See the complete story on my blog.

My name is Brent Fisher. I live in Highland Utah. I am a Mormon since my birth ~35 years ago. After so many years have passed, I realize now that I must write according to my conscience, both intellectual and spiritual. I suppose the reason that I have not written about this before may stem from my own procrastination. But I think in the interest of my own intellectual honesty, I believe that I am not actually that lazy of a person, but my procrastination has stemmed from a deeply held fear of the truth. This need to procrastinate complexity has formed many bad habits in my life, including excessive TV watching and other wastes of time aimed at taking my mind of off discovering truth.

I think most of us fear some sort of truth. There are many truths that instead of setting a man free, may remove the simplicity from that man’s life, leaving room for an intellectual complexity that could affect most aspects of life including the most important ones. The truths that I speak of are far more inconvenient than the inconvenient truth spoken of by Al Gore. While his truth is inconvenient in that it would cause most of us to bicycle in to work, or car pool, or ride the bus, or telecommute, I speak of life’s complexities.

These complexities are difficult to describe, perhaps, to those who haven’t experienced them. To these fortunate souls, I smile in love and often wish I were them. The spiritual and intellectual complexities that I am speaking about would seem to challenge and shake most of the everyday life. These complexities would change how all of your current relationships with other loved ones would be formed. Family members, who once loved you and cherished you, would now grimace and feel displaced hatred or confusion towards you. Or worse, they may feel misplaced pity.

These complexities may strain extended family relationships in much the same way that you might accidentally strain a muscle in a sporting event, but this muscle may never heal. If each muscle represents one of the aspects of your everyday life like a relationship, or going to work and the sporting event represents life. You may have once enjoyed this sporting event immensely, but now that all your muscles are strained, the sporting event is now painful. The metaphor may not be exactly right, but sometimes it feels like it.

Now imagine, those pains would not occur if you would simply ignore the cause of that pain. Would you do it? For so long, that is exactly what I did. I have endeavored to ignore those stirrings of intellectual incongruity to allow me to continue to enjoy the sport of life.
I am not entirely sure what has caused my intellect to convince my smarter self to quit ignoring those stirrings and investigate. I think part of it must have come from my own stubbornness. Perhaps it was this or something more virtuous such as the proverbial search for truth. I rather doubt it is the latter, since I generally consider myself a bit on the lazy side, but I am a rather stubborn, yet patient man. Whatever it was, I finally started paying attention about three years ago. The seeds of this complexity were planted, however, long before that.

I don’t want to delve too much into the Mormon culture because there is plenty of material out there that talks about both the Doctrine and the culture of Mormonism. I want to just kind of sum it up. I was born into a Mormon family, complete with my Mom and Dad and eight kids. Growing up, I believed in Mormonism because it felt good and my parents were very strong and faithful in taking me to church every Sunday. We all participated faithfully. There are a lot of good things about Mormonism. Following the teachings taught in Mormonism produce a pretty good society I think. I went to church, including Sunday school, Priesthood and graduated from Seminary. When the time came for me to serve an LDS mission, I served in the Barranquilla Colombia mission in 1991-1992, after I graduated from High School. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

Although I had heard of the anti-Mormon literature produced and distributed at the Mormon Miracle Manti Pageant, I was able to intellectually ignore them for most of my teenage life. None of these complexities entered into my life until one day while walking back to my flat in Barranquilla Colombia.

One evening, while heading back to my flat after another hard working day of missionary work, a young man in his twenties began to walk with my companion and me. This young man didn’t talk to us, but waited to be talked to. He knew that even poor grade missionaries wouldn’t pass up a chance to open their mouth to a contact that they didn’t have to knock on a door for.
I don’t want to go into too much detail about my discussion with this fellow. I just want to say that we soon found out that this fellow was a returned missionary who had attended Rick’s College in Idaho. He had since left the church. When we asked him why, he told us that he had discovered that the Book of Mormon had been changed quite a bit since its first release and that to change the book changed some of the doctrine in it as well. This paradox, or conflict of it being a book given by revelation from God, but then requiring revisions to maintain consistency with Mormon doctrine was one of the main reasons that this man left the church and returned to his home in Barranquilla.

My story goes on at my blog