How did you decide whether you should attend church?

  1. The spirit told me it would harm my child.

  2. It felt disloyal to attend a church that preached I could be ripped away from my non member husband and assigned to a different man in the afterlife.

  3. Attending was making me a worse person. Less honest. Less kind. Less charitable. More proud. More vain. More greedy.

  4. When I tried to discuss what I read in the BoM (and on Wikipedia), the missionaries yelled at me, in my home, in front of my toddler.

  5. I just don't fit in. Not on any level. When they say something that makes the spirit go down, I want to speak up. When I see them hurt or exclude someone, I want to comfort that person. When they try to mix politics or business with religion, I feel shocked and offended. When they make fun of the way other cultures dress I feel offended. When they make racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks, I cringe. In short, I'm just not one of them.

  6. I'm bisexual and I don't want to go back into the closet. Kinda part of the whole not fitting in thing, but a big enough issue to deserve it's own number on the list.

  7. The more I attended, the more I stared to feel like God hated me. It was like this angry, evil voice in terms back of my brain started saying nasty / hurtful things and the closet I got to the church, the louder and more powerful it got.

  8. I started becoming obsessed with sex. It was like all sorts of innocent parts of life were getting twisted in the most sexual way possible. At the same time, I started having difficulty engaging in normal sexual activity. It was like everything was getting twisted.

  9. There was a tremendous darkness in several people's eyes. I know this probably doesn't make sense to say to a mostly atheist audience. But, if would be dishonest to omit this just to fit in here.

  10. There are some things going on there spiritually that are of great concern. I don't know how much detail I should go into with this audience.

Anyway, those are the big 10 for me.

/r/exmormon Thread