I heard these ideas in a podcast and they struck a chord.
It was not clear how much of his suffering was due to genuine stuff that people go through that you have no control over and how much was imposed by his own guilt.
There is a vicious cycle where you feel guilt & shame because of the doctrine of the church and then you feel you can't get over the guilt except with the doctrine of the church. So now the church becomes your saviour when the church actually created the problem in the first place.
Religion offers you salvation to a problem that didn't exist until it created it.
An illustration of this is simply illustrated with this Book of Mormon teaching that creates both the problem and the solution in a single verse:
For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.
Mosiah 3:19
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There's a religious perspectives that says: this life is miserable, everything is out there to tear you down it does nothing for us. I remember having my eyes so set on heaven, that things around me did seem really bad here. I think that was creating itself. I had this vision that perfection looks a certain way, so anything less than it would look inadequate. When I let that go, life looked a lot nicer.
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