‘offensive’ imagery or text. Beards and long hair are strongly socially discouraged, and will get you kicked out of BYU, as will visible tattoos and piercings. When you skip to “4. Regulate diet – food and drink, hunger and/or fasting”, well there’s the word of wisdom, and fast Sundays. And it just kinds goes on and on. They don’t do some of the things (murder, rape, etc.), but they do a lot of them to some degree.
At a minimum, it’s an unhealthy degree of authoritarian control.
Our pastor did a whole six-week long study of Acts, talking about how we needed to give more so we could fund mission trips and whatnot. I got caught up in it all (he was quite the orator, I’ll give him that) and donated a decent chunk of the money I’d been saving up to get a new iPod.
My sister went on one of the mission trips and had to pay for literally everything out of her own pocket. Despite the plentiful donations for, allegedly, that express purpose.
Cherry on the cake was that they soon broke ground on a new youth group building (which we didn’t need), complete with a coffee house (with prices and menu comparable to Starbucks). All I could think of was Jesus getting pissed at the vendors and money changers in the temple and flipping tables over. “‘My house will be called a house of prayer’, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers’.”
That sounds pretty heartbreaking, I’m sorry you’ve gone through that. Hope you’re in a better place today. If you’re OK with me asking, were your parents under chronic stress to both have developed such psychological traits?
I grew up with very devout parents who raised me in a particularly conservative Calvinist Christian denomination, and I bought it all for years for a few reasons. For one, everyone I trusted seemed so utterly convinced by all these things I had been raised to see as fact. Also, the incredibly biased sources I was given for any questions portrayed anyone of different faiths or beliefs as deluded at best or evil at worst, which didn't really make their positions appealing.
I prided myself on faith, because when I ran into something that didn't make sense I'd be like "Wow, it sucks that that might make some people stumble, but I'm going to do my best to just trust God on this one."
The first cracks started to form when I started to realize the sources I trusted might not be trustworthy. Despite all the weird religious special pleading, I'd otherwise been taught decent critical thinking, and I started to see actual rebuttals to the religious apologetics I'd been raised on, rather than the pathetic strawmen conservative Christian writers had constructed, it made me question the apologetics and the writers I'd thought were upfront, honest, and wise.
Still, I held onto the thread of faith. This stuff had been absolutely drilled into me, I had been raised not to let anything shake that, and I was starting to discover I really didn't like the idea of losing my faith when that was the glue of my family and every other meaningful relationship in my life.
Any time I made friends (mostly online, some through college) who weren't within that big Christian bubble I'd been raised in and reinforced, myself, though, it raised this weird uncomfortable thought in the back of my head: "If friends, or really anyone end up suffering for all eternity for not having this religion, how exactly am I supposed to deal with that knowledge for eternity to make heaven the bliss it's supposed to be?" If this eternal soul of mine is perfectly able to be, like, transcendentally happy forever while knowing it's all on the backs of billions of people suffering for eternity, that soul isn't me anymore. In a weird way, the idea of heaven being something that would fundamentally make me something unrecognizable made the concept make a whole lot less sense.... Sooo I tried not to think about it.
This went on for a few years, concerns and doubts growing quietly, and this one day, someone was trying to talk to me about ghosts. He asked if I believed in ghosts in the first place and I said "No." and he was downright surprised because, you know, all these people say they've seen ghosts! He says he's seen ghosts! And, yeah, I don't find that compelling.
I went home and thought about that, then thought about the purported evidence for ghosts, then thought about the defenses various religions made for their beliefs, considered why I didn't buy them... Started to realize a parallel here- and then I buried that line of thinking. I was not okay losing my community. I was less and less certain I believed, but I still wanted to play the part so it would keep my faith going.
COVID happened, as did the BLM protests of 2020, and it suddenly became extremely clear that my community kind of fucking sucked. That popped the lid on my thoughts and I started to look in earnest at what I believed, and why other people with the same general beliefs could think that treating people as other people was optional.
Ultimately, I ended up in an epistemological situation. A number of the "facts" of the Bible were patently untrue, with the same sorts of errors I'd seen as gotchas against other religions. The arguments I'd seen for belief were much more obviously poorly formulated when I compared them to near-identical arguments for other religions. I realized my epistemology had a big fucking problem with it, and that problem was the belief in faith as indicative of truth. Oh, hey, look at that, people can and have believed every possible position on faith. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?
So I let it go. I let the faith go. I let the bad argumentation go. I let myself let go of the morally absurd positions I'd been boxed into by a bunch of ancient writings. I by and large lost that community, but I had started reaching out to make friends outside of it for a bit now. I had something, and that made it easier.
My family is still in my life, though thankfully several hundred miles away. They still are pretty unhappy about the whole situation, even more upset than they are about me being trans, which I finally realized I was able to admit to myself after letting go of the religious dogma.
Anyway, it took me a long time to get here, and I can't help but be upset that 26 years of my life were colored by a view of the world that I find morally unconscionable now, but at least I got to ramble about it on lemmy to almost the character limit.
Was raised going to church each sunday, but approaching confirmation age I realised I couldn't mesh faith with my understanding of the world. That was it for me really, I'm quite open to the idea of god(s), ghosts, magic or other forms of the supernatural, but until there's actual proof, I can't believe in it.
This was a long time ago, but I had to go to the methodist version of confirmation. It was not any one thing that made me stop believing, but many little things. What I could not get over was the “virgin” birth of Jesus. They talked for weeks about this and the “miracle” got more and more ridiculous over the lesson. Joseph got played.
The funny part is how that word supposedly may translate better as "maiden" than "virgin", as in "young girl" rather than someone who has not yet had intercourse. I wonder how many people have been beheaded for asking about such things.
Jesus Himself hated such over-religiosity - "Want religion that is pure and blameless? Take care of widows and orphans!!" - but sadly it seems the natural human condition.:-( The extreme irony is how He went to LARGE efforts to just constantly and consistently give the religious fruitcakes of His day the middle finger ("thou shaltest say to every Karen, fuck ye off"), which ofc got Him killed just like everyone else who tried it previously. So like... was Jesus one of the early atheists then, if you think about it like that...? :-D /s
But I mean, in all seriousness, the gist of Jesus' message seems to me to be to ignore the fruitcakes and just do the right thing, regardless ("the worker deserves his wages..."). So like, wtf does His teenie sexed-up mommy have anything to do with anything?! But Karens gonna Karen, I guess, and get all worked up about whatever drama they can either find or invent.
Ex-Christian here, I was in a pretty easy going division of Christianity, main thing was that we didn't believe in hell and were "metaphysical" (hippie way of saying we didn't strictly adhere to the Bible). I would often look after the smaller kids in Sunday school, and one day we put on the veggie tales version of Noah's ark, and I actually watched it while watching the kids, and somewhat considered the idea that if there was a flood, inevitably quite a few children would have been caught up in it and died, which in my mind a kind god would not have even contemplated. The level of cognitive dissonance I experienced kind of made me think about listening to atheistic opinions to double check I wasn't completely off the mark with my beliefs. So I listened to Dawkins, Hitchens, and Carl Sagans arguments then actually sat down and read the Bible. Not gonna say I accepted it overnight, but that is what eventually led me to where I am today as an atheist.
Not a lemming per se, but I stopped judging people based on the reasoning, “because God [supposedly] says so.” It takes effort, it really does, to hate things and people. It’s draining. I don’t know how so many religious people can be so focused on hatred, all the while forgetting the adage, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” You can easily cut yourself off from good experiences and relationships if you focus on staying “pure”. It’s lonely up on that pedestal.
I’ve been Christian-lite since before Trump was President but the rise of MAGA and strengthening of religious influence in politics has made me even more happy about my decision to step away from regular attendance or association with specifically religious groups. For them, righteousness trumps any amount of human suffering, and for some, suffering is a requirement of righteousness.
“Lemming” is used to refer to people that use Lemmy (lemmy.world, lemm.ee, etc.). Give that you have to have an account to post, you are def. a lemming.
I remember as a tween sitting there and praying and I just sorta realized wtf am I doing. I had always asked too many questions so I thought it weird an imaginary guy could hear everyone and everything at once. Then I was brought to a fmaily member's church where they told me my father was going to hell because he was a soldier, no ifs and or buts about it. So yeah if 10 year old me can realize it, I don't know what the hell is wrong with these fucking abrahamic religious zealots.
My mother worked at a catholic school; she was sexually harassed by the principal of the school and rather than firing the POS the diocese sent the whole staff to sexual harassment training. I found that to be a real slap in the face. Showed me they still had zero interest in accountability. I still appreciate the message behind a lot of what the church preaches (I loathe some of their stances, mostly related to sex and abortion) but I refuse to enable their hypocrisy.
I never was personally. But one thing that constantly gets me is religious people knowing their church people are touching little boys and girls and they still believe in them and their higher power.
I went to church as a young kid, but never really believed and by interacting with people from different denominations and religions it became clear that the church I went to claiming to be the right one out of thousands was pretty unlikely. Was able to talk my mom out of taking me around 12 years old, and spent a couple years as agnostic until deciding that science made a lot more sense and if we could prove there was a god, he would just be part of nature and therefore not really a god as taught in church.
So basically thinking critically about it undermined the teachings. I still kept the positive messaging, but also added in the positive messaging from other religions and honestly see them all as more cultural than mystical.
I still kept the positive messaging, but also added in the positive messaging from other religions and honestly see them all as more cultural than mystical.
I kind of relate to this, but I think in certain situations people may feel some spiritual forces akin to schizophrenia, and that religion might also have served for survival purposes since different cultures developed supernatural beliefs. Also, what positive messagings do you keep? Because I also find that Christianism and Buddhism for example have important ethical teachings that I try to follow.
My family was secular so I didn't have religion shoved down my throat as a kid. I got curious about church when I was around 8. I went for a year or so then had an epiphany about how nonsensical it was that a loving god would consign people to hell and stopped going.
I toyed around some with occultism in my teens but have been an atheist ever since. Nothing about religion makes sense and I live in the material, rational world.
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