New nevermo member saying hi

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_candygal
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _candygal »

Welcome...! I resigned from the church in 2008 after over 40 years..this may be eye opening for you here and hope to get your perspective from one on the outside looking in.
_Kishkumen
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _Kishkumen »

Welcome, MonkeyNumber9. I love that so many of our friends on the board are NeverMos, bringing their much-needed outsider’s perspective to the discussion. Great bunch of documentaries you listed there. I very much enjoyed them. I remain fascinated with my experience as a Mormon, and my past experience as an LDS person.

One small comment on your bemusement about smart apologists: people are capable of reason; they are not inherently rational. Not being Mormon is not a badge of greater rationality. Being Mormon is also not necessarily a badge of especial irrationality. The human experience is fundamentally irrational. Choose your poison and choose wisely.

(Aspiring to reason is something I do and advocate. Being humane is equally important.)
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_kairos
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _kairos »

Welcome - i too am nevermo with TBM my wife and grown TBM children! your take on issues discussed here is welcomed and often informative because of your nevermo status. There is great honesty here, insights on Mormonism from real experts, lots of humor imho and support for the exmo position.

k
_msnobody
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _msnobody »

Count me in on the never-LDS roll call. I don’t participate as much as I used to when I was a stay-at-home mom. In fact, I hardly get here these days after going back to work full-time and having an elderly parent I help out. I am an evangelical, I think would be the term used here. Prior to participating on discussion boards such as this, I had a fair amount of interaction with mainly LDS missionaries. After a good while, I think I was ejected from the teaching pool.
One question I had pondered back then was why was I raised in a United Methodist members’ home and church and why others were raised in LDS homes/family/religion. Other than religious beliefs, we were really alike in many, many ways. I was really questioning God as to why this was. He showed me Acts 17:26-27. He taught me that he placed me in the time and place He had purposed, that perhaps I would seek Him and find Him. This taught me that others were placed in the times and places by God for the same reason. Those verses really helped me gain a new and fresh perspective. Anyway, just thought I’d share that. Welcome to the discussion board!

26 [God] And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; 27 That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:
"The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them.” Psalm 145:18-19 ESV
_MonkeyNumber9
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _MonkeyNumber9 »

DrW wrote:The guidance that both my spouse and I received growing up from our Mormon parents was Family First - no matter what.

It's sort of ironic, but there was a time when the LDS Church put great emphasis on family. Some of us, especially those of a certain age, still take Family First as a prime directive.


I hadn't realized that this had changed. I do see, in posts on reddit in particular, how so many people who are going through a faith transition find that their parents (in particular) just cannot handle it and in many cases basically shun them. 30 years ago, would the typical Mormon parents of a 20-something son/daughter who had lost faith have been less likely to freak out?
_MonkeyNumber9
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _MonkeyNumber9 »

MsJack wrote:Yes, intelligent people can definitely believe strange things. I'm probably one of them! (On a good day, at least.)


Not that I would lay claim to any intelligence for myself, but this has got me thinking about what I might believe, wholeheartedly, that's totally, objectively BS. If all of these millions/billions of religious people, many of them (obviously) highly intelligent, can believe their fairy tales to be objective truth, am I really that special that I don't believe things equally preposterous? Yes I am!!! :razz:

Kidding aside, I wonder...

m#9
_MonkeyNumber9
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _MonkeyNumber9 »

Holy Ghost wrote:By the way, do you participate in any other ex-cult message boards?


I read MDD to get more of the TBM take on things, though man, I find it really, really hard to handle some of those folks. My reaction is similar to when I (a left-of-center Northern California liberal) go to Breitbart.com and read the comments section to see what the other side thinks of current events. A little goes a long ways.

I can't even imagine how hard it must be for those of you now free, blinders off, glasses no longer fogged.

On reddit, I also check out r/Mormon, r/exmormon, and r/latterdaysaints

I think I posted one time.
_Jersey Girl
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _Jersey Girl »

MN9 have you visited the Recovery from Mormonism board? The exit stories there are the first things I ever read online regarding Mormonism. That was 20 years ago. :eek:
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
_Gadianton
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _Gadianton »

am I really that special that I don't believe things equally preposterous?


it's not that you do or don't, it's whether you could given the right circumstances.

most of these die-hard apologists are life-long members, and it's not just a list of crazy propositions, it's a list of crazy propositions that are intertwined with their own identity. It's not just being told it's night time when the sun is shining, but that you're a prince or princess and special and have a divine commission and that Satan knows you personally as one of the great ones in the pre-existence. You're going to live forever as a God married to your wife and the list goes on. And so when certain key bare facts go like, there weren't really Nephites, it puts the entire thing in jeopardy of toppling down.

The die hard apologists aren't like most of the Brietbart folks who are little more than meme transmitters. And they are different from those who join the Church as adults, who also aren't simply meme transmitters. I've considered emailing Rick Ross and asking his chances of deprogramming DCP, but I'm pretty sure from reading his stuff online that he'd say no dice. Interventions and deprogramming work on people -- adults or teens -- who are suckered into it, and the key to deprogramming is getting them the information that was withheld from them and get them to see the flaws in the leaders who are portrayed as without reproach.

Those who get suckered into a crazy religion often are going through stress or trauma, or looking for something, and their guard is down.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Physics Guy
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Re: New nevermo member saying hi

Post by _Physics Guy »

MonkeyNumber9 wrote:If all of these millions/billions of religious people, many of them (obviously) highly intelligent, can believe their fairy tales to be objective truth, am I really that special that I don't believe things equally preposterous?

The world's a weird place. What is the Matrix? You can take something stolidly real and objective, like any random chunk of rock, and notice banal physical facts about it, like the way it falls if you drop it. Go into real detail, though, and it's all a mind-boggling rabbit hole. The rock falls because spacetime is curved. The rock is made of atoms that are mostly empty space. They stick together because of weird quantum mechanical principles that only make sense in an abstract mathematical space of very high dimensions. Even empty space is full of fluctuating electrical fields and charges when you look on small scales. And nobody knows how all of that stuff affects curved spacetime.

Unlike religious weirdness, physics weirdness has a lot of evidence behind it. It's still really weird. And insofar as it is nonetheless true, it was still true before we knew all the evidence for it. So other weird stuff can likewise be true even if you don't have all the evidence for it.

What to do about that? You could certainly just shrug and ignore all the weird possibilities unless and until you can find firm evidence for or against them. But what if you care about some particular issue, and don't want to ignore it? You can try to plug away with working theories and hypotheses, groping as best you can for whatever evidence you might one day find. You can make a leap of faith and invest years of your life in pursuing some particular hypothesis. That's how we gathered the evidence we have for physics, for example. There was a lot of careful testing but very little of scientific progress has come from pure empiricism. Science is mostly hypothesis-driven. As a layperson consumer of science one can simply wait for the verdict before deciding, but the scientists themselves have to work hard, perhaps for many years, in the hope that something good will come out.

So even in science one goes out on a limb and has faith, in a certain sense. It doesn't count as science unless there is at least a reasonable prospect of getting some evidence, one way or the other, within a reasonable time frame. So science isn't just the same as religion. But it's not a completely sharp distinction, either. There's a continuum of how much one invests upon how much evidence. There's a point along this continuum up to which even very hard-nosed scientists go all the time. There's a further point past which whatever you're doing isn't science any more. But it's not necessarily completely crazy for intelligent people to go past even that point. The world is weird and sometimes strange things are true.
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