Cooled Off

Sorry about that profanity ridden vent yesterday. I was so frustrated to find that I had to start all over again in my efforts to have my name removed from the lists of the church membership.

The afternoon and evening got much better. My birthday's today, but my husband had to go out of town this morning. He took me out last night and we had an enjoyable evening. I have plans for the weekend and next Monday involving baking 100 vegan cupcakes, attending a baby shower, hanging with some of my bff's, having my sister spend the night Sunday night, and spending Monday being as lazy as we wanna be. It will be nice.

Thank you for the reading recommendations. I do appreciate it. I hope there will come a time when I can start letting this go, and not feel the compulsion to read everything I can find and be all ranty like I am right now.

I Am Absolutely Livid!!!!

I am SO FUCKING PISSED AT THE FUCKING MORMON CHURCH!!!! 

Originally, I sent my resignation via email back in June. That’s when our fucking bishop called my husband, and my husband got all freaked out and I said fine, leave my name on.

And then I found my balls and sent a resignation again via email on October 24^th and threatened them with legal action if they contact anyone in my family about it.  Nothing. I called a few weeks ago, and they said it was in process. 

I called again today, got shipped around from person to person, and was finally told I have to hand-write a letter and mail it in.

Fuck that! I printed off my last e-mail, signed it, and mailed it.  I also highlighted the part where I said I wanted no contact save verification that my name has been removed, and the part where I threatened legal action if they contact anyone in my family via any method at all.

So now I have to wait another month.  This is outrageous!  Any other church, you just stop going. But the fucking mormons make you jump through hoops. And if I didn’t so vehemently disagree with their policies and practices, I wouldn’t be making a big deal about it. But I do. I disagree so much that the thought of them counting me as a member makes me want to throw up.

I'm so angry I'm shaking. I absofuckinglutely cannot believe this.

Coffee Burps/Books

I had lap band surgery almost a year ago (down about 65 pounds, thank you very much!), and one thing I (and everyone around me) have noticed is that when I eat too much, or when I eat certain goods, I start burping uncontrollably. This can be amusing or embarrassing, depending upon when the burps happen and how loud they are.

Today I've got coffee burps. Never had that before, that I recall, and they're frankly kind of nasty. They're not belchtastically loud, but they taste kind of disgusting. Not disgusting enough to turn me away from coffee, however, because coffee is like nectar. Especially peppermint mocha coffee, of which I had 2 cups yesterday and 3 cups Monday. And this cinnamon cappuccino I'm sipping on this morning is also extremely tasty. There's this part of me that says I should pour it out so the burps will go away, but the other part of me says screw that! I'm drinking it until it gets cold and I have to pour it out. Because coffee? Sweet, sweet sin.

Changing the subject:

I've been doing tons and tons of reading about TSCC. It amuses me in a not funny sort of way how I've been afraid of anti-mormon literature, but the things that are the most anti of all are produced by the church.  You know, the book of abraham, the book of mormon, journal of discourses. I still remember the first time I read the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, and how awesome it all was. And I definitely still remember last April how I felt when I found out he was not martyred but murdered by the husband of his most recent wife, who hadn't bothered to divorce him before she married Parley.

Please--if you have any good book suggestions, I'd love to hear your input. I'm listing below the ones I've either read or have purchased and are on my TBR list:

Purchased and read:
Mormonism: A Life Under False Pretenses by Lee B. Baker
Hippie Boy: A Girl's Story by Ingrid Ricks
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife by Irene Spencer
Favorite Wife: Escape from Polygamy by Susan Ray Schmidt
The Sins of Brother Curtis by Lisa Davis
Heaven Up Here by John Williams
Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Wife No. 19 by Ann Eliza Young
The 19th Wife (fiction, I know) by David Ebershoff
Fanny Stenhouse's memoirs
The City of the Mormons, 3 Days at Nauvoo by Caswell I think--it didn't seem really reliable, but I don't know--wasn't there



Purchased but not yet read:
Mormonism: Con or Cult? by Martin Scholes
The Mountain Meadows Massacre by Josiah Francis Gibbs
The Mormon Mirage by Latayne C. Scott
Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower
I have a couple of volumes of the Journal of Discourses, which I was able to download for no cost
I've also downloaded a number of other books written about the early Utah Mormons & polygamy, but don't know how accurate/reliable they are

I've seen Todd Compton's book In Sacred Loneliness recommended, but it's not available in nook format, nor is No Man Knows My History.

Any recommendations for other books to help round out my knowledge? I'd like to read an honest biography of Brigham Young. I want to read Rough Stone Rolling but I don't want to buy it again--I'd bought it once in hard cover, but it went up in flames when my house caught fire. I'm of the mind to avoid anything put out by the church, as I've paid enough money into their coffers over the last 30 years.

Last Night

I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

No, wait! That's not what I meant to say.

Last night I read Mormonism: A Life Under False Pretenses by former mormon bishop Lee B. Baker. I kept finding passages I wanted to share with my husband. I didn't bother, of course, after his telling me that it didn't matter what evidence I found, because he believes it.

But some things really jumped out at me, and I wanted to note them down here in case they jump out at anyone else.

Baker makes the point, on page 213 (nook edition), that it doesn't matter whether you know the truth or whether you are ignorant. The truth is what it is. So for the 30 years that I was a member of the mormon church and did not know what I've learned in the last 8 months, it does not change the facts that the things I've recently learned really happened. I'm not saying this well, and it's frustrating. For example, I didn't know that Parley P. Pratt was murdered by a man whose wife he had convinced to marry him without divorcing her first husband. But he was. My ignorance didn't make any difference with anyone except me. Now I know, and I can't go back to that state of ignorance.

This next one appalled me. (p. 289-290, nook edition)

"My first reading of In Sacred Loneliness became a pivotal point of research, as I came to understand that the exact same primary sources Mr. Compton had used in his research were those sources used by the church itself to construct the official lesson manuals we had used in our Sunday classes. As these sources could scarcely be considered anti-Mormon, my spiritual depression became even more overpowering as I contemplated the secret liaisons, private conversations, and intimate acts within what I could only describe as 'wife swapping' among the leadership of the Mormon Church. It should be remembered that the doctrine of polygamy remains within the official Scriptures of the Mormon Church, and this eternal principle is clearly a requirement to progress to the highest kingdom in heaven as recorded in the Mormon Doctrine & Covenants, sections 131 and 132. In a very personal and graphically related experience, a Mormon High Priest once told my wife and me, 'You do not know for sure that you will be required to share Kathy in the next life.'"

So the church condemns infidelity, fornication, adultery, yet it was practiced both secretly and openly in the earlier days of the church and there are those who believe it will be practiced in the future, whether on earth or in the heavens. They just paint it with a slightly different brush to make it seem more acceptable.

Here's another shocker, concerning the founding of the Relief Society.

"The painting depicts approximately sixteen women who, with Emma Smith front row center, seem to be attentively listening to every word of the prophet, with a variety of expressions ranging from deep admiration to sincere reverence. After I had learned the facts about both polygamy and polyandry, I further researched the official church history to find that only twenty women were at that first meeting. That idyllic painting of these devoted women assumes a somewhat disturbing feeling when viewed in the light of the following documented facts of that spring day in 1842. As Joseph Smith presided over the meeting of those twenty good sisters in the church, he was married to exactly half of them."

Wow. Just, wow.

I could go on and on, having bookmarked numerous passages, but I think this is plenty to be going on with. Deception is the hallmark of the mormon church. I prefer truth, no matter how unpleasant.

A Man Convinced Against His Will...

...is of the same opinion still.

I don't know who originally said that, but it's been on my mind this weekend. My husband spent a fair amount of time this weekend telling me how he used to be a happy person until he joined the church, how he doesn't understand how the church leaders say they stand for this or that, blah blah blah. I read him various quotations from different former mormons, and he listened to them, and then returned to his doggerel about how he doesn't understand how the church leaders say they stand for this or that, yet can be so cold and cruel.

The last thing I heard him say on the topic before I fell asleep was that he didn't care what evidence I found to the contrary, he believes the church is true. Based on everything he said the rest of the weekend, he believes God hates him; he believes he is damned; he believes that 2 of our dogs died and our house burned down because of him; he believes he's going to lose everything in the end.

And when he says that particular line, I feel guilty for wanting out of our marriage. Of course, I still want out of our marriage, but would like to lose the guilt. I don't think either of us should bear all the blame/responsibility/whatever for having a bad marriage, but dang! We have a really crappy marriage much of the time. And it seems like every time I try to convince myself that we can salvage it, he does something really assholey that just emphasizes the need to end things. Like Friday night. I stayed home sick Friday with an agonising headache (one of those where your head feels like it's made out of glass, and your brains are bouncing around. I still have it, in fact, and am going to the doctor this afternoon. But I digress.) and he was due to return from a business trip. Now when he comes home from business trips, usually he's horrible--yells about everything, picks fights over nothing. But the last two times he came home, he was decent, and I thought we were making some progress. But when he got home on Friday night, he woke me up yelling at me 3 or 4 times about various things, some of which I didn't even do, but he didn't believe me when I said I didn't do them. Like the garage. He said that I scraped some paint off the wall or something when I parked in the garage. Only problem was, I hadn't parked in the garage. He didn't believe me, of course. And he was mad about 3 or 4 other things, and finally it registered with him that I had taken all my medicines and had been asleep, so I wasn't able to coherently answer him. I felt like he was still convinced I'd parked in the garage, and just thought it was my drugs that made me say I hadn't.

Speaking of drugs, I have 4 prescription medications I take. They keep me on a more or less even keel. But he thinks I'm a drug addict. So yesterday he said he thinks the acute headaches I've been having are due to my medications. The fact that I have been on these medicines for at least 3 years doesn't seem to matter, nor does the fact that I haven't had acute headaches for the entire time I've been taking the medicines. I'm a drug addict. And yes, he's told me that flat out.

When he's nice, he's amazingly so. When he's a jerk, he's amazingly so. (And I can be a real jerk, too, I know, so I'm really not trying to only blame him.) We know how to press the buttons that instantly set each other off.

Sorry--I didn't mean to be so vent-y today.  It was a long, painful weekend.

I Am Teh Awesome!!!!

Apparently, spamlds thinks that I have the power! Or else s/he thinks that I think that I have the power to bring down the entire cojcolds.

I'm pretty impressed, to be honest. I mean, I never really thought about it that way. I set up this blog so that I could express my frustrations about having been lied to for 30 years. I set it up so that I could share what I've learned on my journey out. So that I could share discoveries I've made since leaving. So that I could ask honest questions.[sarcasm]Can I singlehandedly bring down the church? Wow! I'm going to have to put some serious thought to that![/sarcasm]

Spamlds accuses me of being unoriginal--I don't think that I ever claimed to be original. And spamlds says that I set up a free blog (what's the problem with that) with the intent of singlehandedly taking down church.

Spamlds doesn't know from bupkus. That's all I'm sayin'.

And for the record, this morning I learned that peppermint mocha creamer in my morning coffee adds up to sweet, sweet sin.

Oh, and I seriously detest spam. Nasty stuff. 

I'm Not Anti-Mormon

I'm pro truth.

I just read that statement in the Ex-Mormon Forums archives, and it resonated with me.

So many of the things I once believed "with every fibre of my being" I've since learned are, plain and simply, untrue. If I were to point my finger at just one thing, I'd select the Book of Abraham. It's not what Joseph Smith claimed it to be. The drawn-in completion of the figures in the facsimiles are pure fiction. The papyrus is from The Book of Breathings, an Egyptian funerary text. It has nothing to do with Abraham. And the figure they claim to be God has an erection. Don't believe me? Look for yourself.



I'm pro truth, and will continue to seek out truth wherever I find it. No more will I base my truths on warm fuzzies and circular logic.



Peace out.