Johnny Rhodes here.  Former missionary to Tahiti, EQ teacher, SS president, and sucker.  Raised by a TBM mom and inactive dad.  Married in the temple and blessed 3 kids in the LDS Church. 

I had always struggled to balance my beliefs in science and Mormonism.  More and more, I felt that biology and chemistry and physics and engineering were real, while religion was something you have to convince yourself to believe if you're going to get along with other believers.  God never answered any of my prayers, particularly the Moroni's Promise stuff.  But I put my doubts on the back shelf and played along with the game.

You know all that history that the LDS Church doesn't teach you?  Well, my Institute teacher at Weber State Univ taught a few things in his Church History class that weren't in the lesson manual.  So I knew there were differences between the actual history and the Sunday School version.

I often wondered about the Book of Abraham.  It just seemed like an obvious way to determine whether Joseph Smith could really translate Egyptian (or Reformed Egyptian) scripture.  At the time I did not know anything about the papyrus having been lost and found; just a decent interpretation of the Facsimiles printed in the Pearl of Great Price would have satisfied me.

In late 2008, I took my kid to a birthday party in our Houston ward.  The parents had travelled to Egypt, and they displayed prints similar to the facsimiles that they had found at a market.  They boasted that the dumm Egyptologists had the Book of Abraham all over the place and misinterpreted it as the Book of Breathings.  Hmmm.

The bishop phoned me at the end of December for an impromptu Tithing Settlement.  I decided right then that I would not pay tithing again until I learned whether Joseph Smith was God's translator.  This was during a vacation in UT.  A few days after we got back to TX, my wife worked a night shift.  So I had a chance to do some research without a disaproving wife looking over my shoulder.  I wrote my final tithing check and held it in my wallet just in case.

Obviously, the BoA turned out to be a hoax.  So it was just as obvious that the BoM was also a hoax.  My research snowballed:  peepstones, polyandry, 14-year-olds being taught that salvation is obtained by marrying JS, "Lamanite" DNA, pre-Columbian horses and steel, the 3 and 8 witnesses, the Kirtland bank fraud, the Nauvoo Expositor, the ever-changing Endowment, Mountain Meadow, racism, blood atonement...  holy shit, Blood Atonement as God's vengeance for miscegenation.  God commands us to kill all half-black children along with the parents so that God can forgive the parents.  Brigham Young was obsessed with racism and vengeance, and he repeatedly preached that God was too.

Over the next year, I continued to attend church with my wife (known here as rocknrhodes).  I dropped subtle and not-so-subtle hints to my wife all througout Sunday School.  There were plenty of opportunities; the topic that year was Doctrine and Covenants, so church history was being misrepresented for an hour every week.  I nearly confessed all once in the middle of the night, but I chickened out.

On 11/1/2009, someone mentioned tithing during Fast and Testimony meeting.  The wife mentioned that she hadn't seen me pay tithing all year, and I told her I was a closet atheist.  Late that night, she read the notes I had taken.  The next evening we had a long discussion at a quiet restaurant.  She was willing to do some research of her own, starting with "How could a 3rd grader have written the Book of Mormon?"  I got a little too excited and typed up an essay on the topic laying out several ways that the BoM could have been written, all of them more plausible than a silly tale involving magic rocks, Nephite ghosts, and hidden gold plates.

A month later, we arranged a meeting with the bishop.  The following week was the last time our family attended church.  We sent an email to our friends and family in the summer of 2010.  We invited home teachers and missionaries and ward leaders to visit us for a year, and then we got tired of it and resigned in November 2010.