I may as well change the name of my blog to “Apostate Adventures in Mormon Land.” This is where I’m at in my life now, being friends with Mormons and eating their food, and I won’t fight it. I bloom where I'm planted.

So the missionaries I talked to last weekend invited me to a baptism with treats afterward. They were good treats – assorted cookies, crackers with toppings, vegetables, and little oranges. I bravely sat at a table full of girls, then felt like a creep when they all turned out to be college freshmen. Oops, I pulled a Joseph Smith. We mostly ignored each other, but I couldn’t help noticing that their mode of dress would not have flown at church when I was their age. Multiple sets of multiple ear piercings, multiple sets of bare shoulders, even a little nose stud on one and a hint of cleavage on another. Okay, maybe I am a creep for noticing that, but I am an observer of how the LDS Church’s eternal teachings and standards evolve. I think Mormon women started dressing like this first, and then the old men realized too late that they could either shut the hell up about how women dress or watch them all leave, and of course their will be some tension as hardcore Mormons like my sister still teach their daughters that multiple ear piercings and bare shoulders are evil while all their friends at church have those things.

But on this day, the exodus of Mormon women was partially offset. In her talk at the end of the meeting, she said that she grew up as a non-Mormon in Salt Lake City, and she envied the spiritual stability and friend groups that the Mormon kids had. So according to her own words, not mine, her conversion was at least partially driven by loneliness. I'm not surprised by that, I'm just surprised that she was so honest about it. I can’t imagine the LDS Church baptizes many people in developed countries who aren’t lonely or otherwise deeply dissatisfied with their lives. Missionaries are literally trained to target those people. That won’t be me because I know better, and no amount of warm feelings or even having a crush on a Mormon girl (which is possibly a topic for next time) will make me deny what I know. Still, of course when I and everyone else in attendance were asked to write her supportive messages, I didn’t invite her to read the CES Letter because that would have made me a dick.

Yeah, I threw in the “anymore,” which wasn’t strictly necessary. Sue me.

Different Mormon sister missionaries from the ones I talked to came to my house to give my landlord cookies, and he brought them downstairs to use the bathroom because his is off-limits for some reason. Cue them asking if I'm in the ward and me telling them I'm not a member because I don't lead with telling people that I've already been part of and rejected their religion, though I'm probably overthinking it because every Mormon their age knows twenty people who have left. My landlord actually isn't a member either, and he joked that he'll get baptized when he's ninety, but I took the missionaries' side and reminded him that he doesn't know if he'll live that long. They asked if he's talked to me much about the church, and I laughed, and he joked that I don't know anything about the church. They asked if I'd been to any church meetings, how long I'd been here, where I'm from, whether I was raised religious in New York, what religion I was raised in, and whether my church records are in New York, and next time I'm just going to tell them everything up front instead of looking like I have something to hide.

Because the conversation took this trajectory, these missionaries (by which I mean the one missionary who did most of the talking) asked a different question than all the other missionaries I've talked to since 2022. Instead of asking why I left the church, they asked why I had my records removed. Those questions have different answers. Perhaps I should have acted like a Mormon apologist and answered the question they should have asked, but I didn't. I gave them a brief summary of the child sex abuse scandal that broke less than three months after I had fully stopped believing, which certainly would have made me fully stop believing if I hadn't already, and in any case removed any lingering desire to be affiliated with that organization. Out of tact, I only told these innocent young women that Paul Douglas Adams "abused" his daughters, not that he frequently filmed himself raping them and uploaded the videos to the internet, which is how he was exposed by police in New Zealand seven years after his bishop in Arizona didn't report him. I can imagine the progression of thoughts that I would have had if I were them listening to the story:

Oh, you removed your records because one LDS guy abused his kids? That's dumb.

Oh, the church's lawyers told the abuser's bishop not to report the abuse because it was against the law in Arizona, which wasn't true? Um. I mean... I guess they're just lawyers... The Book of Mormon says that lawyers suck...

Oh, the church as an institution - which, to recap, claims to be led by Jesus Christ himself - fought against the abuser's victims in court instead of using a fraction of a percent of its massive wealth to compensate them for what happened under its watch, which would have been a more Christlike thing to do even if it had no legal liability?

...Shit.

In any case, I'm certain a switch turned in their brains as they realized they had no chance in hell of reconverting me. They expressed condolences, said I was welcome to come to church stuff anyway, and didn't pursue the conversation. I never wanted to cause them cognitive dissonance, but now I hope they're experiencing cognitive dissonance, because if they can just not worry about what I told them, they're not good people. I kind of wanted to be like, "Yeah, so I dare you to tell me I was deceived by Satan." Why do missionaries even ask those questions? They aren't trained to deal with the answers. I'm positive nobody has ever said, "I left because I stopped reading the Book of Mormon enough, but now that you're here, you can challenge me to read it again!"

After they left, my landlord launched into arguing with me about feminism again, which is a thing he's been periodically doing as a result of me sharing stuff on Facebook like a Salt Lake Tribune article about why women are now leaving the LDS Church at a higher rate than men. Being from India and having converted to the LDS Church, he has a more "traditional" view of gender roles and what constitutes equality, and he also keeps pointing out the ways that men get screwed. Those are valid. They should be fixed. I personally don't prioritize that. I'm aware that I get screwed in various ways because I'm a man, but the thought of what it would be like to be a woman horrifies me. I regularly walk wherever the hell I want at night with headphones on and zero anxiety, so I can live with the fact that I had to register for Selective Service before I could access some of my civil rights. So he launched back into this debate even though he knew I was in the middle of work. I tried to find common ground by expressing my disgust for the batshit insane women who support Lindsay Clancy and insist that her husband did it because female intuition and astrology told them so, but that just set him off about how the justice system is more lenient toward women. Of course I don't support that either. To me, feminism means treating women as equals in every respect.

Across these debates, my landlord - who, I want to note so you don't get an unfair and one-sided picture, mostly leans left, hates Trump, and has no problem with women having careers or being presidents of things - has sometimes brought up the same points and asked the same questions as if he thinks it's for the first time, even though he can remember something I said around 2014. The gender wage gap was one of those. I have also heard that the gender wage gap is a myth when you break down the math, and it's not something I've ever devoted energy to complaining about. I'm more concerned about women being treated differently from their male colleagues despite having equal rights on paper, e.g., being seen as "bossy" or "bitchy" if they don't preface their contribution with an apology. But the second time he mentioned the gender wage gap, he first mentioned that his friend had mentioned it, and then he'd explained to her why she was wrong. I knew this friend, but nothing about her. Now the implication that she was a feminist despite being a Mormon made me want to know more.

I thought she was my roommate's girlfriend after they came home late together on my first night here and she, startled to see me in the backyard looking at stars and assuming I was her friend, the landlord, yelled, "Don't do that!" My roommate and her are clearly close, but now I don't think they're dating because they don't do touchy stuff and he spends almost every evening at home playing computer games with his brother. Anyway, she came over on Friday morning for him to help her assemble a shelf for her fish tank, and they did that on the patio, where I was already working, and they barely talked to each other except to discuss the instructions, so I had my chance to broach the topic. She was not particularly pleased that my landlord had mentioned her in that way. Oops. But this got us talking. Yes, I virtue signaled. Normally I hate virtue signaling so much that I get embarrassed when women compliment my Ruth Bader Ginsburg shirt. In this case, though, I simply wanted to communicate that we seemed to be on similar wavelengths and could maybe get along well.

My roommate also chimed in a little, and when he said, "I don't want to sound sexist, but -" he had his back to me, and his probably-not-girlfriend looked at me with a big grin, and I cherished that moment of bonding. I didn't think what he said after the "but" was that bad, though. It makes perfect sense to suggest that a majority of women tend to be certain ways and a majority of men tend to be certain other ways, as long as we acknowledge individual variation and cultural conditioning and don't tell either group that they're not allowed to do certain things regardless of their actual qualifications. His probably-not-girlfriend pushed back a little, and he said it could even be 70-30 or 60-40, which sounds fair to me. If he hadn't been there, I would have gone ahead and asked her how she feels about being denied privileges and positions in her church due to what it claims are all women's innate eternal traits, but hopefully I'll get to that another time.

My virtue signaling worked. I was all but invisible to her before. Now she became very friendly toward me, and we also talked about her career and interests, and after she left and came back for the lunch that my roommate does with church people every Friday and has never specifically invited me to, though he has mentioned that I'm welcome to join whatever is going on, she invited me to it. Naturally, most of the conversations were related to the church in some way. I was fascinated when the guy next to me said that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lobbied the state government to let them ban firearms in meetinghouses and that it was stupid. So on the one hand, he felt a need to use the full name of the church in accordance with the recently deceased prophet's personal pet peeve, which most Mormons in this age group don't even bother with, but on the other hand, he didn't hesitate to tell a bunch of other Mormons that something the church did was stupid. I think this is an illustration of how the LDS Church is screwed because people across the political spectrum don't take it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

My roommate's probably-not-girlfriend, who is thirty, accidentally referred to the new Young Single Adult ward bishop and his wife as "the only adults there," then said that she hated how the YSAs get treated like children. If I wanted to deconvert her, I would have taken notice of that and filed it away under possible avenues of approach alongside the feminist stuff. But of course I wouldn't attempt that because it would only validate Mormons' belief that I was deceived by Satan and am now being used by Satan to deceive others. Satan isn't real, by the way.

I politely called out the sister missionaries for ghosting me as soon as I reiterated that I wasn't interested in coming to Sunday meetings, as I thought they should be aware of the impression that sort of thing makes. They said my number got lost because they all share a SIM card that switches between their phones. I misjudged them, and I'm correcting the record because I'm fair-minded and not just looking to make the LDS Church look bad. This sounds like a really stupid system their mission uses. I wonder if they've lost anyone who wanted to be baptized. Not by them, obviously, since women can't baptize people, but you know what I mean.

I went to a Saturday night ward activity that my landlord invited me to because of the, as he put it, "kick-butt food." He said he was trying not to say "ass" because he's been reading the Book of Mormon, but he says "shit" all the time without blinking. He personally financed this activity because actual church activities suck, and his friend who used to be my landlord cooked the chicken. This is a Young Single Adult Ward, but both of them fall beyond the prescribed age range of 18-35, and as it turns out, they're not the only ones.

The activity was called "Pitch My Friend" and entailed people showing slideshows and talking about why someone should date their friend, followed by their friend's contact information. During the dinner that preceded it, though, everyone was also supposed to wear nametags and traffic-light-colored stickers to indicate "Single," "It's Complicated," or "Taken." I didn't do that, obviously, but as I headed toward the food table, two women with green dots stared at me, and it made me self-conscious and downright scared. Why did they not ignore me like other women? Out of the goodness of my heart, I sat with a lonely-looking guy at the table next to theirs, but then one of them caught me glancing at her, and I looked away and made an absurd pretense of staring at the wall because there was nothing interesting for me to pretend to look at, God damn it. Why did they do that to me? If they had ignored me like other women, I would have ignored them and not cared that I couldn't say hi without immediately killing any potential attraction.

The main event wasn't awful, but it was more depressing than I expected. First of all, it brought up a bit of PTSD from that period of my life where I tried to participate in the dating scene because my church told me to, and almost nothing pleasant happened to me. Second, I felt sorry for everyone on the stage being pitched. I would rather stick a needle in my eye than stand in front of a crowd asking for someone to please date me. I wasn't even willing to wear a green sticker. What if some of them, after putting themselves out there, didn't get texted by anyone? They must have felt like shit all day today. Third, all of these people, according to their friends, had done more with their lives and had more to bring to the table than me. If I hadn't been an apostate who couldn't give them a temple marriage and didn't want to give them children, I still would have felt inadequate to text any of the women up there, nor could I in good conscience allow a friend to pitch me as an acceptable candidate. On that note, fourth, the restored gospel of Joseph Smith was very important to all of them. Years ago, I found that quality very attractive and wished I were worthy of it, but now I think it's sad that they're devoting their hearts and souls to a lie.

Honorable mention for the mild awkwardness I felt when both of the 38-year-old women being pitched expressed a desire for children. I was like, Ummm... who's gonna tell them?

And one of the guys being pitched was Stuart Petty! He's a minor Mormon celebrity I knew of from a Facebook group years ago, and I've listened to his classic children's TV show theme covers on Spotify. I don't understand why a good-looking, talented, funny guy like him has any difficulty getting married.

Oh, and none of these presentations mentioned the most important thing about the candidates. Who are their candidates? If any of them voted for Trump, they deserve to live and die alone.

When the main event concluded, some kind of dating experts started answering questions, and I went home. If I'm still alive in a few years when robot girlfriends are widespread and affordable, I'll get one of those, and I should get a discount because I don't want to have sex with it. If I'm not still alive, I won't worry about it. Until then, my needs are met by doing things that Mormons consider sinful, sometimes to an unhealthy extent, but loneliness is supposedly as bad for your health as smoking, so sue me. At least this activity reminded me what I've escaped from. Those poor bastards. With the caveat I just mentioned, I hope they all got dates out of it.

I worry more than I'd like to about the countless things beyond my control that could happen to make my life a lot less pleasant than it is right now. I'm fully aware that worrying doesn't help, but I don't want to be blindsided. I'm on edge about the infinite array of nasty surprises that could await me at any moment. So I watched this video that helped me a little, and maybe it will help you too. His central theme is "It's all going to work out," but he explains it in a way that makes it sound a lot less delusional than you'd think. I can relate to his experience of feeling like my darkest moments have worked out or at least become more tolerable, and I've felt as though my life is following a predetermined and ultimately positive path. At the same time, I've suffered immensely and have no interest in suffering immensely again in the future. I hope my darkest moments are behind me. I'm pretty okay most of the time, notwithstanding frequent bouts of passive suicidal ideation from [gestures vaguely at everything].

​He also touches on the perspective of human evolution, which reminds me not to see my life as a self-contained unit. If I see it that way, I focus too much on the injustices I personally face and the opportunities I'm denied, instead of the role I can play in moving the human race to a higher state of consciousness and laying a foundation for future generations to have fewer injustices and more opportunities. Then, too, I need to remember that my role is a small one, or at least it looks small, and not be frustrated by my inability to singlehandedly and immediately make the changes I want to see in the world. I think things will work out for the human race. We'll go extinct someday, of course, but I think we'll make things great until then, as soon as we grow out of the shitty animal phase we've been stuck in for what seems like forever but is really negligible in the cosmic timescale. I'm currently not confident that we'll be fast enough to avoid causing irreversible change to the climate that will kill millions and millions of people and make everyone else miserable, but maybe we'll invent a new technology next year that changes everything. The future is not linear. I'm just rambling now (insert your own quip about me always doing that here), so I'll shut up and let you watch the video.