Please don't tell me my youth was robbed of me based on my family and community pressuring me into something as flimsy or flimsier than the evidence for the existence of unicorns.
You robbed yourself because you won't accept spiritual evidence which is all any religion will provide. I find it highly unlikely that anyone lied to you regarding positive claims about the Church so really perhaps your parents simply did what they thought was best and now you don't believe. Get on with your life and stop blaming others for your unhappiness.
In the last 15 years, I've also saved my parents from the delusion of Mormonism. They are very much appreciative, and much more rational than they ever were before. Delightful people. I have no animus toward them about the way that I was raised. They were merely little cogs in the machine centered in SLC that interfered with my having had a normal youth. That is, my parents were each under the societal and family pressures themselves, to in turn exert such on me. When I shrugged off that yoke of Mormonism, they saw me become a much happier and self-sustaining individual. They've each sought and attained such for themselves. It is an example that it is never too late to begin living life on your own terms, without the hokie notions of a 19th Century-born religion.
Yeah, because that's not circular logic or anything.
"The Church is authoritarian, tribal, provincial, and founded on a loosely biblical racist frontier sex cult."--Juggler Vain "The LDS church is the Amway of religions. Even with all the soap they sell, they still manage to come away smelling dirty."--Some Schmo
I think 'spiritual evidence' boils down to this: if you assume the religion is true, then that is the evidence it is true until it is conclusively proven to be false. Since it cannot be proven true or false, voila' it is true! Evidence, I tell you, evidence!
Of course, epistemologically speaking, that's nothing more than a bootstrap argument. There is no rationale for beginning with that assumption than there is for not. Indeed, the unicorn shows the epistemological absurdity.
If you assume that unicorns exist, then that is the evidence that they exist until it is conclusively proven that they do not exist. Prove that negative proposition. Since no one has provided conclusive proof that unicorns do not exist, voila' unicorns exist.
On the other hand, if we begin from the premise that something is not true until proven, both unicorns and religions fail miserably.
In the end, it seems that there is no more evidence for Mormonism's truth claims than there is for the existence of unicorns. Both give believers warm fuzzies. So it is merely arbitrary by those who would accept one but not the other. For the epistemology of those two propositions is the same.
sock puppet wrote:Both make believers feel warm and fuzzy.
So is your reasoning, if unicorns never existed, then Mormonism can't be true either?
I'm not sure what you're going for, myself.
stem, certainly DCP can help guide you to making better attempts at derailing a thread.
No. The reasoning is that both belief in Mormonism's truth claims and belief in the existence of unicorns is based on the same faulty epistemology. Not that prove that one does not exist means the other is false.
bcspace wrote: You robbed yourself because you won't accept spiritual evidence which is all any religion will provide.
We all know that people interpret their spiritual experiences in favor of their religion, but the real problem for LDS is that there is plenty of evidence against. I can't think of another major religion that has so much evidence against it's claims.