OMG, your reply is the most Mormon thing I have read in a very long time!
Dr. Shades wrote: ↑Wed Mar 26, 2025 6:14 am
But it's a lie.
This is a core problem in Mormonism: There's more to the world than "truth" or "lie." There's also: Belief. Misunderstanding. Sincerity. Mystery. Evasion. Sensation. Evolution. Authenticity. Hypothesis. Synthesis. Fiction. Memory. Guessing. Metaphor. Invention. Opinion. Exaggeration. Trickery. The Unknown and the Unknowable. (I keep adding to the list. We'll see how many I can come up with by the time I post this.)
Some of those words, depending on context, could be equated with "truth" or "lie." But not all of them and not in all contexts.
If I form a hypothesis that I sincerely believe but my hypothesis is false, that's not a lie. There was no intent to deceive.
Alternatively, I've told a couple stories about my youth, but nowhere near all of them, and I've left out significant portions of the stories I have told. That's not a lie either. It's reducing a memory to its most relevant portions given the topic. (Even if that could somehow be construed as lying by omission, none of us have any sort of "right" to each other's life stories that would make omission of details "lying.")
One way or another, Mormonism always comes down to that:
Either all of it's true or none of it is. This seems to have only grown, like a cancer, in the past 20+ years, and ex-Mormons are just as stuck in that binary as active Mormons.
I'm using "ex-Mormon" here very loosely, so I'll put some parameters on the term, just for the sake of this particular conversation: How many hours one spends thinking about or discussing Mormon-related topics, despite no longer being an active member. There's now a whole cottage industry of professional ex-Mormons, many of whom spend more time thinking about Mormonism than my tithe-paying, temple-going parents do. At some point, "ex-Mormon" becomes a personal identity that's just as compelling (and destructive) as Mormonism itself.
SaturdaysVoyeur wrote: ↑Wed Mar 26, 2025 12:05 am
Well, that sounds petty
and it doesn't make me sound smart. I better just say, "Well, of course, because it's not true."
Dr. Shades wrote: ↑Wed Mar 26, 2025 6:14 am
Not if it isn't the real reason. Then it becomes a lie.
Your underlying assumption here is that there's One Real Reason. Very much like One True Church.
Sure, it
could be a lie. If I knew it to be false, but I intentionally represented it as true, then that's a lie. (Will someone please buy this man a Dictionary/Thesaurus?? You can find them bundled together. Like quads.) I'm sure some ex-Mormons do lie about why they left, even if only for self-preservation.
I suspect that, more often, it's a matter of adding reasons post-hoc. Perhaps, in retrospect, their first temple experience feels culty
now, but they describe it in such a way as to depict it as feeling culty
at the time. That might be a lie, or it might not be. Are they gaining insight into their past feelings? Or are they bandwagon-hopping because it's currently fashionable in the ex-Mormon sphere to call the church a cult? That's how we would determine whether it's a lie or not, but (given how personal and internal the question is), it would be pretty much impossible to ever really know either way. And also it's not really any of our business.
My own most prominent or pressing reasons for leaving have been different at different points in my life. When I was going to a secular university and telling my parents that I was still faithfully attending all my church meetings? Indisputably a lie.
But there were a lot of reasons I didn't want to remain active, and the way those reasons blended into each other over time is not subject to the "truth/lie" binary that you want to cram them into. There were reasons I understood at the time, reasons I've come to understand with time and perspective, and probably reasons that will dawn on me later in life. That doesn't make them lies.
Humans are more complex than that. Mormonism is more complex than that. The refusal, or perhaps inability, to accept and deal with that complexity is eating ex-Mormons alive. In my opinion.
SaturdaysVoyeur wrote: ↑Wed Mar 26, 2025 12:05 am
To this day, I'm not inactive because "it not true." I grew up surrounded by Evangelical Christians. I had more than enough exposure to the idea that Mormonism's unique narrative is not literally true.
Oh, this should be a fun one! I was
never quite sure what happened to Joseph in the Sacred Grove. At times, I parroted what I knew I was supposed to say. That was a lie, albeit a lie I desperately wanted some certainty about. How ironic! I once
wanted to be more black-and-white in my thinking! Better to just say I wanted to sin. Which would be mostly a lie, but not entirely. There was fresh air outside this binary box. I could smell it, and I wanted to fully breathe it in. Let's leave it at: Tripping your way through first love in college when you've never even kissed someone...well, perhaps some of you can relate....
Thing is, I'm
still not sure what, if anything, happened to Joseph in the grove. I've always thought he had some sort of transcendent experience that, through a combination of intentional deception (i.e., lying), Joseph's talent for storytelling on the fly, combined with the difficulty of describing transcendent experiences to another person....whatever it was, it quickly took on a life of its own.
I'm not lying. I'm not even hypothesizing. That's just been my long-held guess. The grove in Palmyra has a strange energy about it.
Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt that your "truth versus lie" construct is actually more of a "truth versus falsity" construct (i.e., one can be incorrect without being intentionally deceptive OR intentionally deceptive while still being correct), there's just so much we don't know or don't understand, I doubt I'm the only one whose experiences won't fit neatly into what your "truth/lie" framework allows for.
There's another thread on here that caught my attention, but it fits here, too. About a couple of Mormon podcasters who got on the church's bad side by trying to help struggling Mormons. All I could think was:
How many ex-Mormon podcasters do we need??
I called it a cottage industry, but it functions almost like a para-church auxiliary. It clearly isn't causing people to contemplate Mormonism any
less. At this point, a few of them have been professional ex-Mormons for longer than they were actual Mormons.
And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Except I think virtually all of them would say that's not what they're trying to do. That they're helping people escape a cult, or they're answering the difficult questions, or they're providing people with "The Truth" (which presumably will replace "The Lie").
But if a person is still thinking about and talking about Mormonism for at least several hours a week, can that person really be said to have
left Mormonism at all, as opposed to having simply replaced it? Ex-Mormonism really is a lot more like Mormonism than anybody wants to admit. An inverted, funhouse-mirror version of it, but still...I can't imagine watching General Conference anymore, or even watching someone else analyze it. The industry just doesn't seem to be serving the function they think they are or that they want to be.
I think by now I'd rather give Mormonism 10% of my money than 10% of my time and mental energy.
