Why a Rational Thinker Leaves the Mormon Church

I read the following letter/essay the other day:

http://pearceonearth.com/why_i_left_the_mormon_church.pdf

As I was reading this letter, I almost felt like I was reading my own thoughts.   The first issue he tackled was the unreliability of "spiritual" experiences as indicators of objective truth.  "Exactly!" exclaimed my mind.

And then on down the list of many of the bigger issues that expose Mormonism as a fraud.  He made a few minor exaggerations here and there, but by and large I thought his treatment was fair.  The letter wasn't long enough to give in-depth treatment of the issues, but he summed it up pretty well.  I've been working on my own list of "issues" I have with the church.  Maybe later I'll post them all.

In a past life, I might have looked at the similarity of thought patterns and conclusions between myself and this author and thought "Wow, there must be some guiding force [God] to our thoughts.  This is inspiration!"  I would often think things like this when reading the Ensign and seeing the apostles say certain things that I had previously thought up independently.  I saw this as evidence of the Holy Ghost speaking the same thing to our independent minds.  Now I think that people who think about the same topics long enough will come up with similar "inspiration" related to those topics.  So now, when I read this letter, I just think "This must be how rational minds think their way out of the church."  It makes sense that the rational path out of the Mormon church (or any religion) would be similar for most people.  Conversely, it makes sense for the irrational path into the Mormon church (or any religion) to be similar for most people.  This is the brilliance behind testimony meetings.  Have people get up there and share their stories (which will often be highly similar to the stories of many others in the congregations), and you get a crowd of people thinking that they're interconnected by some higher being.  Not at all.  They're simply thinking in similar ways about similar topics.