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I’m a Mormon. We here are all Mormons. As the Book of Mormon musical says, “We are all Latter-Day Saints, all of us. Even if we change some things, or break the rules, or have complete doubt that God exists.” As my demythologizing became more complete, I found within me a secular humanist, the person I would have been if I had not been raised Mormon and had been raised a secular humanist. Finding that was a very unique experience. It was a person that I knew how to be, even though I had never been that. I got back in touch with the child in me who never believed in God, the child that was fascinated with nature and the natural world. I do not have any recollection of belief in God until I was about 12 years old. As far as I can tell, though I was raised in the Church, I was an atheist until after puberty. I don’t even have any recollection of my baptism, even though I have a good memory.
So I am a Mormon. And I am a humanist. As I’ve returned to the Church, the Mormon in me has come back. I know how to be that person. And I’m much more authentic than I was before. I was pretty fake as a TBM and I wasn’t very comfortable with myself. I once had someone tell me that I appeared to them as “a bad actor who had not yet become comfortable with his role.” So I was fake. Now I am more honest with myself and more authentic. Which is why I keep my mouth shut at church.
🙂 During my faith crisis I spent a whole lot of time contemplating mortality. I concluded that our consciousness probably ends when we die. Since my reawakening I’ve realized that no one really knows what happens after we die. It seems absurd that something as marvelous as human consciousness is finite. But eternal life is absurd in its own ways. In math calculations, infinity is not a number. Infinity is a direction. We’ll say things like “as x gets arbitrarily large.”
I personally don’t make an attempt see the BoA as inspired to to reconcile it with anything Egyptian. I think of it as something of an exercise in Mormon cosmology and as scripture containing some interesting and helpful ideas. I’ve found the idea that “men are, that they might have joy” to be very influential in my life when I was having a crisis of faith and no longer felt that I had divine purpose. If I didn’t live for God, then what was the purpose of life? I found the idea that the purpose of my life it to be happy to be very helpful. I have a calling and a temple recommend. So I attend, but I can go check out other religious ideologies. What if I asked this question: Does the Church make me happy? Or will being part of another organization make me happier?
The Mormon afterlife is probably the most interesting of any religion that I know of – creating planets and worlds and populating them with one’s own children. Protestant heaven sounds pretty boring – sitting on a cloud strumming your harp and eating all the junk food you want. Muslim heaven sounds a little better. The Mormon CK is the most grandiose of any afterlife I’ve heard of, but I guess that some people might not want that afterlife. We do release our consciousness every day during our sleep. So we do need a daily break from consciousness.
It seems unlikely that the AA will be able to give you an answers that you haven’t heard before. You may be directed to the apologists for historical and doctrinal questions and may be encouraged to “keep the faith” for spiritual questions. Most of us are here on this forum because we concluded that there aren’t good answers to some of the tough questions in the Church. DarkJedi, I was thinking that perhaps some kind of humanism, new age spiritualism, or Eastern religion blend combined with the philosophies of men, might be an adequate replacement. I went to a Unitarian church here in SLC and it seemed kind of silly because it was basically an academic/political lecture with a saxophonist and pianist. Being an atheist was empty and boring after awhile, and the post-Mormon community wasn’t too impressive and it wasn’t too useful for me socially (it’s mostly married men who complain about how their wife can’t see how wrong the Church is.) After awhile, the atheist rhetoric about all the reasons why God doesn’t exist becomes tiresome and boring, and even if you accept the arguments, there’s no reason to keep rehashing them. OK fine, let’s suppose for a moment that the atheists win, and there is no personal God and no afterlife. Now what do we do? People in atheistic countries (i.e. Sweden) have found ways to make meaningful lives for themselves. So there are ways.
But I’d be missing something if I went back to being a non-religious atheist. I feel like I’m done with that. I’d like something to fill that hole. Maybe it’s the Church and maybe it’s not; I’m not sure yet.
My girlfriend dumped me yesterday (this is relevant to the discussion.) Even though we get along well and have lots of fun together, she says she still doesn’t feel attracted to me (after weeks of trying) and was tired of trying to feel it. And so I’ve been going through all the things that I could have done in the last year that would have made me into someone she’s attracted to (I’ve always struggled with attracting women.) I didn’t date much at all last spring or summer, and dating more may have helped me learned some things. But I did spend more time studying for the Physics GRE, which I did well on. I’ve heard that it’s best to judge the wisdom of a decision not by the outcome, but the the quality of the decision at the time it was made. The decisions I made over the last year made sense at the time, but they’ve led to me not lighting a fire inside someone who I very much want in my life. But my decisions over the last year made sense at the time and they seemed like good decisions, even if I now wish that I would have acted differently. I’m a lifelong Church member, but for those who joined the Church as teenagers or adults, joining the Church made sense at the time and seemed like a good decision. In general, I think we shouldn’t be mad at ourselves for making a decision that we now see as bad, but that seemed like a good decision at the time.
It’s still going to be hard to take my own advice on this in my particular situation.
nibbler wrote:The culture from his perspective is that people pity the single sisters while they blame the single brethren.
Yeah, I could talk for awhile on all this. As for blaming single brethren while pitying single sisters, I think that comes from the belief that men have control over when then get married, but women do not. With some exceptions (as could be the case with Nibbler’s friend) my experience has been that it is primarily a person’s attractiveness (how attractive they are) and selectiveness (how picky they are), not their gender, that determines how much power they have to get married. Attractive people (based on personality and appearance) have the power to get married easily, while less attractive people have much less power over when they get married and who they get married to. People who are attractive and not picky get married very easily, while people who are unattractive and picky have great difficulty getting married.At some future point I will probably post more about all this because I’m extremely frustrated with all of it.
hawkgrrrl wrote:God as Yenta. Not a fan of this.
Alex wrote:She got the answer she wanted.
That’s it in a nutshell. I do believe in divine inspiration, but I doubt it a lot when it comes to relationships.
And that’s the strange part of it. She said that dating me was not the answer that she wanted, but she felt strongly that she should date me. It does make sense to me that most people get the answer that they want when it comes to dating. But if she felt strongly that she should date me, then maybe she actually did like me to and was conflicted about it. I’m sure I will ask her about it, but I suspect that she might revise her memories to fit what she’s feeling now instead of being honest about what she felt at the time.SilentDawning wrote:Tough one. If you marry a TBM there will be conflict your whole marriage unless there is some kind of uncommon love or need that you meet in your spouse. I don’t have an answer…
I personally was TBM for 25 years and then become unorthodox. At that time my wife and I had kids, propertly, mortgages etcetera, and I meet some important needs in spite of my lack of church interest, so it works.
To start cold-turkey would be a different story then. I think you have a hard decision.
The marriage issue is really the issue for me. If I marry a TBM and I decide in 5 years that I don’t want to go to Church anymore, I spend the rest of my life posting and venting on NOM and there may be conflict our whole marriage.I guess I’m kind of thinking out loud here.
If my GF dumps me, I’ll give online dating a try (again) and take out some TBM women. I’ll confess my non-literal belief to them and see how they respond. If they freak out, then maybe it’s just not going to work with a TBM, and I may just have to leave.
There is also the matter of Gospel discussions, where a TBM wife would say “God did this” or “Satan did that” and I’d have to say that I don’t think that either of those beings did anything.
The Church is one of the more expensive organizations to belong to. On my graduate student salary, which I anticipate having in the fall, I’ll make about $26,500 annually, so I’ll be paying $2,650 per year in tithing. If I go to 104 Church activities a year (two per week) then each Church activity will cost about $25. I like going to Church, but I have to decide if it’s worth $25 each time to me.
So these are hard decisions, and I don’t have good answers right now. I wish I didn’t have to make them. When I was not going to Church I was never totally comfortable with the typical single non-LDS lifestyle. When I came back to Church I thought that I had solved those problems. But here they are again.
I once asked a BYU biology professor about how to reconcile evolution with the Garden of Eden. He said he didn’t know. I was like, “Whadda mean you don’t know?” And he said he didn’t know. I think that the story of the Fall is more powerful as a myth and a metaphor than as a literal historical story. I think that the process of experiencing sorrow thorough knowledge gained is an experience we go through repeatedly in our lives.
Curtis wrote:The last paragraph, especially, says that the Constitution can’t answer the question definitively in this case – so, in practical terms, marriage becomes an issue that must be decided by the society itself, based on what it collectively values the most.
I’ve seen lots of facebook posts that try to answer the gay marriage question by making an appeal to the Constitution. If I understand you right, you’re saying that this appeal is unable to answer the question. I side towards that approach – and I think that answer is sort of obvious anyway, because if it was clearly in the Constitution, there would be no debate. I used to say that the Constitution is something that we made up to try to live together peacefully, and that all decisions like these are ultimately made by society. And we can made those decisions by trying to appeal to a founding document (like the Constitution) or just making our own decision.So is he saying that the question of the rightness of gay marriage is objectively unanswerable because of competing views on the function of marriage? He didn’t take a position for or against gay marriage – he seems to say that we need to decide. Is he advocating popular vote?
