I wonder if there are any Mormons reading this thread who are now questioning their beliefs.
Almost certainly. One thread won’t be enough to turn someone into an apostate, but it all adds up. I read a lot of sltrib threads as a Mormon, as well as quite a few sdmb threads. I hated that the “anti-Mormons” always had cites and simple logic backing up their claims, while the apologists could only try to minimize the claims.
IIRC, this is the thread where someone linked to FAIRLDS to defend against the claim that Joseph Smith was a convicted con man before founding Mormonism. And the justification was that he could not be a con man, because to be a con man a crystal ball gazer has to be unemployed - and Smith was receiving a salary from his mark, therefore employed and not a con man. That’s actually pretty typical for LDS apologetics. It’s exhausting for a Mormon to read that sort of stuff and continue to believe.
A closeted atheist friend of mine (publicly Mormon) has said things similar to this. That it actually takes energy to engage in that kind of double-think.
I’ve read a fair amount of FAIRLDS and what used to be called FARMS. I don’t encounter many Mormons in my life now, only my mother and we do not talk about religion.
When I was a Mormon, there weren’t that many sources of information. We all knew that there were “anti-Mormon” literature, and we all knew that they lied and twisted the truth in order to deceive. I find it most ironic that it’s the apologists who twist words in order to cloak the fraud. Things like saying that it was “some early Mormons” who believed that all Indians were descended from the Hebrews. One poster on SDMB used naive to describe such a belief, which is interesting because it was clearly taught and believed by all prophets down through Spencer Kimball in the mid 80s, and perhaps later. I guess the statement above is technically true if one were to define “some” as “all” or at least “all but a tiny minority which didn’t include the prophets.”
This is one form of denial. Similar to the claims that the Book of Abraham wasn’t a translation after all or that the papyrus wasn’t really written by Abraham after all.
Then there is another type of denial, which goes against the time honored tradition that the prophets and apostles were actually inspired. Already the idea that they were inspired in all matters has been tossed under the bus, but now we see posters saying things such as the Church was only several decades behind other Christian sects on equality for blacks. It’s interesting to imagine how a god would be always on the lagging edge of social norms.
I don’t normally hang out in Great Debates, so I missed this thread…
Yeah. It was an evolving process for me, over a year or so… reading a lot of random sites/threads. (I hadn’t discovered SDMB yet, though!)
I have to say, though, that the characterization of the Tanners earlier in the thread as unreliable is spot on, though. There is a huge amount of logical, rational stuff out there questioning various claims of Mormonism, but the Tanners aren’t it – they mischaracterize all kinds of things. (I can’t cite, because I read it ten years ago and I don’t feel like reading it again, but at least in my experience, it was an order of magnitude worse than, say, the better stuff on exmormon boards, and several orders of magnitude worse than the threads here.) Reading the Tanners made me think, “Huh, if that’s the best they can come up with, the Church must be true!” (As opposed to reading some of the other, more cool-headed rational stuff, which made me rather more upset.)
That being said, I also must say that often the apologetics’ arguments pushed me further away from Mormonism than the anti-Mormons did. There’s all too often I thought, “Uh, your logic there? Is just plain wrong.”
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Adherents are asked to stand and raise their right hands while the Temple Narrator reads the following oath: “Each of you bring your right arm to the square. You and each of you covenant and promise before God, angels, and these witnesses at this altar, that you do accept the Law of Consecration as contained in this, (The Officiator holds up a copy of the Doctrine and Covenants again.), the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, in that you do consecrate yourselves, your time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed you, or with which he may bless you, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for the building up of the Kingdom of God on the earth and for the establishment of Zion.”
[/QUOTE]
…wow, really? I thought the Law of Consecration got jettisoned back in Joseph Smith’s time! That is… disturbing. That is really disturbing, actually, even though I really like the Law of Consecration as an abstract ideal of our relationship with God. But as an actual concrete ceremonial thing… doesn’t that bind you, in principle, to giving up everything you own to the LDS church?
I… am really glad that I had my crisis of faith before I had any kind of opportunity to get endowed. Wow.
Interestingly it was something very similar that stopped me from being a climate change skeptic
Yeah, the Law of Consecration is still one of promises you are forced to make in the Temple. (Well, you can leave at any time, but seriously, who’s going to leave in the middle?) It’s understood that you won’t have to actually sign over your house to them until the Second Coming, but it is useful to guilt you into callings. “Sorry, I can’t take this calling. Between work and the kids…” “Oh, so you DIDN’T promise in front of God, angels, and witnesses to give all your time to the Lord?”
But yeah, the Endowment was nothing but a negative experience for me. One that didn’t improve with endless repetition.
Piffle. Henotheism has its own development curve and making some figurehead god into the top of the pantheon is not part of it. Zeus, Jupiter, and Odin/Woden/Wotan were all the “father of gods” in early mythology among their adherents long before Christianity showed up. (And why are you dragging the Jesuits into this when they were not even founded until the sixteenth century? What major indigenous religion suddenly developed a “top god” only after European invaders showed up?)
That makes no sense. When some Christian is telling you “Worship our god or we burn you alive and sell your children as slaves”, how does telling them that you have a chief god help? We aren’t talking about people who went from door to door handing out pamphlets.
This is basically a copy from my post in another recent thread, discussing Mormons vs. mainstream religions. However, I think it’s relevant here because I believe that modern scrutiny is forcing Mormonism to abandon many of the teachings and to acknowledge that there are too many holes.
There is an interesting article written about a speech given one of the apologists, and he talks about where the Church would want to circle its wagons. If you think about it, they are already chucking a number of enormous doctrine and traditions out the door. It may not be as obvious to someone who is a member and watching it go slowly, but for someone like me who was completely isolated from the mid 80s until after 2000 when I started reading things on the Net, it was almost like they were two different religions.
In the 60s and 70s, we were a particular people, and proud of it, dammit. The world was wrong, we were right, we would die and go to the great Org Chart in the Sky. The Catholics were evil, the Protestants mislead, and there was only one true Church, so we didn’t want to be mainstream.
In the article, one of the first things to go would be the Book of Abraham.
This is rather brilliant. Naturally, there is the spin that the argument against the Book of Abraham is “so complex” is great. It’s not complex. It’s simple. It’s a fraud, and easily demonstrated.
While spinning is cool, what is brilliant is the suggestion to jettison damn near everything which Mormonism used to be. Note the six suggestions. Only one thing has anything to do with it. Gree is specifically talking about something which is clearly an embarrassment for the Church, but note that he’s allowing for even Joseph Smith to get thrown under the bus at some time in the future. Also note the phrasing, that “God talked and still talks with men through the power of the Holy Ghost.” The teaching used to be (actually still is) that Jesus talks directly to the men at the top. The phrasing here seems to leave a lot more wiggle room.
There are active Mormons on this board who are acknowledging that Joseph Smith “could have” got one of the core tenets wrong.
I don’t think it will take 100 or even 50 years for Mormonism to go mainstream. The availability of information via the internet is forcing a housecleaning, and it’s obvious the direction which has been chosen.
It surprised me when I was in the temple receiving my own endowment. Afterward, in the Celestial Room (the ornate room on the other side of the temple veil, where Mormons sit and bask in The Spirit), I asked the veteran temple-goers who accompanied me, “Did I just swear an oath to increase my tithing from 10% to 100%?” The response was “yeah, technically, but we don’t really do that.” After 19 years of being taught that making and keeping sacred temple covenants was the One True Path to eternal happiness, I was then told that inconvenient covenants could be disregarded.
On a side note, I always thought of raspberry hunter as a friendly, open minded Mormon. But in your latest post, you seem to imply that you are no longer a Mormon. Have you switched teams? If so, congratulations! I hope other Mormons treat you with the same non-hostile attitude that you’ve always shown us apostates.
! …Okay. I… have no words. I like to think that I’d halt right there and say, “Sorry, I can’t do that,” but my socialization not to kick up a fuss would probably cut in and prevent that. It’s much better I never had the chance.
Heh, sorry, I probably come across as all-over-the-place in my posts. Yep, I’m a practicing Mormon, go to church every Sunday, hold a calling, more-or-less do my visiting teaching, follow the Word of Wisdom, wear knee-length pants if I’m going to be around other Mormons, and I don’t see changing any of that anytime soon. But – I’d never had what I’d call the strongest testimony ever; I’m a technical person, which by itself leads to cognitive dissonance – so my testimony had its ups and downs – and about counts eight years ago I found all this stuff on teh interwebz about Mormonism (ironically, in a period where my testimony was relatively strong, while I was researching material for teaching a Gospel Doctrine class) and over a period of several months or so, feverishly reading all the pro- and con- material I could, I completely lost whatever faith I’d had.
But anyway, although I now think of myself as an agnostic, I can’t let go of the community and the support and the people, all of which I love. And the way the ward works together and the intertwining of lives and caring – I adore all that, and I don’t know that it would be possible to find without the faith that binds it all together at its root. (I think visiting teaching is awesome, but how could you make such a program work without a core group of people who fervently believed?) And I think the kind of faith that Mormons have is beautiful in a lot of ways, even if I can’t do it myself. So for those reasons I continue to be a Mormon.
(It feels weird to “out” myself, even on an anonymous message board. I’m pretty sure if I go back and look at all my posts, there are others that obliquely imply what I’m saying here, but I’ve never put it all out there like this. I’ve told close friends, all of whom are atheists so don’t count, and I have talked about it to church friends in extremely general and abstract terms – as a former Mormon, you can probably encode it yourself – and my bishop obviously knows that I can’t answer the first couple of temple interview questions in the affirmative… But anyway, you asked, so there it is. And they started it, by being so… hypocritical! … about the Law of Consecration. For some reason that bothers me a lot more than any of the other stuff brought up in this thread, mostly because a) I knew all the other stuff before, and b) it doesn’t affect me personally, whereas this would if I got endowed. I have severe issues with being forced to forswear myself.)
So, Mormon practice without Mormon belief. That sounds just about perfect, for the few who can pull it off. When we came out as non-believers, my Elders’ Quorum President recommended that route, and it sounds like his wife is in a similar situation. My family tried it. We lasted one week, and decided it wasn’t for us. Are you familiar with the work of John Dehlin? He gets some criticism from Mormons for discussing problems in LDS history, doctrines, and culture, and from ex-Mormons for encouraging doubters to remain cultural Mormons. But thousands of people in between love his Mormon Stories (.org) podcasts.
There’s no way I could be a cultural Mormon. I grew up believing it too deeply, then when I discovered it wasn’t right, I couldn’t make a transition to pretending to believe.
It’s personal for me. I grew up with Mormonism as the center of the universe, but starting in high school was when I started to have doubts, however strongly I subconsciously pushed them away.
When I went on my mission, one of the reasons I went was to see if I really could believe or not. I started to really read the Book of Mormon, and even not being exposed to any of the “anti-Mormon” literature, so it wasn’t anything which was an external influence. The more I read, the more I was convinced that if I was that if I had decided to made up a religion and write a book, this is what it would be like. (I know now that I would never be that good. Ah, the vanity of youth.)
But I prayed about it and prayed about it, and got more and more depressed. With my background as growing up in an abusive household, I wasn’t able to express this shock. First the branch president at the MTC (Missionary Training Center, where we studied Japanese for two months Stateside) and then the mission president both just gave me the same admonition to increase my faith.
A couple of months into my mission, I was in Nagasaki and had a companion who I couldn’t stand. I was isolated and depressed. I couldn’t speak Japanese yet and couldn’t get along with anyone. My companion believed that you needed to think about the gospel 24 hours a day, and that my problem must have been a lack of faith and work.
He was concerned, though, so he took me up by train to Fukuoka, where the president was. The president was a nice enough guy, I suppose, but they don’t prepare them to handle psychological issues. What I needed was therapy and SSRIs, what he had was only prayer.
Not that he actually used it, of course. Instead, he had decided that that day was the day to demonstrate why the lack of belief was behind all of my problems. So I was quizzed. Do I believe in the Book of Mormon? The First Vision? Etc. Etc. I was made to feel guilty on top of feeling bad. Mormonism had been my whole life. It was my family and friends. It was my life. I didn’t have the words, but I think I had no idea of what to do if it weren’t true. And the guy in front of me, who I had been lead to believe was called of God to lead, was now using my natural doubts to attack me.
The ironic thing is that it would have been so much more interesting if he had only whipped out three or four of the contradictory accounts of the First Vision to browbeat me. When Joseph Smith first encountered the divine did he see one god? Two? Just an angel? While the difference may seem trivial to outsiders, growing up in the faith, the whole reason for our existence was The Truth, which only the Mormon church had and only the Mormon church would ensure our salvation.
It mattered if Joseph Smith saw one god or two because he said it mattered. He and all the subsequent prophets and apostles would stand before the members and swear that only we had the Truth. This is what we were doing, taking The Truth to the world. We taught, as missionaries, that Joseph Smith saw and talked to God the Father, his Son and felt the Holy Ghost. The rest of Christianity was deluded into believing in the Trinity, a doctrine inspired by Satan.
So we taught our version of the Godhood, and there I was, depressed and sick, being shamed for not having faith in a fairytale. What I would give to go back to the early 80s with proof that Smith had changed his story repeatedly. Then I could have asked which version was I supposed to believe in. Which one would cure my depression and the pain.
This is the reason I could never be a cultural Mormon. That by pretending to believe, it supports those misguided souls who, perhaps unwittingly, use the teaching to hurt rather than to help.
At the end of the day, are more people helped or harmed? And even if a few more are helped, is it worth it?
Rhodes,I don’t think I could do it were I male (with all the attendant issues concerning the priesthood and going on a mission and presiding positions that I can cheerfully ignore… as well as the fact that Elders’ Quorum isn’t nearly as awesome a support group as Relief Society) or a complete LDS family (something about looking like a perfect LDS family but not sharing the beliefs, it sounds like the dissonance there could be hard). That sounds way more difficult than attending church as a church-single woman (nonmember husband). The fact that my husband’s a nonmember is already kind of a marker that I can’t be all that fervent (which is true; we were engaged before I had this epiphany), so there’s already a bit of low expectations for me, which makes it a bit easier as well, especially for being able to say things about having doubts (though again, usually heavily encoded) and not have people be totally shocked. I had not heard of John Dehlin, but he looks really cool – thanks for telling me about him!
TokyoBayer, I have been lucky enough never to have had an experience like that; if I had, I have no doubt that I wouldn’t be in the Church now either, even as a cultural Mormon. (The bishopric of almost every ward I have been in has known about my doubts, because they periodically want to know why I don’t have a temple recommend, and none of them has ever done what your mission president did. I even got upset at one of the counselors – this was before I came to terms with the whole thing – because he was supposed to tell me I was wicked and clearly had to repent of serious sins and that was why I had these problems with doubts, and then I could leave without looking back because I knew that was a lie – and he persisted in being compassionate instead.)
Another difference between you and me is that Mormonism was never the center of the universe for me – my mom, while she attends church, isn’t the most devout person in the world, and that rubbed off on me and my sister – so the shift was not nearly as great for me as it was for you.
(Interestingly, the thing that is the same about you and me is that in the end, what convinced me was not the pro- or anti- Mormon stances so much as it is that one thing I trust about myself is my ability to analyze literature, and the BoM does not read like an ancient document at all, to me; there’s a strangeness that the New Testament or Beowulf or what-have-you have that is entirely lacking, to me, in the BoM.)
My dad basically had his life saved by the Church when his dad kicked him out of the house; in a way I owe my very existence to the Church. For me, at least after I went to college (my home ward was… a mixture, though no worse than the non-LDS surrounding mixture), the Church has been nothing but a blessing. It’s provided me with an instant community and friends when I’ve moved into different areas, including the women who are my closest friends in this area. It’s saved me from the loneliness and isolation, especially as a new mother, that I’ve heard about from so many other women and that I experienced myself in the days I was less-than-active. It has taught me the joy of being part of a community that serves each other, constantly: that bears each others’ burdens and comfort those in need of comfort – and yes, they really do.
Plus which I’m a better person when I attend church. I can be fairly judgmental and get angry at people at times, and church, especially being around the members of my ward, really helps me with that and to be a more loving person, especially around my family (especially my parents).
So yeah, my experiences have been such that I do think it’s worth it – but I know I’m thinking locally and not globally. Globally, I don’t know the answer. How many stories are there like yours, versus stories like mine? I simply don’t know. I can only judge by what I’ve seen and felt.
At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters–what works for you. I, for one, really miss the built-in social network of the church. If they let you access that without the attendant pressure to conform your beliefs, that’s pretty cool.
I just hope you don’t run into problems when the kids start reaching baptismal age. Not even whether to go through with the ceremony itself, but because that’s when the indoctrination really starts in earnest.
It may have made a difference for me if I had ever felt like church were a home. Our family were the outcasts. Not only at school, but at church as well.
I guess along with this was that when my father was dying of cancer, and our entire family was coming apart; my older brother had isolated himself and refused to help; my oldest sister was in Chicago; my second sister had serious, serious problems, and was flopping in various people’s homes to keep her off the street; my younger brother was in the psych ward; and my mother was almost crazy with stress, I went to see our bishop because we were getting absolutely no help from anyone. The Home Teacher would occasionally break stride at church to confirm with my mother that everything was going well.
After breaking down in the bishop’s office and begging for some sort of help, he said he would do something.
And he did. Six weeks later our Home Teacher stopped by for a 15 minute chat, as well as to drop off the generic message from the First Presidency on whatever finer points of spirituality was being pushed that week.
The Relief Society did bring over a couple of casseroles after my father died. That was nice and shows fellowship.
But my mother deeply believed it and still does. She was the one who taught me most of what I know about Mormonism. Everything I heard in Sunday School, Primary, Young Men’s, Seminary or the MTC were already covered at home.
My mom has never really forgiven me for leaving the church. Sometime after I outed my brother to my family for raping me, my mother said something about how all of her children had disappointed her. My brother for raping me and me for quitting the Church. The funny thing is that in her mind, mine is probably the worse sin.
Bitter? Funny you would ask.
Erdosain, yeah, I wonder about that too. I’m glad my kid’s a girl. I think the indoctrination for boys is far worse for a lot of things – especially with the pressure to serve a mission. And some of the girl-indoctrination is sufficiently laughable that it was hard for me to take it seriously even as a teenager – no one in our family, for example, ever took the “Girls should stay home and be wives and mothers” thing at all remotely seriously.
TokyoBayer, I am so sorry; that sounds absolutely terrible, and in your place I’d be bitter too (probably more). Do I remember correctly that you were a Utah Mormon? (I’m pretty sure Rhodes was a Utah guy; not sure if I am conflating the two of you.) I’d never ever want to be a Mormon in Utah. I can say that the ward I’m currently in isn’t like that; there’s no way, from what I have seen them do for a number of families, that they’d allow that to go on without stepping in – but I do know that some wards, maybe many of them, can be like that. And your family – I’m definitely lucky (and my sister, who has left the Church for good, is even more lucky) that my parents are more laid-back about it (my dad’s disappointed in my sister, but manages to keep quiet about it most of the time, and although she outed me to him we simply don’t talk about it).
I was born in Utah, lived outside of Utah as a kid, and was back in the Salt Lake area from age 14 to 30. On the outside, I was the epitome of Mormonism. Internally, I had growing doubts until I finally started studying uncomfortable topics. This was shortly after moving to Texas.
ETA: And, compared to some of the other ex-Mormons on the Dope, I had a very non-traumatic childhood. I sure thought it sucked at the time, but I’m not in the same league as them.
As a never-a-Mormon, take heart that this is all way down the grapevine, but the pressure for mission thing may change. I’ve been seeing a lot of young 20-something Mormons posting articles and arguing things like “is it time to stop the pressure on young men to serve mission?” or “is the criticism of men who don’t complete mission warranted?” And stuff like that.