Mormons Make Great FBI Recruits

TLDR: 1. Strong foreign language skills from overseas missions. 2. It's easier getting them security clearances since they don't use drugs or alcohol.

Lots of people think this means "don't smoke" or something like that.

From the members I have conversed with, they are forbidden from using caffeine.

Coffee and black/green tea are typically considered to be prohibited (I know active members who drink green tea and still participate fully), but caffeine in general isn't banned. One of the apostles even acknowledged drinking a whole lot of diet coke to help while learning to use a computer[0]:

> It took a great deal of time, repetition, patience; no small amount of hope and faith; lots of reassurance from my wife; and many liters of a diet soda that shall remain nameless.

[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference...

I'm not a member, just going off what they told me. From what I understand the actual edicts (maybe it's called something) else aren't really supposed to be published or talked about. So I've only talked to ex-mormons about this.

I'm a former Mormon (I guess you could call me an "ex-mormon"). Just some advice: be careful about getting (or propagating rather) information from ex-mormons regarding Mormonism (or rather, verify it first). There's an incredible mix of ignorance and/or antipathy that leads to extremely unreliable information. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but it's a massively deep philosophy/corpus that not many (even active members) put in the effort to actually know it, and for some reason some people become LLMs when asked questions about it, answering very confidently with whatever sounds the most correct to them without regard to actual truth value.

That "massively deep philosophy/corpus" doesn't help things, though. With nearly 200 years of a leadership that teaches that whatever is spoken by God's servants (the highest church leadership) is to be equated as similar to the word of God (with a normal human distribution of those leaders who approach this view with a cautious humility through those who speak their musings with confidence) there's a HUGE of collection of some pretty odd beliefs. Since the church leadership almost never repudiates these past statements, preferring to have them quietly fade from the collective memory and consciousness of the membership over time, chances are that there's still some few members who are aware of these weird beliefs and can back them up with some sort of statement by a modern LDS prophet or apostle. This makes any "actual truth value" of an odd teaching or belief really difficult to gauge, and chances are there's some actual statement behind many of that unreliable information.

That's speaking of teachings and doctrine, of course. When it comes to history that's less like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall and it's much easier to find sources for more accurate history, and I agree that it's a bit sad how little accuracy in history seems to be respected by some believing and formerly-believing members.