My Background

Now, in 2022, I'm nearly 41 years old.

 I grew up in a partly religious home. My parents often sent me with my grandparents to attend a non-denominational community church when I was a child.

As I got to being a young adult, I started considering things more seriously, and I started wondering about baptism and about communion (what Latter-day Saints call "the sacrament") and how I would know when I was supposed to participate in it.

Around that time, I became aware of friends from school who were "Mormons" (what Latter-day Saints called themselves as a nickname at the time.) The church I went to had never taught me specific negative things about Mormons, but I did have some vague idea that it was a dangerous cult that I should stay away from. That's really all I knew.

I loved my friends and I was very concerned for them, so I asked one of them about it, I got a copy of the Book of Mormon, and I started to learn about it and read about it online as well (in the very minimal form of the Internet that existed at that time.) I wanted to learn what they were wrong about, so that I could save my friends from whatever trouble they were in.

As I kept studying, my younger self started to feel like they had better answers than I had, and I converted myself in, instead of converting them out.  Oops.

I was baptized as a Latter-day Saint on January 1, 1999, when I was 18 years old.

I received my Temple Endowment on May 29, 2001 at Mt. Timpanogos, Utah.

I married in 2001, in the Salt Lake Temple.

I became a Freemason, taking the three degrees on October 22, 2002, November 27, 2002, and January 29, 2003, respectively.

Even though my first wife and I weren't getting along very well, we had a child in 2004. We got divorced a few months later.

I married again in 2005.

I started seriously studying Kabbalah, mysticism and the occult.

I became a Royal Arch Mason in 2006.

I resigned from the Church in November, 2008, for reasons which I will elaborate on another time.

I served as Worshipful Master of my Lodge, High Priest of my Royal Arch Chapter, and Illustrious Master of my Cryptic Council, all in 2009.

My second wife and I started dating a girl polyamorously in early 2011.

My wife and our girlfriend both left me in August 2011, and my wife divorced me in early 2012, I think it was January.

My deep interest in Mormon history has never gone away.

Somewhere over the last decade, as some of the pain started to become more distant, I started being able to seriously study the Bible.  I was no longer worried about what conclusions I might find in it.  I realized that I no longer had any particular dog in the fight.

It's time. Let's talk about some of this stuff.

I am Jeff Day.