Join At Your Own Risk

I just found this AWESOME blog and am inviting the HERO behind this blog to become a contributor to Join At Your Own Risk! We are on the same side! Join At Your Own Risk is just uglier and we lie!

Dear Ram and Andy,

Since I began to investigate the wealth of information you are providing on this blog I have had many second thoughts about Mormonism.

I decided I needed to have a talk with my Bishop. It was an important step for me. First, as a courtesy, I needed to officially resign from my calling as a Gospel Doctrine teacher (up until this time I had been telling our Sunday School President that I couldn’t teach on the days I was supposed to). Second, it confirmed to me that I had no fears in expressing my new beliefs even to those whom I had previously given “authority” over me.

To be honest, the Bishop was totally cool. I didn’t go into detail and he didn’t try to pry. His advice was to hold off on resigning my membership and to give it some time, which I had already decided I would do for family reasons. He simply said that he wished others felt what he had felt. For him it works, for me… it definitely did not.

I was in a singles’ ward, so I acknowledged that my records should be sent to the “family” ward where I currently reside. I gave him my permission for him to contact “my” new Bishop and let him know that I wanted some space and would not be attending services. We shared a quick embrace and I walked out.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a bishop of a singles’ ward. These guys must be gluttons for punishment. But, I am now a new Bishop’s problem.

I really don’t care if the new “Ward” contacts me or not. I am becoming more and more comfortable in acknowledging my apostasy. I figure in a year or so it may be time for a letter to Greg.

On the way out I saw a couple of friends from the ward that I had not seen since I left. We chatted and we both acknowledged I had not been to church in a while. I told them I would not be coming back. They inquired as to which ward I would be attending. I replied “none!” After an awkward pause, I gave a short explanation that I was there to meet with the Bishop and had decided the church wasn’t for me. The conversation continued awkwardly for a moment until we left the topic of the church. We agreed to get together sometime.

I slept with complete satisfaction and even felt those familiar feelings of the “Spirit,” which I recognize now as emotional contentment.

Thanks again,
Edward Phillips

Dear Andy and Ram,

Thank you so much for all the fine work you guys are doing.

If you haven't heard by now I've removed my web page.
I've chosen an alias because I'm still trying to find a way to bring my page back. It was my mistake for using my real name, I felt that to do otherwise would be cowardly. I guess the joke's on me.

I was born and raised a Mormon in Southern California. My ancestors crossed the Plains in covered wagons, and I have ancestors who were married to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

To be a Mormon takes a lot of dedication and time. The average service on Sunday is over three hours, and that's not counting other activities during the week. The Church makes sure its members are always involved, which is one of its selling points. Mormons are made to feel important. Ever since I can remember, Mormonism just didn't seem right to me. The teachings were so different from other Christian religions that I never felt comfortable with it.

Religious instruction starts early with constant reinforcement. Everyone around me was so sure Mormonism was the right religion. I felt that I was just a bad person who wasn't 'getting it'.

These feelings continued to grow as I did. I tried to believe. I read the Book of Mormon and prayed about it. I never received the 'burning in the bosom' talked about by Mormons. This was suppose to be a signal from God that the individual had found the true Church. This made me feel even worse. I was a rebellious child, and Mormonism isn't the ideal religion for that. It's very structured with clean-cut boundaries as to behavior and status. Needless to say, my activities put me near the bottom of the pecking order. As I approached the missionary age (18-19), I sat through farewell meetings for my friends. I heard the girls cry while the young missionaries would almost glow with religious fervor for the Lord. My mother would talk about how nice the meeting was, and plan what they were going to do for my farewell. I would smile and feel like dirt. I knew that a mission was out of the question, because I didn't believe. Yet, I didn't quite know why. As time passed, and it was clear I wasn't going on a mission, people's attitudes towards me changed. Conversations stopped when I came near, and everyone always had something to do and left. My social life was finished because Mormon girls are taught that their prime duty in life is to marry a returned missionary and raise children. There was only one young woman who treated me with kindness during that time. B. E., if you ever read this, thanks. I drifted further and further away from even the most basic Mormon beliefs; however, I still has to attend while living with my parents. Seeing everyone believing and content just pushed me further into depression and confusion. I joined the Air Force at age 21 and left for basic training. While there, I once again tried to return to Mormonism. I reread the Book of Mormon and prayed, but it didn't help.

I was stationed at March AFB, Ca., near Riverside. Leaving the Church was easy, and I didn't miss it at all. I was always told that I'd feel an emptiness in my life without it, but I didn't.

Mormons are very tenacious people and don't like the idea that one of their members is back-sliding. Since I was still on the membership roles, I could be tracked down. Men from the Church would come to my home and ask me to come back. Their visits would average about once every 4 to 6 months. I would get phone calls both at work and home for the same purpose. I was considered an 'inactive' member by this time.

Mormons have a program called fast-offerings. The first Sunday of every month, members are required to fast from the Saturday evening meal until Sunday evening meal. The average food cost is then calculated, and that amount is given to the Church (as a minimum donation). On that day, twelve year old boys are handed a package of envelopes. On them are the names and addresses of inactive members living within certain boundaries as well as those individuals who couldn't attend the fast meeting. The boys are then driven to the targeted houses and ask for a fast offering. I was hit up for this as well.

I left for Korea for a 1 year tour and wasn't there two months before they found me again! I had to live in a dormitory and my neighbors would tell me about missionaries knocking on my door and asking about me. I worked rotating shifts and was seldom home. The visits had gotten so frequent that my neighbors taped a sign to my door saying 'Mormons, go away!' Religious recruitment is forbidden on military installations. How did they get in? How did they keep on finding me? As a result, I had my dog tags changed for religious preference.

After my return to the U.S., I started doing my own research into the history and doctrine of the Mormon Church. As stated earlier, I required three independent sources of information to confirm a belief or event. The reason for this is while the Mormons were starting their religion, they were persecuted. While some anti-Mormon literature was written, there was also a great deal of objective and firsthand accounts as well. If three different sources agreed on an event, it was unlikely to be pure hate literature. What I found out was very different from what I was taught growing up. The Church version of Mormon history is a heavily doctored one designed more for the raising up of faith than recording accurate history.

Independent research is highly discouraged. Members are told to view, read, and listen only to Church approved sources. The more I learned on my own, the more I believed that Mormonism is not the true religion of God. I was no longer bothered by the thought that I was going to the Telestial kingdom (the lowest of three worlds Mormons believe will exist in the afterlife) for casting away the true gospel. The discrepancies between the historical and Church versions were so wide that I started to get angry. All my life, I was taught to believe that Mormonism developed in a certain way, and now it was all wrong.

It got to the point that I wanted to sever every tie with the Church that I could. I called the local bishop and asked him to forward a letter to Salt Lake City, Utah. In that letter I stated that I wanted my name removed from the records of the Church. He sounded very distressed. He stated that he didn't even know I was in his boundary (I guess the dog tags was how they kept finding me). He asked to meet with me, but I declined. I told him that I didn't want to talk to anyone, no one was to come to my home, and no one was to call. He was agitated and somewhat dumb-founded. He asked me if I had sinned against the Church, and, if I had, that I must go through a bishop's court. In this court I'd be judged as to whether I warranted excommunication, in other words, cut from the Church on their terms. I told him that I wouldn't attend any court because I no longer recognized his authority (he didn't like that). After some more discussion, he agreed, and I mailed him my letter.

About two weeks later, I was away for the evening. When I returned, my wife told me that the bishop had come over. He told her that he needed my phone number and priesthood records. After she let him in, he immediately started looking around for me. He asked her if she was Mormon (she isn't). He told her all the horrible things that would happen to me in the afterlife if I continued with this process. After getting his information, he left. I was furious when I found out. The only reason he was there was to get my phone number (it's unlisted). I clearly told him I wasn't to be contacted at home, and he disregarded my wishes.

About two months passed without any progress. I received a phone call one evening from the bishop. He asked me to meet with him at the Church next Sunday. My initial thought was that he had my membership cancellation notice. But as I thought about it, it didn't make sense. It would've been mailed to me. I asked him what he wanted to talk to me about. There was silence for about twenty seconds before he spoke. He said that the Lord had a calling for me. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I asked him to repeat what he said, and he did, adding that we needed to talk about it. I told him I wasn't an active member and wasn't interested. He turned nasty then, mocking my voice and started pronouncing doom on my head if I refused the Lord. I hung up the phone. This happened in Jan. ' 95. By this time I knew that he wasn't going to honor my request. I started to look for another way out. I couldn't believe the trouble I was having getting out of a church! If I had gone ahead with a bishop's court, it would've already been over. The Mormon Church doesn't like people leaving on their own. It makes them look bad. But if the person has been excommunicated, they can say that the person was a sinner and didn't deserve to be a Mormon.

I contacted a lawyer and told him what had happened. At first he looked at me a little strange but as he got the full story, decided to help me. He told me he would call Salt Lake and advise them to release me. If they didn't, then I was going to sue the Church for harassment. In addition, he wanted the records to reflect that the only reason I was removed was because I had requested it.

I went home and just shook my head. I was amazed at this whole thing. If it wasn't so pitiful, it would've been funny.

The next day, I came home from work and checked the mail. In it was a package sent overnight express. Inside was my records cancellation letter from the local bishop. It was a Xerox and written in the top right-hand corner was 'Nov. 94'. I just laughed, they were fighting to the end. I decided to develop a Web page to express my opinions and become a point of contact for others who had gone through the same experiences I did. It got pretty popular, receiving over 31,000 hits in seven months. I was helping people who've had their lifes thrown into turmoil by leaving the Mormon church. As my page received more exposure, the members in my parents area started to mobilize. My parents were harrassed by people they've gone to church with for over 20 years. Instead of exhibiting Christian-type values such as comforting them for the loss of a son from Mormonism, they received emotional blackmail instead. My father's health started to suffer as a result of it.

I was forced to remove my page from the Internet because I was stating my opinion and it scared them. Mormons have long cried "Persecution! The world won't let us believe what we want and publish/think what we want." Well, that same attitude has been used on me. Since they couldn't get to me they turned on my parents. Another example of a repressive, closed-minded church that will work tirelessly to stop anyone who dares express an opinion of Mormonism that hasn't been through the Church's sanitation machine. I've had many people tell me I should write a book, I'm in process of doing that

The following comes from one of our readers who was once in the clutches of the Mormon Church but has managed to escaped. She goes by Wackybabe in the blogosphere. These are her words:

I don’t know what all to say about the Mormon shit that happened. There was this one girls camp where the young women’s leaders gave all of us girls a name and identity when we got there, like my name was Caroline and I had 6 children or something. We were all supposed to be pioneer family’s who traveled to Utah. Anyway, at every meal, we’d be given a note that said something like, there’s a plague that has gone around your camp. Your youngest daughter, Emily died and your husband is ill. Shit that was really sad. Anyway, the more we got into the game, the more time we’d spend crying. We were only 13 or 14. Finally, there were just a few of us “left” and we were supposed to decide amongst ourselves who got to "live” and who had to "die" and what we wanted the survivor to tell our family back home before we “died.” Then we had a big funeral and all the girls were crying and putting flowers on the mock graves and stuff. Very morbid.

At the time it seemed like it was a cool game to get us to feel closer to our Mormon heritage and to teach us how hard our ancestors lives were. But now that I’m out of it, I just think, what a mind fuck.

A couple years later my mom left my dad and moved me and my sisters to Las Vegas when I was 16. Then she married another guy who had another family who wasn't Mormon. So we all kind of got out of the church at the same time and never went back.

I always felt like the church people were just being nice to me so I'd keep coming back to Church. Every once in a while I see Missionaries on the street and I want to throw something at them, but I keep myself calm. Life's too short.

Thanks, Wackybabe... we hope that you will share more of what the nightmare of being with those lunatics was like as you uncover more memories.

As I was going to St.Ives
I met a man with seven wives;
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were going to St.Ives ?

Missionaries boast wrongly that the Church Of Latter Day Saints is the fastest growing church on the planet. They are wrong. They are lying.

A worker inside church headquarters reports:

Official membership increased from 10,752,986 to 11,068,861 during 2000. This consists of 273,973 convert baptisms and 81,450 increase in children of record. The loss of 39,548 is due primarily to deaths, and various adjustments. The First Presidency is aware of the problem of the "name removed file" growing to hundreds of thousands of names, all still included in the 11 million. It appears that they are reluctant to change the policy, and therefore they still count those people as part of the total membership.

News Beat

Saturday, October 1, 2005

Psychosexual test for videotaper

OGDEN -- A judge ordered a psychosexual evaluation of a man who admitted to videotaping himself fondling teenage girls while on his church mission.

John Matthew Baysden, 22, will be returned to 2nd District Court on Jan. 10 for sentencing before 2nd District Judge Pamela Heffernan, who ordered the probe Wednesday. The 90-day evaluation conducted while in lockdown at the Utah State Prison diagnostic unit is meant to be a guide in sentencing by determining how much of a threat to the community a sex offender may be.

Baysden was arrested in January on multiple counts of forcible sexual abuse and voyeurism involving three girls in Roy. Two of them were molested as they slept, police say.

In June, Baysden pleaded guilty to reduced charges in a plea bargain.

Baysden had been flying in from his native North Carolina for court hearings since The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cut short his mission after his arrest.