I was just thinking abt what the LDS church would have to do to eliminate mind control tactics on my way to work this morning. It would be such a breath of fresh air to the membership, IMO. Here is a partial list:
1. Eliminate threatening prophesies. Declare that Christ is not coming again, no impending Armageddon, the earth is not going to be bathed in blood and war in the near future, etc.
2. Eliminate preoccupation with money. Tithing reduced to 1%, vast financial holdings sold and proceeds donated to humanitarian efforts, etc.
3. Eliminate secrecy. Publish full financials annually, all meetings open to public, temple ceremonies made public, open archives, etc.
4. No more shrines for the elite. Every member can attend the temple, get the second annointing, etc.
5. Eliminate privacy infringement. No more confessions, youth interviews, annual PPI’s, etc.
6. Remove hyper-purity demands & guilt. Word of Wisdom is just advice, advise abstinence early, but emphasize safe sex above all, masturbation and fornication not mortal sins.
7. Remove illusion of certainty and foster tolerance. Teach that warm feelings do not equate to sure knowledge. Eliminate testimony meetings.
8. Remove any requirement for top-down obedience, remove disciplinary action process.
9. Remove information censorship, teaching the membership the whole history. Reward honest members with an honest rendering of church doctrines, history, etc.
10. Eliminate ‘heavenly soldiers for God’ theme in song and in lesson materials.

There is more, but this would be a good start.

I see satire is completely lost on you. This disappoints me greatly, especially since you are an aspiring writer.

Sadly,

James

Please keep your comments civil.

I shall now create an online message board to help others recover from the ill-effects of reading your posts. I think I’ll call it ex-Lyndos.com

You ask some good questions, which I may respond to in a post soon.

I have the rich but occasionaly sad experience of reading dozens of exit stories each week. The common theme among every one of them is the loss of self worth while in the LDS church and the instant feeling of hope when they leave.

I’ve met people that are twenty years away from having had Mormon ties and still feel the guilt and shame that was continually drilled into their heads and hearts while in the church. Two decades to undo the damage inflicted by this cult.

I’m only at the halfway point and am feeling more and more whole every week. Learning to make new friends with the very backward and infantalized communication skills fostered in the LDS culture has been difficult. I find that shedding those poor habits is very complicated since I’ve not had balanced and intellectually honest methods modeled for me. I find many former LDS who struggle similarly.

When those of us with huge extended families still deeply entrenched in the church are out here on our own, longing for the deep connections but gunshy about the manipulations exacted on us while in those LDS families and settings, it helps considerably to have places where we can gather (online and in real life) and share our common histories, our complex challenges, humor, lightness, and eventually find that there are many more wonderful things to discover BEYOND MORMONISM. I’m hoping to get there soon. I can’t bring my family but I can make new connections.

Yes the LDS church is a boat anchor to human health and happiness for most people. I think virtually all who are willing and able to falsify it will agree that part of their faith evolution felt like cutting the chain to the boat anchor.

Mormonism is a memetic virus, and meets the criteria for being a destructive mind control entity, encouraging suppression of the authentic self, ever increasing dependence on the group, and top-down obedience. Mormonism has evolved to be very efficient at preying upon our innate cognititve human biases as well. The long term psychological ill effects of destructive mind control are well known, and abundantly evident among LDS membership – at least as I see the data.

Understanding mind control tactics and how religion reinforces human biases was a huge help to me in my recovery from LDS mind control. It helped me realize that I was (dare I say?) a relatively normal human being to have fallen so deeply and become so completely assimilated by Mormonism for so long. Recovering from 45 years of mind control was not a simple undertaking. And it is a recovery process, that happens in stages. In fact, I wrote a book called “Standing for Something More” which summarizes my findings to help others speed up their recovery. In fact, writing the book was part of my recovery, and was recommended by a therapist. While I did not realize it at the time, but speaking to my former high council was also part of my recovery.

Dana used a Company analogy, I will use the rabid dog analogy. If you and your children were bitten by a rabid dog, do you just say “That’s life!” and go on? Hardly. You seek treatment, go through a recovery and healing stage, and call animal control to try to make the neighborhood safe again. You might even participate in a “Rabid Dog Awareness” group on-line to do your part to help the human race. That is all we are doing as Ex-Mos. Helping each other and the human race by pointing out what is obvious to those who leave.

In the second verse of the song, “The Man’s Too Strong”, Dire Straits accurately portrays corporate religion in general and Joseph Smith Jr. in particular as follows:
I have legalized robbery, called it a belief.
I have run with the money, and hid like a thief.
I have rewritten history with my armies and my crooks.
Invented memories, I did burn all the books.
And I can still hear his laughter, I can still hear his song;
The man’s too big, the man’s too strong.

To amplify this excellent montage of how humanity justifies its conduct using religion (which I will refer to as “faith” in this poem), I add the following:

An Ode to Dire Straits
We have legalized robbery and called it faith, but that is not all;
We have exalted gullibility and called it faith.
We have censored the voice of reason, embraced delusions, and called it faith.
We have granted power to demons, feared the imaginary, and called it faith.
We have sanctioned discrimination and called it faith.
We have numbed our intellect with conformity and called it faith.
We have justified suppression of information and perpetuated lies and called it faith.
We have condoned inhumanity and called it faith.
Our elderly have abandoned life in preference for death and we called it faith.
We have surrendered our free will and called it faith.
We have declared ourselves the Chosen Ones and spat on our neighbor and called it faith.
We have apologized for reality and called it faith.
We have traded sanity for security and called it faith.
We have abused our children with guilt and shame and unbridled fear and called it faith.
We have demeaned our women, esteemed them as property, and called it faith.
We have laid waste to families and called it faith.
I sit on the sand and feel the rhythm of the waves.
I lay down my burden and watch it dissolve with the tide.
The water and the sand and the sky become one.
I will study faith no more.

Membership in the church of Jesus Christ comes with a whole lifestyle and consuming set of activities. It isn’t just a religion, it’s a culture, a corporation, the whole of one’s time while in the church.

It’s the company store and the whole family buys their goods there, pays whatever price is set, and accepts the limits of the goods offered.

So if you want to leave or even suggest that there might be a better way there is a whole bevy of involved people that will resist or shun you for such a simple thing.

You can leave the company but they still own your house and your family and your car and all that you worked for.

If you make waves they’ll turn your family against you and your family will see that they can either join you away from their support source and flail on their own, or accept the rules and prices set by the store owners.

So you make the choice and leave the company and slowly find out that there’s a lot of other stores with better prices, more variety, more opportunity.

You miss your family but you can only visit them on the terms set by the company they still work for and eat only the products the company dictates are appropriate.

The company only offers stale oatmeal, day after day, year after year and the price is 10% of your income.

Even if your family wants to try something else they know that the price would be expulsion from the company owned house, loss of transportation and other supports, so they make excuses for the company and defend it because the investment is just so high.

Once you’ve experienced self employment it’s very hard to go back to working for “The man” and “the man” has little use for independent minded folks who have seen the world outside the company grounds. Having independent folks is disruptive and causes folks to ask questions.

It’s just better for the Company to villify the one who left rather than look into why they left.

Now I look back wistfully on my big family of 100 and wish I could offer them some really good granola but they’re so conditioned to believing that the stale oatmeal is the best they’ve ever had, even though they’ve never tried anything else that they look at my delicious granola with it’s bits of cranberries and slices of almonds and think it’s just downright sinful.

Oh well, too bad for them.

Some folks just like stale oatmeal.

A tad dictatorial maybe?, to prescribe the appropriate emotional and social decorum that follows? But, as everyone has said, this is an emotion-laden experience not only for the principles but for those who watch vicariously — even from some of the internet seats apparently. So it’s possible it’s more understandable than it appears to this non-Mormon.

Still, making the accusation that the person evicted from their former life by the pronouncement of others is “playing a victim card” for not meeting the spectator’s concept of the required degree of contrition or depression is harder to defend, even in the abstract.

I think someone wanted it to actually draw more blood than it did.

“…congratulations and peace to you. Now stop pretending to be a martyr.”

You’re very rude. John already addressed this quite specifically and indicated that is not his intent. Next time you opt to use sarcasm instead of civility consider this:

“A sarcastic person has a superiority complex that can be cured only by the honesty of humility.” – Lawrence G. Lovasik

Imagine you work for a large corporation and you are devoted to helping the company do well in exchange for what they promise you is a big fat bonus at the end of a few decades of service. You keep working, working, working and giving with your big reward in mind.

Then you find out that the corporation is corrupt and polluting the groundwater and even covering up numerous evidences of toxic dumping. You don’t want to believe it because you have invested several decades into the company but pretty soon the evidences pile up and you can’t deny them any more.

You try to bring them up to the powers that be and they tell you you imagined it, are wrong to notice, and even if it did happen, they’re justified.

Finally you realize you can’t represent the company anymore no matter what they promised you.

You walk away but they believe they still own a part of your pension but won’t give it to you unless you keep their secrets.

You can’t in good conscience keep the secrets anymore because people are getting hurt and sick from the toxic sludge they’re pumping into the gutter every night behind the tanning plant.

You cry foul and they tell you you’re a bad person. You cry foul some more and they still won’t fess up and point the fingers back at you.

Finally they are sick of your efforts to get them to stop poisoning the water system and decide to revoke your pension and infer that you were embezzling the whole time you worked for them.

The big bosses call a meeting and they’ve already framed you for embezzlement, even though they know they were the ones who poisoned the water system. You know they’re going to charge you with embezzlement and try to humiliate you with feigned kindness and intimidate you with a whole line of stark CEOs all glaring down.

Now wouldn’t you call it pretty much a lamb to the lions if you were put in such a scenario?

Lie-ons for the Lord are still Lions.

Oh good grief…

I’ve yet to see an LDS setting where intellectual integrity, fair play, and honest open discussion were welcomed or allowed, especially in a Kangaroo Court of Love such as John went through. In that realm, then John went in as a lamb to the lions knowing full well that they had already made their decisions and his presence was only a courtesy to them and closure for him.

It takes a brave soul to face such a foregone arrangement and I consider his actions pretty damn gutsy. Most would just destroy the note, ignore the request for attendence and then summarily avoid any further contact.

It seems to me he went in loud and proud and took his lumps well.