# I was raised by devout Mormons, AMA [&|] Soliciting Advice

I was raised by devout Mormons in Mormon central (Northern Utah). It’s hard to accurately capture the scope of the conditioning via writing.  
  
Standard tenets of Mormon doctrine include:

*   No tea/coffee/alcohol
*   No premarital sex
*   Keep the sabbath (Sunday) holy
*   Mandatory 10% tithe
*   Book of Mormon as “most correct of any book”
*   Follow (i.e. obey) Church leaders
*   The Church is the only one with the Truth, all others are wrong
*   Read scriptures every day, pray several times a day (guilt enforced)
*   You should gain a Spiritual Witness of the Truth by praying about it  
     

In my case my parents are True Believers and devout even in comparison to the other Mormon families around. There’s no official list of “Things okay/not okay to do on Sunday”, and so different families have different opinions. For my family, that meant “No shopping/work/activities-of-any-kind-not- directly-related-to-worship” I wasn’t even allowed to do homework on Sundays, nor read non-religious books, etc.  
  
Strangely enough, they did emphasize the importance of education and both my parents were college graduates. You would think that would increase the risk of learning dangerous critical thinking skills, but when you’ve brainwashed the victims to assume a priori that emotional/spiritual experiences >= empirical evidence they do all the compartmentalization themselves.   
Nobody ever \*said\* the term “separate magisteria”, but that’s what it was held to be.

I had just enough critical thinking as a child that some things always bothered me, but I didn’t have the necessary knowledge to pin down why that was, and everyone around me regularly emphasized the Truth of our beliefs.   
The most egregious of these 'bothers' being "Pray until you get a spiritual witness", which in retrospect was flagrant disregard of [Conservation of Expected Evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jiBFC7DcCrZjGmZnJ/conservation-of-expected-evidence). (No answer? You haven't prayed enough. And even if it doesn't happen for years, it just 'wasn't the right time'. No amount of failed experiments will ever be allowed to be considered counter evidence. Very convenient.)  
  
I wish I could say that once I became a teenager I shook off the conditioning and declared myself an atheist, but that’s not how it happened. I \*wanted\* it to be true, in part because I love my parents and trusted them more than was healthy. Compartmentalization is a helluva drug ala Robert Aumann.

It was only after moving out and spending a few months living on my own that I slowly dragged myself kicking and screaming into acknowledging that it doesn’t make sense to require evidence for all claims \*except\* those of the one-true-religion-that-I-happened-to-be-born-into, which for \*some reason\* gets a free pass for emotion-counting-as-evidence.  
  
I'm still somewhat in process of recovering, there's a lot of conditioning to unravel and it's only been a couple years since I finally admitted to myself that I didn't believe anymore.  
  
***I'm happy to answer any questions about my perspective/former beliefs!***  
  
***Also, I'm aware many of you have had similar experiences, so if you have helpful advice to give me please do so!***