Unwavering Faith

The hearing of Jeremy Runnells On this day, I finally watched the  excommunication hearing video of  Jeremy Runnells; and I feel for every person in the room where it happened. My first takeaway thoughts were that it appears that the leadership are fearful of the CES letter that Jeremy wrote, and understood its potential to unravel the Mormon doctrine. At this time, I had not read the CES letter but I had heard about the problems it raised. When I later read it, it was clear why it has given many people much to think about and consider, and why the church considers it to be anti-Mormon material. As the video continued,  in what appears to be a hasty and cold move of holding a “court of love” for his apostasy, Jeremy refutes the claims and says that he has only sought answers to questions that were outlined in the letter , and that if it was wrong, to be told where so he can correct it. The room fell silent for a moment; no one answered, but instead continued to say, “You...

The Stories of Others As I undertook my own faith transition, I began listening to the stories of others and how they felt during the process. I found this helped me because all I wanted to do was talk to people about the experience I was going through, but I didn’t know who to turn to. I didn’t want to stir up problems with believing members, and I didn’t want to explain the nuance to people who hadn’t been in the church.  This video here was  about a bishop who  didn’t consider himself to be a spiritual person, who  read the gospel topic essays , and found them to be deeply troubling. This was one of the first times I heard about these essays , which are written by anonymous authors and published on the church website in a not-so-obvious  place. I heard someone mention that it’s the church’s liability protection for when people say, “Hey, the church never taught that.” The topics range from the wives of Joseph Smith, the translation process of the Book o...

Leaving Mormonism means also Leaving God During the month of May, I can see several instances where I started to shift in my thinking and perception on topics and viewpoints. For example,  I listened to episode 1544 of Mormon Stories that talked about the leaked talk that Brad Wilcox gave at the Alpine Stake in Utah. The commentary offered made some points that I resonated with, one of which being that the doctrine of Jesus and God from the Mormon view creates a version of Jesus and God that cannot be easily transferred to another branch of Christianity. I would say that because of the way to church teaches its members that it is the only true church with the most correct doctrine, and if someone decides to leave the church, at least for me, it ruins the concept of God and Jesus. I believe this is true for me because when I was taught about the God and Jesus and their nature and place in the grand Plan of Salvation; it was literal. In a corner of the universe, these beings existed ...

 After we got back from New Zealand, we caught up with some friends of our who had already decided to step away from church. If I was to go back to my believing Mormon brain , I would have said they yoyo’ed in their activity and faith. I now see that they were just making realtime decisions based on their situation at he the time. There was at first a surprise reaction, because I guess we came across as the types of members that were “strong” in the gospel, and to flip around to not believing in it that much to the point where we would stop attending really surprised them.  As we continued to talk about it, we agreed on a few things that we found problematic. What is interesting is that these issues existed but in a shelf capacity , meaning we did not give them space in our mind, so we put them over on our “We don’t know the answers to these questions yet” shelf. Most if not all Mormons know about this shelf  concept as taught by Spencer Kimball’s wife.  Here were tw...