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…
Category: post-Mormon
Do people leave the church for greener grass?
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…
Knowledge, Community, and Relationships
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…
Third Culture Kids and our Disaffected Mormon Underground
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…
What is/was your relationship with Mormonism?
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…
Making Peace with the Loss of Certainty
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.
Are you a Mormon?
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…
What’s in a Mormon identity?
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…
A reminder to be positive and upbeat, especially with members
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…
Your Sunday School Lesson: The First Vision
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…