marg wrote:Sethbag, what country are you from? Were you raised by parents very religous? both Mormon? What influences do you think encouraged you to critically think... mainly from parents, from school, or no one in particular?
I'm from the US. My parents were both born in Utah, but I was born in Arizona and moved to Massachusetts when I was a kid. So I grew up around non-mormons. I was the only Mormon in my class in high school. None of my neighbors were Mormons, nor any of the friends I hung out with at school. While during that whole time I was truly a dyed in the wool kind of absolute Mormon believer, I can see how this experience of "real life" with non-mormons has enabled me to see the parallels between Mormonism and the beliefs of a lot of other people out there and realize that a lot of what Mormons think is unique and "special" to Mormonism really isn't.
I've always had an active interest in science. When I was a freshman in high school I wanted to be a geologist or meteoroligist or something like that, because that's what we were studying. As a sophomore I wanted to be a biologist when we studied biology. As a junior I wanted to be a chemist. As a senior I wanted to be a physicist. Well, that was the last I had done, so I started studying physics in college. I eventually strayed and switched to computer science and German, but for practical reasons and not because I didn't love science.
I think the open attitude, for the most part, toward science in the church helped me feel comfortable learning how to actually trust science, which is not the same thing as believing everything science says implicitly. I stopped disbelieving evolution and believing it instead in my teens, and that started me on a long journey of identifying more and more things (like the Noah's Ark story) that I couldn't reconcile between the LDS church's teachings and the things I believed scientifically. I believed there was good reason to trust the science more in these areas, and so I acknowledged that the church got it wrong on some things. That was the initial chink in the armor. I rationalized it all as not important to my salvation, etc. But the realization of an increasing number of cases where the church simply had it wrong grew and grew, and I had a hard time with that. When finally confronted with the depths of Joseph Smith's polygamy and abuse of power (telling a young girl that God had given her to him, and that an angel would kill him if she didn't agree to marry him, IS an abuse of power), combined with the even more potent evidence that Joseph Smith made up the Book of Abraham, really pushed me over the edge.
Ever since I made the fateful realization that I was kicking against the pricks of truth, and that the LDS church really might not be true, and then eventual realized that it is not in fact true, I've seen more and more ways in which this is now obvious. With the clearing of the fog of mental conditioning, and the ever-increasing clarity of being able to see the church from "the outside", I'm realizing more and more that there's been this gigantic puzzle all along showing clearly that the church is really man-made and not from God. This puzzle is made up of a great many individual puzzle pieces that each contribute to the picture. Book of Abraham is one such puzzle piece. Joseph's deception and abuse of power in the polygamy case is another. Lack of inspiration with regards human origins, age of the earth, things not dying before Adam, Noah's Ark, the many problems with the Book of Mormon, etc. are all pieces of this puzzle. That the LDS conception of how they receive "knowledge" from the Holy Spirit is not reliable, and not even unique, and that a lot of other people in the world use the same ideas to justify their "knowledge" that their beliefs are correct, is yet another puzzle piece. That Brigham Young was so uninspired that he taught things like Adam/God, blood atonement, black priesthood ban and the smearing of all black people with the believe that right out of the womb they were reaping the disadvantages they deserved as a result of their actions in the pre-existence, all these are yet more pieces of this puzzle.
When you put all these puzzle pieces together, you realize that it all clearly shows that this church is just a man-made institution like all the other churches out there. It's plain as day. Maybe you have to be a right-brain, "big picture" kind of guy, but that's what I am, and I'm seeing the "big picture" here and realizing that this church simply is not true. No way, no how. And tackling each and every one of the very many puzzle pieces and trying to present a plausible explanation that cancels out their evidentiary value is simply not cutting it. The net result of all these puzzle pieces is as clear as day, the nose on my face, etc.
