Rebecca,
I wish you and your family all the best. I think that you may be a good example. If it is not too personal, please elaborate on the feelings of rejection you felt from God. The rejection from members of your former faith is not surprising. What lead you to leave?
To me, the whole thing is like a child riding a bike. They start with a tricycle, then a bikle with training wheels, then one without, then a multi-speed road or mountain bike. It seems like those who leave the Catholic Church never got past the training wheels and are mad that they couldn’t get the 21 speed. They leave the church and find one that has something that they need. They hate the Church for not giving them the best bike when they weren’t ready for it at the time. The Protestants seem to be closer to the 10-speed and want the 21 speed mountain bike. They are thankful to the previous church for getting them to the 10-speed, but they wanted more.
Interesting analogy, but not my experience.
Mormonism taught me that you have to be worthy of God’s love. That this life is the time where we prove to God that we can be perfect, not make any mistakes, and if we can do that, then God will love us.
I was taught about forgiveness, but it wasn’t a clean forgiveness. I had the morality lesson when I was a teenager, that I am like a brand new piece of wood. If I am unchaste, then that is like a nail being hammered into the wood. Forgiveness is the nail being removed. But look! There remains in that new board a hole, that can never be repaired. So forgiveness isn’t really forgiveness.
It was demoralizing. Especially for a young girl who had a boyfriend and wasn’t as chaste as all that. And already feeling guilty as hell, I knew that I was done for. That God rejected me, fully and completely. No questions asked. There was no way I could be perfect. Not ever. There was no way I would ever be “worthy” of God’s love.
There were other things going on at the time. The most impact was the equal rights amendment and the mormon church’s stance against it. When I could see nothing wrong with it. At all. It only confirmed my growing suspicion that I was being led towards a life that I didn’t want.
I started looking at other belief systems. And I read one book about early mormon church history and was shocked at the lies I had been told. It all came to a point in my early 20’s where I saw religion as nothing but lies. And God as one MF bastard that I didn’t want anything to do with. And one day, sitting at red light, I had the greatest insight ever. I didn’t have to believe in God, at all. It was this huge relief and I felt so damned happy over that realization.
Mormons that I tell this to tell me I left because I sinned. They see this a tale of an unchaste girl who wanted to live a life of sin. Which, is quite the opposite. I wanted God to love me. I wanted forgiveness. But based on what I was taught I knew that it would never happen.
And it effected me in other ways. I believed for the longest time that sexual desire itself was a sin, and that had quite the effect on my life and marriage. It wasn’t until I few years ago that I was telling this to a friend and they tole me that sexual desire was normal. Oh. I thought I was some freak who couldn’t stop sinning, and I’m not talking any acting on anything here. Just normal sexual desires. So that triggered my pissed off at mormonism, big time. Because I know where that idea came from. My mormon religious education.
There are 50 things like this at least, that I discover. The biggest being that God is Love, and loves me no matter what. And my response to that is love in return and certainly, in a relationship of love you work at keeping everything “right”.
I was pissed beyond belief when I figured this out. I wanted to throw things and scream every cuss word that ever existed. This was the root of my atheism. I thought I had stopped believing in that god that rejected me, but I hadn’t. My unbelief was based on a belief in a god that was lie. Damn I was pissed. For one, I thought I had “got the mormon” out of me. But there it was, holding me down.
As I learned about God, via my studies of Catholicism, I would sometimes just grieve for days over what I had been taught and wonder why it was that that stinking stupid religion ever existed at all.
