[Arrakeen]

InquiringMind wrote:

For starters, punishment works as a deterrent – you avoid doing bad things because you want to avoid being punished for your bad behavior. But beyond that, the entire concepts of “good” and “evil” become meaningless if you try to remove the consequences of people’s actions. If your evil actions will have no negative consequences for you, what does “evil” even mean? Removing the consequences of people’s actions removes the basic idea of good and evil.

If God used punishment as a deterrent, you would think he would make it much more obvious what the punishment is, and what things warrant it. Deterrence isn’t based on the punishment itself, but a person’s belief and fear. Unless everyone knows they will be punished for certain things, then the existence of an actual punishment does nothing to deter bad behavior. Especially if people won’t really know where they stand until after they’re dead.

All actions have consequences, but not necessarily the way we want. Evil actions may be evil not because of the consequences for the person doing them, but because of the consequences for the victims of those actions. I do not believe the universe has any obligation to be fair. There are people who get rewarded in this life for things that harm other people, and people who suffer because of helping others. I suppose many believe the next life will sort all that out and somehow redistribute consequences to be fair, but I personally don’t count on that happening. I’m not sure there is really any way to separate out everyone’s actions and their associated consequences on an individual basis since we are all interconnected.

And if good and evil are defined by rewards and punishments, then isn’t morality just self-serving? Doing the right thing would be to get a reward and avoid punishment instead of doing the right thing to help others. It would basically be a morality of whatever is good for me is right, and whatever is bad for me is wrong.

[Arrakeen]

InquiringMind wrote:

I still have that pesky obstacle of not believing the beliefs. If you want to fully participate in the Church, you have to believe the gold plates were real, you have to believe that the Nephites really existed, you have to believe temples, tithing, etc etc. Trying to understand the point of view of guys like Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman has been sort of mixed for me. It seems that some people are much more predisposed to spiritual experiences than others – some people seem to regularly have prayers answered and they seem to have a host of mystical experiences, while other people try and try for years and get nothing. I’m one of the people who prayed for years and years and got nothing.

I tried going back to church a few months ago despite being more of an atheist. I missed the community, and I recognized my lifestyle and values are still much the same as when I was a believer. But it was hard sitting through talks and lessons when it was clear I was expected to believe things I simply did not believe. I was never able to shake the feeling of being an outsider looking in. And it seemed like a lot of the community aspect had given way to more lessons hammering home the same doctrinal points over and over again. I really couldn’t find any way to meaningfully participate. As much as I would like to be a part of it all again, I don’t think I will ever be fully accepted again without those shared beliefs.

[Arrakeen]

InquiringMind wrote:

Arrakeen wrote:

I believe there is a very foundational aspect of morality baked into our genes. We are all human, therefore we want fairness, we want to love and be loved, we feel compassion at the suffering of others, we justify our anger when we feel attacked, we want to be good people but at the same time often fall victim to our selfish impulses. The most basic elements of morality are things that simply come with being human.

I used to like evolutionary psychology and it used to be an important part of my worldview, but this is a place where I think evolutionary psychology has been wrong. What evolutionary psychologists do is that they look at American and Western culture and they assume that American cultural norms are human universals, and they try to fit a model of genetic self-interest on top of American cultural norms. The result is something that looks like a genetic version of free-market competitive capitalism that probably has nothing to do with human nature. Then they announce that they can reject American culture and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition because it’s all encoded in our DNA so we don’t need religion to be moral. Further, they argue that religion is not just wrong but actively harmful, and if we have any moral sensibility we will become atheists and do everything we can to destroy religion.

It’s actually not obvious that humans should treat each other with fairness. Indeed, in Ancient Rome you’d be more likely to outrightly slaughter you enemies than to make an effort to treat them fairly. The entire concept of “human rights” was certainly not obvious enough to ancient people to be encoded in their laws (at least not by our standards), and is still not obvious to many countries around the world who still engage in egregious human rights violations. It’s actually not encoded in our DNA that you can’t go slaughter somebody just because you don’t like them or you don’t like what they’re doing, because people throughout history have done exactly that. Far from being encoded in our DNA, Western and American cultural norms – including fundamental human rights – are actually very unusual in historical context. It’s actually quite strange that we would try to treat each other with basic dignity rather than treating each other horribly, which is the historical norm.

That’s the thing about the Judeo-Christian moral tradition – if we were fish, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition would be the water that we’re swimming in, and we wouldn’t even notice it. It’s frankly preposterous to say that these norms are human universals. You can confirm this by a quick look around the world. Then the “New Atheists’ go and say that we don’t need religion to be moral, even as they themselves are living out – and benefitting from – the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

One thing that perplexes me very much is that even within the Judeo-Christian tradition, people disagree sharply about morality, as is obvious in our political discourse. It’s not clear to me why this should be so, and it’s not clear to me what it means. If there is no objective morality, then it really doesn’t matter whether you choose Left, Right, or Center. Or Far Left or Far Right or Anarchist for that matter. If there is objective morality, then one group is right and everyone else is wrong. If all moralities are equally valid, then why am I wasting my time trying to be a productive and responsible citizen when it would be just as morally valid for me to be a slacker, a mooch, and an outlaw?

I believe some biologically encoded morality exists, but it is not necessarily good- it is just what is common to all human societies and cultures. Kindness is present in all human cultures – but so is murder. Our natural inclinations are what evolution has provided us with, for good or bad.

Much of what you have alluded to is what I consider to be the social level of morality, and some of it does depend on culture. As someone who grew up in a multicultural family, I have seen that there are some differences, but a lot more similarities. And the modern world is becoming increasingly interconnected. In fact much of our society’s morality isn’t really the “Judeo-Christian” tradition as much as it is the 21st century. The moral values of someone living in America or China today are far more similar to each other than either are to the values of someone living in the Middle Ages.

[Arrakeen]

Old-Timer wrote:

Missionaries now have mental health services available as a standard part of their missions, with MissionPresidents given basic training and guidance to use the services, but they are accessible only to the extent the missionaries are willing and able to ask or their symptoms are visible to others.

This might depend on the mission, but the mental health services available on my mission consisted of one retired counselor for several hundred missionaries who could do a brief phone call once a week and a local member who was a doctor who wrote prescriptions for all the missionaries’ medical needs. I was mostly just handed medication with the expectation that it would fix everything, and the lack of privacy on a mission really made it hard for any sort of real therapy session to take place. Considering how many missionaries I served with also struggled with mental health, it was very inadequate. This was 2015-2017 so there may have been some changes since then, but I think it is safe to say there is a lot of room for improvement.

[Arrakeen]

catlady wrote:

Every email and weekly phone call was totally positive and he was always happy. He was very well prepared for his mission and it was completely his decision to go. But apparently he was stuffing emotionally and didn’t know that it was o.k. to say something about it.

This is a big takeaway from my own experience: It needs to be ok to say something about it.

I was severely depressed on my mission and though I never actually attempted suicide, I definitely had those thoughts.

Yet my family back home didn’t know much. In my mission we had specifically been told not to include anything negative in our emails home. My parents got a sense that something was wrong as my emails became extremely short, but they never knew just how bad it was.

After I got home, the most difficult thing to deal with was feeling like I was the only one who had a terrible experience. Though there has been some progress in this area, it is still rather taboo to speak negatively of one’s mission. And when everything you hear from others is positive, it’s easy to feel like there’s something wrong with you for having a hard time. But in reality there are many others out there who struggled but just don’t talk about it.

I guess what I’m saying is I think it is important that he knows he is not alone and has a safe place where he can share his feelings and emotions about it even if they are not uplifting or positive.

[Arrakeen]

Morality is complicated and is a combination of several different elements, only some of which we can choose. I believe there is a very foundational aspect of morality baked into our genes. We are all human, therefore we want fairness, we want to love and be loved, we feel compassion at the suffering of others, we justify our anger when we feel attacked, we want to be good people but at the same time often fall victim to our selfish impulses. The most basic elements of morality are things that simply come with being human.

On top of the inherent human morality, there is the level of social morality. The values you grew up with that are influenced by culture, religion, family, and education. There are some interesting moral dilemmas that show the difference between cultures. For example, if a man’s mother and wife are both drowning and he can only choose to save one of them, which one should he save? The answer is often different when the question is posed to someone from a Western European culture compared to someone from an East Asian society. Like the inherent sense of morality we get from genetics, social morality isn’t really something we choose.

Then there is the top level of individual morality. This is where we pick our own morality and decide who we want to be. I think this is actually a relatively small part of our overall sense of morality, but it has a large impact because it is the part that differentiates us from everyone else. All people have pretty much the same biologically determined elements of morality as ourselves, and many of the ones we regularly interact with will also have a similar sense of social morality by virtue of living in the same place and being part of the same community. The individual component of morality is the only one we choose, and is what makes us a “good person” or “bad person”.

If there is a God, he must know that we as humans are incapable of viewing any moral standard objectively, and have much of our morality predetermined. But there is the small part of individual morality that we can determine for ourselves – and this is the precious gift of agency.

Picking your own morality – I would say that is the entire point of our mortal existence. I cannot believe God would give us a gift of agency expecting for us to give it back as a test of faith, submitting our will completely to his. Is life really a test in the sense of seeing if we will adhere to some list of rules, or is it a test in the sense of seeing what kind of person we really want to become? I do not think there is necessarily an absolute right or wrong – only choices and consequences. We often think of judgement day as God determining that in the next life good people get to be happy and bad people get to be sad. But what if the reward or punishment is simply the natural consequence of your choices? If you tried to be a kind person in this life, your reward in the next life is that you are a kind person. If instead you spent your life as a selfish person, your punishment is that in the next life you are a selfish person. But if that is what you wanted to become, you may still view it as a reward. Life is not about God giving out prizes only to the people who got the question right, but an opportunity for all of us to grow and determine what we really want.

To me, moral agency is not about choosing whether or not to obey. It is the freedom to choose our own destiny, to decide who we want to become, and live with the consequences that follow. In order to know what moral direction to take, we have to know what moral destination we desire. And that is something each of us has to decide for ourselves.

[Arrakeen]

AmyJ wrote:

For the most part, the “crisis of faith” is settled – pretty much everything that was going to fall apart has fallen apart testimony-wise. A lot of the anger and pain has settled down.

I feel like I am at this point spiritually – the collapse of my testimony is pretty much done, and things have already fallen apart. I’m now just looking at the pile of rubble and trying to figure out what to do with it. In a sense this is an ending, but not a very satisfying one until I figure out what comes after.

[Arrakeen]

SilentDawning wrote:

I think you should write in your journal about your feelings. Even if it’s just stream of consciousness as you revisit the topics that have caused you to doubt or want a different relationship with the church.

I have mixed feelings about journaling. I do think it could help to get everything out of my head and onto paper, but every time I attempt it I find my words to be inadequate. My journals always end up sounding embarrassing, and I end up throwing them away. But I do think one reason I am still stuck on my mission is because I have never felt able to completely express the details of what happened and how it affected me, leaving me feeling completely alone with my experience. Writing it down could at least help me feel like my story has been told to someone, even if that someone is myself.

[Arrakeen]

Roy wrote:

The past will always be there. I think a big question is whether or not you are able to function and succeed in the life goals that you might set for yourself. If something is “holding you back” and keeping you from working towards your goals, then something needs to be done. As long as you are able to live the life that you want to live then maybe it is expecting too much of yourself to be completely ambivalent towards church matters.

I think a big part of why I feel held back is not having any sort of replacement for the things I have lost. I lost my community and social circle during my faith crisis, and years later I have yet to make new friends or find any new group where I feel like I belong. I lost my sense of purpose, and I still feel adrift in life without a clear direction for where I want to go. I still miss having that sense of community and purpose, and the church was the last place that I found it. But at the same time I am realizing what used to work for me no longer does, and there is no way to return to the way it was before. I just have a hard time accepting that and starting down a new path, because I now have no idea where I’m going.

[Arrakeen]

Roy wrote:

Arrakeen wrote:

Know ye not that the Lord hath chosen him to be a ruler over you,

That never really happened did it? Laman and Lemuel tied him up on the ship and then ventured out on their own once they reached the promised land. Nephi never did rule over them because they refused to accept it.

Nephi does some of his own apologetics on that one in 2 Nephi 5:

Quote:

And behold, the words of the Lord had been fulfilled unto my brethren, which he spake concerning them, that I should be their ruler and their teacher. Wherefore, I had been their ruler and their teacher, according to the commandments of the Lord, until the time they sought to take away my life.

So he was their ruler for a very brief time, but they didn’t like it and tried to kill him so he ran away, but technically he was their ruler for a least a little, so the prophecy was technically fulfilled.

[Arrakeen]

Everyone always forgets the true hero of the beginning of the Book of Mormon – Sam. We always talk about how Laman and Lemuel were beating up Nephi with a rod, but they were beating up Sam too:

Quote:

Wherefore Laman and Lemuel did speak many hard words unto us, their younger brothers, and they did smite us even with a rod.

But what does the angel say when he shows up?

Quote:

Why do ye smite your younger brother with a rod? Know ye not that the Lord hath chosen him to be a ruler over you, and this because of your iniquities?

I used to imagine that after the angel left, Laman and Lemuel looked at each other and said, “Hey, he never said to stop beating up Sam….” and then continued on. Poor guy.

Sam, as the oldest righteous brother, also should have had the right of first inheritance. But instead he just gets to have his posterity bundled in with Nephi’s.

On my mission I created a whole series of half-joking stories about the hypothetical Book of Sam (lost as part of the 116 pages). I imagined that when Nephi broke his bow, Sam actually still had a working one but Nephi wanted to make his own to show off. And while Nephi was shocking Laman and Lemuel to get them to help build the boat, Sam was the one patiently laboring away in the background who actually built the thing while they were busy fighting. Sam was always the humble guy doing what needed to be done but not making it all about himself, while Nephi was preoccupied with being a hero.

[Arrakeen]

Roy wrote:

I sometimes think that the church is focused on answering 19th century questions (which church is true?) and not as great at 21st century questions (why church?).

Exactly this. And it’s especially clear when you look at how the missionary lessons are organized. The church still views its answer to “which church is true?” to be its primary selling point.

[Arrakeen]

PazamaManX wrote:

My questions for everyone here are, what are your thoughts and/or beliefs in regards to the priesthood? Do you believe it has actual, tangible power? Does someone being a priesthood holder make them a better person or at least require that they live at a higher standard? And does the priesthood have any effect on your other beliefs about the church or gospel?

The priesthood used to be a fairly important part of my overall belief, and I considered it one of the pillars of my testimony. I believed it had real power to heal and move mountains and all that, if only I was righteous enough. At times it was a motivation to improve myself, but most of the time it was an unnecessary guilt trip. And there are a lot of things I never would have done if it wasn’t for the “priesthood duty” rhetoric, like serve a mission (which ultimately precipitated the collapse of my testimony).

[Arrakeen]

InquiringMind wrote:

This was really at the heart of my faith crisis. Either God is cruel, or God doesn’t exist. I found it easier to believe that God doesn’t exist than to believe that God is cruel.

Like several others here, this was also a major component of my faith crisis. Two years of sacrificing all my time striving to be obedient and doing what I thought God had asked of me left me completely broken. I then returned to BYU and every Sunday heard other people’s mission stories about how they overcame their trials with faith and how God always came through for them. So if God helped them, why not me? The conclusion I came to was either God didn’t exist, or God must hate me. For a little while, while I still believed in God, I viewed him as my enemy. But over time my anger cooled and I just ended up not believing in God at all, which finally helped me make sense of my experience as a missionary.

Though I currently don’t believe in the existence of God, I still think about it from time to time and always run into the Problem of Evil. I sometimes wonder if maybe God gave up jurisdiction of the Earth to his children, effectively making us humans collectively the “God” of our world. That our probation on Earth is less of a test to see how obedient we are, and more of a probationary period of employment, where we are already doing the “real thing”. Where God gives us the power to change our world however we see fit, and it is up to us to decide whether it becomes heaven or hell. And then leaves us to our own devices until the final judgement where he determines how well we did, and whether we get to keep our jobs (though I guess this would make God more of a hiring manager than a loving parent). In that case perhaps the “God” who is to blame for the persistence of evil is actually humanity itself, and the state of the world is a reflection of how well we are doing at caring for, protecting, and loving one another. And all the horrible things we wish God would do something about are actually things we are supposed to step up and try to take care of as part of our duties.

[Arrakeen]

InquiringMind wrote:

What would you hope to accomplish by having Church leaders speak out on geopolitical issues? If President Nelson condemned Putin’s invasion, would that do anything to help the Ukrainians? If President Nelson condemned communism in Venezuela, would that end communism there? That would just be a lot of virtue signaling, and it would accomplish nothing of any value.

I think my frustration with the church’s silence on certain issues is just another manifestation of my own disillusionment with the idea of prophets. Growing up, I was taught that the prophet was God’s chosen mouthpiece on the earth to boldly declare the truth, condemn evil, and lead people towards the path of righteousness. To be the watchman on the tower and warn of danger. I heard about how the prophet was just like having Moses on the earth today. Prophets could perform miracles, stopping armies or parting the seas. I think if they really could do those things, it would seem a gross dereliction of duty to not do or say anything about the atrocities being committed in the world today.

But alas, I no longer believe that way. And I am left profoundly disappointed by how powerless prophets seem to me now. It now feels to me like they are just motivational speakers without the charisma. Every time they fail to speak out on an important issue, I am reminded of how little they can really do. But part of me still wishes they would try. Not doing anything is like admitting defeat and giving up hope. I think if they were to speak out, perhaps they would inspire others. Perhaps they could spread the hope that we can actually change the world for the better.

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