Comments

1
"they sentenced me to 20 year of boredom
for trying to change the system from within"
-l. cohen

I heartily encourage every Mormon to leave the Mormon Cult.
2
Your last two paragraphs should apply to many religions. Sashay away, indeed.
3
I just gotta say, you know, credit to Ms. Kelly for agitating for gender equality in a patriarchal world, but she wanted to stay in the Mormon Church? There's some serious cognitive dissonance going on there. I mean, those people don't have a firm grasp on reality, let alone gender, equality, history and compassion. Better to be well & done with that pile of crazy.

(I'll tell you my story of visiting SLC & the taking the Mormon-Tour sometime.. hilarious!)

That said, it often does take a good, swarthy punishment of someone trying to do an obvious good to awaken the others to the assholisitic tendencies of the soi-disant 'church' they support. I hope her efforts result in more ex-Mormons.
4
Is Mormonism prematurely entering its own dark ages? It took Christianity and Islam each 500-700 years after their foundation to go full retard and another thousand or more to get over it (Islam still has a ways to go). Mormonism must be experiencing the quickening of the information age.
5
Religion is a mental illness.
6
Their cult newspaper, the Deseret News, carries the Mormon slant on the news. It's pathetic watching them tie themselves in knots trying to cheerlead for the Supreme Court to let them keep their discriminatory laws. I've been posting counterpoints to their articles and jousting with their very conservative readers in the comment threads for some months now.

From an intellectual standpoint, it's just shooting fish in a barrel. But, it's impossible to change any minds. They don't care that there are other religions which are loving and inclusive. They don't care that our secular government is supposed to be separate from their church. They don't care about any of the logical fallacies or factual falsehoods that underlie their arguments. Like you say, it's a cult.

I'm not going to promise never to again attempt to interject sanity in their frothy, hate-filled threads, but I'm coming to the conclusion that it might be a complete waste of time. There are a number of pro-equality posters there, including LGBT Mormons, doing their best to rebut the biggest lies, but the pigheaded homophobes seem completely immune, stinking drunk with hate. On top of that, reading the citation titles and "authorities" the opponents quote from the Mormon religion with such fervor, it reads like bad parody to someone not immersed in it.
7
@6 Sorry, didn't mean to go full off-topic. The story on Ms. Kelly's excommunication garnered a cult-load of comments, condemning Ms. Kelly. More comments even than the same-sex marriage stories that garner most of my attention there.

I was horrified, frankly, by the hundreds of comments cheering the Church for excommunicating her.

I. Am. Never. Setting. Foot. In. SLC.

Nor am I ever going to pass up the opportunity to approach their "missionaries" on the streets. They may not be quite as bad as our rats, bedbugs and roaches, but Brooklyn definitely has an infestation of Mormon missionaries.
8
@7 Salt Lake City proper is actually relatively liberal compared to the rest of the Salt Lake Valley and Wasatch Front population centers. The Deseret News represents the Mormon perspective, but the Salt Lake Tribune (the paper with greater circulation, journalistic integrity, and reputation) represents a more heterodox perspective.

SLC is pretty good, so long as you avoid Temple Square and the suburbs, most of which are actually their own city corporations like Draper, Murray, and Sandy and are not part of Salt Lake City proper, which has things like non-discrimination ordinances and a history of liberal mayors like Rocky Anderson and Ralph Becker.
9
When "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" came out, that was my final straw. No one with any experience of the LDS church could doubt what a hateful load of shit was hiding behind those carefully chosen words. That said, it's insane to protest for change - LDS dogma is not subject to any opinions except those of the creepy old white men who claim to receive prophecy. The two choices are conform or leave, and door number two is getting more popular all the time.
11
you girls really shouldn't take it so personally.

every now and then the toilet has to be flushed,
otherwise the shit piles up and stinks up the whole joint.

expect more flushing in weeks and months to come.

but this is a win-win....

the whiner degenerates who bail out of the mormon church and join the perverts raise the average IQ of both groups.
12
I'm not a Mormon, never have been, but I have friends who are ex-Mormon. They left many years ago because of the institutionalized bigotry and general cult-like atmosphere. Many have found support on this site: http://www.exmormon.org/

Good luck and get the hell out of the Mormon church - ASAP.
13
@4 Well, the two largest Christian denominations in the U.S., Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist, don't believe in the equality of women or gay people. That's just as messed up.
14
@3 - Liberal mormons who want to stay in the church baffled me too, but I recently moved to Utah and its becoming much clearer why this is a common phenomenon. The church interweaves itself into every single aspect of these peoples lives. All their rites are performed in a temple where you have to be in "good standing" to even be admitted. That means baptisms, weddings and other big events in your family life are off limits to you if you are not in good standing with the church. The church also strokes the reward centers of its members brains like no other organization i've ever encountered. Being a man in the church is just relentlessly gratifying and Mormon women are conditioned from a young age to be literally competitive with each other in their shows of devotion to the church. A lot of people who leave the church leave behind their entire culture, their entire family and almost all their friends. I know john Dehlin who is the other prominent mormon dissenter being threatened with excommunication, as well as a lot of other mormons who are no longer believers. Every single one of them is culturally mormon to their core and always will be. One of these friends was telling me one day that he had trouble forming friendships with non-mormons because "Non-mormons are like this, and non-mormons do that, etc." I finally just interrupted him and told him, "you do realize that when you say 'non-mormons' you are talking about pretty much everybody on earth, right?" He had to think about it. In their minds it really is a mormon world and the rest of us are just living in it. In Utah, of course, that is literally true.
15
To echo @8, SLC is the only relatively normal spot in Utah. Don't watch the local news, don't read the paper (though the Trib has been mostly balanced in coverage, for as long as it lasts after the hideous agreement with the Deseret Mormon News that will probably sink it like the Seattle Times - PI mess). Stick to places like the Tower Theater, the breweries (serving beers with names like Polygamy Porter, Ezra Taft Draft), coffee shops like Jack Mormon Coffee Co and Bad Ass Coffee, and you can avoid seeing many hard core Mo's.
Temple Square gave me the urge to vandalize something for the first time in my life, probably because a good friend committed suicide after 4 years of familial and church (emotional) torture when he came to the realization he was gay. He probably would have been fine if his family didn't live in a small town in Utah, complete with even smaller minds, but I could not convince him to leave his family and move to SLC or elsewhere. The church is insidious in its hold - making members so dependent on being a part of it that it is hard for many of them to fathom life without it. Though some do come to their senses. A neighbor who was part of the church for all of her life lost her husband several years ago. She started dating again recently - a non-Mormon - and received numerous home visits from "concerned members" worried about the impropriety of her boyfriend's car being parked outside her house until she finally told them to fuck off and butt out, and removed herself from the church. She regales us regularly - over margaritas, no less - with ridiculous Mormon church stories.
16
I left Mormonism in Oct 2012, at the age of 34, after a lifetime of service. Mission, Temple Marriage and everything. My wife left two months after I did. We have two young kids and we left because of the LDS Church's sexist and bigoted views and practices.... at least those beliefs and practices is what helped us open our eyes and do the honest research into the actual real history of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, which was all we needed to get the hell out. I now blog about our experience, especially since my wife has Bipolar Disorder and the Mormon Church greatly contributed to her illness and was quite harmful in so many ways, wit their culture of shame, guilt and perfectionism.

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