charity wrote:MishMagnet wrote:Lighten up, people! It's a joke! .
Thanks, mish. One of my sons-in-law sent it to me this morning and I thought it was funny. I put it up on MA&D, too.
I don't think it is funny that people feel like they can't stay in the Church, for whatever reason.
I really didn't think it would come to a discussion about why people really do leave the Church, but several of you have mentioned it.
I do not disbelieve any of your own experiences. My experience has been different. I know some people who have left the Church. These are the reasons. And these are the reasons
stated by the person him/herself. I am not speculating.
1. Got involved in a commercial personal improvement program which conflicted with Church teachings.
2. Would not belong to a Church which did not condemn capital punishment.
3. Thinks God did not answer his prayers when he was doing everything he should be doing and God should have.
4. Decided members are snooty and judgemental.
5. Excommunicated for adultery.
I don't know any other individuals who have left the Church. I am not including partially active people who still identify themselves as members, even if they do not attend regularly.
These all look like valid reasons to leave the Church. In fact, I'm not sure there is a non-valid reason to leave the Church. Membership in and attendance of a Church deliver a variety of benefits, including, but limited to, spiritual and social. Different people weigh different benefits differently. For some,the social benefits may be the most important. Membership and attendance also impose costs of varied kinds, which people weight differently, including, but limited to, opportunity cost of time, monetary (e.g., tithing), or mental (e.g., drudgery of listening to same superficial messages time after time). Once the costs of membership or attendance outweigh the benefits, the person will either terminate membership, or stop attending, or both.
We should be careful assigning our own weighting perferences to others. If someone, for example, places greatest weight on the social aspect, and who stops attending because someone offended her, then this strikes me as a perfectly valid reason to cease activity, regardless of what the spiritual snobs (those whose who derive significant spiritual benefits from participation and assume everyone else should experience it like they do) may say.
God . . . "who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, . . . and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him ..."
