Over the years, I’ve watched former mormon blogs come and go. And posters on various former mormon boards join and leave. (Kiley recently talked about it here). From what I can discern, there appears to be a cycle that some former mormons run through. At first there can be a lot of emotions; hurt, betrayal, ...
This is the second part of what has turned out to be a surprisingly lengthy two-part series on the perception of ex-Mormons as being angry and causes and reasons for anger that may exist, originally posted at Irresistible (Dis)Grace here and here. Please read part I (if you haven’t already) here. 3. Why do ex-Mormons ...
A while back on reddit, a Mormon stumbled into the popular (and still growing) ex-Mormon reddit to ask the ex-Mormon denizens a few questions. Many of the questions were quite patronizing (despite the poster’s stated desire to “support whatever [our] beliefs [were] in a non-patronizing way”), and the proceeding conversation was less than pretty. However, it ...
I have to say that, a year ago, I knew of only a handful of LDS families that were said to have gay members, but I knew nothing of any challenges they may have faced because of this. I had no knowledge of damage that had been done to families by the Church’s involvement in ...
The answer is yes. If I could have been a liberal, non traditional mormon, I might have continued to be mormon. There is no space for openly liberal mormon in the Utah LDS church. There certainly wasn’t when I left. I did not see then (over fifteen years ago) anyway to be a liberal, feminist ...
One of the big stereotypes about people who leave the church is that anyone who would do such a terrible thing must have done so because they were too lazy to follow God’s commandments or because they just wanted to sin. We’ve probably been accused (either explicitly or implicitly) of these (or a variation thereof) ...
I was just reading a fascinating new post at Times & Seasons — Wanted: Greener Grass. I won’t lie; part of what amused me was the link to a study of children’s drawings that captured their preconceived notions of what kind of person a scientist is (with implications as to the gender stereotypes harbored by ...
Over at the faithful Mormon blog Faith-Promoting Rumor is a discussion enticingly titled “Do Relationships Make the Church True and False?” This post is a short enough one that you should just go over there and read it, but I guess I will still highlight some points here…when I was reading it, I will say ...
A while back, there was a husband-wife couple of speakers who came to one of my classes to talk about their mission to Papua New Guinea for several years. I wrote about that on my blog a while back, highlighting one of the things they said about their children that particularly struck me. These children ...
This is a question I just had for everyone…because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this blogging, it’s that people have such widely differing relationships with Mormonism. I’ve taken for granted that people are looking for the same “things” from it as I was/am, but that is not the case. So, my question ...
One of the more difficult things that came with recognizing that the Mormon Church wasn’t 100%, literally “True” was that this paradigm shift introduced incredible levels of uncertainty into my knowledge of God and the purpose of life. Views: 830 ...
We recently discussed the various names we use to refer to ourselves (liberal Mormon, NOM, post-Mormon, ex-Mormon, etc.) depending on how we each perceive our relationship with Mormonism. I’m interested in much more direct question, which I’m never quite sure how to answer. Are you a Mormon? It seems like a straightforward question, but I ...
I’m certain that this has been discussed over and over in numerous ways and in numerous formats on the internet…but…what do you think your identity is relating to Mormonism and what do you think that identity signifies? For example, we each know that there’s Further Light and Knowledge (FLAK), and New Order Mormonism (NOM), and ...
When I left the church, I found that more things made sense to me. I didn’t have to start rationalizing things to make it fit in with doctrine, and I could just believe in the world based on how I saw and experienced it. So, I’d definitely say that when I left the church, I ...
According to the philosopher Mircea Eliade, of whose work I learned at BYU, every community, tribe, or nation requires an origin myth. The account of a community’s or practice’s origin has far reaching consequences because it implies how they relate to the cosmos, which is necessary for human beings to imbue their world with shared ...