Sharing my story. I was born into the church. I left nearly 25 years ago.

I am not the best at writing so please bear with me. Additionally, there are a lot of details from when I was very young that I don't remember, and some I just don't have, but I'll do my best to share the crucial parts of my journey. And I'll often refer to it as "Mormon" or "the Mormon church" because that's what they are, in spite of their rebranding efforts. I don't care what they want to call themselves these days.

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I was born in the early 1980s. I was an only child from my parents though I did have some half and step siblings. My biological parents were converts; they joined the church before I was born and were sealed in the temple while my mother was still pregnant with me. I remember reading my mom's journal as a teenager, she seemed to be very excited about the church and "being together forever."

Fast forward to about the age of 4 or 5-years-old and my parents divorced. To this day I'm not entirely sure why they divorced (they're both long deceased) but as a divorced man myself, I understand that it happens. I stayed with my father, my mother moved out with my half sister. My dad and I continued to go to church together and I was baptized at the age of 8.

Interesting side note: my parents were good friends with a former member of the Quorum of Seventy, and he was at my baptism. I have also spoken to him a handful of times over the last decade or so.

My dad remarried not long after I was baptized and my new step family were also members. We all continued going to church and even now had "family home evening" on Monday nights, where we'd often read and discuss scripture. Eventually we wound up moving to Utah, where we lived for just under two years, then we moved further east across the country. And several more times after that. Before we left my home state, I recall my mother distancing herself from the church and attending some non-denominational Christian churches. I attended a couple of meetings with her when I was very young and honestly they were fun, way less boring than Sundays in an LDS meetinghouse.

Not long before I was 12-years-old, my mother took her own life. I'll never forget the day I found out. I was at home with my dad and step family when the phone rang. I was near it so I answered, it was my half sister (she was still living with my mother). She sounded extremely distraught. I asked her what was wrong and all she would say was, "Put Dad on the phone!" My dad and step mom told me not long after that my mom "had an accident" and passed away. I didn't learn that it was suicide until my half sister told me a few years later. I guess my dad and step mom thought I was too young to handle that information.

I learned later in life that my dad intentionally kept me from her, still not sure why (and I'll never know) and that information brought up a memory of him telling me, "if anyone asks you where you want to live, tell them that you want to live with me." I try not to wonder if this had a hand in my mom's suicide, that kind of speculation wouldn't do me any good at this point and I know she had mental health challenges. At this point I hardly remember her. And having kids of my own now, it hurts that she is not around. But I digress.

In spite of how hard that was, life was busy and went on. In school I was in band, I played sports... and church took up a lot of time as well. I was ordained as deacon in the Aaronic Priesthood at about 12, teacher at about 14. I was heavily involved with scouting, young men's groups and activities, etc. I was going through the motions like most Mormon kids in Mormon families do. It's what my family did so it's what I did. I didn't ever really give it much thought until about 16, when I was ordained as priest... that was when it all started to get real.

Just before I turned 16, my family moved back to Utah, to a neighborhood where everybody knew everyone and they all went to church together. On top of all the things mentioned in the previous paragraph, now I was also getting church at school, because there was a seminary building next door to my high school's campus and since I was a member, I attended during school hours as if it was just another school course.

When you're a young male that turns 16 in the Mormon church, you're ordained as priest in the Aaronic Priesthood. Among other potential duties, this gives you the "privilege" of blessing the Sacrament for the congregation. It's a huge deal for Mormon boys, I will never forget my first time doing it. I don't know if things have changed since then, but at the time, they had a laminated card you could read the prayer from until you had it memorized. You spoke into a microphone so everyone in and around the main chapel could hear it.

The very first time I spoke those words to the congregation, it hit me like a freight train... I had absolutely no idea if I sincerely believed it. Any of it.

This was a new feeling for me and it made me very uncomfortable. So much so that I quit wearing a tie to church. That was a big deal back then. Not wearing a tie meant I couldn't sit up front to help prepare, bless, and distribute the sacrament. To an outsider this probably sounds ridiculous, it's just a damn tie, but that's the way it was. Of course this meant that the young men's group leaders would walk up to me and say, "Hey, Brother Dad_SB_007... where's your tie? Here, take mine!" It was like... take a hint, dude. I just wanted them to leave me alone.

Eventually that type of continued, added pressure turned into me starting to refuse to go to church. My stepmom didn't really seem to care but it initially really pissed my dad off. I heard the "this is my house, my rules" thing a few times. I had a lock on my bedroom door and there was definitely some banging on it a handful of times on Sunday mornings, Dad yelling at me to get ready for church. At this point I'm positive he was then only concerned about how it made him look when his oldest son wasn't at church with him, but oh well.

I didn't have any non-Mormon friends at the time so I turned to the Internet. Things were a lot different online in the late 90s than they are now but I found a message board to post in, venting my frustrations... and I was soon overwhelmed with people from all over the world offering support. In spite of the fact that I had been raised to "believe" and repeat that "my church was the only true church" it dawned on me that there were countless other religious believers that felt the same way about theirs and there had been for at least as long as humans have been writing things down.

While that newfound support didn't resolve the internal conflict I felt, it certainly helped. I learned a lot. I was able to start slowly crawling out of my Mormon bubble. The biggest help to me ultimately came from my Mormon Bishop, ironically enough. After not going to church for a while, he reached out via my parents and asked to meet with me. I took him up on this offer, considering that according to my upbringing at this point, this man was supposed to be someone I should consider an authority and counselor regarding exactly this type of dilemma I found myself in.

He asked me why I wasn't going to church, so I told him; I wasn't sure if I believed any of it and I felt very uncomfortable. Then he asked me what I'd done about it, if I'd been praying or studying scripture or anything... I told him I hadn't really done anything, I'd just kind of pushed it aside. I spent my Sundays watching football and playing video games. On top of how uncomfortable I was going to church, it was painfully boring. Anyway, for those that don't know, the Mormon church keeps very detailed records about its members... what this Bishop then said to me is not something I will ever forget. I still remember his name and I can still see his face.

"If you ever want to see your mother again, you need to need to quit messing around and figure it out."

This was probably one of the most horrible and most helpful things anyone has ever said to me. I wasn't angry at him for saying it, it inspired me. It lit a fire under my ass. Young me was like, "He's right." I figured if this stuff was all true, nothing else mattered. That's pretty solid reasoning, right? So I became obsessed. I read the King James Bible (using the NIV comparatively), Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price... cover to cover.

One story in particular that always stood out and really bothered me, even more so since becoming the father of boys of my own*,* was Abraham and Isaac. Genesis 22. God tells Abraham to take his son up the mountain and sacrifice him. Spoiler alert: it was a test of faith and an angel stopped Abraham at the last second, giving him a ram to sacrifice instead. It'd take a special kind of sick, sadistic, psycho to do that to someone. If God told me to sacrifice one of my sons, I'd tell him to kiss my fat ass. And this was the God I was supposed to believe in and bow down to? I had notebooks full of notes, thoughts, and questions like that, and I didn't stop there.

I read books from current and former church authorities and "prophets." A couple of years later I worked at a thrift store (not Deseret Industries) and we would often get tons of old, out of print Mormon-published books. Including things they've since changed. I read everything I could get my hands on. But in addition to being obsessed, I was also terrified. What if I was being "led astray by Satan"? What if I was making a mistake? What if he was right and I was on the path to damning myself and would never see my mother again?

The more I learned about the Mormon church's history, the easier it became to distance myself from it. I learned that I did not like Joseph Smith or Brigham Young... two of the church's foundational leaders. Smith was a pedophile, a criminal, a conman, and a traitor, to say the least. Young was probably even more vile. And they were hardly the only leaders since that were problematic (understatement). It blew my mind that black men couldn't be ordained into the priesthood until 1978, just a handful of years before I was born... more than a decade after the civil rights act... and the church leadership continued to preach against interracial marriage for years after.

I dove pretty deep into the history of the church and there is a lot that is truly disturbing even outside of the polygamy, underage marriages, and racism. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but I soon began to realize that this wasn't a church I wanted to be a part of. I wasn't yet sure how I felt about God or Christ but I knew in my heart and mind that if they were real, they wouldn't hold it against me from walking away from this organization... this cult.

When I was about 20 years old, before the days sites like QuitMormon, the Internet directed me to send a letter to the Mormon church membership records office to request myself removed from membership, so that's what I did. It was short and sweet, I just said, "I am no longer a believer, I renounce my faith in the Mormon church, and request my records be removed and destroyed." I felt pretty good about it. I'd been living off on my own since about 18, starting to gain some independence in life away from my parents at the time. Then Missionaries kept showing up at my apartment. Then local bishopric. They left letters and pamphlets on my door telling me I was making a huge mistake, I was going to "void my baptism" and condemn myself. It was harassment.

I returned to an online community I was a member of for a few years at that point. I vented about all of this and happened to cross paths with a civil rights attorney that drafted a letter template for me. It was very strongly worded. I filled it out, printed and signed it, and sent it off. I soon thereafter received a letter confirming that my membership and personal information/files had been removed. I wish I still had that letter.

Over the next couple of years I was still "searching for truth" as they say. I was all over the place. I read into the Torah a bit, the Quran, also everything from von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods" to Walsch's "Conversations with God" to going to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in theaters (which made me extremely emotional, sobbing and angry at the time). Eventually my path turned towards philosophy and science.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." [Galileo]

It has been quite a journey over the years. At one point I was a stubborn atheist that basically turned mocking religion on the Internet into a hobby. And while I still consider myself atheist without even any specific beliefs in "life after death," perhaps I am a bit more open minded than I used to be... but I don't find answers in religion.

There's probably a lot that we'll never be able to wrap our human minds around; there could be all kinds of things about life and existence we'll never understand, no matter how smart we think we are. As much as life sucks sometimes, generally speaking, it is quite fascinating. The fact that we're here at all... we love... we create beautiful art, music... we look at the stars and we wonder.

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." [Carl Sagan]

That is my spirituality.

Thanks for reading!