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bc_pg, the article was great and the movie made some good logical points. I haven’t read the whole article yet, because it’s long, but there were some great ideas in there. I liked the Easy Answer to the Hard Question: “Why do smart people believe weird things? Because they are skilled at defending beliefs that they acquired in non-smart ways.” Confirmation bias is insidious and I see myself doing it in many areas of my life. It was fascinating to see that people think that everyone else believes in God for a different reason than they do: people believe that they themselves are acting rationally, while everyone else is acting emotionally, even though they reached the same conclusion. I struggle a little with rejecting the literal truth of the claims of the Church because there are plenty of people who are smarter and more educated than me who accept them: Richard Bushman and Hugh Nibley are two examples. Am I prepared to say that I think that Bushman and Nibley are wrong about the Church and that they are hopelessly deceived? I can’t talk to Nibley, but Bushman is still around. These individuals have undoubtedly done much more historical research than me and have weighed the arguments and have found that the Church is likely to be what it claims to be. How can I say that they are wrong? These replies are helpful in understanding Stage 5. I know that I wouldn’t really understand it unless I experienced it, and I can’t force myself into Stage 5, just like I didn’t force myself into Stage 3 or Stage 4. I see that Stage 5 accepts the possibility of both subjective and objective truth. It does seem that these stages happen in their own way and on their own timetable. We don’t ask for them to happen; they seem to happen to us in an unbidden way. It seems to me that I may need to let my own Stage 4 run its own course on its own timetable. It looks like people move to Stage 5 when they grow tiredof Stage 4 and realize its limitations. In other words, we don’t choose the Stage we are in, and we don’t choose to move from one Stage to the next. They are things that happen to us, and the Stage of faith we are at is beyond our will and ability to control. I’m not trying relieve myself of responsibility, but it seems that we do not control our position in these stages. I don’t think that anyone would argue that we can simply choose to be in Stage 6 and would suddenly be there. I like the Magic Eye analogy. I have to ask myself, “Is the dolphin real or is the dolphin imaginary?” Even if a person feels God in their life and feels and sees a powerful life-force that permeates the universe, all of their feelings and views could be an imaginary construct of their marvelous human brain. I’ve had many “revelations” and “spiritual experiences” that turned out to be imaginary constructs of my brain. So how do I know what is real and what is imaginary? I don’t buy the idea that “if it’s real to me, then it’s real.” I can feel very real and powerful feelings for an attractive woman, and I could have very real and powerful feelings that she and I will get married, and these feelings are completely real to me, but if she doesn’t reciprocate my feelings, then the marriage will never be real; it would exist only in my imagination. Even powerful internal experiences don’t necessarily correspond to real external phenomena.
I’m very careful about imaginary spiritual experiences, because I’ve been fooled many times, sometimes very badly and at significant cost.
So I know that the structure of Stage 5 is real, but how does one know if the content of Stage 5 is real?
I have also found the Spirit to be quite unreliable. On my mission I would feel “prompted” to knock on a certain door, and I’d go knock on it, and no one was home. That happened several times. I also had a “revelation” that I would marry a certain girl; this girl ended up telling me that she had never been interested in me and never would be (happily, I never told her about the “revelation.”) I’ve had two female friends who said that it was revealed to them that they’d marry a certain guy, and neither of those marriages are going to happen. I’ve even had friends who say that God can say “Yes” to one person and “No” to the other, which seems absurd to me.
I agree with what’s been said about the fact that a simple prompting of the Spirit could prevent serious problems in some situations, yet no prompting is given. Recently I wrote a check for which I had the money, but it was in a different account than the one that the check was attached to. The check cleared, but I got a nasty overdraft fee. After all the things I’ve done for God, why didn’t he prompt me to check which account the check was attached to so I could save myself an overdraft fee? Explanations could be given, but none of them are satisfactory. This is less serious than kids dying in the back of a car, but it’s the same concept.
I’ve only really had one experience that seems possibly likely to have come from some supernatural source that might be called “the Spirit.” I’d misplaced my credit card and it was time to make a payment on it. I desperately prayed to find it, and was told by some force that it was in my glove compartment. I looked in my glove compartment and it was there. I hesitate to totally accept this as an answer from God becuase I was the one who had originally put the card in the glove compartment and so my own brain knew that it was there and could have recalled it in a time of need. I’ve also asked God to help me find other things that I needed or wanted and I didn’t find them; why weren’t those prayers answered?
I’m quite certain that people mistake their own feelings for the Spirit all the time, just like people in testimony meeting attribute things to God that he probably didn’t do: they’ll say, “God did this for me, God did this for me, God did that for me” when those things probably would have happened anyway. Humans have a long history of attributing naturalistic events to supernatural beings, such as attributing lightning to Zeus. I’m still in the process of figuring out if I believe that the supernatural exists at all. Even if there is such a thing as the Spirit and spiritual promptings, it’s troubling to me that God would create the world and us in a way that would make it so easy to mistake own feelings for spiritual promptings.
I think that people become persuaded that answers to prayers and promptings of the Spirit are always reliable by using a thought process called “remembering the hits and forgetting the misses:” if a hunch turned out to be right, they called it a “prompting” and remembered it, and if it was wrong, they made some excuse and forgot about it.
The fact that I wasn’t getting these mysterious promptings of the Spirit that seemed to flow so abundantly to other people was a major cause of my initial disaffection. Now I understand why I didn’t get them: even if the Spirit does exist and really does give revelations, it’s probably much more rare than the people in testimony meeting express that it is, and people mistake their own feelings for revelation all the time. I’ve even heard people say that when a person is living worthily, EVERY thought they have is from the Spirit, which I think is completely wrong.
M&G, I like the box analogy. My trouble with Stage 5 was that it didn’t seem to believe that there were any universal truths that were true for everyone, but it seems that Stage 5 is open to that possibility. I’m looking for THE box, the Box of Universal Truth. But perhaps THE box doesn’t exist, and there are only millions of little boxes with truths and falsehoods. Roy, I’m careful with the word “proof.” “Proof” is for mathematicians and lawyers; scientists prefer to think in terms of evidence. Any thoughtful atheist knows that it is impossible to prove that there is no God and no afterlife, but good evidence can be presented to support the case that human consciousness ends at the death of the brain. And I’m cautious about believing things for which there is simply no evidence. For example, if I were to start telling people that there were leprechauns in the forest just outside of town, I wouldn’t expect anyone to believe me because there is no good evidence that leprechauns exist. And we don’t have any more evidence for the existence of an afterlife than we do for the existence of leprechauns, so I’m not sure of the grounds on which I can believe in the existence of an afterlife, but not in the existence of leprechauns. I like the evidence-based approach to beliefs about God and the afterlife, because in the past I’ve held some overly-optimistic beliefs about God and the Church that I had no evidence to support and that turned out to be wrong.
Quote:I am also most interested in what you are basing that last sentence on?
I was talking about our relationships with other humans, not necessarily our relationship with any divine beings. I meant that I don’t think we’ll get into the hottest social club in the afterlife because we made the right connections here, or be raised to a higher status with greater authority over others in the afterlife because we knew the right people here. If there is an afterlife, it seems reasonable to believe that we’d take our relationships there, but I don’t think it would give us any advantages over others, because that would put people who didn’t live long enough to form such relationships at a disadvantage.
SD, what you’ve described in your min-max regret technique is similar to Pascal’s Wager, which is this: If the existence of God is uncertain, it makes sense to believe in God and live a pious life, because a person has everything to gain and little to lose by believing in God and living a pious life. Check out the wikipedia article for a more in-depth treatment. I might eventually end up taking Pascal’s Wager, but I’m not sure. One difficulty with it is that it will do little good to believe in and serve the wrong God: if the one true religion actually turns out to be Sikhism (a religion with about 30 million members) I may or may not receive any brownie points from the God of Sikhism for being a devout Mormon or Christian or general do-gooder in the community. I’d not only be taking the wager that God and the afterlife existed, but that I’d picked the right way to worship the right God, and that’s a lower probability.
People don’t separate the existence of God and the existence of an afterlife; there could be a God but no afterlife, and there could be an afterlife but no God.
And another thing, FC. As a TBM I believed a lot of very optimistic things about God that turned out to be wrong. For example, one time I almost wrote a check that I didn’t have money in my account to cover because I believed that God would miraculously put the necessary money in my account before the check cleared. Gladly, I didn’t end up writing the check. I believed a lot of things like that- I believed that God would do this or that for me if I prayed and was faithful, and my beliefs turned out to be wishful thinking. So I’m quite hesitant at this point to believe things about God that I don’t have evidence to support. Ray, I’m inclined to think that there either is a God or there isn’t, and I don’t see another option for describing reality. If there is another option, what is it? It’s true that agnosticism is an option, though I’d like to be able to definitively state what I believe, and I’ve always thought of agnosticism as the “weasel answer.” Perhaps it may serve me. I read the poem, and my struggle with it is this: if God wants me to believe in him, then why would he make himself so hard to find? That question could begin a long discussion on what does and doesn’t constitute evidence of God’s existence, and I know most of the arguments. FC, thanks for your responses. I struggle with the idea that I can choose to believe whatever I want. I find that I am compelled to believe the most compelling argument based on the evidence. I can believe all I want that I’m going to marry Emma Watson, but if I don’t have any evidence for believing it, then I’m not going to believe it. But I’m not sure that’s what you’re really saying, so feel free to enlighten me.
Thanks bc_pg. You’re right, that’s not a great reason to stay. I guess the real reason that I’m trying to stay- and the reason that I’ve stayed in spite of being significantly dissatisfied with the Church for quite a while- is that Mormonism is most of what I’ve ever known and I’m afraid to leave. I don’t know what’s out there and I don’t know how to live as a non-Mormon. Plus I’m moving to Salt Lake City in about a month, and though there are more non-LDS than LDS there, I’ll still be one of the “other” if I quit the Church. Being a single guy, I’m also afraid to leave because, if I decide to come back later, I’ll have the stigma of having had a “period of inactivity.” Mormons seem to show a strong preference for people who have been active in the Church their whole lives. Plus it’s easier to stay from a social and a family point of view. But I suppose I should put those fears aside and do what I think is best, and I’m not really afraid that I would incur divine displeasure by going inactive. I don’t like the idea of identifying myself as an atheist, but if I decide that’s the most plausible reality of the universe, I would be joking myself if I believed otherwise. Atheists are the most hated minority in America, so it’s not just Mormons who think that Atheists are enemy number one. I don’t like the idea that human consciousness ends with the death of the brain, but we really don’t have any evidence that indicates that our consciousness survives the death or our brain. Then there’s the argument from poor design, the argument from evil, the argument from conflicting revelations, and the argument from reasonable non-belief, all of which seem to indicate that the concepts of God and the afterlife were created by humans who knew their own mortality and created a way for themselves to believe that they could survive death, even though no way may actually exist. These views made them more likely survive and reproduce, and so they passed on their believing genes, regardless of whether or not those beliefs were actually true.
I’m almost scared of what I would do if I didn’t fear any divine consequences. I’d have to invent my own moral code. I don’t know how I’d make friends. I don’t know how I’d meet girls. Sometimes it seems that I’d like to just walk away and forget about Mormonism and become a secular humanist, but it won’t be that simple given that I’ve been more or less a lifetime TBM. I could leave the Church, but it’d be a long time before the Church left me, even if my beliefs were long gone. If I quit the Church, I would have to fill the void in my life somehow. Grieving the loss of a belief in an afterlife has been a hard thing for me, or at least grieving the loss of the certainty of an afterlife. It’s tough to think that I’ll never see my family or friends again because I’ll never see anything again. If death is a dreamless sleep from which we will never awake, there would be no pain of loss, but no joy or reunion. I’d have to find some kind of social organization to fill the void and keep my mind off of staring into the abyss.
I personally find the Church’s financial practices to be one of the biggest challenges to my faith reconstruction. It’s unsettling to see the Church spend $2 billion on a shopping mall when some of its members don’t have enough food to eat. I know that the Church has to do somethingwith the excess money it takes in, but why not use it to help the poor rather than catering to the wealthy? Or why not lower tithing to 7%? Sometimes it’s easier to see the Church as a corporate empire, and the LDS religion is one “business arm” of that empire; this religious business arm sells religious products and services to its customers (the members) for a fee (tithing.) The members are literally buying a religious experience from the Church. The Church advertises is products and services by sending out missionaries to recruit new customers; it works to maintain customer retention through programs like home teaching; and it warns its customers that they will be punished in the afterlife if they take their membership and money to a competing business (another religion.) This religion-as-business view kind of disgusts me, but it completely makes sense when you consider that the Church’s policy decisions seem a lot like business decisions and that tithing must always be paid even if it means that a poor widow must make her children go without shoes or proper healthcare. I don’t want to see the Church as simply a business, but when that paradigm fits the facts, it’s hard to see things differently. Quote:As I’ve been on the message boards and listening to podcasts, it seems like there is a pretty good number of female voices in the disaffected Mormon community. The trouble is finding them….
There are probably quite a few, and I may have unknowingly met several of them. But they don’t advertise their status for the same reason that I don’t: in a Stage 3 religious culture, making it publicly known that your testimony in the core claims of the Church is anything other than unshakable is social suicide. So there would have to be a gathering place for such individuals; otherwise, I could meet a New Order Mormon girl and neither of us would know of our shared disenchantment with the Church because we’d both still be pretending to be TBMs in order to be socially acceptable.
Quote:We need the popcorn-eating emoticon.
It appears that this means that we need to wait and see what happens on this issue, but I’m not sure.
Quote:I simply cannot answer all the belief questions and my integrity is too important to me.
That’s where I am. My recommend comes up for renewal in September, and while I can answer all the behavioral questions well enough, I can’t sit there and tell someone that I have a testimony that Joseph Smith restored the One True Church (question #3). In fact, I don’t think I can affirmatively answer any of the first four questions. I’m trying to see if I can reconstruct a faith, but if the Church isn’t what it claims to be, then do temple ordinances really have the power to create an eternal marriage anyway? If the Church isn’t what it claims to be, then getting married in the temple is exactly the same as getting married on a beach in Southern California.
I’m really weighing the value of staying in a Church whose core claims are highly questionable with whatever options are “out there” in a world that I haven’t explored very much. Even as a “New Order Mormon” (one who identifies socially and culturally with the Church but who doesn’t believe some or many of the Church’s claims) I’d be second-class citizen in Mormonism. I’d be embarrassed to state my lack of belief when asked to bear testimony at FHE and it would make the situation super awkward. And it seems that the only realistic avenue for marriage in the Church would be to a girl who is a also a “New Order Mormon.” My suspicion is that single New Order Mormon girls are rare in the Church because women don’t seem to be bothered by doctrinal and historical problems the way that men are and most girls have never felt the need to ask the tough doctrinal and historical questions.
My luck with Mormon girls has been kinda spotty, and I just don’t seem to be the man that they’ve been dreaming of their whole lives, even after substantial efforts to improve myself and having what I think is a pretty interesting life. On the other hand, I’ve had a couple of quite attractive non-LDS girls be quite forward about their interest in me. I rejected them because they weren’t LDS, but I’m questioning that decision. Those specific opportunities are gone now, but there would be others.
I admit that I’m kinda scared to try dating non-LDS girls. I don’t know what they want or what their expectations are. But I clearly don’t know what Mormon girls want either, because I’m not married. So I’m working through all this stuff.
I’m in much the same situation that you are. I’m a single college guy who is having the in-vogue doctrinal/historical crisis of faith. Much of the material designed to help people having a crisis of faith makes the assumption that the questioner is already married; very little has been written about the experience of being a single doubting returned missionary. A crisis of faith is probably less complicated for a single person than for a married person, but there are some tough questions that single people have to answer that married people don’t, such as these: If I leave the church, how will I make friends? How will I meet girls? What kind of girl will I marry? Will she be a disaffected Mormon like me, or a Protestant, or a lapsed Catholic, or what? Am I going to go to bars and clubs to meet women? Am I willing to cohabit with a girlfriend? These are tough questions that single people having a crisis of faith have to answer, and I’m still trying to answer them for myself. Continuing to pursue orthodox LDS girls seems problematic. What good LDS girl who’s dreamed of marrying her Nephi in the temple is going to want to marry a guy who seriously doubts the authenticity of the Book of Abraham and the historicity of the Book of Mormon? No one that I know. And though websites like LDSSingles.com do exist, I’m not aware of any ex-mormon dating sites with names like “PostLDSSingles.com” where disaffected Mormon men can meet disenchanted Mormon women and live happy semi-Mormon lives together.
In his book “Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man” (which was part of the mythopoetic men’s movement,) author Sam Keen gives this profound insight: “There are two questions of manhood: Where I am going, and who will go with me? If you ever get those questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble.” It seems true that people like you and I are unmarriageable until we decide what we believe about the Church. Like I said, what Mormon girl wants a guy who doesn’t believe that the Church is what it claims to be? And what non-LDS girls wants a man who can’t make up his mind about the religion he grew up with? So it seems true that people like you and I will have to make up our minds about the Church and our activity in it before we are in a position to get married. That doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t date, but if things get serious with someone (which can happen really fast, because hey, we’re Mormons, right?) then we’d have to explain our doubts and questions to our now-serious girlfriend, which is embarrassing to even think about. But then again, she may express the same concerns, and we could get married and go inactive together. Wow, that actually might work out nicely. But I’m not counting on it.
Additionally, if you (or I) did find that pretty LDS girl who gave us a reason to stay in the Church, that won’t make the problems with LDS Church history and doctrine go away. A hot girl can’t alter the clear connection between Masonry and the LDS temple ceremony. And though I’ve never been married, it seems clear to me that getting married doesn’t change historical facts about the Church, no matter how awesome the girl you’re marrying.
Also, I’ve never really tried to pursue a non-LDS girl, so I’m not really sure how to go about it.
Anyway, I’m in the same position as you. It’s a tough spot, and I’m still trying to figure things out.
