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.

This is the Mormon immune response to exposure to information that causes cognitive dissonance: slander the people who left the church because the fact that they left the church means they are ignorant.

lol, why would I slander myself? If avoiding cognitive dissonance is my goal, it would be far easier to just accept uncritically any dumb thing against the church than to have to defend the truth.

This is the type of black and white response that I find so common with ex-mormons. If somebody pushes back on disinformation (even easily disproved like the above thing about keeping caffeine teachings secret), the superstitious thinking kicks in and excuses fly (like "they must be a secret apologist" which I heard recently). It's every bit as ridiculous as the believers are when they dismiss inconvenient facts like Zelph the White Lamanite[1][2] because it goes against their preferred narrative. It's superstitious thinking.

Edit: Hah! I couldn't have asked for a better real-time example to demonstrate my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35774479

[1]: http://www.mormonthink.com/zelph.htm

[2]: https://mormonr.org/qnas/3yUz5/zelph_the_lamanite

Citing two prominent Mormon apologist foundations certainly doesn’t help your point that you’re not acting as closeted Mormon apologist. And when you use a misunderstanding of a non-Mormon about secrecy and caffeine as an example of ex-Mormon lies, you are certainly showing your bias towards those who leave the church.

The exmormon community is extremely thorough and factual when it comes to talking about the church, because it is to their benefit. More people have left the church after unsuccessfully trying to refute The CES Letter than have ever left due to smear campaigns and slander. The truth is to the rational thinker’s benefit, which is why the church spends so much time and money hiding it and whitewashing it.

> Citing two prominent Mormon apologist foundations

Um, I think you're confusing MormonThink and MormonR for "FAIR" or the "BoM Foundation". They're two "middle-way" sources that try to balance the knife's edge of giving just enough of the negative-yet-factual information that faith is still possible, as opposed to something like the CES Letter which is a compendium of pretty much every negative-yet-factual piece of information that, in total, make faith in the organization pretty much impossible for the average member who reads it. But they're definitely not apologetic sites, they're just more of a "shallow water" approach than a "throw you in the deep end of the pool" approach.