For the first time I felt like I didn’t belong

About the title.

I never got to the first time I felt I truly didn’t belong.

I have a fairly heady background, having taught early morning seminary for a year and generally being a doctrinal bookworm. I had fulfilled and read everything “allowed” on my mission and memorized whole sections of scripture (at one point I had half of the book of alma completely memorized). I asked special permission to read non-approved but still church literature, my mission president granted my request.

When assigned to a particular area, I had access to an institute library. In another transfer there was an entire and complete copy of the journal of discourses in a meeting house. Another meeting house had every issue of the improvement era back to the 1950s. (including the 1968 copy that had the papyri in it). I read it all. The things I didn’t have time to read I photocopied. My district meetings and later zone meetings became famous for the trainings I produced.

Because of that, I usually avoid Gospel Doctrine class and instead attend gospel principles. I love the earnest faith and real questions asked and I generally try to be an asset in the class. 2 weeks ago the subject was the Law of Chastity. People began to stray towards homosexuality as a topic when the proclamation to the family was mentioned. I raised my hand and expressed that we need to confront within ourselves our own issues before we can condemn anyone.

Well an older LDS couple was also in the room. The lesson devolved into a “wise” explanation from this older member on why people are gay. Fag was even uttered a couple of times by him. I was dumbfounded and perhaps cowardly left the room. I could not have had a civil disagreement with him. That was the first time I truly felt that I didn’t belong, that it wasn’t for me. The teacher did nothing to stop it and everyone but my wife was nodding their head. So I left with my youngest daughter and read a recently released scholarly/doctrinal work by one of my good friend’s older brother in the foyer…

I should have stayed in the room.

Zelph – welcome to the site. Great intro. I identified with a lot of what you had to say.

Well an older LDS couple was also in the room. The lesson devolved into a “wise” explanation from this older member on why people are gay. Fag was even uttered a couple of times by him. I was dumbfounded and perhaps cowardly left the room. I could not have had a civil disagreement with him. That was the first time I truly felt that I didn’t belong, that it wasn’t for me. The teacher did nothing to stop it and everyone but my wife was nodding their head.

You’ve got it backwards. YOU are not the one who didn’t belong. This man is in apostasy, not you. Anyone who claims to have charity and speaks like this of his fellow man is not Christian. Members who agree are in the wrong, but Mormons have a very very hard time speaking up for what is right! Even when false doctrine is preached over the pulpit, it’s difficult for people to acknowledge it. It’s so much easier to just pretend it didn’t happen or to go along with it. People do lack courage.

I agree with Ray. If people don’t have doubts about their faith, they are foolish. Our spiritual experiences sustain us in whatever form they come, but I too am a skeptic about the claims people routinely make.

This is a complex issue for me. I reveal myself to others piece by piece. Because of non-traditional thoughts I have revealed to some ward members, I may be regarded by suspicion by them and feel marginalized. Because I am also always holding back with ward members and framing what I share in positive ways I feel somewhat isolated – never truly known or accepted. For me the big exception to this has been my family. In my family we are all different but rather accepting and loving. Though they do not know me completely I am confident that they would accept me just the same regardless. DW and I have discussed wanting to provide this same loving acceptance for our own children.

First of all, thank you for the kind words, it brought some tears to my eyes. I’m pretty outwardly adamant about approaching things from a scientific perspective. I have been for a while. In some ways I think my parents would be fine, but my mother would cry over me. If there’s such a thing as an intuitively spiritual woman, it’s her. She would not love me less, but she’d cry while praying for me.

I’m pretty open about most of my views since even my parents are generally unorthodox Mormons. My mother is rather famous for giving mind opening church lessons. I still remember the time in one of her Gospel Doctrine classes, she posed the question. “If a non-member pays tithes to another religion with faith that he is following Gods commandments, does he receive the same blessings we do for paying our tithing?” You could see it slowly blowing everyones’ minds. Her point being that the “one true church” doesn’t have an exclusive on the blessings of god.

I’m wondering about birth order dynamics here. It sounds like you have been pretty independent and responsible. The more dependable you have proven to be the more others have depended upon you and the less help you have received. This in turn can make you even more dependable and “self-reliant.” This can be viewed as a blessing or an injustice.

Absolutely. I may have eaten sloppy joes, beans and cornbread, and lots of ramen as my parents raised me while they finished school, but I’m also the executor of their will. They trust me rather implicitly. Honestly I think they’re paying for her schooling as a bargaining chip to keep her from running off with her non-member boyfriend.

Your personal/family/religious background surely contributed to the man you are/were, what is more difficult to guess would be if your life would be “better” or “worse” with some alternate course.

I wouldn’t change a thing. I can’t imagine having a better life honestly. Working your own way through school while providing for your family (wife is a stay at home mom) is hard and tiring, but I have a job when so many others do not. My family has its needs fulfilled and all I have to do is lose a little sleep.

For my own children, I endeavor to provide them with that loving acceptance I mentioned earlier. I have no idea if this is the best way to raise them – some might say that it is too soft. I don’t want my kids to be promiscuous, or sexually mistreated (inside or outside of marriage), or go through divorce, or lose a child and some may feel that if I raise my children “right” they will have a better chance at avoiding the first 3. I don’t know too much about that, but I do know that if any of these or other tragedies do happen to my children and they need a safe place to turn – I want them to be able to find that safe place in our home and family.

Absolutely. I have 3 daughters under the age of 5. If their mother is any indication they’ll be gorgeous young women one day. I am not ready 😆

the church can’t actually bend on homosexuality until it bends a little on the law of chastity

I agree. Unless those who are gay married are accepted, which seems unlikely given the church’s political actions.

If a religion makes someone a better person, but the reasons they thought it made them better are inaccurate, does that make it true or false? It gets pretty fuzzy when you start to inject human beings as variables into the equations.

That’s my current view. I see it as good or bad, rather than true or false. If I have issues with historical claims of the church it actually has little to do with my current lack of belief. The church could be true even if the leadership were “bad” men. By it’s nature it is only the spirit that dictates “truth”. Even then there is a line of thought within the church that I absolutely love. I’d actually argue that it’s the one true way within the church. D&C 9 sums it up perfectly. Study it out in your mind then get confirmation. Nothing galls me more than people who roll the bones. They do nothing and think they’ll be guided. They do no search or ponder, they just want answers handed to them on a silver platter. Watching a missionary decide where to knock on doors by closing his eyes and pointing at a map, or searching for an answer to a problem by dropping his scriptures and reading the first verse that it opens up to hoping that it contains the answer. Magic 8-ball revelation is complete BS and the antithesis of everything I find of value in the church. Again this doesn’t reflect on the leadership, just the members.

So yes absolutely I find a great deal of value in the church. So many lives of those I love the most have been completely changed by it, I am a better person because of it.

My belief only breaks down with the spirit itself. I make do with searching and pondering.

If an FLDS member prays to know if the Book of Mormon is true, he gets an affirmative, based on the common premise of it being the keystone. So what does he do with that information? Is the FLDS church true because the BoM is true? Community of Christ? I do not and can not believe that there is a single line of truth with the current prophet as arbiter. This then means that EVERYTHING is open to being truth/not truth, every claim whether historical or spiritual needs to be “studied out in your mind”. So here I am. I cannot implicitly trust everything that flows from the mouth of those who have “stewardship” over me. I cannot implicitly trust myself as I am quite fallible. The only answer for me is to study everything out in my mind. Because I doubt that the spirit is communication with a god whose only true and living church is the LDS church based on the fervency of religion and lack of monopoly on the holy spirit, I then can only rely on the spirit as my own intuition empowering me with the things I have prepared by studying them out in my mind.

Even Brigham Young said that there are no miracles. Only things that we do not understand. IE, there is always a physical law in effect when a miraculous event occurs. By the nature of the LDS gospel and the reasoning behind the atonement god cannot break the laws that he has set forth. This makes him an architect or programmer of the world, who at one point compiled and ran the universe So when I say I am currently an atheist it is only because I don’t believe in a personal god right now.

Totally agree with you on how to describe religious experience: good, useful, valuable, inspiring, soul expanding, and of course all the opposites of those. True/False just doesn’t cut it for me anymore really, not in describing religious experience and theological speculation. “True” is really the wrong category of label to apply to most religious concepts. It’s like saying the Church is lemon-flavored. It doesn’t make sense.

i just had hardware floors put into my living room because the @$#% cat declared her territory all around the edges of the carpet. this morning i had to ‘true-up’ the bookcases as they wobble a bit on the new floor. as well, the boundaries of the room seem to be ‘not true’, because of a bit of house settle. as i was working with my level, i checked it both ways o make sure it was ‘true’.

the word ‘true’ has a lot of meanings.

as i mentioned to you the other night, i am reading “on being certain” by robert burton. when lds have a comforting, feel-good experience about something in the church, there is a sense or feeling of knowing that tells the mind, “this is true”: meaning it feels right. alma 32 describes this process with amazing accuracy. whereas alma 32 speaks of knowledge of a specific, testable thing, the problem is that LDS generalize the conclusion of rightness. they take the specific feeling of rightness, by faith or trust, and extend it to all other things about the church. a declaration of testimony: “i know the church is true” really means, “i feel that the church seems right“. when we deconstruct our own testimony, i would submit that the feelings we had when we were constructing an LDS testimony were real and in some cases powererful. the personal experience or the phenomenology of the event is ‘true’, the subsequent conclusions are not truth or knowledge.

the problem isn’t the word, the problem is how we use it.

Historical facts can be true or false. Interpretations of the historical facts to create meaning, generally not so much. I don’t find any thing or any person to really be all good or all bad. It’s a Yin-Yang of various proportions.

hmmm. maybe you’re right — not sure, and it depends on what you mean. invoking yin-yang here may not be a natural fit to judgments of history. dao (unity and interaction of yin & yang) has an opposite, “fei dao” – which means “wrong way”. there is no yin-yang aspect of feidao, it is the way if separation, abuse, dishonesty, and death. when facts are manipulated or interpreted to deceive and harm: it is ‘not the way’/feidao. yin and yang have nothing to do with it.

As a card-carrying nerd, I understand your desire to apply the scientific method to test the truthfulness of facts. I have a 25 year old son from a prior marriage before I joined the church. To illustrate the dichotomy that he grew up living under, his mother and I divorced (in part) because she decided she was lesbian. Within the next year I joined the LDS church. Due to split-custodial arrangements, he came to church with us 2 Sundays a month until he was about 11, then we moved further away, and he spent weekends with his mom, so he stopped coming to church. He has become, like his mother, a professional critic–in his words, “skeptic”–and firmly believes in the scientific method. He is a very intelligent young man, though lacking a little common sense, and very full of himself, in that he thinks that he can master the world through his mind. He very much resembles me at that age.

But what he is missing is that the scientific method disallows for another dimension of thinking that secular individuals probably think of as intuition but which I think of as revelation. These are things that we intrinsically know are true outside of any objective, conclusive proof. My 2nd wife and I both grew up in alcoholic families. I recognized that the painful death of that marriage had a lot to do with my family history. I felt crazy. In my mid-30s, despite the absolute best efforts of my mind, my life had broken apart. I was an agnostic searching for answers. On the advice of others, I went to Al Anon, and they told me I had to get a Higher Power. What’s a Higher Power? I had no idea. But I remember with extreme clarity the night 21 years ago I was journaling and God touched me. As I journaled, I was influenced to write that I needed to know who Jesus Christ was. That was a bolt of lightening out of clear blue sky. That feeling from 21 years ago and the knowledge that those words were given to me by God is as tangible to me today as the table lamp next to me.

In our Elder’s Quorum class two weeks ago, the teacher drew an analogy between the scientific method and personal revelation which I found interesting. To test the validity of facts, we apply the Scientific Method: