When I finally admitted to myself that I could no longer believe in God, I felt I owed him an explanation.

This is an excerpt from “Losing My Religion: Why I Love and Left My Mormon Faith” by Eric T. Hansen, a book-length essay about the positive and negative aspects of Mormonism.

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In the end, I could have lived with a lot of things — the contradictions, the doubts, all that. If you believe, you can live with a lot. If you have faith, you are willing to suffer for it.

What I couldn’t live with was the self-loathing.

The moment my love of God turned to self-loathing came one Sunday in the Munich branch of the Mormon Church in Germany when I was just shy of thirty. I remember sitting near the back, with my wife, listening to another member speak from the pulpit. The pews were sparsely populated, people listened politely or paged through hymnals or the scriptures or something else. A few rows in front of me, a couple of children had their heads down over something that was more interesting — a coloring book, maybe.

Suddenly I realized how often I had heard everything the brother was saying from the pulpit. Every word I had heard before: the parables, the personal anecdote, the testimony of faith, the admonition to keep the commandments, the little joke, the homey metaphor about the dog that trusts its master unquestioningly and the responsibility that brings. Not only that, I realized that it would be like this forever — every Sunday, I would be sitting here listening to things I had heard a thousand times before, over and over again, until the day I died.

Outside the church walls, life was happening.

It was the late eighties. The Cold War was still on, atomic bombs were piling up, the Middle East was a mess, politicians seemed to be irresponsible lunatics, there was terrorism everywhere, society was tearing itself to pieces. It was a big, frightening, confusing world.

And here in church … what was the issue of the day? Coca-Cola.

The Coke Dilemma

Like all new ideas, the Mormon health code called the Word of Wisdom, as brilliant as it was, also brought new problems. It forbade “hot drinks,” a 19th-century term generally interpreted to mean coffee and black tea. Mormons further interpret God’s dislike for “hot drinks” as related to the fact that they contain caffeine. Caffeine is, after all, a drug.

Coca-Cola was not a “hot drink,” but it did contain caffeine.

Complicating things was the fact that it was invented after the Word of Wisdom. Thus, Mormons today are faced with a dilemma: Does God want us to retroactively interpret the Word of Wisdom to include Coke, or would he come out and say it explicitly — in a new revelation — if he didn’t want us to drink it? Church authorities, when asked about the issue, say that it’s up to the individual. Ah, but they forget that telling Mormons that something is entirely up to them is like asking a cat to decide whether it wants to be inside or outside.

There are two factions: The Coke-drinking faction appears weak and hedonistic, as if they were flirting with sin; the Coke-abstaining faction has the “better safe than sorry” principle on its side, but it also gets a little too much satisfaction out of implying that they are somehow following a “higher law” that inferior Mormons aren’t quite ready for.

Outside: real life. Inside: the Coke dilemma.

I had to get out. I had to stand up and walk out. I knew this was not what God put us on earth to do. I knew I could not live my own life if I sat there a minute longer.

But I couldn’t.

There is always a right and wrong in the Mormon church, you see, and not attending church — much less leaving in the middle of services — was clearly wrong. I had been raised — I had made it my declared goal in life — to do the right thing. Now I saw I had reached that goal: I had become a good Mormon, as witnessed by the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to perform the simple emancipatory act of walking out of a church meeting, even though I knew I was wasting my time.

As I sat there grinding my teeth, tense and desperate, fighting with myself, I reexamined my life.

The Church was Like a Mother and Father to Me

I did not see a grown man.

I had left Hawaii and come to Germany not only to marry and study the Middle Ages, but also to get away from my overbearing family and gain a taste of independence. To be the captain of my own fate, to live my own life. To grow up.

But I had taken the church with me. The church told me exactly how to behave, just as my mother and father told me when I was a child. I looked at myself and I saw a thirteen-year-old, looking to the church in lieu of Mom and Dad for authority. I was nearly thirty, yet I was still incapable of taking command of my own life.

I sat there, unable to move, and hated myself. The shame and self-loathing grew when church services were over and I was outside, walking with my wife to the subway. Then, in the subway, waiting for the train, watching a pretty girl walk by, I turned to A. and told her that I would not be going back to church next Sunday and not for a long time after that, either.

My favorite Mormon fable to scare kids away from sin is the one about the frog in the pot (it’s one of those parables that many Protestant churches use). It goes something like this:

If you throw a frog into a pot of water boiling on the stove, it will immediately jump out to save its life. But if you throw a frog into a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat until it reaches a boil, the frog won’t notice the gradual increase and will sit there, content, until it is boiled to death.

It’s a parable about sin: You might start out with a small sin, something innocuous, something even God can’t really get upset about, but once that sin feels normal, you go on to the next sin, and the next, and before you know it, you are lying in a gutter dressed in a leather bondage out t with a needle sticking out of your arm.

That’s the problem Mormons really have with Coke: It’s the gateway drug to alcohol.

Almost Drunk in the Munich Christmas Market

That week, I went out and bought a Coke and drank it for the first time. It didn’t taste like sin — it tasted like a sugary drink. A week or so later — with our Sundays free, we had a little more time on our hands — we were walking through a Christmas market that had just opened on Marienplatz in downtown Munich.

We pushed our way through the tightly packed crowds in their winter clothes and splurged on a bratwurst and a sack of roasted chestnuts. When we found ourselves before a stand that offered Glühwein, a hot, spicy Christmas punch laced with wine.

I had grown up in a household without alcohol. For me, alcohol was all about sin, crime and danger. I had never been in a bar — even walking past one of those dark and cave-like dens of sin made me shudder. If I knew someone who drank, though I never said anything, in my mind he was one step away from being a criminal, and the sight of a wine bottle in a friend’s kitchen lent the entire household a hint of unrepentant decadence. Yes, I was afraid of alcohol — as I was raised to be.

But now I was ashamed of constantly being afraid — afraid of alcohol, afraid of people with a different lifestyle, afraid of the world outside the boundaries of God’s commandments, afraid of the risks of life, afraid of life itself. I was sick and tired of being the frog in the pot, I wanted to be a human being in charge of his own life.

My wife was different. As long as she was in the church and believed, she followed the commandments, but she had grown up with alcohol in the house and was not afraid of it. She knew what I was thinking and said, “If you’re going to do this, you have to go all the way.”

I told her, “If I start acting weird, if I take my clothes off and run around naked and try to dance on a table or anything like that, stop me, okay?”

She promised she would. Then I drank the punch.

Nothing happened.

No, that’s not entirely true. Something did happen. I looked around.

Marienplatz was full of parents with their children, boys and girls on dates, normal people buying trinkets, chatting, laughing, arguing, standing in line, taking photos of each other. No one was dancing naked on a table, no one was taking out a knife to settle a disagreement, no one was rolling around in a gutter. They were all normal people. Just normal people.

I wondered then how much of life I had missed. How much life had passed me by while I was huddled together with a lot of other Mormons discussing how best to remain uncontaminated, uncompromised, not endangered by the big bad world out there.

This was God’s creation. This sprawling churning carnival of sheer unpredictable human life, the Mormons and the non-Mormons, the Coke-drinkers and the non-Coke-drinkers, the good and the bad and the right and the wrong and all those people in between — all of this was what God made.

All of a sudden I could no longer imagine a God sternly judging us for our evil thoughts. I could not imagine a God demanding that human life conform to a single set of principles valid for all. I could not even imagine a God that would demand his children sit in church every Sunday for hours on end sweating in their Sunday clothes and listening to some guy telling them what is wrong with them and every day worrying about whether they had looked too long at a pretty girl or if they were going to be punished for that one time they drank a little Coke when they were teenagers. I could no longer imagine a God looking down on a lot of families wandering through the Christmas market chatting, spending money, joking, maybe getting a little tipsy, enjoying their day with each other, judging them and taking down their names for later punishment.

Paradox and the Mormon Version of the Garden of Eden

In the months that followed, I did a lot of thinking about Adam and Eve.

The Mormons teach the story of the Garden of Eden very unlike any other church. There is no “Original Sin.” Eve was not the first sinner, she was the smart one. Satan — in the form of the serpent — was just doing what God told him to. And most importantly: By reluctantly eating the apple, Adam solved an unsolvable paradox.

I think a lot about that word: paradox.

I remember a missionary companion of mine in Dortmund, I think it was. Once, he said something out of the blue that I will never forget: “In paradox there is truth.”

It was a startling thing to say. It has stuck with me ever since. I think about it when I recall Nephi’s words about opposition in all things — no good without evil, no happiness without grief, you have to be cruel to be kind.

Paradox is the key to the Mormon version of the story of Adam and Eve.

When God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden, he gave them two contradicting commandments.

The first was “to multiply and replenish the earth” — in other words, to have sex. Alas, as described in the Bible, Adam and Eve were “innocent” — they did not know what sex was, they didn’t even understand that they were naked. They were prepubescent children in adult bodies.

There was a solution, of course: In the Garden grew the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. One bite of the fruit of this tree would give them the necessary boost into maturity.

Unfortunately, God’s second commandment was: Never eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God made it very clear there would be dire consequences if Adam or Eve ate of that fruit: They would be cast out of the Garden, out of the presence of God, and in the world outside they would find hardship, suffering, confusion and death.

The paradox, then, is this: No matter which commandment they followed, they would be breaking the other. In Mormon cosmology, paradox is a real part of life.

Church authorities would never say it in those terms, but if you pay attention in the temple, the story of Adam and Eve teaches us that obedience to God can only be fulfilled by disobedience.

No one knows how long Adam and Eve wandered innocently about the Garden of Eden, from tree to bush to grassy riverside. I imagine it was long enough for them to get bored. At some point, it became apparent they had no intention whatsoever of touching that fruit. So God turned to Plan B: He sent Lucifer to the Garden. That’s right: The Devil’s presence in the Garden of Eden was God’s doing. And that’s a good thing. If Lucifer hadn’t shown up, Adam and Eve would still be wandering around the Garden today, petting lions, picking flowers and living on nuts and berries.

It tells you something about how Joseph Smith saw women that in his version Eve knew what she was doing when she bit into the apple — she was smart enough to comprehend the hidden message behind the paradox. And her motives were also typically Mormon: family. She understood that the family she was sent here to create — the human race — was impossible without disobeying God and facing death outside the Garden, outside God’s presence. In Mormonism, Eve’s act of disobedience is a declaration of independence from God.

The Mormon Garden of Eden is a parable of living : You grow up innocent and protected, your parents take care of everything and teach you a simplified version of life: Do what Mom and Dad tell you, never lie, clean up your room and eat your vegetables, be obedient and everything will be okay. That’s legitimate from Mom and Dad’s perspective. They see you as a child and want to protect you from the dangers of the adult world. To their minds, the worst thing you can do is disobey — that puts you at risk. Stay safe. Stay at home. Follow the rules. As long as you remain in the Garden, Mom and Dad can protect you.

Then comes puberty. You become aware of sex and with sex comes the need for independence. You start doing things Mom and Dad don’t want you to do, and eventually you eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and you get kicked out of the Garden.

Life out here in the real world isn’t as fun as you thought it would be.

Back in the security of home, you used to rail against the hypocrisy of the adult world; now you need the money to pay the rent, so you suck up to a boss you hate. You used to have a vision of peace and harmony; now you realize that other people aren’t going to treat you as fairly as Mom and Dad did, and that a lot of the rules they taught you at home don’t apply here. You have to decide what kind of person you want to be. Much of the time you don’t live up to your own standards.

But that’s the whole point. Life at home, life in the Garden, life with God in the pre-existence was one-dimensional. Only on the outside can you grow into who you really are.

Even today my thoughts keep returning to this ur-parable of life — the story of the Garden of Eden. And always I arrive at the same conclusion:

If there is a God, we are not supposed to know that.

The moment he communicates with us — via prophets, belief systems or wise books — he negates the principle that we have to find our path independently. To ensure our independence, God cannot tell us the truth about himself. His greatest gift to us is closing the door, turning his back and walking away. Any religion, including Christianity, any holy book, including the Bible, any prophet, including Joseph Smith, even Jesus, may well be valuable, but were not sent from God. The story of the Gar- den of Eden stands at the beginning of the Bible like a divine disclaimer, telling us that the wisdom and truths to follow were not written by God — which, ironically, includes the story of the Garden of Eden itself.

Saying Goodbye to God

This, then, was my personal paradox: The church had taught me my purpose here on earth, but to fulfill that purpose, I had to leave the church. If I wanted to obey God, I had to disobey him. If I believed in God, I had to stop believing in him.

When, at some point not long after I turned thirty, I was living alone in a small student apartment behind the University in Munich. I had finally received my Master’s in Medieval German Literature, but besides that I had only debts and no profession. For a few years now I had not attended church, instead I thought endlessly about the Garden of Eden, about the God I had loved, and about how I was going to manage life outside the church.

Again and again I kept putting off taking the last step. But I knew I owed it to myself and to God. So one night I knelt down in my little room above a bar and prayed.

I told God I no longer knew whether he existed or not. I hoped he did exist, but I was no longer certain. I told him that — in case he did — I owed him an explanation. That’s why I was kneeling here. The God who had accompanied me all my life, the God with whom I had closed a covenant, had the right to know why I was turning from him.

I said that I had never grown up, that I was still living like a child, that the church and God himself were a kind of substitute parents whom I gave too much responsibility for my life. I said I wasn’t behaving the way I expected of myself. I said I wanted to live like a grown man in my own eyes. I wanted to face life with all its risks and dangers, without hiding behind God. I wanted to make mistakes and to admit to them and if I failed, then it would be my failure.

I said I was leaving him now. I would no longer be attending church, I would no longer be keeping his commandments, and I would no longer pray to him.

I did not ask for forgiveness. I did not ask for understanding or for permission, nor did I ask for his help in my further life, though I was sorely tempted. I simply said goodbye. I closed my prayer as all Mormons close their prayers, in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and with “Amen.”

Then I stood up and went about the business of becoming myself.

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Eric T. Hansen is an American writer of nearly a dozen fiction and non-fiction books in German. He left the Mormon church 25 years ago and today and lives in Berlin. “Losing My Religion,” published by Hula Ink, is his first book in his mother tongue. (www.hulaink.com)