The LDS Church Is Indeed Imperfect

So, I go completely insane. And going to church turns out to be a major factor ratcheting up the insanity. After the hospitalization, I decide that I am going to go back to church. However, each time I go, it is so unpleasant that I can barely go at all, maybe once every two to three months? Well, the last church visit was March 2007. It was really, really pathetic. I could tell that everyone was either cursed, brainwashed, or depressed. There is no spirituality. All that is good about it is that I realize I grew up with all the more elderly people in the congregation. I decide I have a love for them. That's all. Basically, throughout 2006 and 2007, every time I go to church my mental health symptoms get worse. My medication wasn't at the right dosage yet, and every time I attend church, except for the last March visit, I get symptoms that indicate that I'm starting to hallucinate again.

Church was a trigger for insanity?

One thing that I grew up with and agreed with told me that I had to keep going to church even if it was a miserable experience. I was told, along with a lot of other members, that the LDS Church was perfect, but the people in it were not. I swallowed this whole. Most people took this idea to mean that if someone at church offended you, you were supposed to keep going anyway, because the Church was perfect. This was all part of the brainwashing. It wasn't that there was nothing brilliant about the way the LDS Church was run. It was that there were a lot of problems that people constantly turned their backs on. The content of a Sunday School lesson was lame and banal. A Relief Society lesson seemed filled with lies. A bishop gave someone brutally rude and untrue advice. Someone killed himself because he was gay. These problems were glaring, but often ignored.

I believed that the Church was perfect. I would talk about how we, as LDS people, had the truth, to my friends who were LDS. I was supposed to be really righteous and spiritual because I liked the LDS Church. But what surprised me was the fact that not everyone responded with glee to these speeches. Some people seemed floored, as in shocked. They seemed downright shocked. Maybe the speeches made them feel guilty? Maybe some people were cultural Mormons who didn't believe everything they heard in the walls of the church building? Maybe some people hated the Book of Mormon? I loved the Book of Mormon for a long time. Surely I would rub some people the wrong way!

And then there was the idea that people would get offended and not attend again. Every six months, in General Conference, LDS people get to hear how they are supposed to live. They hear speeches from the General Authorities on different LDS topics. The General Authorities were fond of saying that if you are offended by someone, that is no reason to stop attending. Basically, if you are offended, that is your problem. But, after about the age of 25, I started to get offended by many things. First I noticed that the speakers in sacrament meeting often used bad grammar. But after that age of thirty, I started hearing things come out of people's mouths that sounded wrong. They didn't sound like Church doctrine. A lot of things weren't Church doctrine. But some of the things that sounded wrong really were Church doctrine. I realized that a lot of people were parroting a lot of untrue things in church. One person would say something. Then another person would say it, too.

And then I started to notice, about five years ago, that some of the things they said in church weren't just wrong or untrue, they were mean, hateful things. They said mean things about people grieving the death of a loved one. They said means things about the mentally ill. They said mean things about people who didn't give their all. They said mean things about lazy people. And the meanness didn't abate. It got worse and worse. It got so that everyone sounded either shallow or completely stupid.

I had been offended over and over and over again. I began to realize that something was wrong with a certain percentage of people in the LDS Church. They were mean. They were shallow. They were uneducated. They were close-minded. They didn't travel. They only associated with immediate and extended family members. They were overworked and didn't take time to nurture their friendships, including with me. The people's focuses in life began to be offensive. I would develop feelings of jealousy when a group of people decided they were going to the temple. Some people would talk about going to the temple in front of me just because I was beginning to hate the idea and refused to have my temple recommend renewed. I had uncovered a pattern of feelings of unworthiness whenever I thought about renewing it. They thought I had done something wrong. I was unknowingly dissing the temple because I thought something was wrong with it. And I kept thinking of reasons I couldn't go, mostly because I was never, ever worthy enough to go. I hadn't done any of the horrible things they thought I had, though. Mostly, my evil was an imagined entity. Even if I was becoming evil, I was never worried about any evil that actually really existed in my person. It was all overly imaginative anxiety. It was based on the LDS Church's definition of evil, not a practical encounter of truly bad habits or attitudes.

In the end, I couldn't fit in. Everyone else was getting on with their lives. And I was left worrying futilely about my own salvation. I just couldn't get it together. And time was passing! I was over thirty! And I still hadn't gone to the temple to get my endowments!

But this idea of unworthiness started to dissolve. And it turned to a disgust for the things talked about in church. And I began to admit I didn't like LDS men, which was horrible for me, because I thought I was supposed to marry one of them.

After a while, I admitted to myself that I didn't even like LDS people as a whole, especially while they were busy trying to be LDS, which was basically in every spare minute that they had. While I do not think that I truly hate all LDS people, I have a suspicion of them and what is on their minds. After all, I was one of them. I think I have a few LDS friends left. I'm just not making the effort to contact them until I am more right with myself and my position in regards to the LDS religion. I am not interested in insincere conversations about being LDS or liking being LDS. About a month ago, I finished unloading a boat load of anger, and I am still kind of bitter and frightened.

And when you think about what it really means when they say that the LDS Church is perfect but the people are not, I am stuck in a logical quandary. For what else is a church, but a group of people getting together to worship in a particular way? For if the LDS people are not perfect, including the top leaders, the LDS Church cannot be perfect at all. A church is a group of people. If a group of people is imperfect, then a church they form will be imperfect as well. This could probably apply to any church on earth! Basically, my brainwashing is undone. The LDS Church is indeed imperfect.