I found most of the answers on here at least naive and some bordering on disengenuous. Perhaps because most folks are lax in self understanding, it is possible some of the reasons apply. Perhaps in some cases they apply exactly because the pereson leaving did understand themselves.
Interestingly enough, the answer that suited me best was from an LDS person who said “I also think that some people leave the church they were raised in because they find truth elsewhere.” If you are a truth seeker beyond the habituation of cradleism, this might ring true. Otherwise it is useless and will be refuted through habit.
For my part I left after strenuous effort to discover the meaning of a mystical experience I had. That experience was the “capper” on a series that I had had throughout my life. When approaching clerics over the next few years, my sincere questions were dismissed with opinions ranging from calling them halucinations to that they were the product of hormonal functions. I was also repeatedly told to pray and have faith. I had been and was continuing to do that to the pont of, well, too much. It wasn’t a case the was susceptible to a “faith” answer. No respectful psychological, logical, spiritual, scriptural, or metaphysical explanation was forthcoming from any quarter I had access to, including literature of the Church.
At that time, with the resources I had available in a large urban parrish and archdiocese, I found nothing that was fitting to the experience I had had without the aid of halucinagenics and perhaps with the aid of long years of fervent prayer. I went outside the Church to see if there was anything that matched my experience. There was.
Not only did this newly discoverd paradigm fit, it fit a whole gamut of considerations I didn’t think were associated with my perceptions. For over forty five years now, what I found outside the Church has unfolded as an increasingly deep and profound structural and practical system for engaging life and doing good at all the levels of my involvement with life, form interior practice to public service.
Had I stayed in the Church I would have perhaps gone mad, or at least become very repressed and closed, as seemed evident from my course before my happy discovery. I will say that after all this time, and within the last five yeras, I have seen why the Church didn’t meet my plea for knowledge. It has the necessary knowledge, but doesn’t know it, or won’t admit it. If it doesn’t know it, that’s because it has made something symbolic and meant as an exemplary map, into something unattainable. I sense and feel that the original teaching of the Jesus, the aspect of it that would have been directly pertinent to my needs, has become hidden, lost, or both. It is why Mark 4:33,34 is in my signature. I further feel that, despite such teaching as would have helped me is invaluable in some circumstances, it is not necessary or crucial for most of the faithful. But it was in my case, and it has taken this long for me to even see its traces in the modern Church.
I feel sorry that I had to go “outside.” It is traumatic to discover that the system that you had lived and proselytized has failed you in you hour of need. But, fortunately, God is not Catholic, God is God, not our thoughts about God, or our thoughts about the Teaching of the Sonof God. So I feel like I won the lottery, in fact, at least in this regard.
So my three reasons are:
- Incompetent response to sincere questioning in esoteric cases.
- Lack of teaching distributed over all aspects of human experience.
- Failure to recognize and teach root Understanding relative to the Nature of God and Man.
