True. Useless.

O joyous day, Brethern and Sistern! His Holiness Brother Greg West feels impressed to speak to you. Yea, impressed by the Holy Spirit^TM, even. Gather up your smelling salts, pull up the swooning chaise, ransack the jewelry box for your clutching-pearls, and get ready for a great big case o’ the vapors:

I was surfing around today and stumbled upon the web site of an exMormon from Canada. He claims to have been a lifelong member of the Church, served a mission, and was a bishop at age 35 or so. I have no reason to doubt his story, but I’m always wary of how these guys tend to inflate their importance. As I read some of his story, I was struck how his tale is just the same old song I’ve heard a zillion times. It amazes me that, for all the demands that they have their story heard, it’s always the same old story.

I have no reason to doubt his story, but I doubt it anyway! Witness how he inflates himself to God-like proportions by asserting that he served as both a missionary AND a bishop! His pretensions to grandeur know no bounds! And imagine the brazen audacity necessary to desire that others hear his story! Such arrogance! Let us continue!

Universities seem to be the place where the proud begin to succumb to the temptation to be smarter than everyone else. I don’t know if it’s competitiveness so much as it is the desire to be accepted by those one looks up to. I’ve heard many times of a LDS member who was humiliated because all he could do was bear a simple testimony in the face of a direct intellectual assault on his faith by an esteemed professor. Determined to never be humiliated again, his pride sets him off on a quest to know more than anyone else.

Translation:

Universities seem to be the place where the proud those who are eager to learn begin to succumb to the temptation to be smarter than everyone else learn. I don’t know if it’s competitiveness so much as it is the desire to be accepted by those one looks up to learn. I’ve heard many times of a LDS member who was humiliated because all he could do was bear a simple testimony appeal to his own emotions in the face of a direct intellectual assault on his faith actual evidence by an esteemed professor someone possessing even the most rudimentary of critical thinking skills. Determined to never be humiliated again, his pride desire to learn the truth sets him off on a quest to know more than anyone else learn something. Anything. At all.

Fixed! Next:

…the gospel is intentionally designed to not be “provable” by man’s sciences.

Translation:

Jesus was sitting around one day, trying to make up a religion. He thought “If I provide proper evidence for Mormonism, then everyone will believe in it, and then who exactly will I send to these Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms? I put a lot of fucking God-hours into these things and I’ll be Me-damned if they’re going to go to waste!

“I have an idea! I’ll make sure that tangible evidence for Mormonism is so difficult to find that no one in their right mind will believe in it, and those Kingdoms will fill up faster than a paper sacrament cup in a hurricane!”

Sure, Jesus could save everyone. But, like Syndrome once said:  “When everyone is special, no one is.” Why not create billions of offspring, claim to love each and every one enough to die for them, and then exclude as many of them as you can for not finding the invisible plastic eggs in your cosmic Easter egg hunt.

There’s even more:

There is real power in faith. Evidence doesn’t have that transformative essence.

Translation:

There is real power in faith, provided it’s faith in the religion I already believe to be true – faith in any of the other thousands of religions is BAD. Evidence doesn’t have that transformative essence isn’t favorable to the myriad unsupportable assertions that comprise my belief system, so I have no qualms about rejecting it. I do however reserve the right to change my position and accept evidence should any in support of my belief system miraculously materialize somewhere.

Fixed. Again. More:

The brother about whom I write apparently wrote to Elder Holland of the Twelve and didn’t get a satisfactory reply. His next step was to write an open letter on the Internet to Elder Holland. Still not receiving a reply that satisfied him, he wrote again–this time an 80-page rant–wherein he listed all his grievances, his critiques, his unanswered questions, and posted it as a PDF file.

A PDF file?! On the INTERNET?! Why not just FAX the letter to SATAN himself! Everyone knows PDF is the Devil’s Format!

Still more:

As I perused the document, I was stunned to see that almost every single page of it contained a “carbon copy” of every other anti-Mormon’s rants. It had obviously been a long time since this brother had read the Book of Mormon with any regularity, but it was apparent that he had studied every single anti-Mormon treatise available. It was like a catalog, every page plagiarized, cut-and-pasted from anti-Mormon books and web sites.

He used arguments that were presented elsewhere! No solid case can ever be built upon precedence! ‘Tis madness! And just because Joseph Smith plagiarized large chunks of the Book of Mormon from the King James Bible doesn’t mean that some filthy exMormon is allowed to do the same! Joseph Smith was a prophet. God told him to plagiarize those passages. And He even made sure that Joseph Smith repeated the errors made by the King James scribes, just to test our faith!

We finally approach the end:

If you are a woman who has a husband that is placing you in this situation, for the sake of your own salvation and that of your children, it is better to cut the apostate husband loose. As tragic as it may be, it would be more tragic for him to pull you and your children down to hell with him. If he insisted that you and your children remain inside a house that is burning down, would you stay or would you flee for your life and take your children with you?

Remember, Sistern – when you were married for Time and All Eternity^TM you didn’t just marry your husband. You married God, too. And God will not be cock-blocked. So kick your filthy freethinking apostate scoundrel husband to outer curbness! He will soon drink the dregs of the bitter cup of divorce! And God shall hold you tight unto his bosom, yea, even tight like unto a dish. For a dish thou art. Verily, God totes thinks you are teh hawtness.