To my dedicated readers: I take weekends off, and I didn’t fall in love with any posts this week until today. Sorry for the lack of updates. I refuse to post from home as I don’t want my family and friends to find out about this blog yet. It’s sacred, not secret.
Here’s a post from “Stunted,” at RFM, about an experience he had on the bus in Salt Lake City…
Last Week I was on the UTA bus riding into SLC from UT County. The bus is mostly filled with white shirts and ties. I assume that most of the riders are headed for jobs at the COB but I’m not going to ask them to confirm it.
Two stops after I got on a woman boarded the bus and sat in the empty seat next to me. She was smartly dressed with a professional look about her and she held herself with confidence and gave me a nice smile as she sat down.
Shame on me for assuming she wasn’t a Mormon! There must be dozens of TBM women that dress with style and have self confidence I just didn’t expect one coming out of Utah County on the bus -my bad.
How do I know she was a Mormon? Because as soon as she sat down she flipped open some paper work and started making notes and editing what looked like slides for a presentation. I was a bit curious and wanted to know what kind of work she was doing so I let my eyes slide over the pages on her lap.
It was a presentation on how to get more missionary work out of church members. I don’t recall any direct quotes from the material but I was shocked at how blatant the manipulation was. There was one section on why people don’t do more missionary work. The reasons listed sounded like responses to a survey given to church members. They were polite excuses that included the standard things – too busy with small children, callings already take up most of the week, no free time because of other church obligations etc.
In addition to “already running full speed on the Mormon Hamster Wheel”, other excuses were offered – don’t know any non-members, uncomfortable approaching strangers and such. There was even one honest response – don’t like doing missionary work.
According to the next page none of these excuses are the least bit valid and need to be worked around by applying more guilt to the overworked members. Apparently the members of the church just don’t understand how critically important this work is!
At that point I was feeling a bit sick and had to stop reading.
Then I got angry.
Why did I take that kind of abuse for so long? Why does the church demand so much and how do they get away with it? How many meetings did I sit through, as a TBM, where I was berated for not doing the impossible? Why did I always agree that the problem was with me?!?
I’m glad I’m done with that crap but I feel sorry for those who haven’t yet seen the cult for what it is. The welfare and happiness of the members is given a lot of lip service by the church but it’s obvious that the only thing the church really cares about is The Church – individuals are expendable.
Stupid Cult.
Stunted.
Tags: exmormon, missionary, Missionary Work, Mormon, postmormon
