My Dearest Friend,

After our fight today, I am moving ahead in resigning my membership in the LDS church. I respect the church as a community, but it grows harder to pretend to live by concepts I no longer believe. I cannot raise our kids to believe it. They deserve to know the truth. I deserved to learn it as well as a kid. But instead I was fed only a diet of internal proofs and propaganda. All meant for the best, hopefully. Of course I believed it. What choice did I have? Other kids get equally indoctrinated in other faiths. It does not make them all true. The moment you begin to look, really look from the outside, with any objectivity, the underlying foundation looses its stability. At least it has for me. Joseph was smart, but not that smart. Two hundred years of deliberate myth makers have done the rest.

The other reason I am leaving is that perhaps a formal resignation from the church will force us to adapt more quickly as a family. I cannot baptize our son if I am not a mormon. That problem you raise is thus solved. You can also discredit anything I tell the kids by my officially apostate status. 

I was researching though, that when one spouse resigns, it leads to divorce in a majority of cases. I love you so much more than the mormon church. The mormon priesthood teaches a dogma of loyalty to God (i.e. church leaders) first, then wife and family after. I never agreed with this ranking. You were and still are first. For me, God came in fourth or fifth and the church, as an institution, much lower than that. Regardless, my marriage is with you, not the church. Though it is a fact that our temple marriage will become ineffective, when I resign. I believe we can still have a wonderful earthly marriage. But maybe I am naive. Your faith and commitment to the church may prevent such a situation from being feasible.

I know this decision frustrates you and leaves you feeling betrayed. If it makes you feel better, I have been dealing with much anger and feelings of betrayal myself as I have faced a long and slow arousal from the dreamland of blind belief. You can blame me if you like. I blame others. The bottom line is we live the principles we believe. I used to believe the LDS doctrine with all my heart. I lived by it. My personal quest is now leading me in different directions. I am open to believe new things. I do not see it as negative. Life is a journey. I could have ended up in countless destinations. I am here. I now have to plot new courses to move forward from where I am. If the answers were truly there as promised, the LDS church is where I would stay. It does not have the answers I seek. I have searched for decades. Truly, deeply searched. I feel it is time for me to move on. My time is running out.

That said, the LDS church has much philosophy that is wonderful and edifying. I do not deny that. I will support your membership and that of the kids, if they choose it. I will also promote other choices as well for them and hopefully expose them to additional philosophies to consider in their own quest for truth. 

Back to the baptism question you raised for our son, personally I now believe it is ridiculous to think that an eight year old is at a place to join a religion for life. I was not, our son is not. We may as well baptize them at birth. We thump our chests that we avoid the horrific "evil" of infant baptism, only to indoctrinate them and coerce them to do it at age eight. Honestly, what "choice" do they really have? If it is evil at birth, it is only marginally less so at age eight.  If we truly wish to give them religious agency we would teach them to be good, kind, to help others, to learn philosophy, science, art and logic. Then love them and let them decide as adults what they want to do. 

All this nonsense of avoiding becoming the "weak link" in a long line of faithful is fear mongering. I say let's break the weak chain that binds our minds and keeps us from learning the thousands of additional truths we could find with a more open mind. The integrity of staying true to the "faith of our fathers" lacks credence when you think that our "fathers" were not true to their fathers when they first chose the Mormon church. If our fathers had any of the same sense of integrity we would be protestants, or catholics, or older still, pagans. But no, some of our fathers, at least, were willing to take risks, break tradition, and forge new paths.

I still think of Lucy Mack Smith when her son approached her and said, "I have learned for myself that your church is not true." How does a parent react to that? Well I have now learned for myself that my mother's church is equally untrue. Granted, God did not appear to me in person to tell me, which, in the end, is exactly the point.