It is choice from my experience. I know nothing about being shunned. LDS have a choice to be LDS or join any other church of their church.
I say stigmatizing and demonizing people is just as bad as shunning.
What your church has to say about those of us who made the choice to leave:
It was said here this morning that no person ever apostatized, without actual transgression. Omission of duty leads to commission (DBY, 82).
Let a man or woman who has received much of the power of God, visions and revelations, turn away from the holy commandments of the Lord, and it seems that
their senses are taken from them, their understanding and judgment in righteousness are taken away, they go into darkness, and become like a blind person who gropes by the wall.
People do, however, leave this Church, but they leave it because
they get into darkness.
When they lose the spirit of this work, they lose the knowledge of the things of God in time and in eternity;
all is lost to them.
What have the Latter-day Saints got to apostatize from? Everything that there is good, pure, holy, God-like, exalting, ennobling, extending the ideas, the capacities of the intelligent beings that our Heavenly Father has brought forth upon this earth. **What will they receive in exchange? **I can comprehend it in a very few words. These would be the words that I should use:
death, hell and the grave. That is what they will get in exchange. We may go into the particulars of that which they experience. **They experience darkness, ignorance, doubt, pain, sorrow, grief, mourning, unhappiness; no person to condole [lament] with in the hour of trouble, no arm to lean upon in the day of calamity, no eye to pity when they are forlorn and cast down; and I comprehend it by saying death, hell and the grave. **This is what they will get in exchange for their apostasy from the Gospel of the Son of God.
You have known men who, while in the Church, were active, quick and full of intelligence; but after they have left the Church,
they have become contracted in their understandings, they have become darkened in their minds and everything has become a mystery to them, and in regard to the things of God, they have become like the rest of the world, who think, hope and pray that such and such things may be so, but they do not know the least about it. This is precisely the position of those who leave this Church;
they go into the dark, they are not able to judge, conceive or comprehend things as they are. They are like the drunken manâhe thinks that everybody is the worse for liquor but himself, and he is the only sober man in the neighborhood.
The apostates think that everybody is wrong but themselves.
Those who leave the Church are
like a feather blown to and fro in the air. They know not whither they are going; they do not understand anything about their own existence; their faith, judgment and the operation of
their minds are as unstable as the movements of the feather floating in the air. We have not anything to cling to, only faith in the Gospel.
Why do people apostatize? You know we are on the âOld Ship Zion.â We are in the midst of the ocean. A storm comes on, and, as sailors say, she labors very hard. âI am not going to stay here,â says one; âI donât believe this is the âShip Zion.â â âBut we are in the midst of the ocean.â âI donât care, I am not going to stay here.â Off goes the coat, and he jumps overboard.
Will he not be drowned? Yes. So with those who leave this Church. It is the âOld Ship Zion,â let us stay in it.
(All taken from
one lesson)
