Blast from the Past

[Anonymous]

If you sacrificed then you believed. I know I did on my mission.

I believed with all my heart.

But when presented with sufficient contradictory evidence, I altered my beliefs. I was never a True Believer in the sense of the word as I understand it today - someone who is so enmeshed with his/her belief system that he/she will continue to believe no matter what contradictory evidence may arise.

I actually was a True Believer in the sense that I didn't, and couldn't, take seriously the possibility that the church wasn't actually true. I just knew it was, and it was so obvious to me that the alternative simply wouldn't be taken seriously. Since I had this attitude, I empathize a lot with others who still do have that attitude, because I know what it feels like for the church to be obviously true.

In the quotes above, I actually pretty much agree with what Daniel Peterson said. If the church really is true, then there's no good reason to leave it, there's only the freedom to choose not to obey God and follow his counsel. And as DCP said, the problem is that we don't have perfect clarity in our understandings and knowledge, so it's possible for someone simply not to know that the church is true. That would explain people like us, in DCP's mind, I think. The bottom line is, however, that I'm actually quite confident now that the LDS church really isn't true.

I argued a while back that I think in many cases where sin precedes a person's exit from the church, loss of faith preceded sin. People's faith erodes, and therefore so does their sense of obligation. People's motives are complicated, and I doubt anyone has ever abandoned religion simply because they wanted to sin.

Exactly. If a guy leaves the LDS church and then enjoys a beer from time to time, most TBMs will just say he left the church because he wanted to drink. People have been brewing beers and ales for millenia. Long, long before there was a temperance movement, or Joseph Smith to copycat it, there were people brewing "mild drinks" from barley and wheat and rice and what have you. Having a beer is actually a perfectly normal, human thing to do, and beer and ale and wine are very ancient parts of human existence.

One might still decide not to drink for sound personal reasons, like the desire to avoid the risk that one is susceptible to alcoholism, for example, or they just grew up assuming that anything that wasn't water or milk was sweet like soda or juice, and can't wrap their minds (and tastebuds) around the concept of drinks that aren't. But once one believes that Mormonism isn't true, the sin-based revulsion against having a beer fades away. They are not "leaving to sin", as it were, so much as just re-joining the rest of humanity in a normal part of human existence.

Can people overdo it? Yeah, of course. If you leave the church and get all dysfunctional, that's not a good way to live no matter what you believe, and TBMs are going to say "see!?!? he just left because he wanted to sin!" and use you as a poster child to scare others away from apostasy. It's a handy way of distracting people from the intellectual problems with Mormonism.

edited: trying to reduce my verbosity, so I went in and cut out about 40% of my original post - hey, I'm working on it!

[_Sethbag]

However, our knowledge here is limited, fragmentary, imperfect, and distorted. So it's possible that one can leave the Church for reasons that, given the flawed nature of our knowledge in mortality, genuinely appear to be good and sufficient. It's a matter of our perceptions.

But our perceptions are always colored by our own individual personal history, character, knowledge, ignorance, desires, mental and emotional health, ambitions, etc. So no decision to accept the gospel or to reject it is likely to be purely rational, uncolored by "personal" factors.

I know this statement was made under the assumption that the LDS Church is true, but I am still amazed that he could write this without giving more credence to the notion that you suffer with the same limitations when you think you have gained a testimony as you do when you lose it. What makes testimony any more correct than a conviction that the whole thing is bogus, given the existence of these factors?

A good emotional reaction, or euphoric experience, plus the comfort of beliefs among which one has grown up. Never discount or underestimate how much Mormonism simply "feels right" and comfortable to a true TBM. I know I felt that way.

[_beastie]

Of course it's just a smoke screen, a mechanism used to discourage members from thinking about troubling issues.

I actually was a True Believer in the sense that I didn't, and couldn't, take seriously the possibility that the church wasn't actually true. I just knew it was, and it was so obvious to me that the alternative simply wouldn't be taken seriously. Anything that would prove the church not true was simply wrong, or misguided, or irrelevant. Since I had this attitude, I empathize a lot with others who still do have that attitude, because I know what it feels like for the church to be obviously true. This is also why it took into my late 30s to finally realize that the church wasn't true after all. It took a very long time for the little chinks in my belief, like knowing the church was wrong about things like Noah's Ark and evolution, and the origin of the human species, to work up to the level of a willingness to consider the possibility that the church is simply not true period.

I think the reason I did not quite fall completely into this was due to the fact that I was a convert. I joined the church at 19 because of the strong answer to my Book of Mormon prayer - but at the same time, God never did answer my prayer about Joseph Smith being a true prophet. It was an odd combination, that I think left open to my mind, along with not having grown up Mormon, the possibility that the church was not quite what it proclaimed itself to be. The missionaries and my sister (who had jointed some months prior to me) convinced me that if God told me "yes, the Book of Mormon is the word of God" then I could automatically assume Joseph Smith was a prophet. But I always knew that these were separate issues. Someone could be inspired Old Testament write a text that held "the word of God" without also being called to be a prophet called to restore the "true church". I went along with their reasoning because it felt so good to believe, but it was very easy and natural for me to begin suspecting the church wasn't what it presented itself to be when I learned more "dirt" about Joseph Smith in particular. So when I learned of his immoral behavior, I began pleading my case before God again to tell me Joseph Smith was a true prophet. By that time I had spent over a decade as an active, faithful member of the church, so I felt sure that I had proved my general worthiness to get an answer. I was sincere. I really did believe the church was true, and first viewed this is just a trial of my faith. I would come out even stronger on the other side, I believed. But as time went on, and no answer from God arrived, and more and more troubling information contradicting church claims arose, my confidence began to erode, and I really began to fear the worst - the church really wasn't true. It took me as long to give up on it as I did due to the strength of my experience with my Book of Mormon prayer. I do understand when believers insist it isn't just a feeling, although it's a type of feeling, the intensity is so beyond what we normally experience, day to day, that it's hard to accept it wasn't divine in origin. THAT was what kept me tied to the church for a long time past the point when I could intellectually believe anymore.

But not having grown up in the Mormon church makes it a bit easier, I think, to even begin considering that the church might not be true. I agree that one of the most important questions for believers is: if the church weren't true, would you want to know it?

I think often the answer is no.