2bizE wrote:I think a middle.ground exists, too. I am stuck someplace between active and exmo/athiest. I still attend church with my family. I believe the church leadership has strayed from the primary principles of the original church teachings. I think the restored gospel is a fraud anyway. So, essentially, we are being led astray from false teachings toward more falsehoods. I do think there is much good taught in the church. The people are my friends and are fellow deceived.
If that is not somewhere in the middle, then I don't know what is middle. Does the church recognize a middle area of the gospel? Maybe. The recent leaks revealed a member grading system. This acknowledges not everyone is top celestial material and that there is the need for some middle area.
From the point of view of our believing family, ward members, and spouses the middle way is,
at best, mildly tolerated as long as we continue to act like believers and don't bring up our points of view in Gospel Doctrine class. I recognize valiant souls like Bill Reel who is doing his best to make the nuanced, middle way view more acceptable. FairMormon is kind of making middle way possible by acknowledging issues with faithful answers and a number of pastoral apologists like Patrick Mason, Richard Bushman, and Tyrell Givens quietly grant a need for more tolerance of a middle way.
The problem that I have with these all of these efforts is that they all effectively support all public elements of LDS culture. They all effectively tell you to stick with three hours of church, pay tithing, spread the gospel (ie., say nice things about the church), keep a temple recommend, maintain the Word of Wisdom, and revere Joseph Smith and his successors. Above all, we have to honor the "one true church" mindset with the insistence that LDS priesthood power exclusively
owns crucial, universal ordinances of salvation. Problems with feminism, LGBT issues, and the cult of virtue signalling might be regretted, but the current LDS policies will not be discussed beyond repeating the litany of official LDS positions on each of these issues.
The NOM forum acted as a place where all of us "former believers with faithful spouses", wounded semi-believers, hopeful Christians, faithful agitators, and number of snarky malcontents could gather comfortably. We could at least know that we were not the only skeptics among the faithful. We knew that we were not the crazy person in our fractured relationship with the institutional LDS church. This is our desperate instantiation of a middle way and the most official acknowledgment we can expect is getting a suspicious letter grade deep in the bowels of the church office building.
or anything specific that might be of interest to some here...LGBT suicides/suffering and that sort of thing.
Yes. Please. Or if anyone is watching, maybe they can start a thread here?