Found this guy's story on exmormon.org. Just the first two paragraphs, the rest can be read here. 

I'd like to add my story to your web site. The decision to leave the church has been made very recently [Jan. 1999], with letters going out this very week to family, bishop, stake president, and church office informing them of my decision to have my name removed from the records of the church. So, I'm right in the middle of it all... which may make for an interesting post. (Perhaps I'll update it in couple of months or so with some perspective.) I've never done anything in my life that I was more sure of than stepping cleanly away from the church. I've never felt so peaceful, so free, and so alive in my life as I have since the 'change' began about 4 months ago.

What was the change all about? It was about doing my own searching for the meaning of it all. It was about reading some concepts in a book that were put so clearly that I couldn't help but change my mind about such basic things as the nature of God and the purpose of life. For the first time, the world made sense to me. No big nagging questions that I had had since I was a small boy. I gained a perspective that simply wiped out the stereotypical concepts of God that I'd been exposed to (Mormon and Christian mainly). For the first time in my life I saw God's love as truly unconditional and that we have God-given free agency to create what ever we want to in this life WITHOUT fear of condemnation or judgement in any form. Life is about the experience. It's simply about being. We're all OK in God's creation.

This guy totally gets it. 

Been thinking about polygamy. I mean, honestly, would I have multiple women all hanging around me all the time if I could? I mean I know for a fact that it's possible to be in love with more than one girl at a time, because that's my life 24/7. I'm going to save the polygamy talk for another day though. For now read this blog post.

Joseph Smith must have had a huge libido. I think that comes with being a very creative person. I imagine Joseph Smith to have been tripping on shrooms from a very young age. I myself have never done it, but I have read up on it and it really seems like it's what he had going on. In the Nauvoo days, he said "It is my meditation all the day, and more than my meat and drink, to know how I shall make the Saints of God comprehend the visions that roll like an overflowing surge before my mind." There are naturally growing hallucinogenic mushrooms in the area where he grew up, and he grew up in the folk magic community which definitely knew something of drugs, so I don't see it as too distant of a possibility.

In any case, I have often felt the same way, walking around with an overflowing imagination and wishing I could share it with people. Imagination was a big part of what led Joseph Smith to do the things that he did, which I think is cool. I mean, a lot of the challenges of the future are definitely going to require a lot of creativity on the part of leaders to solve. Unfortunately I think he was the last leader of the church with any creativity or charisma at all. I wish they'd let me take the reigns of the church.

Haha, isn't this what people always do when they leave cults or churches, they come back and say that it should be them running the place? Well now I get why. It's only when you enable yourself to view your own life or your organization with some objectivity that you are able to see the problems that need fixing. You have to be willing to admit that you might be making some mistakes, in order to be able to fix them. You have to drop the magical thinking that comes with the spiritual narcissism of Mormonism, and say hey, maybe I'm not perfect. Maybe no one is perfect.

There are still a lot of parts of the Bible that I believe in, because they line up with what I've experienced to be true in life. Here's a good part:

"And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God."

Jesus told a guy that no one is good but God. I think when Mormons read this, it leads them to be self-righteous and kind of fake-humble. But lets all stop crying from the beauty of this guy's humility and actually examine what the fuck he's talking about.

There's no one good but god? Dude, you're just going around being a good guy to everyone. Who's better than you? I think the only thing that Jesus can be referring to here is the idea of subjective reality instead of objective reality. What's good to one person might not be good to another person.

This is a big, big concept in Buddhism. The idea that we shouldn't judge life as good or bad, but simply accept what is without wishing it were anything else. There's a zen parable about a guy whose son breaks his leg and his neighbor says "Oh no!" but he said "Meh, could be good or bad." Then the next day the military comes to enlist all eligible men to be in the army and the young man gets to stay. It goes on and on back and forth in the parable, but you get the idea. It's like, you might buy flowers for someone but then they might end up being allergic to flowers.

So in life, it's not that everything happens for a reason and that's why we can be ok with it. We can be ok with it, but because our notion of what is good and bad might be wrong at any given moment of the day. It's my opinion that Jesus was teaching Eastern philosophy to the Jews through what they could understand.

This is important because it taps directly into what is going wrong with the church. A gerontocracy has been been established as the government of the church. This is where the oldest guys automatically get the power. I think Joseph Smith originally wanted it to be a hierarchy but that didn't work out. The thing they need to realize is that the true spirit of Christ can't be expressed through any authoritarian power structure, because Christ is against all authority but God's and therefore is anarchic (without any power structure or authority) and, I would say, socially democratic.

So yeah. In my opinion, the people in charge of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, specifically the Presidents, Counselors, Apostles, and Seventies, need to be overthrown and replaced by other committees of people who are genuinely committed to the principles that were taught by Jesus Christ. Why not dissolve the church altogether, you say? Well I mean, I still think that the church could have an important mission in the world, but it needs to change from what it is now. You can't just say that you really want to be like Jesus Christ but then lead the people in a totally different direction. They just spent 3 billion dollars on a luxury shopping mall and all of the prophets and apostles were there cutting the ribbon and shouting, "let's go shopping!"

So the question becomes, well, what is good? Like, what is that "god" thing that Jesus referred to? If that's what's good, what is it? Well, in Mormonism there was an image of an iron rod that got used a lot. "The iron rod is the word of God." It's like a thing we can hold onto in this world of Satan's confusing mists. Like the parable of the house built upon the rock and the house built upon the stone. You have to have some kind of footing in this world so you don't get "tossed around by the waves of the sea," as James said. I think that the iron rod we can all hold onto is simply, love. Meaning, do unto others and you would have others do unto you. Non-judging love. Total acceptance of reality. For me what it means is that if you're the one in the situation bringing the vibes down, then you're the one that's wrong, whatever the situation may be. Aight, Hurt out.

Diary of an Ex-Mormon...it begins

I think I was 12 the first time I noticed something was weird about my religion. The missionaries were over, giving my 10-year-old sister and I their shpiel. Another thing to keep us kids entertained while the adults were out doing God knows what. Basically imagine Bart and Lisa Simpson sitting half-eyed on the couch listening to two chuckling young "Elders" drone on about religion. Bla bla Jesus Christ. Bla bla God. Until one of the missionaries mentioned something in passing that made me raise my head up.

"Wait--did you say that we become gods someday?"

The missionary looked at his companion, with a look asking if he should answer. His companion smiled.

"Yeah, man. Someday we can create our own planets."

I laughed and thought of all the possibilities. I told them I wanted to make a planet someday where the show Beast Wars was real, and dinosaurs and robots could have awesome wars all for my pleasure. All of a sudden I had the best religion at my school! Wait till my friends heard about this! I'm going to a way better heaven than you, bitches.

They continued on in their lesson and started talking about the temples, those beautiful buildings we've all seen. I had recently gone inside one and participated in the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead. I had been baptized like 40 times in a hot tub by a guy dressed in white, "for and in behalf of" a bunch of dead foreign people.

I was telling one of the Elders about my experience and I mentioned that the guy who was doing the confirmations for the dead (laying hands on the head of the newly proxy-baptized kids and praying) had seemed like we was gay. I didn't say it with judgement, it was just mentioned in kind of a detail-remembering way. But they laughed to each other and said, "No, if he were gay he wouldn't have been in the temple." And I just remember feeling really weird right then. Like, oh. This is the trade-off. If I want the planet with the robots that fight the dinosaurs…I've got to say I have a problem with two dudes being together, I guess. There's always a catch. Well. Whatever.

I think there are a lot of moments when you're a kid and you have to say Whatever to the situation you're in. When the girl you like at school would never like you back. That's one time we all have to learn to say Whatever. But it gets harder when the situation is that your father is screaming at the top of his lungs in the kitchen about how he's going to leave, which had happened two years before. When you've already had that big of a Whatever, a lot of other Whatevers can kinda hide under it.

I have a journal from my mission that contains an entry in which I talk about how I'm trying to figure out why homosexuality is a sin. None of the explanations I had heard make any sense; they all just basically appeal to tradition, ignorance, and bigotry. Eventually my half-sister Kristy (from my dad's previous marriage) got married to a cool girl that I like and started having kids that I really love. They're one of my favorite families. Not long after, the church told us all from the pulpit that we had to tell all of our friends and family in California to vote for Prop 8. At that point I knew something was wrong. I started to realize that all those "Proclamation to the World" pamphlets about family that I passed out on my mission were actually gay-hate propaganda. I started to realize that the church had an agenda. Something was moving this organization that I had never before thought could have had any motives other than to try to help people come to Christ. It was moving the church in a bad direction. 

Eventually I learned about politics, how modern conservatives and liberals are, and I figured out that the church has aligned itself with the far-right for political purposes, much like Joseph Smith would have in his day. Right now they're sending out a lot of missionaries by lowering the age to 18 for kids to go, so I guess they hope to accomplish something politically by that. Joseph Smith actually sent out political missionaries when he ran for president, so that kind of parallels this.

Anyway, long story short, here I am, an ex-Mormon (well still technically a member of the church I guess, until they excommunicate me or whatever), writing about the things I learned as a Mormon and the things I've learned as a non-Mormon. I still live by a lot of the things I learned as a Mormon, like striving to be humble and a good person. It's just that my journey to become a good person led me away from the church. I've come to see that the church has been misled by false prophets into ignorant philosophies of prejudice and hatred, the very philosophies that Jesus of Nazareth fought so hard to destroy.

Eventually when I spoke up to my bishop about my feelings about how the church should keep politics out of religion, first I was given a pamphlet on how to deal with my gay thoughts. After explaining to the dude that I wasn't gay, he then proceeded to tell me about when he was on his mission and he had a problem with the church not giving the priesthood to Black people before 1978, and his mission president just told him to "put his thoughts on a shelf." That seemed to solve everything for him. I was just floored by how this guy seemed to take an easy solace in simply accepting the notion that he did not deserve to think his own thoughts. That was the last time I went to church.