Hey dude! I’m was a lifelong atheist and then I packed up my family and moved them to Utah to pursue joining the LDS church. I had kind of ruined the ideas of Catholicism and Protestantism for myself because Catholicism is just so regularly attacked in the media and mocked and Protestants were honestly always kind of lousy to me growing up. The LDS church was new to me and an idea that I hadn’t ruined for myself yet. I’d always been very comfortable in my atheism, but after my first child I had this enormous amount of gratitude and nowhere to direct it. I also started realizing that my child had inherent value, even in the womb, and it caused me to rethink a lot of my nihilistic positions on life and morality. Unfortunately the LDS church, while filled with a lot of wonderful people (like your parents, I’m sure), just isn’t built on truth. I am positive that you have probably read CES letter 100 times over and that you know all of the arguments, but I struggled hard to accept them. To me giving up on belief in the LDS version of God was accepting that God didn’t exist and it made me miserable. For years I continued to swing violently between (intentionally) blind “faith” and nihilism. It was awful, honestly.
My wife was anti-LDS the entire time, and even though she had lost her faith years ago due to the falling out with her own parents she had when she married me (a non-believer) she offered to go to church with me, so long as it was any other church. We church hopped and shopped for quite some time before finding a non-denominational church in northern UT that we liked. She was actually willing to go and seemed into it, though I know that at the time she was merely supporting me. I was baptized (I never actually joined the LDS church, I just investigated and struggled with my desire to believe in what I knew wasn’t true) and thought I was done and good to go. I started reading a lot about protestant theology and trying to get my footing. I had spent years obsessively (for real, I lost like all of my hobbies and even missed a lot of work to read, think and decide) researching the LDS church and now I had all of this study time to direct at protestantism and become confident in my ability to defend my beliefs. It all kind of started to crumble pretty early on, though.
For one the bible never expresses that Sola Scriptura is a thing, at all. It says that scripture is good for reproof, for correction, etc but it doesn’t say that it’s the sole authority. It does however say that the church is the authority, when it says that if you have a disagreement with one of your brethren to handle it 1-on1, if you can, and if not then in a small group, and if not bring it to the church. Christ also gives the apostles, to include Peter who is expressly stated by Christ to be the rock that the church is built on (which will never fall), very specifically the abilities to forgive or even NOT forgive sins, as well as to bind and loose on earth in a way that will bind and loose in heaven.
