[InquiringMind]

Roy wrote:

I also do not believe that NDEs offer “proof.”

I remember the experience of Colton Burpo that claimed to see Jesus riding a rainbow colored horse. I do not think that anyone has suggested that horses in heaven are rainbow colored.

InquiringMind wrote:

And this idea that God never punishes anyone. Really? Never? Not even violent criminals? Not even serial killers and mass murderers? God does not punish anyone, ever, for anything? I just can’t believe that. I completely reject that idea.

I don’t have answers but I do have questions. For example, what would the purpose of this punishment be? If G-d is punishing us without a purpose then that changes my ideas of who G-d is.

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.

And if someone is caught in a cycle of bad behavior, probably the worst thing you can do is try to shield the person from the consequences of their actions. If you remove the consequences of bad behavior, that’s a guarantee that the person will keep doing the bad behavior.

And that’s point of the point of what I am saying – without fear of punishment, what will stop anyone from “gaming the system” by intentionally behaving badly with no fear of punishment?

And for Colton’s description of the horse as “every color of the rainbow.” To me that is attempting to describe something that is far more visually vibrant than an ordinary rainbow, and probably more vibrant than anything we would usually see on Earth.

[InquiringMind]

DarkJedi wrote:

In the New Testament accounts, Jesus repeatedly said to love one another and in there are several accounts of Jesus demonstrating love/kindness himself. I don’t “know” much in relation to the gospel, but if I did know something it would be that – God wants us to love one another, which could just as well be phrased as “be kind” to one another. I think the gospel itself is very simple, and much less complicated than the church (and many other churches) would have us believe. It may well boil down to “believe” and “be kind.”

One way of thinking about this is that NDEs are mostly meant for the person who experienced them and are not easily generalized for everyone else. Each NDE may tell that person what they need to do in their life, but may not be helpful for others. It may be true that some need to be kinder, but perhaps others may need to grow a spine and start standing up for themselves, and they may have a different NDE. Some NDEs (about 5-10%) are actually distressing rather than pleasant, including Bill Wiese’s 23 Minutes in Hell. These NDEs are much less likely to gain widespread publicity and are probably less likely to even be reported.

Some people do have NDEs where the are shown the flames of hell and are told that they need to accept Jesus into their life. It is probably more the universalizing, non-judgemental, pleasant NDEs that get most of the publicity.

I have been hoping that NDEs may offer some kind of evidence-based way of figuring out what morality is. But maybe that isn’t going to work. It seems that NDEs tell us about the people who have them, but not about everyone else. I may have to go with my own moral sentiments and assume that’s how I need to live because I don’t have anything else to go on.

[InquiringMind]

I thought we had decided that StayLDS is not a place for political discussions.

[InquiringMind]

Roy wrote:

I think that there are some communities that are based more on facts. I assume that there are scientific communities, educator communities, journalism communities, and more.

Those communities are not religions and they are probably not as tightly knit as you and I have experienced in LDS wards growing up.

I feel like religion by definition doesn’t deal in provable “facts.” I am imagining a sliding scale where the greater deviation from demonstrable facts the greater the group’s sense of community and the lesser the deviation the lesser the sense of community. What’s the point of joining a sky is blue and grass is green club? Everyone already knows that.

I had a conversation with a professor of mine about this. Yeah, on some level it is actually the weird beliefs that bind people together. Groups based on obvious, universally accepted facts don’t have much to keep them together.

It’s looking like I’m going to have to go on a little longer journey to free myself from materialism as a worldview. And by materialism, I’m talking about the scientific assumption that the material universe is all there is, and that there is nothing “supernatural.” I’ve been doing some reading and it’s probably going to take some time.

[InquiringMind]

SilentDawning wrote:

Here is an interesting article that shows the church is willing to support same-sex rights, while still maintaining its stance that same sex relationships are a sin:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mormon-church-comes-support-same-222005071.html

If you believe that the language in the bill will protect religious freedom, I’ve got a couple acres of ice in Antarctica that I’d like to sell you.

It seems like the Church is trying to strike a bargain here – they’ll back off from the legal issue if they are granted the religious freedom to not perform weddings they don’t want to perform.

But I think it would be naive to believe that the language in the bill will protect the Church on grounds of religious freedom. Based on what the cake-bakers had to go through to protect their religion freedom, it seems like the Church may be in for a similar battle.

[InquiringMind]

Roy wrote:

I think that I can get behind goodness. More interesting than if something is true, is if something is good. There is much that is good in the LDS community. There is much that is good outside of the LDS community. I think that goodness is its own reward and we should draw close to goodness and help to add to/expand it if we can.

I’ve heard something like this a the “utility vs. validity” argument. So yeah, maybe it’s not as factually valid as I’d hoped but it’s still very useful because yes, there is a lot of good there.

Roy wrote:

On helpful strategy is to put on your anthropology hat and sit through lessons like you would a researcher invited to witness the sacred rituals of an ancient people. You are not there to determine if this religion is true. You are there to better understand the meanings between the rituals, the social connections of the community, and how it impacts family relationships, etc.

I actually did this when I attended church for several months after having left about two years earlier. And yes, it was fascinating to look at it as a sociologist would, to see testimony meeting as each person’s attempt to demonstrate their allegiance to the group’s ideology, to see the social function of all the rituals and beliefs, etc. That was good, but at some point I want the rituals to be true rather than just sociological curiosities.

I mean, it seems like the answer here is that in the best case scenario, no one really knows whether Jesus was literally resurrected, or whether the Nephites really existed, or whether Joseph Smith really had gold plates; and belief would be a matter of faith without any hope of getting any solid evidence to support it, ever. In the worst case scenario, it’s all fiction, though it may be a very useful fiction and much good may come out of it.

But is there no belief system that is morally good, that also has the benefit of being factually accurate? Do I have no other option than to give myself over to “useful lies” and “guiding fiction”?

Can I not find a religion whose moral teachings are good and whose founding beliefs describe actual historical events and actual future events?

Can I not have factual accuracy in addition to moral goodness and an supportive community? Must a community be founded on a set of stories that are apocryphal at best and fictional at worst? Why can’t I have both facts and goodness?

[InquiringMind]

Roy wrote:

InquiringMind wrote:

I personally don’t buy into the deist explanation. I don’t think on any level that a being that created the universe would be uninterested in us or not care about it. I think the withholding of the purpose of life from our view is intentional and is part of the whole Earth life experience.

I personally like to feel that the great progress that we have seen worldwide towards universal human rights in the last few centuries is God inspired. I do not feel that to be inconsistent with Deism in the least.

So if God wanted universal human rights, why not just create a world with human rights in the first place? Why create a would God create a world with horrible human rights violations and then applaud us for getting better and better over time, better than the way we were originally created? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Deism is, to my understanding belief in a watchmaker God who at one point was involved in creating us, but now no longer intervenes (at the least) or is (more likely) not paying any attention to us at all.

And if God created us to be such horrible creatures at the very beginning, how could He hold us responsible for acting horribly? We can’t be held responsible for the way we were created.

[InquiringMind]

DarkJedi wrote:

It’s one of those things God could have made a little (OK, a lot) clearer but since that’s not the case we seem to be left on our own again. (And I thank God for Deism! :thumbup: )

This is one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It seems to me that if there is a God who created us and sent us here, the purpose of or lives has been intentionally withheld from us. I don’t think it’s an accident or a mistake or an oversight that we don’t have any information about the purpose of life. That was intentional on the part of God not to tell us.

And I’ve been considering what that might mean. So far it seems that it doesn’t mean that I get to choose my own purpose in life. There still seem to be predetermined or fore-ordained things I need to accomplish in my life. I can’t choose a life plan arbitrarily.

I’m going to guess that there is some reason why God has left us to stumble and flounder around, confused and frustrated, trying to figure out what we’re supposed to be doing with our life. There is some reason why those massive pillars of eternity are hidden from our view. Maybe we need to demonstrate to ourselves and to God what we would do in a situation where there is no compelling reason to do any particular thing. Given a massive array of options for what we could do but no compelling reason to choose any particular option, what will we choose?

But this still conflicts with my own experience of having a specific life plan, but not being able to know what the life plan is. This has been a great source of frustration and anger and a major difficulty I have with faith. It does appear that God has a plan for my life, but He won’t tell me what it is. Instead, I have to stumble around in the dark until I just happen to stumble on the right answer, which God apparently knew all along but intentionally withheld from my view.

This is where my experience contradicts the Book of Mormon, where prophets get very clear and direct instructions on what to do next. Instead, I find that I need to wander and stumble around through a process of trial and error, often for months or years, before I stumble on something that works or happen across something that seems interesting to me, then I can follow that path. Why God can’t just tell me straight up what to do next, I have no idea.

Philosophers have been asking the question of the purpose of life for a very long time, and it seems clear to me that no one knows the answer. Why no one knows the answer is an interesting discussion in itself, but I personally don’t buy into the deist explanation. I don’t think on any level that a being that created the universe would be uninterested in us or not care about it. I think the withholding of the purpose of life from our view is intentional and is part of the whole Earth life experience.

[InquiringMind]

AmyJ wrote:

I think that a lot of decision-making occurred without understanding or acknowledging indirect consequences to others. Whatever you did at the top of the Mississippi river was your business – no one knew who was at the bottom of the Mississippi river (north going south basically) to experience the consequences of your choices at the top of the Mississippi river. To be honest, the lag-time between being able to identify causes of issues, having the tools to confirm that that were accurate, having the public interest/reporting access to communicate a concern and even start the investigative process, and then actually communicating with the northern neighbors was in the area of decades (if at all).

This is how I feel about the sexual revolution. We were told by the revolution that whatever consenting adults do behind closed doors is their business, and no one has any place to tell anyone how they should behave sexually beyond the base standard of consent. Particularly churches have no place, we’re told, to tell people how they should behave sexually. Now we are all downstream of the consequences of that failed revolution. The lag time was quite long, but it’s clear now.

This is where I think the Church gets things right. A lot of post-Mormons are very outspoken in criticizing the Church’s relatively strict sexual standards. But look around at the disaster than happens when people are allowed to be promiscuous. It’s a huge catastrophe. And yeah, a lot of the decision-making of the sexual revolution was made without acknowledgment of the downstream consequences to others, which was a huge mistake.

[InquiringMind]

Old-Timer wrote:

Every Mormon is a “cafeteria Mormon”. There are enough expressions of nearly everything from top leaders over the years to make it impossible for anyone to believe everything that has been taught.

I think there is a lot of truth in this, and it’s one of the reasons why I had a faith crisis in the first place. I wanted a belief system that was self-consistent, where all the “i”s were dotted and all the “t”s were crossed, that would be theoretically possible to live perfectly if one only was a perfect person. I wanted a belief system where it was at least theoretically possible to keep all the rules, and if I couldn’t keep all the rules then I only had myself to blame.

Sure, it’s true that you can’t follow every statement made by Church leaders because many of these statements contradict each other.

My approach here may be a little different than most. It seems that many people start by assuming that the Church is basically true, except for Doctrine A, Policy B, and Commandment C. So they’re able to stay in the Church while finding some kind of workaround for A, B, and C, but they still come from a place of believing that the Church, on the whole, is basically true, even though they don’t like A, B, and C.

My starting point is the assumption that the Church is all fiction, and I’m looking for anything that I actually can believe or that is worth believing. I look at the Book of Mormon and start from the assumption that the Nephites never existed and that Joseph Smith made the whole thing up. But can the Book of Mormon still have great spiritual value even if Joseph Smith did make it all up? Or is there something even more woo-woo going on, with a very real God revealing a totally fictional book with great spiritual value to Joseph so that we can all learn important lessons? Were the stories never meant to be taken literally, and instead were written as templates and teaching tools showing us how to live? Truth from fiction, as it were?

Or with tithing, I look at the Church’s $100 billion investment fund and I conclude that the Church doesn’t really need my money. So I could pay whatever I think my participation is worth and declare myself a full tithe payer. Is that fair? Can I feel good about that? I’m not really sure.

Or with the resurrection of Jesus. Is a metaphorical understanding of the resurrection adequate, or is literal belief necessary? Maybe the story of Jesus is a metaphor for how we can transform our lives and how we can be reborn again and again in a metaphorical way. But did the resurrection really happen? For real? Yeah yeah, I know – it depends on what you mean by “real.” Just because the resurrection never actually happened doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. I get it. But I want it to be real. I want to believe it literally, not metaphorically, the same way that I can believe the laws of physics literally.

[InquiringMind]

Old-Timer wrote:

My primary advice is to decide what the core issues are in your own individual faith (the things for which you hope but cannot see), focus on those things at church, and work to ignore, overlook, or simply accept the organizational or group things that don’t fit within your own faith. That isn’t easy all the time, but you have identified the overall structure and belief system as being in line enough with your own view that your challenge is not to overlook the majority of things within the Church. That is a blessing in the arena of faith crises or transitions or struggles.

This is something that could possibly work, and I’ve thought about it before. I could just do the things I like doing at doing at Church and not do the things I don’t want to do. I could believe the doctrines I like, and disbelieve the doctrines I don’t like.

My question is, what is the difference between this and a “cafeteria Mormon?” Sure, I guess I could pick and choose what I want to do in the Church. 2 hour church? Yes please. Service projects? Definitely. Food storage? Probably not. Tithing? OK, I’ll give 2%. Word of Wisdom? Absolutely. Temple attendance? You had me all the way up to the Masonic stuff. Christmas party? Wouldn’t miss it. Tithing declaration? I’ll skip that.

As appealing as that may sound, I don’t know if that’s going to work. Do people actually make that work? Mormonism seems like more of an “all in” religion.

[InquiringMind]

Roy wrote:

I recall the amazing feeling of being a full believer. I assumed that our belief was homogenous and monolithic (for example, I would say stuff like “we believe”). I was part of an eternal team and felt instant kinship with those in my “tribe.”

I am not sure that I could experience this particular sense of meaning, purpose, kinship, and belonging again.

I’ve experienced this myself. Being a TBM was awesome in many ways, and I have never been able to fully replace what I had as a TBM. As a TBM I had a place in a community, and I felt I was doing an important service in the world, and I had a system of meaning and purpose, and also social support. I’ve never been able to replace that since leaving.

Since leaving the Church, I’ve spent much of my time working on a PhD in physics. In grad school I found a reasonable place to belong academically, but I had a harder time socially, because social life in grad school revolves around “party culture” with lots of alcohol and hooking up, and I’m not into that. I’ve spent quite a bit of time since my faith crisis going back and forth between wanting my TBM community back, but not being able to believe the beliefs enough to fit in at church. I found an ideological home as a scientific atheist, or at least a scientific agnostic. But the lifestyle was a different matter, as the scientific community (and university grad school community) diverged quite a bit from my more conservative lifestyle preferences, so I didn’t really belong very well.

Lately I have been going through some changes in my beliefs, and I’m rejecting reductive materialism for the possibility that maybe there is more to the universe than the scientific materialist worldview would allow. I’m thinking now that maybe there is an afterlife, and maybe God does exist. Perhaps we are indeed “souls on a journey,” and maybe we lived before we were born, and perhaps life continues after death. Perhaps this life is just one life of many lives that we live, and maybe we are reincarnated on this world or on other worlds. As I said in another thread, it does seem to me that my life is following some sort of plan, and I find it hard to account for this using scientific materialism alone.

The mythos that seems to most closely match my own life is the “Hero’s Journey” as described by Joseph Campbell. It seems that I’m not allowed to remain where I am, but instead am pushed by the Universe (often against my conscious will) to become something more through living some kind of adventure. This same process seems to repeat itself over and over in my life, as the Hero’s Journey archetypally does. Again, I can’t easily account for this using the tools of science. There seems to be a lot more going on in my life than just physics.

I’m not really sure where this puts me when I’m looking for a place to belong. Certainly I wouldn’t be the only one to hold such beliefs as I just described, but “spiritual communities” that hold such beliefs tend to be very loosely-knit and weak and unable to provide the kind of social support that communities like the LDS Church can. I find myself to be spiritually expanded, but religiously homeless. I like the Mormon lifestyle, the music, the culture, the holidays, the ward activities, and all that. But the beliefs put me in a tough spot.

I’m not sure where I belong, and maybe StayLDS (or anywhere else in the post-TBM community) isn’t the right place for me. I’ve followed the post-Mormon community on and off since my faith crisis, and I have become somewhat disillusioned with it because it seems to so reactionary – they stand against the Church, but they don’t stand for anything. They seem obsessed with all the policy changes that they want the Church to make and they can’t stop talking about the Book of Abraham and polygamy etc etc. At some point that all gets boring to me and I really want to move on from that. StayLDS seems much better than most in this regard, as many of the post-Mormon podcasts keep re-hashing the same “faith crisis” stuff over and over, and they seem to actively want to destroy the Church.

[InquiringMind]

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?

[InquiringMind]

SilentDawning wrote:

I think ultimately you get to pick what your morality is — such is the nature of free agency.

See, this is exactly what bugs me. If I get to pick my own morality, that means that there is no objective morality. Any morality I pick is as good as any other. If there is no objective morality, then why does it matter what I do or don’t do?

I can be nice to people or I can be cruel. It doesn’t matter, because there is no objective morality and I can pick whatever morality I want.

I can pay my taxes, or not. I can treat people well or I can treat them poorly. I can support abortion, or I can oppose it. I can vote for Candidate A or Candidate B. None of it matters, because there is no objective morality, and morality is whatever I decide to make up, right?

I’m so tired of moral relativism. I want there to be some kind of universal morality the same way that the laws of physics are the same for everyone, I want morality to be the same for everyone the way that federal and state laws are binding on everyone who live in that country and state. So you’re telling me that we all have to follow the same physical laws, and we all have to follow the same federal and state laws, but that morality is different for everyone? I cannot make any sense of that.

[InquiringMind]

I’d like to respond to the idea that there is no objective morality and that each of us has the freedom to decide for ourselves what is moral, and that we need to live authentically. This is the idea that each of use needs to “live our own truth,” and that we can all invent our own moral system and decide our own moral destiny. While this may make some sense for each of us as individuals, on the level of society it’s an enormous disaster.

And as it turns out, far from encouraging people to “live their truth”, we actually have quite rigid expectations for the behavior of other people, and we become angry when they don’t behave according to the set of predictable and orderly rules we impose on them.

Let’s say that you decide to “live your truth” by taking a commercial airline flight to Paris. During the flight, the pilot feels sad realizing that he has never been to Germany, so he decides to “live his truth” by changing the destination to Berlin. You and the other passengers are very upset about this, but you can’t fault the pilot because remember, there is no objective morality and everyone gets to invent their own moral system. While the plane is flying to Berlin, both of the engines fail because, while the airplane was in the hanger, the aircraft maintenance crew failed to complete the engine overhaul properly because going all the way through that really long set of silly safety procedures didn’t feel “authentic” and because the crew decided that “living their truth” meant performing the maintenance in a very different way than was prescribed in the maintenance manual. You can’t object to this because, again, there is no objectively right way to do aircraft maintenance and each maintenance technician gets to decide for themselves how to do aircraft maintenance, and it’s not the place of the FAA or anyone else to dictate to maintenance technicians how to do aircraft maintenance, right? So the plane glides for several miles and eventually lands in a farmer’s field. You have minor injuries and are taken to a local hospital, where you are informed that the doctors at this hospital do not follow standard medical procedures for treating patients because there are no objectively correct standards for medical treatment; instead, each doctor gets to “live their truth” and give whatever medical treatment feels authentic to the doctor in that moment.

Obviously this way of thinking about morality is completely untenable for the efficient and orderly operation of a society. No society can operate on the idea that each individual can invent their own system of morality. Far from encouraging people to live freely, we actually impose rigid standards of behavior on others because we have to. There just isn’t any other way to have order, safety, efficiency, and predictability.

What would happen if each car driver got to decide for themselves which traffic rules to obey and which to disregard? What if each driver got to decide for themselves whether to drive on the left side or the right side of the road? What if each driver got to decide for themselves what a red light, a yellow light, and a green light means? Driving would be impossible. The only reason that driving works is because we have a set of traffic rules that everyone agrees on and that everyone follows most of the time. It would be untenable to have roadways where every driver could decide for themselves which laws to follow and which to ignore.

So I really take issue with this idea that we can each invent our own moral system independently of the society in which we live. If you want airline flights that operate on time and that operate safely, if you want food that is safe to eat, if you want your money to be in the bank when you go to get it, if you want roads that are orderly and where traffic flows smoothly, you have to have a set of rules that everyone agrees on and that everyone follows most of the time. You can’t have those things in a society where everyone gets to invent their own morality.

[Author]

Posts