Rambo wrote:It's always around the holidays I am thrown back into dumb Mormon talk. This time it was at my cousins house for dinner and they had the missionaries over. The missionaries shared [insert B.S. coincidence that no one could verify anyway]. So this missionary takes this as a sign from god that this was the "spirit" and my whole family believes it as well. Kind of just wants to make me throw up. I'm always tempted to ask questions[... an inquiring mind, also known as the second token of the Rational Thinker, the Logical Grip or Sure Sign of the Apostate.]
To me this is not a miricle at all and this is the type of crap that kept me in the church for so long. I was just too naïve at the time and I took people for there word when they told a story. I am postive that people leave out key points of a story just to make it sound like it was a miriacle.
Sometimes councidences just happen as well.
Rambo, in these last sentences is where my own experience veers off course from yours. I never did think these stories sounded right. My mind always began hunting for alternative explanations, which came quickly. For me, I think that I was on a slow, slippery decline from the age of 8. The baptism was touted up as such a momentous occasion. But it turned out to be no big whoop. No doves descended from heaven. This was the faith of my 'fathers'. So I presumed it to be true, but it seemed to me that there were crackpots involved in it that interpreted everything in a confirmation bias way. Paul Dunn was usually their favorite GA (funny how that one worked out for them).
For me, I was looking for some hook that I could tether myself to, and stop the decline. I grasped. I found the clarity and certitude of McConkie appealing in this regard (in a bcspace sort of way), even if he said a lot of crap that could only be uttered by someone not a crackpot if in fact it was true. Therein lied its appeal. McConkie was so damn whacky and authoritative, maybe he was on to something. It didn't need to make sense. Just crack open Mormon Doctrine, there it was. Stated point blank. How did it fit together? Didn't know, but this guy seemed to have all the puzzle pieces forming a picture in his head that he could see in his mind's eye. He did not seem dumb (exuded an aura that I think MST sort of emulates). Maybe if I just keep reading Mormon Doctrine entries, eventually that picture will form in my head too.
Nope, but that got me through late teen years and through to about the last 6 months of my mission. Then it just sort of fell apart. I started to realize that the pieces didn't fit together. Those telling those faith promoting coincidences, or attributions to deity the fact they found their keys after taking a breather and then resuming what had been hours of looking, went from being sort of whacky to being pathetically deluded.
Because I was always skeptical of these divine intervention stories, I always felt outside of the Mormon Club. Oh well, at the firesides there was usually a girl I was interested in, or at least ice cream or cake and daydreaming about what I'd do as soon as it was over.
