Belief is a choice.

[_honorentheos]

You don't have to go as far as rejecting perceived spiritual experiences entirely to dismiss Mormon epistemology. I mean, you can reject them altogether, but even if you accept spiritual experiences or proof of a God or whatever, there are some huge unquestioned assumptions in an LDS "testimony." One of them is that if there is a God, it must be at least be the Abrahamic god, and more specifically it must be the Mormon god. Another is that what you perceive as a spiritual experience is a valid way to test an empirical claim, and a third is that the spiritual experience means what the LDS Church tells you it means. The LDS Church never explains why you should agree with any of these assumptions, other than the circular reasoning of using Moroni's Promise to test Moroni's Promise.

True, but that's getting ahead of my point.

That being, all of us approach information that contradicts a core belief by asking, "MUST I believe this?" while information that supports our beliefs is approached by asking, "CAN I believe this?"

What you propose above is one example of many approaches by which a person could assess the truth of spiritual experience, but it doesn't answer the question, "MUST I believe this?" while someone outside probably wouldn't have a problem answering "yes" to the question, "CAN I believe this?"

I think it's worth considering how a person still somewhere inside the belief envelop would approach this instead of how it looks to those of us outside.

[_DrW]

It is a good setup for the apologists, because within this framework the apologists only have to make the weakest of plausibility arguments for Mormonism and then they can say things like, "What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love. That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance."

You know, I think I finally get what he's trying to do here. He's not making a stand on the hill of doxastic voluntarism, he's actually completely redefining the words faith and belief! Look at what he says there. Faith is "what we choose to embrace, to be responsive to." There's nothing there about mentally accepting the truth claims of the object of your faith. By this definition, you don't have to believe (in the standard understanding of 'believe') that anything the church teaches about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon is actually true in order to have faith in it. You just have to embrace it anyway and do what they tell you! You can love and embrace Mormonism while still thinking it's all make-believe!

Well written post. This sort of underscores the idea expressed here:

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told.
Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.

Mormons are conditioned from an early age to embrace their religion and taught that this is to be done by faith. If the conditioning process is effective enough, it simply will not matter if the religion they embrace turns out to be true or not. Within wider or narrower limits, properly conditioned individuals will do what they are told, regardless of whether or not it is right.

[_Bazooka]

Is belief an actual choice that you have, or do you just believe you have a choice on what to believe...?
(sorry, I couldn't resist, carry on...)

[_robuchan]

I'm still waiting to hear someone who believes that belief is a choice to address the following:

1. Imagine a scenario where you would have extreme incentive to change your beliefs. (ie a made up scenario where someone would give you tons of money, whatever)
2. The scenario should be pretty difficult to believe (don't make it too easy), but it should be within the "gray area", ie it should be at least possible.
3. There should be no moral basis in the belief, so as to not mix in other motives. ie don't make it about God or religion. You might say it's not worth $10M to denounce God, for example.

example: The Utah Jazz have a winning record. It would be very difficult for them to win the NBA finals this year. But it's possible. Could you change your belief so that you believe the Jazz will win the NBA finals this year. You have to pass a lie detector test (let's not argue the efficacy of lie detector tests) tomorrow where you state this belief. If you can pass it, you will be given $100M. Could you do it?

[_Darth J]

You don't have to go as far as rejecting perceived spiritual experiences entirely to dismiss Mormon epistemology. I mean, you can reject them altogether, but even if you accept spiritual experiences or proof of a God or whatever, there are some huge unquestioned assumptions in an LDS "testimony." One of them is that if there is a God, it must be at least be the Abrahamic god, and more specifically it must be the Mormon god. Another is that what you perceive as a spiritual experience is a valid way to test an empirical claim, and a third is that the spiritual experience means what the LDS Church tells you it means. The LDS Church never explains why you should agree with any of these assumptions, other than the circular reasoning of using Moroni's Promise to test Moroni's Promise.

True, but that's getting ahead of my point.

That being, all of us approach information that contradicts a core belief by asking, "MUST I believe this?" while information that supports our beliefs is approached by asking, "CAN I believe this?"

What you propose above is one example of many approaches by which a person could assess the truth of spiritual experience, but it doesn't answer the question, "MUST I believe this?" while someone outside probably wouldn't have a problem answering "yes" to the question, "CAN I believe this?"

I think it's worth considering how a person still somewhere inside the belief envelop would approach this instead of how it looks to those of us outside.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=21389&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

[_Quasimodo]

Pretending (especially if you know you are pretending) is not very psychologically healthy. Better to seek the truth and acknowledge it.

Woah, but Quas!

I would have to disagree. Pretending (only if you *don't know) is not healthy.

I love pretending and don't do it enough. My art demonstrates this. I strive for academicism too much. I need to pretend more.

You are correct, Z. Pretending is a very healthy part of childhood. Pretending as an adult gives one an opportunity flesh out options and make better choices.

I was responding to the specific idea that pretending to live a religion for the sake of family harmony is probably not a very good idea. It then becomes a situation where lying to others and lying to oneself is is required to maintain the pretense.

A life of denial and dishonesty seems unhealthy to me.

I'm sure I could have worded that earlier post in a better way.

[_brade]

I was responding to the specific idea that pretending to live a religion for the sake of family harmony is probably not a very good idea. It then becomes a situation where lying to others and lying to oneself is is required to maintain the pretense.

A life of denial and dishonesty seems unhealthy to me.

I'm sure I could have worded that earlier post in a better way.

I think you're probably right about that, and that's not the kind of pretending I meant. I meant something more like this. You don't have any good reason to believe that there is a Mormon style afterlife. However, you like the idea of it. It would be nice if it were true. So you go on in your life as if it is true. You don't deceive anyone. You acknowledge that you're living your life consistent with a pleasant hope that something is a certain way, and people more or less know that.

That's the sort of thing I had in mind when I posted about pretending, and I don't really see anything wrong with that. That's something apart from believing that there is an afterlife and that it will be a certain way, or as the case may be, that a certain book is historical or that a certain boy saw God.

My suspicion is that a lot of religious dogmatism is related to sloppy and lazy thinking about epistemology, and I think people adopt that sloppiness from the education they get from their religions as children.

[_Themis]

I remember points along the journey where I wondered, "The historical evidence may seem pretty strong, but how do I explain <insert personal spiritual experience that I really, honestly cherished and couldn't explain outside of there being a God>?"

You bring up what I view as the biggest reason many will reject or reinterpret the cold hard facts. If I hadn't already spent some time thinking through those issues before even finding some of these cold hard facts I probably would have rejected them and choose to keep believing based on my spiritual experiences. The ball got rolling for me hearing and even discussing afterwards with a member who had given their testimony that they didn't know, but believed, and why almost everyone else also didn't really know. It started me to really think about what we really know, and whether my experiences really came from God, or could me body create the experience. I never could eliminate that, and with further reading I had to conclude it was the likely explanation, so when the cold hard facts came along, it didn't take long to recognize the church was not really true. I could not have chosen to really still believe at that point.

[_honorentheos]

It started me to really think about what we really know, and whether my experiences really came from God, or could me body create the experience. I never could eliminate that, and with further reading I had to conclude it was the likely explanation, so when the cold hard facts came along, it didn't take long to recognize the church was not really true. I could not have chosen to really still believe at that point.

For me it was flipped, but the component parts were the same. I encountered the history first, then had to contemplate my way through the maze of circular reasoning that supports Mormonism.

The point being: Sure, it's obviously an M.C. Escher drawing when viewed from the outside. From the inside, it seems like one is climbing a celestial staircase. Choosing to stop climbing isn't such an obvious good idea, even when thoughts intrude such as, "Haven't I seen that water fall before, but as an aquaduct?"

[_Cylon]

You know, I think I finally get what he's trying to do here. He's not making a stand on the hill of doxastic voluntarism, he's actually completely redefining the words faith and belief! Look at what he says there. Faith is "what we choose to embrace, to be responsive to." There's nothing there about mentally accepting the truth claims of the object of your faith. By this definition, you don't have to believe (in the standard understanding of 'believe') that anything the church teaches about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon is actually true in order to have faith in it. You just have to embrace it anyway and do what they tell you! You can love and embrace Mormonism while still thinking it's all make-believe!

Well written post. This sort of underscores the idea expressed here:

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told.
Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.

Mormons are conditioned from an early age to embrace their religion and taught that this is to be done by faith. If the conditioning process is effective enough, it simply will not matter if the religion they embrace turns out to be true or not. Within wider or narrower limits, properly conditioned individuals will do what they are told, regardless of whether or not it is right.

Yes, that's it in a nutshell. You know, it's funny, when I first wrote my post I did it kind of tongue in cheek, but the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that's what's actually going on. I don't know if that was completely intentional on Givens' part, but the effect is the same. And I know he's not the first person to suggest a framework of valuing orthopraxy over orthodoxy in Mormonism.