Quote:
Originally Posted by cougarobgon
I have very few friends or acquaintances that have fallen away from the Church and are self proclaimed apostates. Interesting to me, the majority first broke their covenants and then began to recognize the fallacies of the Church or its leaders and eventually fell away or turned away from the Church. I believe one can break their covenants yet still have no doubt the Church is true
For those of you willing to share that consider yourselves apostates, inactives, or on your way there, what came first, the breaking of covenants or your doubts about the Church?
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The problem with your question is that you assume that these are discrete events, i.e. there's a specific point where you break your covenants, a specific point where you suddenly turn apostate, etc. In people I've known, both events tend to occur slowly over a long period of time. Occasionally, even often, they occur simultaneously, which shouldn't be all that surprising--if you're starting to see your covenants as sort of silly or meaningless, you're certainly more willing to break them. I think the typical Mormon sees this as a copout in that people screw up and then retroactively try to rationalize it, but IMO, that rarely happens.
I also know plenty of people who are very good people and have "apostasized". I guess I don't know them well enough to say that they
didn't "break their covenants", but there's nothing to suggest that they did.