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nibbler wrote:
If I understand it correctly, the concern is the uncertainty surrounding god’s approval of your moral choices.If there’s no way of truly knowing god’s will with absolute certainty, wouldn’t a question worth asking be, “Am I happy with my own moral choices?”
We may or may not end up living with god but we’re stuck with ourselves. Are we happy with our choices?
This is one of the things that I’ve heard from people who have near-death experiences (NDE). They say that God does not judge anyone; instead, we judge ourselves. The problem I have with this is that self-judgement only tells you whether your actions were consistent with your beliefs. If your actions were consistent with your beliefs, then you judge yourself favorably. It’s only when you are a hypocrite that you might judge yourself negatively. But what if your beliefs are all wrong? What if your values are all messed up? You can have dysfunctional values and if you act in harmony with your dysfunctional values then you’d still give yourself a favorable judgment.
For example, a sociopath might be proud of the crimes he’s committed. He might be quite happy with his choices, in spite of the enormous damage caused to others. He might see no problem with his illegal behavior. He might even be proud of it. If he’s comfortable with his values and he judges himself favorably, does that mean that God will not punish him?
How do you know your values are the “right” values? I have my values that I feel comfortable with, but the fact that others hold very different views gives me pause and causes me to question. What if I’m wrong? What if they’re wrong? Who will God reward and who will God punish? And if God doesn’t reward or punish anyone based on their moral choices, what’s the point of talking about morality?
PazamaManX wrote:I have trouble with the idea that we made any covenants/deals before coming here. Considering we don’t remember anything of that supposed time, it wouldn’t seem right to be held to something we can’t recall agreeing to.
I’ve wondered about that too – how can I be held responsible for making an agreement that has since been deliberately hidden from my memory? Seems pretty unfair of God to hold me to that. Well, 1 Ne. 3:7 tells us that we if we made a premortal contract, God will make a way for us to follow through with it.
Part of the reason I posted this thread is that some of the things I appear to have agreed to seem fairly obvious. I’ve gone through plenty of time wandering in the wilderness, but so far most of the time the right answer eventually presents itself in a way that’s hard to miss. I’ve been having a hard time recently because I feel like there is a plan but for some reason I’m not allowed to know what it is beforehand. It seems that all I get is the next step in the plan. I don’t get the whole plan upfront, I only get the next step. I’ll admit that this has been been very frustrating because I would really like to make some plans for myself. But this isn’t the way it works, apparently.
The other place for potential problems is with the doctrine of agency. I’ve been frustrated recently by what feels like a lack of freedom to choose on my part. I had the same experience during another major life transition, the sense that I was not in fact making choices, but that many decisions were being made for me by some divine or cosmic force, and my own conscious mind was just along for the ride (similar to Luke Skywalker getting the call to adventure). Apparently, if pre-mortal agreements exist, they are not allowed to be altered during mortal life, no matter how much kicking and screaming I do. If I had agency, then my agency was exercised when I created and signed the premortal contract, and now I’m stuck with whatever premortal decisions I made.
DarkJedi wrote:
I could have written this, it is essentially where I am at as well. Except the last paragraph. I gave up on prayer a long time ago. I do on occasion pray, but it’s more for me than it is for God and I expect nothing from it. I will admit that often during these prayers I do get a distinctive peaceful feeling and if that’s all there is it is what it is. And if that’s not coming from God, there’s nothing wrong with feeling at peace – that’s really what most of us seek.
Here’s one possible answer I’m thinking about. We have many different kinds of relationships in our life – friends, family, coworkers, bosses, employees, spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend, etc. Each of these relationships is different and requires us to play a different role, and each requires that we treat people somewhat differently. You act a different way towards your boss than you do towards your friends because it’s a different kind of relationship, and you’re in a different role.
I heard a talk by a dating coach who was advising women that the male love interest in their life should be their best friend, and they should relate to him as such. I disagreed. A romantic relationship is not quite the same as a best friend relationship, and though lovers may become best friends, it’s not quite the same relationship as a “best buddies” kind of thing. We play different roles in our lives and we act differently towards different people based on the roles that we are in.
Maybe God isn’t trying to be our best friend. Maybe He’s trying to be our God, which is a different sort of relationship. That may mean not acting at all like a best friend, or even a loving parent. That may mean leaving us on our own a lot, or letting us go through some pretty difficult stuff if there is some good reason for it.
For all we know, we might have made a pre-mortal agreement wherein we told God not to help us out too much, even if we asked diligently for it. Maybe by asking for help, we put God in the position of the family member of the compulsive gambler when the compulsive gambler says, “Give me the money I made you promise not to give me if I asked for it.”
I’m thinking more about this idea that maybe God is honoring a pre-mortal agreement that I made with Him, which is why I haven’t gotten the answers I had expected. He doesn’t answer because I had previously told Him not to. That’s about the best I can come up with right now.
DarkJedi wrote:My relationship with God is much more complicated and much as you describe in the quote above. I could confidently say that God and I are not on speaking terms (and we definitely were not for a while) but I’m not sure that’s really true. It’s not like I never “talk” to God even though I rarely formally pray. And it’s not like I never feel anything in response or randomly – I do (usually nothing more than a peaceful feeling, but a distinctive peace). It is possible God is saying things I don’t recognize, and if that’s the case it’s God’s problem and not mine – if God has something to say then God should say it.
I find that belief in God makes some sense on an intellectual level. I think I’ve gone as far as I can down that rabbit hole, and the idea of a universe created from nothing seems pretty absurd to me (there still exists the problem of explanatory regression, but I’ll sweep that under the rug on the belief that there is a much broader reality beyond the reality we deal with every day). My relationship with God seems about what you’d expect from a bad relationship – it’s characterized by resentment, mistrust, lack of communication, and neglect.
I would never be friends with someone who treats me the way that God treats me. I would never be friends with someone who stood by watching bad things happen to me while doing nothing to stop those bad things. I would never be friends with someone who consistently ignored my requests for help or knowledge. I would never be friends with someone who did strange things all the time and refused to explain himself. You get my drift. I would consider such a person to be toxic and I would avoid that person. And yet, the supposedly most loving being in the universe behaves exactly this way.
My experience has been that God communicates in a way that is very similar to a crappy girlfriend. Rather than God being upfront with me and telling me directly what he wants, God gives “hints,” and hopes that I will “get the hint.” These hints are initially very subtle and are very difficult to differentiate from ordinary experiences. Over times the hints get stronger and stronger as apparently I consistently fail to “get the hint.” Eventually my life starts to fall apart or becomes unbearable and I really have no choice but to change direction. I would never date a woman who communicates this way, so why would I worship a God who does this? How could my relationship with such a being be characterized by anything other than resentment and mistrust?
This is, of course, if God communicates at all. Maybe I’m imagining the whole thing. I spent many years praying daily and I don’t have even one example of a concise and distinct answer to a prayer. Eventually I stopped praying because I don’t think I ever got an answer.
Now I kinda feel like I want to pray but I still don’t really expect to get any answers. I’m not really sure what to do about that. I feel like I’m in for another frustrating experience where I’ll pour my heart out to God and get nothing in response. Not even an acknowledgement of receipt.
DarkJedi wrote:
From my point of view God can’t really be the vineyard keeper pruning at will for our own good and at the same time allow us full agency.And this is much of the point of my original question, and probably a paradox that is not talked about much in the Church. You can’t have unrestricted free will, and also have a God who is the lord of the vineyard. Any pruning of the vineyard that God does will definitely infringe on your free will. That’s the point of the currant bush story – if Hugh B. Brown was left to his own free will, he would have stayed in the Canadian military. But if we are to believe that God essentially forced him out of the military and into a life that ended up being better, then Hugh’s free will was obviously overridden by God’s will. My question in that case was wether God was acting unilaterally, forcing His own will on Hugh for the greater good, or whether Hugh had some pre-mortal agreement wherein the whole thing was previously planned out.
Free will becomes paradoxical when thinking about an omniscient God. One of them is – if God is omniscient, then He knows what we will choose before we choose it, and therefore we really don’t have free will.
It’s the same with Luke Skywalker, right? Luke’s free will would have led him to go to the academy with his friends. But God (as it were) forced him in another direction, taking away his free will, it would seem.
If God does act in such ways, I don’t think that all life events would be directed this way. Many things are indeed up to us to choose. But it is seeming to me that certain specific things are directed this way – and it may not always be the things that I anticipate.
The question I have often had is why God
didn’tintervene when I wish He would have. There are times for all of us when when it sure would have been useful for God to step in and force a change of direction or show me the right way, but God doesn’t show up most of those times. Then when it’s not expected, some more “pruning” happens. It’s completely maddening, and so far, it’s impossible for me to develop anything that looks like a relationship with such an unpredictable and capricious being. But that’s how it’s been. DarkJedi wrote:
For me the choices are the Deist God, no God, or a very cruel and sadistic God.
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. The Problem of Evil is still the biggest obstacle to belief in God for me, and the topic probably deserves a hundred threads on this forum. I’d even say that the Problem of Evil is
thefundamental human question. I was never able to resolve it as many believers do, by saying that God is not responsible for evil. That seems a little too convenient, a god who has found a way to take credit for everything good in the world and avoid responsibility for anything bad. If God created the universe, then of course God is responsible for evil. The best I can do with it right now is to believe that we knew what we were getting ourselves into when we came here, there is some good reason for being in a world with so much evil, and after we die we will in some way be better off and all the evils we experienced will somehow be made right. Arrakeen wrote:
I get that many people disagree on morality, but my point was there are certain things that an overwhelming majority of people and church members agree on, but the church still remains silent on because of politics. For example, almost everyone agrees that genocide is bad. Mass murder is bad. But if these things are committed by the government of a country where the church has any sort of presence, they seem unable speak out. Whether from a fear of potential fallout or a desire to remain above the fray, it makes them seem powerless and irrelevant. If they can’t even condemn human rights abuses around the world, how are they supposed to have anything to say about more nuanced issues of morality or politics?
It does seem like Church leaders ought to speak out on many more things. But I mostly agree with what Church leaders do now by staying out of most geopolitical and culture wars issues, because everyone has their own pet cause that they wish Church leaders would address, and leaders are just not going to be able to keep everyone happy by commenting on every geopolitical event and every injustice. You’d have people from all directions saying, “Why won’t Church leaders condemn _______ that is happening in _______?” Leaders wouldn’t be able to keep up with all of it. Besides, leaders have gotten enough pushback by taking stands on the few issues they do take stands on, that taking more stands on more issues is only going to create many more problems for them.
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.
So I think that Church leaders are actually doing the right thing by staying out of such issues. I also think that church is supposed to be a place where were can stop thinking about the news for like ten seconds and get away from that. I think it would be pretty terrible to be watching the news about the war in Ukraine, and go to church and have the speaker give a talk about the war in Ukraine. You gotta turn it off at some point.
DarkJedi wrote:Up front, I haven’t previously responded to this thread because I don’t believe God has individualized plans for each of us nor do I believe God directs certain experiences. However, I respect your freedom to believe it.
…
(In other words as Obi Wan said “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”)
I would have thought that you would have been the first to believe in the Hero’s Journey, because Luke Skywalker was deliberately written this way. The hero starts in a boring life in the ordinary world, and receives a call to adventure, whereby he eventually gets a much better life than the one he left behind. Luke was headed to a life of relative mediocrity in “the Academy.” But after having heeded the call, he ended up saving the galaxy and his father. He didn’t have much choice either – he initially refused the call, but after his aunt and uncle were killed, he had no choice but to accept. I might be willing to believe that it is God who calls people on these adventures.
I’m sorry to hear about your job. I had a roommate in Salt Lake whose patriarchal blessing said that he should be a doctor. The trouble was, he had no interest in medicine. He went to medical school and didn’t like it. He dropped out, and also lost his faith.
Roy wrote:I think that you may get much value out of what I call the “currant bush doctrine.” This is based on a famous talk by Hugh B. Brown.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/1973/01/the-currant-bush?lang=eng Particularly, when people go through really hard things it can be comforting to see an overarching purpose to it all. I feel that this doctrine coexists in LDS thought with free agency. There is enough support for it that you could be a hardcore “currant bush” believer and not run into any problems (as opposed to believing in reincarnation or something of that sort, the teaching of which would cause a stir).
Yes, I was thinking about this talk a few months ago. It does seem to fit, at least I hope it does. The life he got was better than the one he had wanted, and God stopped him from moving down one path and pushed him towards a better one. I guess all I can do is hope that’s true for me.
SilentDawning wrote:
Overall, I’m a bit disappointed in the direction given to us by our higher-ups. The most recent advice for surviving in modern times from RM Nelson was “gratitude” — a very benign message that I think many people are practicing with or without his advice. No new scripture in recent years. We did get a stand on the family with the Proclamation years ago and some attempts at policy that define our stance on the family, but that was back-pedaled.Perhaps I have too much of a desire for sensationalism. But if you compare the revelations of the current time with revelations and divine activity of the past, there isn’t much really happening. The experience of being a Mormon is very routine and well, boring, in my view.
Yeah, it does feel like there’s this culture war that is the elephant in the room, and the leadership seems content to mostly ignore it and stick to the usual talking points. It would be nice to hear more that is (to use an over-used word) relevant to what everyone can see is going on. At this point I’m not sure that anyone knows the answer to our very divided situation. We’re essentially in the middle of a psychological civil war, and it sure would be nice to get a little better guidance. I think that Church leaders are wise, though, to not try to divide further and to keep the Church as unified as possible.
Arrakeen wrote:
Where is the line that divides politics and morality? Does the church have a responsibility to call out morally reprehensible actions done by governments around the world? What happens if they do?
In case you haven’t noticed, people sharply disagree about what’s moral. Everyone agrees that we should do what’s good, but we very much disagree about what “good” is. At this point in US politics it seems that we have two completely separate and competing moral systems, represented by the Left and the Right. They are two very different systems of morality with different values and different goals. I don’t see this as a sustainable situation, with two very different visions about what the US is supposed to be. We can’t survive very long with two strongly conflicting national narratives.
The decline of Christianity as the primary religion in the US has created a void of meaning and purpose, and many people have sought to fill that void of meaning and purpose with politics. Political parties and political ideologies have come to replace churches and religious beliefs as a place for people to find belonging and a sense of meaning and purpose in life. And who can blame them? The consequences of political decisions seem immediate and critically important, while concerns about the afterlife seem far away….if there is an afterlife. God doesn’t always answer prayers, but laws and politics affect you directly.
It does seem to make some sense from a nonreligious point of view. We got rid of our silly supernatural religious beliefs, so now we can turn our attention to what really matters, which is building a better world here and now. Except that we can’t agree on what “better” is. We can’t agree on what’s good and what’s moral, so we’re having a lot of trouble (from a secular point of view) building a better world without religion.
I actually think that’s why religion is important. Religion helps us think about a world beyond this one, which makes politics less urgent and less immediate. If this life is all we get, then yeah, politics is the most important thing – and I think that’s a bad situation because we can’t agree on what’s moral, and we’re going to end up fighting constantly. Thinking about the afterlife makes politics less all-important: maybe your candidate lost the election, but you’ll still get your reward in heaven, so no big deal, right?
Watcher wrote:
I would recommend you keep a similar journal of your experiences. I discovered that these anomalies always contributed to something I would need later in my life.Two aspects of my life are a strong relationship to both logic and to the restoration of the church. I have discovered that most (perhaps even a vast majority) of those connected to religion are somewhat resistant to logic – perhaps even somewhat being in opposition to employing logic. I find a lot of resistance to logic on this forum. Often when I refer to something being logical, especially in a religious setting, I find little support. For myself, I cannot understand or relate to anything until I can connect to the logic of it.
A journal is a good thing, and I have quite an extensive journal that I’ve kept for a long time. I also think of those anomalies in my life, and about their meaning, and about whether or not they are supernatural in any way, or whether they are just produced by my own unconscious mind. They do clearly seem to exist in my life, but I can’t say for sure where they come from or what they mean. For whatever they are worth and whatever they mean, I can’t say that they corroborate any stories about gold plates.
Many of these anomalies (as they might be called) do seem to take the form of manipulation of events – a phone call that was never returned, a sure-bet opportunity that mysteriously fizzled out at the last minute, a sudden change of plans, a door that suddenly closes, a rejection that eventually works out for the best, a surprise opportunity.
At this point I think it would be impossible for me to deny the existence of such events, and I might be willing to believe that there might be some overarching plan, perhaps a Divine plan. But still, I am actually quite unhappy with this plan and have never really been happy with it. I don’t have some of the things in life I want most, seemingly because they are not part of the overarching plan. I don’t have the free will go out and get the things I want because, as I have said, that isn’t the plan, apparently. I don’t have a bad life, but it’s also not the life I wanted, and it’s not a life that I really like all that much. The hope I have at this point is that there is some greater purpose to this, and that I’ll have a better life later on because of whatever it is I’m learning right now. Even if it’s true that there is a greater purpose to this and that I’ll have a better life later on, I am frustrated that I am not given any clear information on what that better life might be.
As for logic, I’m not opposed to faith as a principle, but I am unwilling to believe anything that is obviously wrong or that is clearly contradicted by good evidence. Whatever I believe, it has to make sense on some level, and I’m not willing to engage in a lot of wishful thinking and call it faith. I have gotten myself in trouble in the past when I continued to have “faith” in things that were contradicted by obvious reality, and it didn’t end well for me.
Roy wrote:
Ultimately, you get to decide whatever narrative that you want for this change. Maybe the narrative will help you to gain new courage and a sense of purpose. May you feel inspired and directed in whichever decision you ultimately make.
Thanks Roy. This is a life transition, and going slow is always good advice. I’m a little less concerned about the career specifics, and more concerned about what it means, more broadly. It suggests a somewhat different worldview, one where life is more like being “along for the ride” rather than being self-directed, rather than me making choices and taking responsibility for them. Given that that such transitions seem to push us in a certain life direction (even seemingly against our will) rather than allowing us to make conscious choices, what is the meaning of the idea of “choice and accountability”? That’s the part of it that seems strange – the idea that I’m making choices and taking responsibility for those choices seems to be inapplicable here.
And what is the entity that precipitates such transitions? Is it God, by God’s own decisions that we can only know after we die? Or is God merely carrying out some previously agreed-upon plan, according to some kind of pre-mortal contract that I signed? Am I in the situation I’m in because God wants me here by His own plan, or because I asked for it to be this way? Or is this all created by my own unconscious mind?
And the issue of a narrative is something I’ve been thinking about. Since there doesn’t seem to be any way to know what the “facts” are in this situation, do I just get to make up whatever narrative I want? Can I really just make something up? In the absence of any better information, it seems that making up a story about what’s going in my life, even if the story is probably wrong, is the only option I can see. The thing is that I have been through such things a few times in the past, and I can almost guarantee that whatever narrative I make up will probably be wrong. Many of the narratives I have told myself about what I was doing in my life have turned out to be wrong, often ending in great confusion and disappointment when my narratives fell apart. But since I didn’t have better information, that’s the best I could do.
This has been a major point of frustration for me. I do want to believe, but there just isn’t any definitive information at all about God, so I just end up having to make up whatever I can about God. What is the difference between faith, and just making up whatever I want about God? And how can I avoid the disappointment that I feel when whatever I decided to make up about God and my life turns out to be wrong? This is why I was an atheist for so long. I have not been able to come up with any beliefs about God that don’t fall apart very quickly or that don’t seem like some completely made-up wishful thinking on my part. I feel like I’m looking for the truth, but the truth just can’t be found. It’s either hidden away in a place where I can’t see it, or it doesn’t exist.
I think that there will be unintended consequence here in terms of men’s engagement and attendance at church. Christianity in general has quite a gender imbalance, with worldwide church attendance being 61% female and 39% male. Take a look around in most any congregation, including Mormon congregations, and you’ll see quite a surplus of women. The reason for this is that for the last 700 years or so, Christianity has been feminizing, and Christian churches are well-engineered to cater to the needs of women, often at the expense of the needs of men. The evidence for this (besides the lop-sided gender ratio at church) is that more men than women are leaving the Church. If the LDS Church offers a better deal to men than to women, then why are more men leaving? The answer is that the Church doesn’t offer better deal to men. Christian Churches are primarily feminine spaces designed to focus on women’s needs and women’s experiences, which is why you’ll see so many men in church sitting there looking bored or playing with their phone. The only masculine space in an LDS Church building is the cultural hall (gym), which is where, at any given time, most of the men can actually be found. You may point to the all-male leadership of the Church as evidence of Patriarchy, but the reality of the numbers reveals that the Church is an army of women with a few male generals. The Church is largely run by women, for women. Which means that this temple endowment change takes a bad deal for men and makes it worse.
I don’t think that anybody believed that the previous temple endowment gave the husband some kind of priesthood right to disregard his wife’s wishes and do whatever he wanted over her objections. Quite the contrary – we have all seen many men in the Church who respond to pretty much anything their wife says with “Yes, Dear.” Everyone knows that women run the household in many/most marriages, and I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that, either in theory or in practice, the old temple endowment gave men some kind of real usable relationship power and authority that women don’t have.
I argue that the Church already gives a better deal to women than to men, as evidenced by the 3:2 ratio of women to men in the Church, and also evidenced by the fact that more men that women are leaving the Church. This new endowment makes that deal worse by stripping away the last little bit of respect and authority that men had in the Church. I understand why the Church had to make these changes. It may bolster female participation, but I also think it will mean even lower attendance and participation from men.
I feel like the real issue for me is marriage. My personal feeling about the Church right now is that I could take it or leave it. I don’t really care one way or the other whether I’m active in it or not. I could be happy either way. There are things I like about it and things I don’t, and there were things I liked about being a non-Church-attending atheist and things I didn’t. I’m tired of rehashing the question of “should I stay or should I go” over and over in my mind and not being able to come up with an answer. A big issue in all of this is whether or not I want to marry a Mormon woman. And that’s a lifetime commitment one way or the other. If I marry a Mormon, and in 10 years I decide I don’t want to participate in the Church anymore, and she still does, then I’ll be have marriage problems. If I stop going to Church and marry a non-Mormon, and in 10 years I decide that I want to be active in the Church again, it’s unlikely that she’ll be on board, and I’ll be going to Church alone. And I feel like it would also be hard to relate deeply to someone who knows nothing about Mormonism.
So I guess that’s what I’m really talking about when I talk about a decision making process. I see how hard it is for all of you who are in a TBM-NOM marriage, and I don’t want that. But it seems a shame to walk away from all I’ve invested in the Church and the life that I’ve tried to build for myself around the Church. I’m getting tired of what seems to be an unanswerable question, and I feel like the price of a wrong decision could be very high.
