Religion, including the LDS church, supplements the life many individuals (real people leading a real life like myself!) to live purposefully. To be a part of a community of real people that share your values is a powerful thing. If for you the exmo community is that place then I'm happy that you've been able to realign and find what truly matters to you, and associate with others that support you in living your best life. And I mean that!
From what I've seen, for some leaving the church can be a catalyst for positive change in mental state, a total change in paradigm that allows for rapid personal growth. For others, joining the church is that exact same catalyst. For myself personally, I enjoy setting aside time for that experience every week as I take the sacrament at my church. In Christianity the name for that process is repentance ("changing the way we see God, ourselves, and the world"), in self-help literature we may call it a paradigm shift. No matter what you call it, we should all be supportive of everyone as they take the time to align their vision of who they want to become with their vision of ourselves, the world around us, and our best self/God.
I often do a self-actualization exercise where I try and draw a "pie chart of my brain". It works as a gut check for myself that I am spending my time in my brain thinking of things I value and less time responding to emotional impulses, justifying my own behavior, or whatever else I wish I'd spend less time doing.
With all of that said, hopefully this paragraph can be taken in context: I really hope we can get away from the point of nitpicking a church news article written by one person, went through likely a small peer review process, using that to disparage an entire religion (and to be clear my problem isn't at this point, if you want to subscribe to that content then the exmo subreddit is a good place for it), then posting that to a totally different community of people you have personally interacted with on Facebook and expecting it to make that collective of Facebook friend's feeds lives better? It's the kind of emotional pandering that bothers me since it is so easy to let it fill up the personal pie chart with detrimental, emotion-reactive thoughts and still feel good at the end of the day with some likes or upvotes or whatever arbitrary social media accountability metric we decide collectively matters to measure quantitatively how accepted something is.
I think everyone, religious, non religious, in the LDS church, exmo, whatever false dichotomy we want to divide the world by... if we could all spend more of our limited time on this earth - a bigger section of the pie chart of our total brain usage - to build up ourselves and our communities; maybe we could spend less of that precious resource seeking external validation from others to satisfy our own insecurities (we all do social mirroring!) and more time reflecting and becoming our best self and creating a world that is better tomorrow than it was today for yourself as well as each individual that you interact with.
