The way this reads to me is that you weren't ever LDS since baptism takes place at age 8. Your dad probably had some issues about leaving it, your mom not so much.
I could make the case, from my own experience, that the LDS Church is anything from a "cult" possessed by demonic powers all the way to the only hope for mankind. I could consider the present leaders practically members of my own family, and make the case about their sterling integrity, or I could argue that they have thrown their birthright/callings to the pigs trying to re-make Mormonism into something comprehensible to the folks of our time. . . .
I do observe that most people's thinking follows their life decisions on personal conduct, rather than the other way around.
I sorta understand the Dr. Joneses of the world, and the good-time charlies, but for me the fact remains, I am not a good enough person myself to be a "leader" of a church or to direct others' beliefs. I can see the faults, as I suppose them to be, in a Henry B. Eyring or a Thomas Monson, but I have not lived as honorably as they have.
Nobody, by "taking thought" can make God or a Church into what they want to think it is. In the case of "God" we simply have no access to any control of whatever that is, and in the case of a "Church" it is the aggregate of a community, often a very large community of millions of people, all of them acting independently at some level beyond our "control", so anything we have to say about our experience is bound to be of "passing validity".
We get to choose for ourselves, to judge for ourselves as we please ourselves to do, but we do not have fundamental power to define others. We do define ourselves.
