As an active Mormon, you are typically expected to:

• Have a "good, better, best" mindset. Sure, what you're doing could be good, but is it the best thing to spend time on? Only things that involve the church are the best use of your time.
• Read scriptures every day.
• Attend several hours of mind-numbing meetings every Sunday. In the case of bishops, this is almost the entire day.
• Attend weekly activities with other people in the church.
• Avoid doing most "worldly" things on Sunday, effectively reducing the weekend to one day.
• Go to the temple as often as you can, where you sit through boring ceremonies that take a minimum of a couple hours out of your day.
• Research family history so you can do more boring temple ceremonies.
• "Hold a calling," which is volunteer work for the church that can range from a few hours a month to a part-time (unpaid) job.
• "Minister" to someone, which means you're an assigned friend that tries to keep the other person spiritually healthy.
• Clean the church building on random Saturdays.
• Watch 10 hours of General Conference every 6 months.
• Spend 18-24 consecutive months as a full-time missionary. No, I don't mean 40 hours per week. I mean all day every day. It completely consumes your life during that time.
• Even when that's over, you're still expected to seek out opportunities to bring people into the church. This makes interactions with non-members a lot more exhausting and inauthentic than they should be.
• Get married ASAP and have lots of kids.

I'm sure there's more I forgot to include, but I think these posters get the vibe across:

Thanks!

Five years later:

"To remove Mormon’s name from the Lord’s Church is a major victory for Satan. When we discard Mormon's name, we are subtly disregarding all that the ancient prophets did for us—even the Book of Mormon."

Adding dialog to warn you is one thing, but I genuinely cannot fathom how they thought putting objective markers on invisible elites was a good idea.

I'm not sure my comment fits in this community, but I hope someone finds value in it. Another clear sign of abuse is what's called "the missing missing reasons."

I've had at least several hundred (yes, really) conversations with my parents where I explained how they were hurting me, and every single time it would just go in one ear and out the other. Once I finally moved out and consistently declined to interact with them, they started saying stuff like "why won't you just talk to us about your concerns? We want to have a relationship with you."

It seems like the only relationship they want to have is one where they keep doing the same shit they've always done and I keep putting up with it.

Instead of actually being happy, I remember this distinct culture of everyone pretending to be happier than they really were. After all, living the gospel is the greatest happiness you can have, right? You must be doing something sinful if you're not happy!

Oh yeah, and there's stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/...

Context: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2023/10/51nelson?lang=eng&id=p23#p23

I hadn't heard of this until now lol

"We don't do infant baptisms because we believe that people should have the agency to make such an eternally-important decision on their own.

"... Anyway, want to come to little Timmy's baptism? He just turned 8 years old and has decided to promise that he will commit the entire rest of his life to the Church! I'm so glad he's finally old enough to make that choice on his own!"

I lean the other way, in that I think religions have gradually gotten better over the years due to societal pressures. Not great, mind you, just less terrible.

Either way, I totally agree that Christianity (and religion in general) is a plague on humanity. I know not everyone will agree with such a harsh statement, but I struggle to see the good in convincing people to live a lie.

For real. Teaching people to devalue what is likely the only life they'll get for the sake of some dubious afterlife is the most sinister perversion of delayed gratification that I've ever seen. The years of my life I lost to that madness will haunt me forever.

Cool! I'm not sure why I can't see the comments on the other 2 posts, but hopefully that won't be an issue going forward.

10/10 teasing lol. I think the ex-Muslim guy would be happy to know his story played even a small part in possibly helping someone be more open-minded.

When you're in:

We never said it would be easy, just that it would be worth it! 🥰 🥰 🥰

When you're out:

Your life would be much easier if you swallowed your pride and came back to church.

This is about the US Securities and Exchange Commission suing the church. Any football stuff is purely coincidental since I'm clueless on that front lol.

Yes! I didn't read the whole thing, but there was a ton of helpful stuff in the parts I did read. Thanks for responding and making sure I've heard of it. It really is an awesome book.

Aw dang, that's unfortunate.

Yep! It seems whatever I ran into isn't affecting anything new, so I don't think we'll need to worry about it.

I don't know if I will ever stop cringing at my past self for thinking this was a cool story lol