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The whole blacks and the priesthood thing was a huge issue for me too. I remember on my mission scrutinizing everything verse by verse trying to find some way that I could harmonize the racist doctrines and policy that the church had held earlier with the scriptures you quoted. I feel like I’m on my way out of my faith crisis now, and looking back I think everything centered around my lack of comfort with ambiguity. I needed everything to be spelled out in black and white. I wanted a direct statement from the church as to what was official binding doctrine and what was not. I’m not saying the church is perfect; I’m still perfectly aware of the flaws with it. But I think I can say in hindsight that my faith crisis was more about me learning to live with uncertainty than it was about determining whether the church was right or wrong. I was still pretty orthodox when I went on my mission, but I definitely did not fit into the mission culture. I never liked pushing truth claims, I hated the teaching format of “teach, testify, and commit” and generally ignored it. They train you to testify after each point you teach, but that felt so phony and cheesy to me that I just skipped it. I took a much more intellectual approach to teaching. Despite being different, I had very few problems with any other missionaries. I think you’ll find that being slightly heterodox may be to your advantage. You may be able to connect with a lot of investigators in a way that the cookie-cutter missionaries couldn’t. Especially the ones with harder questions who are sick of hearing the cop out phrase, “I don’t know the answer to that, but I know the church is true”. I’ve always been annoyed with how we report numbers. It makes the ward lists completely useless for things like home teaching. It just becomes another cause for needless guilt for the priesthood holders who feel they need to get 100% home teaching done to be ‘worthy’, and frankly, 2/3rd of the people on their list have not considered themselves to be “Mormon” for twenty years and do not want any contact from the church. I don’t think we need to throw away the baptismal records, but I think the records of local units could use a good housecleaning. wayfarer wrote:bc_pg wrote:In my mind there are 2 possible answers.
1) It is coming from God.
2) It is coming from you.
both! seriously.
Like
Old-Timer wrote:“Of course, it’s all in your head – but that doesn’t make it any less real.”
Double like.
The math analogy is super nerdy. I love it! As far as the paradox thing goes…. you’ll get used to it.
š Coming from a physics background you’ve probably been exposed to all sorts of paradox, like how light can act as both a wave and a particle. Or pick pretty much any concept from quantum mechanics. I won’t pretend to understand that stuff. It is completely counter-intuitive. But all the observations that we have been able to make seem to say that that’s simply how the universe is.
I’ll agree with you that it is absurd to think that God can both exist and not exist at the same time. (Sounds a little like Schrodinger’s cat to me). There are some things that are binary; like the gold plates either physically existed or didn’t. When it comes to more metaphysical things like the nature of God though… I think it is very possible for contradicting view points to be equally correct; every one is trying to describe an experience with the divine that they don’t fully understand themselves, and each individual will bring out different qualities.
Quote:I believe in Universal Truth. I just don’t believe we see directly and clearly enough to comprehend it, except for the general outlines of fundamental principles.
I like what Ray had to say on this one. I think that about covers it.Welcome! I’ll just put my two cents in. I’m a little over 6 months into my journey now. For a long time it seemed completely unfeasible that I would be able to believe any of it again, but I feel like I’m finally starting to make peace with a lot of things. Don’t be too quick to dismiss a path of belief, but be willing to accept that your new form of belief may look very different than your old one. I disagree with bc_pg’s comment about sunk costs. That may be a good strategy when applied to business, but I’m not sure it applies here. I look at my relationship with the Church more as a marriage than a business venture. There are a lot of negative costs involved in choosing to end a marriage. Walking away from it simply because your spouse turns out not to be the person you thought he/she was when you first married them I don’t think is justifiable. I think there needs to be an attempt to do some serious self evaluation and repair the relationship first. Of course, going with the analogy still, sometimes the relationship may be so abusive or psychologically damaging that a divorce is the only healthy option. (And this is all coming from a single guy, so I apologize if my analogy falls a little short) . I’m not going to push for staying in the church or leaving, but I think maintaining some type of faith is definitely viable after a crisis. Kumahito wrote:the church’s budget from year to year is BYU (second only to physical facilities construction and maintenance). I just had to question whether it was fair, truly charitable or even defensible to spend such a large outlay of church $$ to educate 28,000 white kids from the US
You’re not the only one to ask that question. When I was at BYU-Idaho there was a story circulated about President Hinckley (I think it was him anyway,but it could have been one of the twelve). Anyway, they had just finished the Taylor building, which is an absolutely beautiful chapel-like structure and were giving a tour of it. When they were in the chapel area, he look out across everything and went silent. The person giving the tour asked what he was thinking. He said “I was thinking about how much we do for so few, and how little we do for so many”.
That might turn out to only be a faith promoting rumor that the teachers liked to tell, but nonetheless I think many of the church leaders are aware of the problem.
InquiringMind wrote: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?
I’m not sure they do. Of course, I also thought the idea that being dunked in water could make or break someone’s chances of getting into heaven was completely ridiculous long before I had my faith crisis. I personally don’t see a whole lot of value in getting a temple marriage over a civil marriage right now other than to meet the expectations of family members.
InquiringMind wrote:My suspicion is that single New Order Mormon girls are rare in the Church
I’m not sure this is true. 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….InquiringMind wrote: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.
Same here. I still plan on saving myself for marriage, but I’m not sure how many girls outside of the church would be ok with that.
Just finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago. It has probably helped me the most of anything I’ve read thus far in my faith journey. Thanks for recommending it Bryan! InquiringMind wrote: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.
Hmmm. Maybe there’s a market for this. I should see if the URL is still available and starting coding the website. Haha. But yeah, you summed up the issue pretty well. I pretty much only know Mormon dating culture too. Well, really only BYU-I dating culture which is a thing unto itself. I’m kind of torn on it – I’m pretty optimistic about finding a place for myself within the church despite my intellectual issues, but when it comes time to renew my temple recommend I’m not sure I will. I simply cannot answer all the belief questions and my integrity is too important to me. It’s a complicated situation. I totally agree with your quote though; I need to figure out where I’m going first before deciding who should go with me.This was a really hard article for me to read. I’m just the kind of person that almost never gets angry, but for some reason materialism has always been a hot button issue for me. I have a really hard time around business-minded people. Even when I know them personally and know their character, when they start talking about business ventures I just want to explode. I’m really trying to keep a positive attitude towards the church as I’m going through my faith journey. But I really need to back up and take some deep breaths after this one though. I really don’t have an answer to that. A lot of those same things bother me as well, but I just have to remind myself that my mindset was very much the same before going through my faith crisis. I sincerely believe that people are basically good; most of the evil things we do are not intentionally malicious. We just fail to see the harm in our actions because of our own short sightedness. It takes life experiences to expand our world view enough to understand the suffering of others, and there’s not much that can substitute for that. I have many relatives who have lived in the Mormon Corridor their entire lives, and I’m a little embarrassed at the things they say sometimes about “non-members”. I just try to remind myself that their opinions of people outside of the church has more to do with their lack of exposure than it does with their lack of moral character. The approach that has been healthiest for me has been to simply accept human nature for what it is. Even though I may disagree with somebody’s beliefs or tactics of spreading them, I can at least acknowledge that from their current world view they are doing something good, and it helps me to love them more as a person.
I really liked Wayfarer’s comments on the Holy Ghost. I too believe that there is a deeper part of human nature that is spiritual and intuitive. I think the phenomena that we call the Spirit may well be rooted in the sub-conscious mind rather than a spirit entity whispering in my ear, but those details are irrelevant. I find that whenever I am in tune to it, it brings greater clarity and spiritual understanding to my life. I’m not sure I would be feel 100% comfortable answering yes to this one if I were to have an interview right now, so I answered no. My feelings about Jesus Christ are almost word for word what wayfarer just described, but I don’t know – I guess I just feel like that is so far from the what most Mormons think of when they say “I believe in Christ” that I’m not sure if I personally feel it is valid. Believing in many aspects of Jesus’ life like the resurrection and atonement I think comes down to an act of faith. We simply do not have enough evidence to pulls me one way or another. But I think to at least some degree the Christology that has been handed to us by Christian tradition over the centuries has elevated him above what He probably was. One thing that is really compelling for me is how the archetype of a savior figure seems to pop up EVERYWHERE in mythologies of various cultures. The idea that all of these things point to Jesus as the Savior is something that I might be able to hang my hat on.
