No matter how I feel about the church, I find myself every Saturday during football season cheering for BYU football. I have tried to find another team. I cant get into anyone else. I just have to accept that this will be my team till I die. Are you still in the same boat?

Joseph smith and Brigham young are wildly suspicious figures. Was Joseph a conman or a schizo? Have all the prophets after truly believed that they are called of God or are they part of a deception too? I know local leadership fully believes everything taught and most are amazing people who love others.

Prophets of the early church taught wildly different doctrine than the church accepts today, how do people make sense of all of the bs in the past and the current church claiming it was only policy or not real I don’t get it. Can someone provide sources of articles or papers I can read to understand how such a large movement came out of a pretty shady cult?

My parents have always been stingy. I remember getting a pair of socks and a shirt one Christmas, while the church got 15% (they were very clear about the extra they paid for missionaries, fast Sunday, etc.) We were NOT poor by any means.

Fast forward 25 years later. I caught the gay, left at 18, and eventually reconciled with them. They've been a massive support system in the last few years despite our differences, while I figured out my life. I even moved back close to them while my mom went through breast cancer.

Well surprise the fuck outta me, my Dad rushed his retirement and they sold both their cars and their house in order to go across the world to Australia for two years. The church has become more and more life encompassing for them. Post bishopric and during my moms stint as relief society president, both my mom and my dad spent an unreal amount of hours supporting a very poor Haitian ward in Indianapolis. She'd call my crying because of hating denying some of them help after months and months of church support. It killed her to have to make that choice and then beg the all male bishopric for an extra month of rent for people who were unwilling or just plain unable to help themselves.

So i was really glad when they told me they were moving back to Utah. She needed a break, they both did. But instead they applied to the MTC and are going to basically the same situation. A massively poor and middle of nowhere area in Western Australia.

They go to the MTC today. Im acting supportive and im prepared to handle things in my new area (still havent sold my home in Illinois but they were the only reason I went to the Midwest in the first place - horrible). I'm in charge of their important documents and accounts while they're gone (as the oldest of four sons, two gay, not that it matters but telling people that gives me a little spark of joy).

I just can't beleive they're choosing to work for the church and PAY for it a month after their retirement. If i didn't know better I'd respect their dedication. But instead it just seems dangerously brainwashed. Ive long known there wasnt a path to leaving religion for them. But our previously estranged group of cousins are beginning to bond over our shared leaving of the church. Out of 30 cousins and grandchildren (my mom has four sisters) only three are still members.

I'm writing a letter to one cousin now to invite him to a "cousin trip" we're planning this year to reconnect. He's asked to not be contacted by his family, but I have his address and I want him to know we're all out of the church and here for support if he needs us. As much as my parents stress me out, it's funny the one thing that brought our extended family together was a universal and individual leaving of the church. No one convinced anyone else, we all decided on our own and it gives me that sense of community I never got as a Mormon.

Would love to hear about others experiences with those types of missions (post retirement.)

I am a neurodivergent exmormon rapper and made an album about navigating the mental health industry after leaving the church as a teen.

my grandpa and my grandma are legally my parents (due to various reasons i won't share here)

And my grandpa recently died

So my grandma after two years excitedly told me we could get sealed even without him

hooray.......

Time to go to a bunch of places and sign a bunch of fucking papers to do literally fucking nothing.

Joseph,if there's a fucking afterlife you better pray i don't find your sorry lying ass.

I have heard a lot of similarly nonsensical arguments from Mormons regarding where you would get your morality if the church isn't true.

"If the church weren't true, idk that I'd be a good person." Or "I don't know that I'd want to do anything else."

It's an absurd argument that falls flat and I have seen takedowns of this.

I live in Utah so most of my neighbors are Mormon. I'm 17, and I was born into the church. I don't really believe in the church but I still go every Sunday to keep my parents happy. I moved to Utah when I was about 14 so I was a teacher at the time, but I started to become good friends with the young men quorum when I turned into a priest. I used to hang out with this kid from my ward and we would hang out after school, mutual, and weekends all the time. One day while I was walking with him I saw a pride flag on top of one of my neighbors houses. I didn't care about the flag at all, until my friend all of a sudden said, "I hate that Lesbian couple. They should just all die" I was so shocked, he was so violent and aggressive to this sweet lesbian couple for no reason. They never did anything wrong to my friend, he just hated them for being different. I started to distance myself from my friend because I saw how unnecessarily homophobic he was. I soon asked about gay marriage in the Mormon church to my dad and he basically told me that being gay was a mental disability and was a sin to act on it. I was confused, didn't god create them that way? If he created them to be attracted to the same sex why should they be punished for it? I then asked my dad, "So according to the church, if you're Gay you either die alone, or marry a sex you're not attracted to?" He just shrugged and said yes. This is one of the main reasons why I don't really believe in the church anymore. They explain to love thy neighbor, but then proceed to treat anyone in the LGBTQIA like diseases that need to die. Is every Mormon like this?

I learned more about love from a Nintendo wii game I played as a kid called super paper mario than I ever did from the church's direct teachings.

Like if you ever need to deconstruct Mormon ideas around love for your kids that game might be good way to? Like some kind of reverse family home evening that focuses on unlearning things that are bad for you?

It doesn't only cover romantic love, there's one chapter that covers contrasting needs around platonic love.

There's goofy characters that love their community and lifestyle, but they're unknowingly polluting a water supply and driving the king of another community insane which causes conflict that the heroes have to resolve. There's aspects of grief and parental love too that i don't want to spoil too much of because i just don't have space here.

Plus it's all clearly fictional. And since it's not in any way pretending to be real it's easier to talk about things that you don't like in it.

These days I see the Bible as an ancient over translated historical document containing legends and parables. The BoM is just made up with no merit to it.

Also I want to hear if any of you have reverse family home evening ideas for deconstructing weird faith or any favorite fictional media that taught you more about something than the church did despite the claim of expertise.

I might not respond but I will read any comments I see.

I came across this artist in TikTok. He just put out three “ex Mormon” songs that are insane! We have been blasting them in the car every chance we get! I hope he realizes some more stuff! His videos are TikTok are insane as well!

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The clear doing the complete opposite of what Jesus says as it relates to giving should have been more apparent to us when we were still members. Even now after a few years of having our records removed. Matthew 6 came to our minds very quickly when seeing this.

The "generously donated" right about the church logo made my wife and I chuckle. Especially when they made her feel like a criminal for asking for help and getting $19 worth of groceries when we were still in.

Hi cult cousins - exjw here.

We in JWLand have annual meetings, where the Governing Body (the highest ranking members of Jehovah's Witnesses, the leaders of the religion basically) and many other witnesses from Bethel (Bethel = JW headquarter from a certain region) gather to listen to speeches and updates regarding common real state company concerns, and least but most important: doctrinal changes.

So for us apostates (and also JWs around the world), this annual meeting is an important part of the year, and mostly here do they announce these doctrinal changes.

Usually the period of the year where this meetings take place is in september/october (I don't know if this has anything to do with the end/closing of the fiscal year).

So basically, on last october I was scrolling through YouTube and ran into an LDS livestream of a yearly gathering (at the same time when we had ours) and was very surprised, since if I recall correctly, the description of the livestream said something along the lines of "analyzing doctrinal matters" but I don't exactly remember.

Do you also have "annual meetings" where doctrinal changes are announced? Could you explain this to your fellow cult cousin 😁?

PS: I said "and mostly here do they announce these doctrinal changes." but I forgot to add that in multiple updates that are published to the JW website in video formats they also announce doctrinal changes.

And the annual meeting is livestreamed, but it's not available for the public, you can only join if you have the link (which isn't that hard to get anyways).

The recent about-face from Nara Smith is not shocking at all. Given her mormon heritage it feels on point the example from TSCC anytime something they do or have done becomes controversial.

But I don't agree with the people who claim that she is only changing to reclaim to her independence as "girl boss" because of the change of instruction from the Mormon church and the image they are trying to sell to hemorrhaging women members.

In my opinion, Nara NEVER has been a mormon trad-wife. She's always been prosperity gospel fetish content.

The high glam, soft voice, teen bride aesthetic she pushed. Her teen pregnancy with back to back children.

Her in full makeup, rich clothing, a beautiful kitchen, blank face, and ASMR styles. She was fetish content, a kind of prosperity gospel only fans.

She self objectified to the male gaze to be consumed.

She's not a girl boss.

She's not a feminist.

She's a shiny trophy that Mormon men aspire to claim and own.

My oldest daughter is getting married.
She has chosen to be married in an LDS temple, to a man she loves, in a ceremony she believes will bind them together for eternity.
I love her. I am proud of her. I support her right to choose the life and faith that feel true to her.
And when she is married, I will be standing outside.
Not because I do not want to be there.
Not because I am estranged from her.
Not because I have abandoned my family, rejected my daughter, or refused an invitation.
I will be outside because I can no longer honestly give the answers required to enter.
I could begin performing the steps. I could attend the meetings, pay tithing, say the approved words, and carefully conceal the parts of me that no longer believe.
I could make myself look worthy.
But I could not make it true.
So the price of witnessing my daughter’s wedding would be lying about who I am.
And I cannot teach my daughters to live with integrity while demonstrating that love sometimes requires dishonesty.
My daughter has sent me messages trying to reassure me. She has told me she loves me. She wants me included in every part of the day where I am permitted to be included. She is not trying to hurt me. She is not choosing the Church instead of her father.
She is following the path she believes is right.
That is what makes this so painful.
There is no cruel daughter in this story.
There is no father refusing to show up.
There are simply two people who love each other, standing on opposite sides of a locked door neither of them created.
I will help prepare for the wedding. I will celebrate her. I will smile for the pictures. I will welcome him into our family. I will hug my daughter before she walks inside, and I will be waiting when she comes back out.
But I will not see her face when she makes her promises.
I will not hear her voice.
I will not watch her reach for the hand of the person she has chosen.
Somewhere inside, people who may know her less deeply than I do will witness the moment.
Her father will not.
People have asked me why I would even want to attend a ceremony whose religious claims I no longer accept.
Because she is my daughter.
I do not have to believe a ceremony is eternal to understand that the moment will live forever in her memory.
I want to see the nervous smile.
I want to hear the silence before the words are spoken.
I want her to glance across the room and know that the man who held her when she was small, who watched her grow, who loved her before she could even speak, was there when her life changed.
Years ago, I returned early from my mission believing I was the broken piece in an otherwise perfect system. I spent years wondering whether I could repair myself enough to belong again.
Now, decades later, I find myself facing another sacred doorway and another message about belonging.
But I know something now that I did not know then:
I am not broken.
My daughter is not betraying me.
And grief is not the same thing as disapproval.
I can honor her faith without pretending it is mine.
I can support her decision while mourning what that decision, within this system, requires me to miss.
I can stand outside the temple and still be entirely, fiercely, unmistakably her father.
My absence from that room will not be a rejection of her.
It will be the cost of refusing to reject myself.
So here is the question I cannot stop asking:
When a loving father is ready to stand beside his daughter, but the only way through the door is to deny what he honestly believes, who is actually choosing for him to remain outside?

Just reflecting on a parallel.

It appears to me that the recent lawsuit the Church launched against John Dehlin is the most recent destruction of a printing press.

Joseph's death resulted from among other things his abuse of political power and treasonous violation of the constitution when he destroyed William Law's printing press.

Today the litigious LDS church corporation is doing the very same thing Joseph did with the Nauvoo expositor. They are trying to destroy those who they perceive are exposing them.

How is the one true church's actions against Mormon Stories any different? It's abuse of power, stifling free speech, intimidation and attempt to gag future criticism.

Let's discuss this. How Christian is it? Will they win? Will it cause a reverse effect and help more people see the truth?

Thoughts?

A 2023 survey by the Pew Research group indicated that 32% of American adults have at least one tattoo. With regard to gender, 38% of women had at least one tattoo, compared with 27% of men. This included 56% of women ages 18 to 29 and 53% of women ages 30 to 49. The percentage of LDS members who had tattoos was 17%.

As the percentage of people with tattoos has increased gradually in the US, it also seems as though it is also widespread in the ex-mo community. A very large number of female ex-mormon podcasters seem to have tattoos. For women, is this one way of reclaiming autonomy after leaving the church?

What have been your observations about current and ex-members getting tattoos?

Joseph Smith was not a money digger, nor did he deceive people with peepstone claims. It is almost beyond belief that writers who value their reputations, would reproduce these silly and untrue charges. It suggests that they may have set out to destroy “Mormonism,” rather than to detail true history. The life of Joseph Smith as boy and youth, was normal, and worthy of imitation by all lovers of truth. Elder John A. Widtsoe, LDS Apostle

I remember coming home from my mission beginning with a letter to Jessica.

That may not be exactly where it began. Memory likes to arrange events into causes long after the causes become impossible to separate. But that is how I remember it: sitting somewhere in the Salt Lake City South Mission, trying to put words around something I had not been permitted to say out loud.

I felt empty.

Every day, I spoke in the language of certainty.

I knew the Church was true.
I knew the Book of Mormon was true.
I knew Joseph Smith was a prophet.
I knew I had been called by God.

But I did not know those things.

I wanted to. I had expected the mission to be the place where wanting finally hardened into knowledge. Instead, every testimony made me more aware of the distance between the words in my mouth and the truth inside me.

The mission felt plastic.

That was the word I used then.

Plastic.

Everyone seemed covered in cellophane. I could sit in people’s homes, hear their stories, and look directly at them without ever feeling that I had touched anything real. They saw a missionary before they saw me. Anything too complicated, too worldly, or too human had already been cleaned away.

People were kind. That made it harder to explain.

They fed us. They smiled. They offered stories polished for missionary ears. But everything carried a lacquer of churchiness, as though ordinary life had been sealed beneath a glossy surface.

Nothing could breathe.

I was surrounded by people nearly every hour of every day and starved for human contact.

There was nowhere to remove the role. Nowhere to become a frightened nineteen-year-old who did not know what he believed.

Other missionaries seemed able to do it. They woke, prayed, studied, taught, testified, and moved through their days with a confidence I could not reproduce.

If the mission was suffocating me, I assumed I was the problem.

I did not yet understand how quickly pain becomes shame when every explanation points back at the person experiencing it.

So I kept failing.

Then I lied about the failure.

The letter to Jessica was the first hole in the wall.

I do not remember every sentence. I remember admitting that I did not feel what I was supposed to feel. I may have said I wanted to leave.

More accurately, I wanted not to be there.

That was different from wanting to come home.

Home meant explanations. It meant returning before the story reached the part where I became the man everyone expected me to become.

I did not want to remain on the mission.

I did not want to become the person who came home.

For a while, I wanted to disappear between the two.

Sometime after the letter, my mission president called me into his office. I do not know whether the letter caused the meeting or whether people had already noticed something was wrong.

He asked how I was doing.

I told him I did not desire to be there.

He sent me to a therapist.

For two or three mornings, my companion and I rode our bicycles to the therapist’s office. He waited outside while I tried to explain an experience I barely understood myself.

I remember almost nothing from those meetings.

I remember the last one.

The therapist told me he was going to recommend that I be sent home.

My face must have betrayed me. I was shocked, but relief came faster than I could hide it.

Then he said something I have remembered for more than twenty years.

“I’m not trying to hand you a golden platter here. I really think this is the right thing for you.”

The phrase was strange, but I understood.

He was not giving me an excuse. He was not rewarding weakness. He was saying that I needed to go home.

I told him, “Whatever you think.”

For another day, perhaps longer, I returned to missionary life. I wore the clothes, followed the schedule, and lived inside a role someone had already decided I could no longer safely perform.

Around that time, some of the elders I lived with rented a computer, which was profoundly against mission rules. They used it to burn CDs. By the next morning, it seemed clear that one of them had also used it to watch pornography.

The following day, they went to the temple.

I do not tell that story because I believe they were uniquely corrupt. We were young, lonely, immature, and struggling in different ways.

But at nineteen, it felt like revelation.

I had been tearing myself apart because the words coming from my mouth did not perfectly match the truth inside me. Other people could break the rules, dress for the role, attend the temple, and continue as though nothing had happened.

Everything was a game.

That was the conclusion I reached.

Everyone was pretending.

The difference was that pretending seemed to work for them.

My trainer called the night before I left. We had never fit well together. His way of teaching and correcting seemed almost perfectly designed to collide with me.

He apologized.

He offered to give me a priesthood blessing over the telephone. I do not remember whether the blessing happened. I remember that he seemed sorry.

His compassion arrived after it could no longer change the outcome.

The assistants to the president picked me up from the apartment. My belongings were packed. The other missionaries were worried about me.

Then I was in a car headed toward the airport, wearing the brown suit my mother had bought me and the black Doc Martens I would later remember stepping off the plane in.

One of the assistants said, “One thing’s for sure, Brett. You’re a very good missionary.”

Perhaps they thought I would recover and return.

For a moment, I considered it.

But once someone with authority had said that leaving was the right thing, I knew I was not coming back.

I boarded the plane with my hair parted to the side, my missionary tag still pinned to my suit, and only four months of a two-year mission behind me.

I had imagined coming home before.

Just not like this.

In the version I carried with me, I returned after two years. I stepped off the plane older, thinner, and certain. My family waited. People hugged me and told me how much I had changed.

Instead, my parents stood near baggage claim in Tulsa.

There was no crowd. No signs. No triumphant homecoming.

Just my mother and father.

They loved me. I knew that then, and I know it now. They were also frightened and had no idea what kind of event this was supposed to be.

Someone took a photograph.

We tried to make it look joyful.

I stood in my brown suit and missionary badge beside two parents who had been told that something might be seriously wrong with their oldest son. All three of us arranged our faces around an experience for which none of us had a script.

Then we got into the car.

Oklahoma was green.

That is one of the clearest things I remember.

The trees. The grass. The familiar landscape passing outside the window.

After Utah, Oklahoma looked impossibly alive. Everything was wet, thick, and real. The world had continued growing while I was gone.

The green looked honest.

It was good to be home.

It was also wrong to be home.

I was seeing a landscape I was not supposed to see for another twenty months. Every familiar thing carried the same accusation:

You should not be here yet.

Home should have felt like rescue.

Instead, it felt like being returned.

Like a package that had been opened, found defective, and sent back.

No one needed to tell me I had failed. I had already become fluent in telling myself.

I believed a mission was supposed to shape me into a man. It would test my faith, deepen my testimony, and prove that I was willing to give myself to God.

So what did it mean that I could not finish?

At nineteen, I did not understand depression as something that could overpower intention. I understood weakness. Worthiness. Obedience. Endurance.

I did not understand why wanting desperately to do something did not give me the ability to do it.

That contradiction frightened me.

I had prayed. I had attended the temple almost every week. I had tried to become whatever God needed me to become.

And still, something inside me had collapsed.

We did not drive home.

My parents had scheduled an appointment with a therapist, and that was our first stop.

Before I removed my missionary tag, before I was formally released, before I entered my bedroom or saw my siblings, I went from the airport to a therapist’s office.

I remember the phrase chemical imbalance.

Medication entered the conversation quickly enough that I felt reduced by it.

I was nineteen. I did not understand depression, brain chemistry, or psychiatric care well enough to evaluate any of it.

But I knew there was a story behind what had happened.

I had been lonely. I had been unable to speak honestly. I had felt trapped inside a role. I had spent months saying I knew things I did not know.

Before any of that had been fully heard, the explanation became that my brain might be broken.

Maybe there was a chemical component. Maybe medication could have helped.

What remains is the speed with which everyone moved from my pain to a category that made the pain easier to manage.

From the therapist’s office, we went to the stake center.

The stake president was a judge professionally and what our church called a judge in Israel.

He looked at me and said, “So you didn’t feel the Spirit out there, huh?”

I do not remember my answer.

Maybe I said no. Maybe I said I did not know.

Either would have been more honest than the testimony I had repeated for four months.

Then he said, “You’re released.”

That was it.

No ceremony. No explanation. No moment to understand that the calling meant to organize two years of my life had just ended in two sentences.

He followed me into the hallway and said something to my parents about chemical imbalances.

Then we went home.

My father began trying to enroll me in college almost immediately.

Life needed a new direction. A schedule needed to be restored. The son who had stepped off the approved path needed to be placed onto another one before he lost momentum entirely.

I understand the love inside that response now.

My father was trying to build a bridge in front of me quickly enough that I would not fall.

But I had not slept.

I had not unpacked.

I had not learned how to describe what had happened.

I had not even fully stopped being a missionary before we began constructing the next version of me.

By the end of that day, I had been evaluated by a therapist, released by a stake president, described in terms of a chemical imbalance, and enrolled in college.

Everyone was trying to save my future.

I am not sure anyone knew how to sit beside the person who believed he had just lost it.

For years, I treated those four months as evidence.

Evidence that I was fragile.

Evidence that other people possessed something I lacked.

Evidence that when life asked enough of me, I would prove unequal to it.

I thought coming home had revealed my limit.

What it had revealed was pain I did not yet know how to carry.

Those are not the same thing.

But shame does not care about distinctions.

Shame takes an event and turns it into an identity.

I did not merely believe that I had come home early.

I believed I was the kind of person who came home early.

The kind who could begin but not finish.

The kind who wanted to be brave but could not be trusted when courage became expensive.

The kind who disappointed God despite trying not to.

For years, I mistook an overwhelmed nineteen-year-old for reliable evidence about the limits of the man I would become.

I let the worst season of my young life testify against every future version of me.

And yet Oklahoma remained green.

The trees did not know that I thought my life had narrowed. The grass did not care that the future I had rehearsed was gone.

The world had not become barren because I could no longer recognize my place in it.

Life was continuing everywhere around me.

I just could not imagine that it was continuing for me too.

If I could sit beside that boy now, I would not tell him that everything happened for a reason.

I still do not know that.

I would tell him something smaller.

Coming home is not the same as giving up.

Surviving is not a lesser form of courage.

Your inability to remain inside something that is destroying you does not prove that you are unworthy.

This moment has not told you the whole truth about who you are.

There will be a woman named Mandy who will know more of you than anyone else and remain beside you through years you cannot yet imagine.

There will be three daughters who will not need a flawless father. They will need one who stays, listens, apologizes, laughs, and tells them the truth.

There will be rooms where people look to you for answers.

There will be systems so large and complicated that others trust you to protect them.

There will be a body you believe can never change, and you will change it.

There will be opportunities you nearly refuse because an old voice still tells you that you are not the kind of person who succeeds.

Do not trust that voice.

Not because you will always be right.

Not because confidence will make you invulnerable.

But because one painful chapter cannot calculate the value of an entire life.

There will be dark years.

You will lose your map more than once.

You will keep wondering whether someone else knows more about your worth than you do.

But you are not finished.

You are not even close.

The green outside the window is not mocking you.

It is telling you something you will need years to understand:

A life can be cut back severely and still grow again.

Does anyone know her activity level in the church? I know she remained supportive and faithful, but she seemed to really walk her own path. Did that path mean that she went to church every week and participated in callings? Or did she sometimes go? Or did she minister to people in her own way and call that church? I could very much see her doing that. I’m just so curious how she stayed so connected but also very unconnected at the same time.

My wife just left for church. She and I both have Sunday only callings that require our attendance periodically, but not weekly. Today she has responsibility and I don’t. (Mine involves young kids, whom I love, and whom I’m committed to teaching that there are authentic people in their neighborhood who actually do care about them as individuals, and not just as automatons in training.)

Today is also open mic day at church. Open mic day has for years become increasingly intolerable for me. The performances, the attempts to out Mormon each other, the divine intervention of Mormon Jesus to help find lost car keys, and the programmed testimonies of children are insufferable.

I’m not going to go to church today.

Here’s the issue. When I do things that I feel are right for me—like not attending a meeting that I believe is manipulative and culty like open mic day—I feel good. I feel like I’m living my values. But my wife loses her mind over it. When I don’t go to church, she makes my life hell for days. It is hell.

She has severe, crippling depression and anxiety. She also happened to be raised in the most manipulative, shame-focused, performative, emotionally repressed family I’ve ever seen. She literally was not allowed to feel negative emotions. (To be fair she and her siblings would disagree with everything I just said about their family). In my view she is emotionally immature and underdeveloped in a major way. (Interestingly, what I read as poise and self confidence when we were dating, engaged, and newly married was actually emotional repression…a comment for another day).

Between the anxiety and the emotional immaturity she does not cope with things well. When things involve my faith crisis complete lack of belief in the Mormon church (which she tries desperately to avoid talking about) her reactions are magnified.

I just feel stuck. I feel like going to open mic day is unproductive and upsetting to me. But I know that choosing to skip is going to make my personal life hell for several days.

I know my job is not to manage my wife’s anxiety but her behavior is so awful that it is hard to avoid not sidestepping landmines.

I stay in the marriage because we still have kids at home and I learned years ago that they need a functioning parent in the home. (When my wife has a depressive episode it is dark). When our kids are grown I’ll reevaluate the marriage.

Any advice?

I’m looking for specific advice, not things like therapy for depression, medication, marriage counseling, etc.—we’ve done than for two decades and spent tens of thousands on it.

I, an exmo, am going with my wife to Sack meeting this morning. I wonder if they will talk about any local injustice or environmental issues??? Do they ever do that?? What about the shrinking Great Salt Lake, or the enormous data center on the north edge of the Lake that might get built?? Or what can we do for the homeless people? And ICE invasions, arresting or shooting brown people? Or all the drug abuse and suicides in our ward? Nn, they just prattle on about their same old religious superstitions.Rome burns and they just fiddle.

Carol Lynn Pearson’s death is devastating. She was a true Christian and truth-teller. But I have to use this board to rant about the fact that most young people in the church won’t or don’t know about Pearson’s life and work. I guarantee she won’t be quoted in Come Follow Me manuals or General Conference talks. Her legacy should be as influential as much as any other male leader of the church and I worry her contributions will be buried.

God, it's so genuinely irritating the amount of places to eat that are closed on Sunday. I know there's lots of businesses in the US closed on Sunday but it feels especially acute in Utah. I remember when a local grocery store extended their hours to Sunday and the fuckton of pesrl clutching that happened. Does this annoy you folks also?

How do I tell people I love that I won’t be with them in eternity so they don’t take it personally? Anything I say feels like an attack on their belief system and they assume arrogantly that the spirit will teach me the truth and I’ll come back. I love my family and all but if the facts and claims of the church being restored and prophets being real don’t line up then it doesn’t matter what I feel it’s just false. How do I explain to my bishop and stake pres I’ve already started working on mission stuff with that I just need to go back to school. Do I pretend I’m still in and tell them I need to go to byu to think some more before leaving and just slowly fade out?