Acquiring belief, then losing it

[_sock puppet]

Jonathan Haidt authored The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt basic hypothesis is that we initial form an opinion by our sudden reaction to fear, and then work backwards to come with justifications and reasons to back up our reaction. This dresses up an emotional reaction to look like it is the reasonable conclusion to the matter. I.e., cognitive bias. Haidt theorizes, as mentioned, that the position taken and thus buttressed through the process of cognitive bias, is our individual reaction to fear.

So what did we each fear that led us to a religious belief? For me, in the teenage years of middle school and high school--when my belief began--it was not a fear of death or not again seeing someone who had died. For me, it was a fear of the uncertainty of whether I could make in the adult world, on my own, without the constructs of parents towards a minor child and the buoyancy that one gets from the community, being in the same life raft with long-familiar faces. Like cognitive bias then postulates, I began rationalizing defenses for any criticism of the LDS church that, if the criticism caught hold with good traction, would threaten my social net, a protective shell like that of a tortoise. Initially, this process 'strengthened' my resolve. It did not strengthen or deepen my belief. Digging my heels in deeper each time that a threat came along did not make my belief more sincere, genuine or impervious to later threats.

For many missionaries, the 24/7 companion, the rules, the leaders checking up on them a couple of times a week, the zone conferences and mission president help the missionary's tortoise shell get thicker and stronger. It is, however, a lonely experience for which the rules allow little time for introspection. For me, having to dig deeper and be more self resourceful to make it through that insidious 2 years rather than fail, gave me a self-confidence that I did not need that LDS tortoise shell to go on. I knew that I could make it on my own in life without an LDS community. And in the process, with months to go on my mission, the proposition for me became whether the LDS truth assertions are in fact 'true'. (I'd had too many of the same emotional experiences in other, non-LDS controlled settings to base belief on just "warm rushes" that looking back on it were obviously self-induced. After reading the Book of Mormon the first couple of times, I couldn't even induce (and did not otherwise experience) those 'warm rushes' after further readings.)

With my reaction to fear of losing the communal social net into which I was born and raised now muted by having developed the self-resolve and confidence in that self-resourcefulness, I no longer needed from that fear reaction to immediately go into defensive mode and trigger the associated cognitive biases to rationalize away the criticisms of those LDS truth claims. I looked at them anew, and they all hinge on JSjr, top to bottom. He is the domino that if knocked over, so too go all the rest of the LDS truth claims.

The earnest, nearly blemish-free young, 14 year old farm boy tapped by god and angels, who diligently obeyed and did not falter--you know, the LDS myth spin--did not turn out that way when I looked deeper. While I looked at some other sources (in special collections at the U of U library), most of what came tumbling out was from the multi-volume History of the Church published by the LDS Church. It is one reason that I quote it here frequently. JSjr charged landowners for treasure hunting and was indicted, arraigned and faced a preliminary hearing as a criminal glass-looker for hire. He refused to give back to Sally and Willard Chase the odd looking stone found on their farm, despite promising to return it when they let him take it. He proposed as a bank the Kirtland Safety Society in 1836, but organized it as a joint stock company at the beginning of 1837. It was a scam. He had his followers pay $2500 to Chandler to buy mummies, declared that funerary scrolls inside where precious records of ancients' dealings with god, including on the sensen papyrus that it was the story of Abraham in his own handwriting--not just his own words, but by his own hand. The explanations to the facsimiles and the KEP inextricably tying the BoAbr text to the papyrus found (and proving it was not a translation) were the most clear-cut damnation of that for me, but so too was what the Egyptologists explained that the hieratics on the papyrus found actually say. There were all sorts of devious doings by Mormons at JSjr's direction there, in Missouri and in Nauvoo, including JSjr's polygyny and participating with married women in their polyandry (not much different than the typical swingers groups found in most suburbs these days including the denials, except it was done in the name of god and with a brief, unrecorded and illegal ceremony before he hopped in the sack with these extra women) as well as the Council of 50 and JSjr having set his sights on theocratic world domination. It was one thing to have faith in the LDS stylized version of JSjr, so earnest he wouldn't take a swig of whiskey as a teenager when his leg was being surgically operated on, it would have taken exponentially more faith to have continued belief after learning, for example, that according to the HoC he socially drank beer and ran a tavern in Nauvoo (as well as the litany of in-congruent behavior touched upon above in this paragraph). That much faith? Nope. Not me. Not after realizing I did not need a tortoise shell that belonging to the LDS community could provide.

I hope others that have ever believed, whether they yet do or not, will in this thread post what they think, looking back on their own lives, was the stimulus which created a fear and their reaction from which LDS belief was spawned and then cultivated through the process of cognitive bias. And for those that have lost their religion (whether in the back seat of a '57 Chevy or elsewise), will perhaps delineate how they overcame the fear and their reaction that had led to belief in the first place.