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Both of my parents have PhD(s) from BYU, all 9 of my siblings and I graduated from BYU, all 7 of my sisters married BYU grads who served missions, my 2 brothers and I both served missions, and my siblings have sure been raising a lot of devout Mormons. I used to be devout Mormon myself until the year 2000 at age 28 when I was serving in a Mormon bishopric and accidentally came to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon was fiction and then the house of cards came tumbling down. Up to that point in my adult life I had never seriously considered that the Book of Mormon could be anything but “the most correct book on earth” and definitely non-fiction. Well that was frankly the toughest challenge I’ve ever faced in my life as its changed the dynamics of all my relationships. But there is no denying the truth about Mormonism and I’m not going to sacrifice my integrity to believe in anything that is simply false. I’m confident that any devout Mormon reading this would “go off the rails”.

I’ll add one other tidbit to this. Around 2 decades ago I had a friend of mine who was serving as a full-time Mission President for the LDS church overseas. These full-time Mission Presidents are generally very devout Mormons who are very successful in their families, church careers, and professions who will take off 3 years from their profession to devote themselves full-time to supervising around 150-200 full-time missionaries and fulfilling other leadership responsibilities. One of their most important duties is to have a monthly interview with each missionary and the majority of these missionaries in his mission were young men aged 19-21 from the western USA. For these young men the Mission President is like a Father, Pastor, and Employer all-in-one for their 2 year missions so a big part of these interviews is to help boost their morale and give them good direction/mentoring in life. Well one day my friend was interviewing one of these young men (hereinafter I refer to this one as “kid”) and the kid claimed to be struggling to “have the Spirit”. Its drilled into missionaries that to be successful in bringing people into the church and strengthening the loyalty/testimonies of the members that they need to “have the Spirit” in being enthusiastic and really believing that God is guiding you. Well in his case the root issue was that several years earlier that he was a teenager living in a very LDS community in the western USA where his Ward’s Bishop was a hypocrite. Apparently the Bishop supposedly got some revelations from God which required him to sexually molest several of the teenagers in the Ward including this young man. So he did this but somehow someone told some higher-ups. Well the church quietly excommunicated him, removed him from his position, and sent some higherup authority from Salt Lake to visit, talk to the teenagers, and reassure those involved that they were absolved from sin & make sure it was all kept quiet. If word got out then the church was concerned (because it believes its the Lord’s only true church) that the reputation could be damaged and the Mormon church cares very much about protecting its good reputation. So few people knew about it including this kid’s parents and all the local law enforcement community so this ex-Bishop was still as free to roam the community amongst children as Jerry Sandusky was for so many years. Well now this kid was a missionary overseas away from his parents and wanting to talk to them about this situation in order to “have the Spirit” and be a good missionary. So my friend called the kid’s parents back home to arrange for such a conference call and discovered that the mom was at home, the dad was at work, and so he scheduled for about an hour later when both parents were together to have this important talk.

In the meantime the LDS church had a hotline for its leaders to use to get help for situations like this. My friend called it and spoke to a General Authority in Salt Lake & told him verbatim what the kid had told him & about the upcoming conference call. Well my friend was shocked when about 5-10 minutes later he got a call from the #2 man in the church named Thomas S. Monson who told him to not let the kid talk to his parents. Well my friend kept this to himself and disobeyed by going ahead and letting the kid talk to his parents. Well the parents were upset and then called the police who in turn did a real investigation that uncovered how. What the investigation never did pursue is how Monson had committed a felony in obstruction of justice in trying to coerce my friend to cover up for the church and how when it came out that my friend had disobeyed that Monson tried to get him excommunicated and would’ve succeeded if one of the Apostles hadn’t threatened to face excommunication himself if they excommunicated my friend. My friend keeps this all mostly to himself as his wife is still a true believer, especially how for the past 8 years since the last church President Gordon B. Hinckley died that the Mormons (including Mitt Romney, Harry Reid, and this former Stake President Crapo) now consider Monson to be a holy prophet and God’s official spokesman on earth. And my friend didn’t stay out serving as a Mission President for very long after that event as he lost his trust in the LDS church leadership and shortly afterwards stopped being a believer altogether.

For the most part I do think Mormons are decent people. But they have some ugly history and some leaders who have been so hell-bent on protecting their empire’s reputation that they have now exposed themselves to all as being super-hypocrites.