(Via American Scot)
From my earliest memories of childhood I can recall to having had an adverse reaction to going to church.
My father was raised in a Mormon family that was quite devout, my mother’s family on the other hand was a mix of Presbyterianism and Alcoholism.( the latter,my grandfathers religion, later to become mine) So my parents felt it was important to put on a good face for my grandmother( dad’s side) and have all of us participate in the LDS Primary and Sunday school classes that other children my age participated in.
I remember being dragged from the gymnasium of the church (where we would play before primary) more than a few times to these little indoctrination classes. Mainly because I really couldn’t stand to hear about some guy, who looked like my Uncle Leonard (a biker who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1973) and what he had to say about “The Kingdom of Heaven”, or about his father. I did however find the prospect of a “Holy Ghost” kind of cool! ( I was 6) Then they would begin to drone on about some man by the name of Joseph Smith, and how he was a profit of our heavenly father. Just like Spencer Kimball. (LDS President at the time) And some jazz about golden plates and a bunch of other hullaballoo! Needless to say, this was all too boring for me. But for my baptism at 8, I stopped going to primary and Sunday school until I reached the age of eleven. All reluctantly for two reasons,to attend Boy Scouts and look at cute girls.
As a teen I became involved in the LDS Priesthood almost by accident. All of my friends at the time were forced to attend church on Sunday. So I started to tag along for kicks. It was seventh grade, and since my birthday is in August, most of my friends were half a year older then me. So they all “graduated” from being Deacons, to Teachers before me (to much time to explain, read this) So I was given the post of being the Deacons Quorum President. I’ll never forget how it all came about. I was asked in to see the Bishop of our ward. He sat me down and proceeded to tell me and I quote “We (the brethren) have been praying for guidance in choosing a new Deacons Quorum President, and God has directed us to you.” I just about fell out of my chair! You see, at the time I had been smoking marijuana and drinking regularly for a year! At first I thought, “well maybe this is a sign for me to change.” Then later after accepting the position. I realized it was a “warm body” thing, and the whole thing was a farce! My parents made me stick to this responsibility, half assed I did, but I still continued to get stoned and drink!
By the time I was in high school, I had completely given up on Mormonism. I renounced my membership, and made it abundantly clear to my classmates I was not the least bit interested in going back to their church! Of course this made dating a challenge, as most of the girls in my high school were LDS. More than a few tried to talk me into going to church with them, but I resisted.
Once out of high school, I met more like minded people, and began to broaden my horizons so to speak. I ran with a crowd that was made up of a Lutheran, a Catholic, a Baptist, a Greek Orthodox, and another ex Mormon. We had many discussions about religion and I was exposed to different ideas. Our common thread was that we were all unhappy with religion of our parents. We shunned religion, and looked for god in drugs and booze.
This trend lasted for quite some time. Then in my early twenties, my addictions began to take a toll on my mental health. As I blogged before, I ended up in a psych ward of a Catholic owned hospital, after a futile attempt at my own life. (Thank goodness!) While in the ward I was visited by a social worker who was also a Nun. She was very kind to me, and comforted me a great deal. We discussed my “spiritual” condition and I asked her some questions about her faith, which she readily answered. So upon release I contacted my friend who happened to be going through conversion classes at a Catholic Church nearby where we grew up. He invited me along to see what it was all about. I had always had a fascination with Catholicism, I then remembered going to Midnight Mass with an old girlfriend and how I was awed by the pageantry. So I felt like maybe it would be a great help. After a year and a half of classes, and the dating of a girl from a devout Catholic family, I was baptized and confirmed at Easter Vigil. After the relationship with the girl ended, and the priest whom I respected retired, (He admitted that the Old Testament was all story and not meant to be taken literally) I grew disillusioned with going to mass, and as quickly as it began I was no longer a practicing Catholic.
I then began to question the existence of a heavenly guardian again, but this time I was influenced by the astronomy class I was taking at school. I read of the Big Bang, and of star nurseries, where old materials from stars are reformed to create new ones. I also learned of how all the elements that make up our universe are contained within us. I saw a cycle that made more sense to me, then any mythical creator working with magic and clay to create us and our environment. This was the foundation of my agnosticism.
Again I was forced to make a choice of belief. Again it was over my drinking and drugging. I hit a bottom and ended up going to AA. I was desperate to find help, so when they (the other members) spoke about god and how he/she/it was the answer to not drinking, and the only way to find god was through the 12 steps. I tightly held my nose and drank the medicine. Soon I was sober,and things began to look up for me. I was experiencing acceptance from others like me. And it felt good. How could it not? I wasn’t drunk every night and hung over every morning! All the while I was being told this was all “gods will” for me. So I faked my beliefs, and held fast to the people around me. I didn’t want to rock the boat, so I kept my agnosticism inside.
I then moved from SLC to Chicago when I took my current job, and I really had a hard time getting involved in AA here. So eventually I stopped going to meetings. Well as you might guess, I relapsed and struggled in and out of AA for the next six years. All the while finding it harder and harder to believe in a god. And the more I struggled with my belief, the more I struggled with staying sober. Finally in 2003 I gave up the drinking and went back to AA. But this time I decided to do it on my own terms. I decided from day one that I wasn’t going to pray to any “higher power” or work the steps in the manner that most think they should be done. (belief in god) I soon found out that there were others that felt the same way as I, and some openly talk about their atheism. I still attend AA, but not to hear about god and the steps, but to be reminded of why I don’t drink anymore. The support of others who know what it is like to suffer in addiction is a very powerful thing, a “higher power” if you will. Having said all of this, I can honestly say that I am more at peace with myself, then I’ve ever been.
So I guess this is where I will own up to that Red A on the right hand side of this blog.
I am an atheist! I don’t believe in a god, nor can I prove there isn’t one. I’ll leave that up to you!
If you have the same struggles as I have had, don’t despair! You can be an atheist and stay sober, and do it with a smile!
Dear Dr. Dawkins,
I have no idea if you yourself will read this, but I wanted to share my story with you anyway because you are such an important figure in my life. I can never thank you enough for the ways that your work has set me free and enhanced my life. This isn’t so much a story of how your work has converted me to atheism as it is a story of how your work has made me confident and secure in my atheism.
I was born into a strange family. On the surface we were Mormons, but our lives moved with a deeper current of Evangelical Christianity. When I was six years old, my parents divorced – the greatest scandal my family has ever seen – and my mother moved my sister and me out of rural Idaho and into the more open-minded “blue state” of Washington. I shudder to think how I would have turned out if I’d stayed solely under the influence of my patriarchal, bible-thumping Idaho family. My mother still felt that it was important for our development to know our father and his side of the family, and to spend time with them. We spent every summer in Idaho. I am certain that if I’d had the skills and the courage to tell my mother what my father and his side of the family were doing to us, or even if I had the understanding to recognize how wrong it was, that I never would have been subjected to such abuse again. But I believed that was I was being told was right and good – such is the power of religious indoctrination.
Nurturing mental illness seemed to be the hobby of my father’s side of the family. My father himself was incorrectly diagnosed and treated as a paranoid schizophrenic (much later in his life, he received the correct diagnosis of severe bipolar disorder). Part of his delusion was a belief that he was the true prophet of God – or perhaps that he was Jesus himself, come again – it was never entirely clear. He was a charismatic man, and he convinced his family that it was true. Of course, they were already primed and ready to believe anything that came to light by means of “revelation” – if Dad said that Jesus had revealed his divine prophecy to him, then damn it, it had to be so. My father could even point to passages in the Bible that seemed to support him specifically as the prophet that would herald in the End Times and Jesus’ return to Earth. The passages seemed convincing to me, but I was only a little girl – what logical processes could I really apply to such a story?
Every summer, I was surrounded by Evangelical beliefs and was immersed in this strange culture of listening with reverence to any “prophecy” that my father made. The pastime of my family was looking for signs of the Second Coming and discussing the Trepidation to follow. I had not yet been baptized, but I was too scared to ask that it be done for fear that I would reveal myself as a sinner, in need of cleansing, and that the Holy Family would cast me out.
Every single moment of my young life became a constant, fearful watch for signs of Christ’s imminent return. Every lunar eclipse was the moon turning to blood; every hint of war or negotiations to avoid war was the Last Battle; Schoemaker-Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter, an event that should have thrilled me, was the “stars falling from the sky,” an event that instead filled me with dread of what was surely to come. I fancied seeing Jesus’ face in benign cloud formations and was sure that it meant He would show up to smite me tomorrow. I must have played and had friends, but I literally have no recollection of anything occupying my time other than worrying about my destruction at the hands of an angry Christ. I was constantly afraid, and constantly depressed. I remember having no solace from my fears of the Second Coming, and every moment I was around my father’s side of the family, my fears were compounded. My childhood was a complete wasteland of family-imposed terror and religious lunacy. I was too afraid to do anything that normal children do. How could I find it fun or safe to ride a roller coaster or a horse when God, who loved me and wanted the best for me, was so much more dangerous and unpredictable? I did nothing; I went nowhere; I made no friends. My life was devoted entirely to listening to anything my insane father spouted and trying to find some way to fit it into current events.
Strangely, this knack I developed of finding correlations between “prophecy” and current events was the only thing that provided me some comfort. It gave my life an air of predictability and security. If I could see what this all meant, then surely I could avoid the worst of the disasters to come. The closer I grew to my father and the more I paid attention to his prophecies, the safer I felt. After all, what better place to be when Christ came back to smite the world than next to His divine prophet?
Unfortunately, my worldview was shaken yet again when one of my uncles decided that he wanted a stake of the attention my father was getting from the family. My uncle was better than a mere prophet – he decided that he was actually Jesus Christ himself. And he, too, had all the revelation and scripture to prove it. My family became even more unstable and weird. Soon somebody had decided that they both couldn’t be Jesus – clearly one was really Jesus, and the other was the Antichrist.
Well. Now who to choose? Suddenly it was no longer safe to be my father’s little handmaid – what if I’d chosen wrongly, and he was the Antichrist? I lost my taste for interpreting world events and descended deeper into depression and fear.
Around the time I was 15, my mother caught onto the way my depression seemed to wax with my trips to Idaho and decided that I needed to stay in Seattle during the summers and spend time with my happy, normal, teenage friends. I didn’t go back to Idaho again until my grandfather’s funeral a couple of years later. Two years’ distance from the craziness gave me marvelous perspective. Suddenly, my entire family looked pathetic. It made me sad on their behalf, that they’d led themselves so far into insanity. My fear of the Second Coming became less pervasive, but it still persisted in the back of my mind whenever there was a threat of violence in Israel or whenever a lunar eclipse occurred.
Throughout my teenage years, I felt that I needed some kind of spiritual polestar in my life and I began learning about varying religions, trying to find where I fit. I liked the idea of a loving, kind God rather than the wrathful bogeyman I’d been raised with. I soon discovered that the Mormon church didn’t teach the kind of wacky End-Times prediction games that my family had ascribed to it, and that it was in fact a kind, caring, supportive community that believed in a “user-friendly” Jesus. I had myself baptized at the age of 19 and felt happy and secure with faith for the first time in my life.
Alas for my faith, it was not to last. I decided around the same time I was baptized that I wanted to be a biologist and work to conserve habitats and animal populations. I had very little money and, being white, qualified for disturbingly little aid from the state even though I was living ridiculously below the poverty line. I saved my money for several months and then enrolled in a single biology class to begin my education, planning to continue working and applying for aid until I could afford a full quarter of classes at a time.
My biology class utterly changed my life when we began learning about evolution.
I knew “the basics” of evolution – animals change over time in response to changes in their environment, and over time new species arise. I understood that we evolved from apes, but I believed that God guided evolution according to His plan. But learning about it on a college level completely opened my mind to the awesome power of biology and genetics. I was hooked and when my money ran out I continued to eat up every book I could find on the subject, including The Selfish Gene.
It was about this time that I began to realize that God’s hand wasn’t necessary in guiding evolution at all. It guided itself most ably. But surely God was necessary to have started the universe. This led me to a couple of years’ worth of self-education in cosmology, astronomy, and chemistry. It wasn’t long before I’d formed a clear picture of the universe existing quite well on its own without God, thank you very much.
But I still held that kernel of fear of God. What if it was all true anyway? Couldn’t God be testing me with this knowledge of the universe? Couldn’t he be setting me up for damnation, backing me into this corner of atheism so that he could ride out of the heavens on a white horse and spear me some day soon? Maybe after the next lunar eclipse? The “god box” in my brain was in an all-out war with my reason, and it was most uncomfortable. I began to have panic attacks and was even hospitalized with one especially severe one. I was put on anti-anxiety medication, which did calm me down enough to learn how to beat the god box into silence and let my peaceful reason control my thoughts…most of the time.
Around this time, I read an essay on the internet written by a young Airman. It was a to-the-point debriefing for the religious, telling them what atheism was and was not, explaining why one becomes an atheist, and what an atheist’s world view is like. I was so enchanted by this simple logic and clear thinking. I’d never seen atheism described so eloquently and simply before. I thought, “I would like to be an atheist. But what if God wouldn’t approve?” I began writing to the young man and we soon developed a strong friendship. He helped me slowly shed religion in favor of rationality. Our friendship intensified and soon we were visiting each other during his military leaves. When he was finally released from service, incredibly getting out at the height of the Iraq war, he told me that he had no home to return to. I invited him to come live with me. He accepted, and soon we were planning our wedding, which, I am pleased to say, was completely non-religious.
However, I didn’t fully let go of the idea that God MIGHT be lurking out there somewhere, waiting to get me, until my father died in 2003. The fact that trumpets from Heaven didn’t herald his ascension into the sky as a divine prophet had a little something to do with it. He simply died alone in his apartment, in his sleep with the television on, as any regular human being might die. That simple death cut the last thread of belief in God for reasons I may never fully understand.
On a recent vacation, though, I realized that my religious indoctrination still had some hold over my mind. My husband and I were both a little bit drunk in our hotel room, and a news story came on about some stupid political event or other. I think the alcohol allowed the god box to spring back to life. It just triggered something primal in me – I began to panic and cry in total terror. My husband tried to comfort me and tried to understand what I was so upset over. I couldn’t even identify it myself. What was it about this news story that made me fall completely apart? After much careful thought, I decided that I’d been trying to use it to predict the Second Coming again, and that had in turn brought up the old terrors of my childhood. How stupid, to worry about something I didn’t even believe in – and I truly did not believe in the existence of God any longer – not one little bit.
This episode made me realize how deeply my brain had been wounded at such a young age. I could still have psychological relapses into a fear that was so strong that I would cry over a fictional character’s wrath. I was so angry that I could barely enjoy the rest of our vacation – and when we got home, I headed to the local book store and perused the atheism section (which is sadly tiny, by the way). I found The God Delusion and read the whole thing during a two-day power outage with a flash light. I went through many batteries during those two days.
In The God Delusion, I found the answers to my questions about why and how my brain could continue to have this deep-seated, primal reaction to something that I knew to be false. I was so relieved to know that I wasn’t crazy that I cried all over again, but this time it was a wonderful release of all the pent-up fear and tension. After reading the book, particularly the parts about your discussion with Jill Mytton, I felt NORMAL for the first time in my life. And I felt secure for the first time in my life, too. I understood that God was a fantasy, and I understood why and how my brain continued to fear that fantasy. Once I had that knowledge in my hands, I was able to master my fear and completely tamp it out.
I feel so free and happy now, and I feel like I have you to thank for it. Thank you so very much, from the bottom of my heart – your work is amazing, inspiring, and enlightening, and it has saved my sanity. I feel that I owe you so much. I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life.
(Via Secular Skeptic, Part I: What Took Me So Long?)
My road to atheism was long and difficult. I’ve only actively identified myself as an unbeliever for less than a year, but the questioning started long before that. I’d like to explore, for my own benefit, and hopefully the benefit of anyone under similar circumstances, what took me so long.
I come from a family of 7th-generation Mormons. On my mother’s side, the first convert was a man named James Lake, Jr., who was taught and baptized by Brigham Young himself in the late 1830s, shortly after the foundation of the church. On my father’s side it wasn’t much later, as one of my ancestors was taught and baptized over in Europe by one of the early missionaries. People on both sides of my family came across the plains in the wagon train with the pioneers, and much of my family tree around that time is gnarled with polygamy. Today, the vast majority of my extended family is Mormon, and the vast majority of my friends, throughout most of this story, were Mormons.
Growing up, I was extremely devout. I did my best to avoid sex, drugs, and booze, and for the most part didn’t even swear. I participated in the church youth activities, including the Boy Scouts, and generally did what I was expected to do. My freshman year of college I argued openly with my biology professor about evolution. I wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper in which I mourned the approval of RU-486 (the “abortion pill”), calling it a “triumph for unchaste women.” I was also the Sunday School president of the local congregation during that time.
Then, I embarked on a 2-year mission for the church when I was 19, traveling thousands of miles from home and preaching the gospel to those poor souls who hadn’t yet heard it. I rose through the ranks of trainer, district leader and zone leader to the highest available position for a missionary, that of Assistant to the President, a highly coveted position of great authority. I was known as a pillar of faith, and one of the most knowledgeable “scriptorians” in the mission. I read the entire Bible, front to back, without even noticing the times when God commanded genocide and rape. My faith-filter was highly tuned. Although I did become aware of several important contradictions in the Bible, Mormons believe that the Bible is only true insofar as it is translated correctly, so it didn’t pose a challenge. I had scripture verses memorized that I could wield in almost any situation and to answer almost any question.
I attended Brigham Young University, as did my wife, who had also served a full-time mission. We were married in the temple shortly after we graduated on the same day, and were promised that we would be together not just in this life, but for “time and all eternity” in a secret ceremony only open to those Mormons who meet the rigorous standards of temple attendance. There I covenanted with God and my wife to remain ever-faithful, upon pain of hellfire.
As you have probably noticed, my reasons for staying faithful were legion (to borrow the Biblical usage of the word). It was a storybook Mormon life, had I not been so dissatisfied. I was destined for high positions of leadership; indeed, my patriarchal blessing (a special prophetic blessing that Mormon teens receive; basically a glorified fortune-telling) foresaw that I would “preside over the quorums of the church.”
On the inside, however, things were much different. I remember sending letters to my Mission President in the early months of my mission asking unanswerable questions and being told that I just needed to have faith, which I took to heart. I remember telling some other missionaries that if I wasn’t a Mormon I would probably be an atheist. I remember noticing contradictions between the supposedly perfect Book of Mormon and the supposedly perfect Joseph Smith translation of the Bible. I remember writing an in-depth paper at BYU about the Mormon persecution in Missouri and discovering that the evidence suggested that the reasons they were driven out of town had nothing to do with their religion, and everything to do with their arrogance, pugnacity, unwillingness to associate with the other townsfolk, and the huge voting bloc that they represented, giving them near absolute power over local political matters. This information was not welcomed by my devout professor, and was certainly not to be found in any of the (what I even then considered to be) white-washed church histories.
I began studying evolution and discovered it to be a supremely elegant explanation for the things that the church used fairy tales to explain. I actually discovered that the church authorities had softened their stance on evolution several decades before, and that it is taught as truth in BYU biology classes, but that it just hadn’t caught on among the general membership of the church. This was a relief for me, but I still struggled to understand how to reconcile evolution with the church’s great emphasis on Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. If Adam and Eve are only metaphorical, then the entire doctrine of the church crumbles, and yet here was evolution being taught at BYU.
It was during this time that I basically went numb. For several years I stopped thinking deeply about religion, fearing the outcome of doing so. My church attendance went downhill, and when I did show up it was mostly for social reasons. It was during this time that I married my wife, a very devout Mormon. My unwillingness to address the issue extended even to her, as I avoided religious discussion with her on anything more than a superficial level. I finally began to think about things a few months after our wedding, which led me to cautiously express some of my doubts. Despite my care, the mere mention of doubt was shocking enough to my wife that I decided to go back to not thinking about it for another year or so.
When I did begin thinking about religion again, it was not Mormon doctrine that dominated my thoughts, but the existence of God at all. I had come to be a logical, reasonable person except when it came to religion, and I wondered if I wasn’t compromising my personal integrity in order to believe in it. I began thinking about the odds that any religion was true, let alone the one that I happened to be born into. I began exploring the origins of religion, and came to the conclusion that they were all most likely fiction. Still, I resisted. It was not enough to allow me to liberate myself. I felt like I had too much at stake and risked throwing nearly everything away. It did cause me to reopen a bit of dialogue with my wife, however, albeit to mixed results. The consequences of “coming out” loomed large, and I went back into my numb little shell, refusing to think about it.
A few months later, I happened upon a speech given by Richard Dawkins. I can’t be sure, but I think it was his reading and subsequent Q&A session at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in October of last year. It resonated with me, and I sought out more. I ended up watching and reading everything I could find on the internet by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. It was during this time (I think October or November of last year), that I announced to my wife that I no longer believed in God, although I had really stopped believing some several months before, and had lived a virtually faith-free life for even longer than that.
While the arguments of Dawkins and Harris were certainly useful in battling my seemingly never-ending stream of internal religious justification, their effect on me was not necessarily one of convincing, but one of encouragement. I later read The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, and the End of Faith, further solidifying my desire to be an out-of-the-closet rationalist.
The experience of finally acknowledging my lack of belief, of finally accepting the feelings that had been welling up for so long, of finally putting religious belief behind me for good, is one I’ll never forget. The feelings that accompanied my deconversion are strikingly similar to the feelings described by many of those people who I personally converted to Mormonism. It was a great relief; a giant weight lifted; a rush of excitement. The flood of intellectual nourishment that followed as I sought out knowledge and explored evidence without fear of where it might lead was, and is, constantly exciting.
You see, it wasn’t the rules and restrictions of Mormonism that most bothered me. For the most part I didn’t really mind them. It was the intellectual bondage and the requisite distrust of science that was, to a scientific mind, unbearable.
(Via Secular Skeptic, Part II: The Aftermath)
I still have respect for Mormons, and not just because I remain married to one. Mormonism has a reputation of being a kooky religion that requires extreme credulity to believe. While I find that this is true of all religions, I find that Mormonism is no more, and perhaps even less, crazy than any of the more mainstream religions. The reason it is seen as so crazy is likely at least partially due to the fact that the fog of time hasn’t had as long to afford it the legitimacy that other religions enjoy.
Mormon doctrine is much more deep and complex than that of any of the mainstream Christian religions. It includes stories about humanity’s pre-existence, a much more detailed version of heaven (which I discussed briefly here), and also answers to many of the more difficult doctrinal questions such as “what happens to those who died without the opportunity to believe in Jesus?” Catholicism is still struggling with this question today, having just recently changed their stance on “limbo.” This question is the source of many of the strange doctrines of Mormonism – The genealogy, the baptism and temple ordinances for the dead, etc. It is unwieldy, but it makes sense within the (admittedly nonsensical) framework of Christianity, which cannot be said for the stance that many other Christian religions take on the issue.
Mormons even have an explanation for the existence of God, which is supremely rare. Mormon doctrine states that the purpose of life is not only to prove one’s worthiness to return to God, but to prepare to become like Him. “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become,” is the oft-repeated aphorism. So, Mormons believe that God was once a human like any one of us, and that only through righteous living and eternal progression did he become God. We may presume that the God of the man that became our God achieved his status in the same way. We soon realize that this doctrine turns into “Turtles all the way down,” meaning that there is still no explanation for the first God, if there was one, but at least they go further than anyone else.
Although my infidelic admission to my wife went over in my household like a lead balloon, she’s been a real trooper about it. She has always been fairly liberal, unlike the majority of Mormons*, and has been able to accept my transition with open arms. She even reads all of the content of this space, which has served as good discussion fodder. All told, the consequences of my transition haven’t been as bad as I’d feared, although I must admit that I still haven’t mentioned it to my parents or siblings. Small moves.
In the process of getting things worked out between us, my wife and I arranged a deal wherein I attend church with her every other week. While I don’t enjoy it, my outsider’s perspective can make it intermittently interesting. Even when I was faithful I disliked that the complex, uniquely Mormon doctrine was rarely discussed among the members of the church, and it is even more perturbing now. I still find religious belief and doctrine to be fascinating, which only enhances my frustration at the lack of substance at the meetings. At church you don’t hear much about the doctrine of eternal progression, or even the doctrine of salvation, or even doctrine at all, for that matter. What dominates the lessons is generally various scriptural myths, or more often, it is the simple association of the divine with the mundane.
Stories and personal experiences are bandied about and related to deity in any way the teller sees fit without interjection from present leadership. Coincidences are seen as answers to prayers, good luck is seen as miraculous, bad luck as divine testing. More than anything, though, what dominates the discussion is the relentless expression of conviction. The reality of Mormonism is that doubt is not welcome. The members express certainty about things it is not possible to be certain about, and encourage others to do the same; they ensure each other that they have no doubt about things that should require doubt, and invite others to do likewise. It becomes a contest to see who believes the baseless doctrine with the least amount of reservation. One Sunday each month is dedicated solely for this purpose, and it comprises a good amount of the teaching the rest of the Sundays too.
So, despite the rich and interesting doctrine of the church, its meetings are mostly just boring: Gut-wrenchingly, mind-numbingly, face-plantingly boring. I sometimes wonder why my wife even wants me to go at all, since I usually end up just looking for things to make fun of, that is, the times I stay awake. Even the semi-annual General Conference, in which the leaders of the church (who the members consider to be prophets) speak, very rarely is doctrine explicated. It is nearly always the same trite subjects that are addressed: Faith, sin, repentance, salvation, etc. Those who are interested in Mormon doctrine and belief will find much more satisfaction in the literature of the church’s early scholars and leaders than from any church meetings. It is in those old writings that we learn about our existence as spirits in the presence of God before we were born, the war in heaven in which Jesus and Satan presented opposing plans to God, how Adam helped Jesus create the earth, the various kingdoms and degrees of heaven, our path to Godhood, and more.
Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, Mormonism’s rare and attractive willingness to make specific and detailed truth-claims, combined with its relatively recent heritage, also means that it is more readily falsifiable than most religions. I will avoid going into specifics here, as I don’t seek to contribute any additional fuel to the fire in that regard, although I won’t rule out the possibility of addressing some of those issues in the future.
In the end, religion for me was a limiting factor and I was happy to be rid of it. It forced me to submit to the opinions of authorities rather than allowing me to seek for truth and to understand the world and universe as they really are. For many others, however, religion is a way of allowing themselves to feel comfortable about the unknown, while simultaneously fulfilling some of the social and ritualistic needs inherent in our species. As far as this brand of happy wishful-thinking goes, one could do worse than Mormonism. I can only hope that more and more people come to realize that none of the religions are necessary in order to live a happy life, that we don’t need to lie to ourselves in order to deal with reality, and that religion is ultimately an obstacle on the path toward enlightenment.
Here’s a short followup.
*Mormons comprise one of the most consistently Republican voting blocs in the nation. See the 2004 electoral results here, and the 2000 electoral results here, and notice how Utah doesn’t have even a single blue county, and how the differential between the percentage that voted for Bush and the percentage that voted for his opponent in both elections was greater in Utah (which is predominantly Mormon) than in any other state. This is at odds with the Mormons’ liberal heritage, and also seems generally incongruent, since their underlying philosophy seems to match much more closely to that of the Democrats today. I’ll give Christianity’s association with the Republican Party and some possible explanations behind this union a full treatment soon.