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.

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.

The other day I crossed paths with a trio of Mormon sister missionaries, and instead of waving and moving on like normal missionaries, the leader tried to talk to me even though I was wearing headphones. I took my headphones off and stopped because I want them to have positive experiences and not be miserable on their missions. I call the white girl the leader because she led the conversation and was the most talkative. Her Polynesian companion talked a little less, and their Korean companion said three words to introduce herself and is probably miserable on her mission.

The leader asked if I'd talked to missionaries before, so I went ahead and told them I used to be LDS, and she, unlike most of my family, asked why I left. Of course I didn't have time to go into all the reasons, and I wouldn't want to send them into faith crises on their missions, anyway. It's possible, of course, that they would move on with their lives unperturbed regardless of anything I said, but you never know. It's even possible that one of them is already very familiar with the issues, but not likely. At best they probably got a sanitized, one-sided version of a few of the issues in Seminary and nothing at all about them in their missionary training.

So I just said "history" and "LGBT stuff," and then I said "women's roles" under my breath because that felt like an awkward thing to say to them, but really, just because they're (apparently) okay with their second-class status doesn't mean I have to agree with them or want the same for my imaginary daughter. Lots of women agree with me, anyway. Always the "more spiritual" ones in the past, they're now leaving Mormonism at a higher rate than men for the first time, which is a good sign that society is moving in the right direction despite the considerable speed bump of the Christofascist Trump regime. They can see that they deserve better. But the LDS Church is making desperate changes to keep them in, and these girls may not have even been born when the current "prophet" told them "that if you dress immodestly, you are magnifying this problem by becoming pornography to some of the men who see you," so maybe it will take them a little longer to catch on.

At least their role as missionaries is now seen as legitimate and not something for women to do if they fail to get married in their first three years of adulthood... but the church institution doesn't respect them more, it's just using them more. Everyone on the outside can see it.

"church of mormon." I love that. What a stark illustration of how little Russell Nelson's legacy matters. At least this ad is honest about which church it's for; I saw one on Facebook where the sister missionaries just invited people to "a Christian study group" or some crap like that. I will now answer the possibly rhetorical questions.

"How is a church okay with this kind of marketing?"

My dude, this is not even in the bottom fifty least ethical things the LDS Church has ever done. Its leaders believe that anything to further the church's goals or protects its reputation is justified, including but not limited to straight-up lying and breaking the law.

"Men cannot actually be falling for this, can they?"

My dude, have you seen how lonely men behave? I mean, have you? Here's a hilarious and immensely satisfying story about "Brooke America" catfishing a MAGAt for weeks to make him suffer for wishing death on a three-year-old brown girl. Of course, I don't expect that this strategy will be successful enough to reverse the LDS Church's declining growth rate, but it will work sometimes, and some lonely men will get baptized and remain lonely because the missionaries can't date them and there aren't enough women in the church.

My adblocker on YouTube keeps me from seeing these ads, fortunately. It didn't keep me from crossing paths with them in person. Fortunately, I'm not lonely enough to rejoin a high-demand religion that protects child abusers. I have reached the definitive conclusion that Mormonism is not true or good, I am not questioning, and I am not open to going back. Some Mormons would say that makes me close-minded, and I would ask them why they aren't open to joining Scientology. But I thought I had a nice opportunity to plant a seed by showing these missionaries that apostates aren't all nasty people. I try to only be nasty to those who deserve it.

I held back so much out of my desire to be respectful and not damage their faith. The white girl asked if I have faith in Jesus Christ, and I said no, I believe he's a mythologized version of a historical figure that represents the best of humanity, but I didn't go on to point out historical claims in the New Testament that don't hold up under scrutiny or explain that his divinity evolved through the Gospels in the order they were written. She asked if they could come over and share a message about Jesus Christ, and I said if they wanted to, but I didn't want them to waste their time because I wasn't really interested in coming back. I threw in the "really" just to be nice, when "at all" would have been more accurate, but I thought I got the point across. I have the luxury of time to do things like that just to be nice to the missionaries. Theoretically, I could also take the opportunity to learn from them despite our differences in belief, but I'm sorry, I just don't see myself learning much from 18-21-year-olds trying to sell a religion that I know inside and out.

The white girl asked what gives me hope. I talked about near-death experiences and how wonderful they usually are, and I took that opportunity to explain that I base my beliefs on evidence and no longer believe that feelings are a reliable source of truth, which I hoped would preempt them from asking me to pray about things. She asked how I would feel if I knew that I had a loving heavenly father, which was a loaded and complex question that got glossed over as the conversation moved on. If God was a corporeal literal father like Mormonism teaches, I would want to know it, but I certainly don't have a strong emotional attachment to the concept, which she should have remembered is not new to me, or desire for it to be true. My current belief in God as the universal consciousness from which all reality springs and of which each of us is a tiny piece suits me just fine, thanks. There are several reasons why a supreme deity stuck in a physical human body doesn't make sense, and I also feel like he's a godawful father, and they just assert ipso facto that he's a perfect father in spite of all evidence to the contrary from their own scriptures. There's the whole business of his wife/wives being silenced, too.

The Polynesian girl said something about how we have freedom to choose one path or the other, and the way she said it sounded vaguely like a threat, but I let that slide. She got my number so they could invite me to activities. The friend who owns my house said I'm always welcome at activities, but so far he hasn't told me when any are, so yeah.

Two days later, they texted me to invite me to sacrament meeting. God damn it.

All I will say for now as a follow-up to my last post is that Amber did respond to my text, and she's said a lot of wise and beautiful things that I agree with wholeheartedly, and I'm glad I didn't write her off as insane just because her beliefs seem out there and she drugged me without my consent. The values and principles by which she lives are more important than whether alchemy is real, and she's someone I can learn from and be inspired by. I'm sure I was meant to meet her. I hope her reach and influence grow.

I don't consider myself a very materialistic person - I don't buy a lot of non-essential stuff or yearn to possess a lot of non-essential stuff - but once I own something, I hate to get rid of it, even if the odds of me ever using it again (or maybe at all) are next to zero. When I moved out of my last place, I took all the kitchen stuff that previous occupants had left behind, and in six months, I've used none of it, but I still had to take it with me when I moved again on Friday. It was embarrassing and frustrating to make the people helping me carry so many boxes. Moving was miserable. On the one hand, I still don't own half as much stuff as my parents or grandparents did at my age, and it's unfair that I should have to limit myself more just because I'll probably continue to move for the rest of my life because I'll never be able to own a house because their generations raped mine. On the other hand, it's good to practice detachment because I'll lose everything I own when I die anyway. I'm going to get rid of a lot of this crap if it kills me.

My new location really sucks from a public transportation standpoint and a being close to protests in the city standpoint, and I have to share it with roommates, and the private bathroom I inherited was so gross that I had to remind myself it doesn't matter because I'll die someday. On the other hand, I no longer live next to a highway and a construction site, I have a yard, I can see stars at night, I don't have to pay to do laundry, and rent is hundreds of dollars cheaper. I'm living in a basement again, but a much larger and better furnished one than where I started when I moved to Salt Lake County. And there's a hot tub, which I don't anticipate using current conditions improve. My roommates are chill. One of them has a girlfriend, apparently, so I have to wear clothes in case she comes over. She yelled at me last night when she saw me stargazing in the backyard and got scared, and I'm not going to let her hear the end of that.

I think everyone in the house except me is Mormon. When I met the friend who owns it fifteen years ago in Logan, he was an agnostic atheist, having deconverted from Hinduism after he realized his religion was just as ridiculous as Mormonism. He was one of those people who respected my honesty and intelligence despite our differing views on that subject and made it all the more embarrassing for me to decide I was wrong after all. But he went to church for social reasons for a long time, and he prayed sometimes in case something ever happened, and he eventually came to believe that God wanted him to get baptized. He supports gay rights, or at least he used to, and he agrees with me now that most of the problems in Mormon history and theology don't have good answers, but he decided that was his path, and he seems really into it now. Life is funny. Yesterday I heard him upstairs with some people, and he said something about "fourteen-year-olds back then" and then they were clearly talking about marriage and the church, so I really hope he wasn't straight-up trying to justify Joseph Smith preying on Helen Mar Kimball. He's listened to enough Mormon Stories podcasts to know better.

I may actually go to church activities with him now that I'm farther away from my protesting peeps. I don't know if he's in a mid-singles ward, or if they don't care about the ages here, or what. They raised the upper age limit of Young Single Adult wards to 35 right at the time that I stopped going to church activities and would have aged out anyway, and like all the other consolidations the church has done recently, that's not a sign of growth or prosperity. I'm sure it's also not great for the 18-year-old women. The last time I went inside a Mormon church building was for my niece's baby blessing, and at that time, I got a legitimate warm and loving vibe from the community, but the talks and the lesson were so very boring. I mean, in Elder's Quorum, the guy passed around Hershey's Kisses and asked us each to say something that makes us feel loved, and I liked that part, but the rest of the lesson was literally listening to a General Conference talk, which is marginally more interesting than listening to someone read the majority of a General Conference talk in a monotone voice in sacrament meeting. Anyway, I won't go to the meetings because I don't want anyone to think I'm okay with the church's money hoarding, sex abuse cover-ups, or treatment of women and queer people, but activities, sure.

Even though women recently started leaving Mormonism at a higher rate than men for the first time, there will, no doubt, be more unmarried non-lesbian women at these activities than I've grown accustomed to hanging out with. Maybe what I need to do is find a nice Mormon girl and deconvert her. Kidding, kidding. Only the Holy Ghost can deconvert people. By "the Holy Ghost" I mean Satan, since he's apparently the one who deceives people out of Mormonism by inspiring its leaders to say and do such stupid shit that annihilates their credibility.