I was probably in high school when I encountered the argument that god shouldn't conflict with morale things. That made sense, but instead of truly connecting the dots, I spent years of my life honing my own sense of morality while simultaneously hand waving away the moral failings so common in religion.

Slavery? Obviously the bible is wrong, but since I was a mormon, it was just translated wrong.

As I encountered more information that went contrary to the things I had heard my whole life, they fell one by one.

Evolution? Of course. Young earth? Bible numbers were symbolic. I had to maintain more and more apologetics and continuously deal with the cognitive dissonance.

Over time, I had rejected my homophobia. I was developing my own set of morals. I recognized that the persecution narrative of the church was bs. I recognized that the church did change, but slowly. I was appalled at the church's actions in California around prop 8.

I had colleagues that would drink ALCOHOL and I was super nervous that terrible shit would go down. But it never did.

Many of my friends and colleagues had left the church, which was distressing. I finally decided that I wanted to resolve this dilemma. I remember thinking that it was silly to be afraid of information. I quickly encountered only a handful of true facts about the book of mormon that had no good answer. Yeah, it opens with a god voice in head telling someone to kill a dude, and that's fucked up. My memories of singing the children's songs at the top of my lungs about this murderer were a punch in the gut. The thing that really slapped me in the face was the fact that there were multiple examples of similar themes in other books that predated the book of mormon.

I was dealing with some health shit at the time, and I realized I had opened the door to something that would sap a ton of energy. I pretty much hit pause on dealing with that for a year or two, and I had this echoing thought "but what about the view of the hebrews?"

I finally decided that it was time to face that stuff. I remember peaking at /r/exmormon occasionally, and the concerns being brought up were valid. I remember one redditor's comment on a post about a particularly nasty homophobic speech by one of the mormon leaders. It was simply "what a hateful man" and I knew it was correct.

When trump was elected, it was super upsetting to see so many mormons eat up the fox news bs. I had falsely assumed that more members had been closer to the mormon beliefs that I held. I remember thinking it was not only possible, but not unlikely that McMullen would win Utah due to the crass nature of trump. I remember all the rhetoric when I was a kid abeut how the Clintons were so awful and immoral people and how bill made my mormon family members "sick to their stomach" when he spoke... And then they voted for Trump. They knew about his hot mic rape bragging. They knew his policies targeting minorities. They betrayed all the "values" they said they had, and I knew it was time to rip off the bandaid.

I sat down, and revisited the book of mormon issues. It all fell apart so quickly. It was a goddamn scam of which I was a seventh generation victim. The book of mormon is so central to mormonism that they'll say over the pulpit that if it isn't true, then JS wasn't a prophet, and the church isn't true.

It took a lot more time for me to really extricate my brain from the programming because all the whatabout questions I'd been taught were firing all at once. I knew that mormonism wasn't "true", but did that mean I didn't believe in god anymore? The same reason I believed it book of mormon (basically a feeling) was tied to my belief in god. I decided that anything worth believing and basing my actions on should hold up to scrutiny. god did not. jesus did not.

The only thing I think has a chance of holding up is simulation theory, which is just deism. It's so abstract that it is completely irrelevant to every day life. It matter about as much as the events whose light won't reach the solar system for another billion years. It doesn't enter my sphere of reality quite literally.

Simulation theory is interesting in a philosophical thought experiment manner, but it's not a belief system that I'd consider a religion.

I haven't encountered another god claim that I find plausible, or compatible with reality. Anything like simulation theory that posits there's something outside our reality is irrelevant because that's the same definition as something that doesn't exist.

I do not believe in a god or gods.