Going Clear correlaries to LDS teachings

This last week­end I watched the doc­u­men­tary Going Clear. I have heard and read some about Sci­en­tol­ogy before the doc­u­men­tary, and so I knew to expect there to be some strong sim­i­lar­i­ties between Sci­en­tol­ogy and Mor­monism. I rec­om­mend every­one, faith­ful or not, see the doc­u­men­tary. It does a great job of walk­ing through from the…

Read More

Carson Calderwood’s Leave And Leave It Alone

I’ve been fol­low­ing Car­son Calder­wood’s sto­ry from a dis­tance, and I find it to be such a sad exam­ple of the Church push­ing out peo­ple who are try­ing hard to con­tribute in a pos­i­tive way. I rec­om­mend all go and lis­ten to the Mor­mon Sto­ries episodes with Car­son and Maris­sa, and also go read Car­son­’s…

Read More

Our Questions Aren’t the Problem

It seems like every few weeks we hear about some­one being called to a dis­ci­pli­nary court for apos­ta­sy for dar­ing to speak out about their unbe­lief. Usu­al­ly, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is that pub­licly ques­tion­ing the church’s teach­ings caus­es oth­ers to lose faith and to doubt, thus we are lead­ing peo­ple out of the church. Fre­quent­ly, they claim we…

Read More

Family Letter

Hel­lo Fam­i­ly, Ben and I have real­ized there have been spec­u­la­tions involv­ing us and our fam­i­ly con­cern­ing the church. This comes from our fam­i­ly and friends that are unaware of our deci­sion and that is why we feel it is nec­es­sary to write this let­ter so there will be a bet­ter under­stand­ing of where we…

Read More

D&C 132, polygamy and Harold B. Lee

Post­ed: 11 April 2015 Updat­ed: 9 May 15 (plus post­script) Harold B. Lee The recent Mor­mon Sto­ries Pod­cast inter­views of Kirk and Lind­say Van Allen by Gina Colvin and John Dehlin evoked my mem­o­ry of encoun­ter­ing Harold B. Lee in Sep­tem­ber 1965 regard­ing “The Prin­ci­ple”. When “Steven in Mil­creek” respond­ed to my com­ment about “HBL” on John’s…

Read More

Leaving

Writ­ten in Jan­u­ary, 2012: In Decem­ber of 2011, my hus­band, Justin, and I respect­ful­ly resigned from our call­ings and stopped going to church. It’s been a long, tir­ing, enlight­en­ing process. I’ll start with the day that real­ly got us going down this path. It was a Sun­day in May or June of 2011. I got ready for…

Read More

About The Author

On a per­son­al lev­el, my life has been an ongo­ing search for the Truth. It has been the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion­al force in my life, along with my love for my fam­i­ly. That search led me into the Church many years ago, and ulti­mate­ly it led me out. My heart is the same; my desire to…

Read More

Final Thoughts — Potential Harm

Sev­er­al years back, I was dis­cussing some of these mat­ters with one of my daugh­ters, and she posed this ques­tion to me: Let’s just say you’re right, and that the Church’s claims aren’t true. What is the harm in stay­ing in it, and being involved with it? We’re hap­py, we’re liv­ing good lives. What is…

Read More

Examination Summary

My intent here was to approach the Church’s claims about itself, its his­to­ry, and its mis­sion, from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, rather than rely­ing on a sin­gle dimen­sion. The con­clu­sion seems inescapable: the Church is not what it claims to be, and the claims that it makes are demon­stra­bly false. And while there is a wonderful…

Read More

Examining the Fruits of the Church in Practice

I first need to make a cru­cial dis­tinc­tion here, between the Cor­po­rate and Insti­tu­tion­al Church, and the Church that exists in the lives of the indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies that com­prise the var­i­ous Wards and Branch­es of the Church. Even though I was a con­vert to the Church, I raised my fam­i­ly in it, and was…

Read More