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Roy wrote:
I remember a missionary telling me that the Mission’s smoking cessation program had a 100% success rate for those that really wanted to quit.
No true ex-smoker. If they didn’t quit smoking they must have not really wanted to quit.
bridget_night wrote:
When I grew up in the church it was encouraged to question and get your own confirmation from God. Early leaders like Hugh B. Brown would say things like, “he who has never doubted has never thought.” J. Reuben Clark said the church should be investigated and exposed if wrong. So what changed?
Another big change is the sheer amount of information out there.
nibbler wrote:
But seriously, I don’t think his perspective allows him to be able to feel the plight of the doubter. I know I wouldn’t have before I had experienced it myself.
I agree that I wouldn’t have before experiencing it myself. But I’m a nobody, not the person charged with leading all the members. Why the out-of-place swipe on Easter Sunday morning of all times? This was a talk that began with, “Christ changed each of our lives forever.”
Roy wrote:
bridget_night wrote:
When I grew up in the church it was encouraged to question and get your own confirmation from God. Early leaders like Hugh B. Brown would say things like, “he who has never doubted has never thought.” J. Reuben Clark said the church should be investigated and exposed if wrong. So what changed?
I think 2 things changed.1) correlation happened. There used to be many different flavors of Mormonism. That variability allowed more variation. Unfortunately, that allowed some flavors that we are probably happy to see go – like borderline fundamentalist Mormons or white supremacist Mormons. Correlation was a double edged sword in reducing the “extremes”.
2) I think that Hugh B. Brown and J. Reuben Clark were more outliers themselves. We could find quotes by Elder Uchtdorf and say “What changed?” but that might not capture what is happening. The men of church leadership are not a monolith. They have their different personalities and perspectives. At the end of the day, they are all on the same team and working for the same positive goals despite their differences.
I agree correlation happened and was a two edge sword. My studies of early Mormon history indicate that other flavors were not only accepted but were encouraged early (for the most part, there were some exceptions with extreme views or those that claimed to receive revelation and weren’t named Joseph Smith.
I also agree that Brown and Clark were outliers – but they did something about it. They were directly responsible for calling the ultra conservative apostles that were in power until recently and of which a vestige (although somewhat less conservative) remains. I think for the most part the pendulum has swung in the other direction as far as the Q15 go – but I don’t know when it reaches its end and starts to swing back again.
I mentioned Come Follow Me previously, and I do believe the home centered church supported idea was meant to allow us to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions and testimonies. I just don’t think many church members (and some leaders) were ready for it.
I don’t know the true intention but guessing: 1) They bit the bullet and did away with the 3rd hour. Come follow me was introduced at the same time. Culturally more is better than less so the program was added to say that we’re not really requiring less by getting rid of the 3rd hour. It was also the answer to the question, what do we do now that Sunday School is only twice a month? How are people going to retain the lessons we’re removing from the calendar?
2) Asking people to study the lesson at home and come to SS/PH/RS prepared has always been a thing. The come follow was a fresh coat of paint on that concept. “Home centered, church supported” was a new catchphrase to help remind people that they should be studying lessons mid-week.
I’m sure gaining independence factored in there somewhere, if nothing more than to ensure people weren’t missing out by having one hour less of church each week.
If the goal was truly to get members to think for themselves I’d say they failed. You don’t have to stick with them, but the lessons in the come follow me manuals are chock-full of indoctrination. If the goal was to get people to think for themselves the lessons could have been a simple, “Read Luke chapters 1-5 and discuss with family.”
nibbler wrote:
If the goal was truly to get members to think for themselves I’d say they failed. You don’t have to stick with them, but the lessons in the come follow me manuals are chock-full of indoctrination. If the goal was to get people to think for themselves the lessons could have been a simple, “Read Luke chapters 1-5 and discuss with family.”
Absolutely. I was taken in by the rhetoric. Even Bednar, on the conservative side of the bunch, indicated it was important for us to learn and understand for ourselves and something along the line of not relying on others telling us what to believe. So much for that.
nibbler wrote:
It tells me that Nelson doesn’t understand the position of the doubter. Perhaps he’s a lazy learner.:angel:
I have one word to describe President Nelson’s understanding of the position of the doubter:
MyopicThis is a new article from the Liahona. There is no mention of lazy or lax. (A little joke.) Recommended article by Jana Riess on the topic: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/04/09/jana-riess-overcoming-lds/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/04/09/jana-riess-overcoming-lds/ Some outtakes:
Quote:But the second of his five points struck a nerve with some listeners within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you have doubts about God, Jesus or Joseph Smith, Nelson said, you should “choose to believe and stay faithful. Take your questions to the Lord and to other faithful sources. Study with the desire to believe rather than with the hope that you can find a flaw in the fabric of a prophet’s life or a discrepancy in the scriptures. Stop increasing your doubts by rehearsing them with other doubters.”
In my experience, few people who are having doubts study with the intent of finding flaws in the gospel or the church’s interpretations of it. Rather, they study to recover beliefs they feel are fraying. They want to return to that place of comfortable, taken-for-granted belief, so they double down on what the church has taught them to do (and which Nelson emphasizes in the first of his five points): Study the gospel and be engaged learners. Sometimes, they find answers that, rather than resolving their questions, introduce others.
This is not their fault, and we should stop placing the blame for it on their shoulders. It’s simply a natural evolution of faith to a deeper and more mature level.
Quote:But many times in life, we need to talk to someone who has “been there” and gone through the same feelings and experiences with which we are struggling. I’m part of a Crohn’s & Colitis Facebook group, for example, because there was a time our doctor thought a family member might have Crohn’s, and I wanted to learn as much as I could so I could help. Why would I try to learn about the condition from people who had not experienced it themselves? I instead learned by going straight to the source.
Quote:Nelson and other leaders want Latter-day Saint doubters to be able to magically know how to do something we’ve never taught believers how to do, which is to understand we could be very wrong in what we are currently thinking about religion.
Quote:Talking with those who are acquainted with doubt — particularly those who have come out on the other side with a more nuanced, deeper faith — helps people who have been raised to mistake belief for faith to not become overwhelmed when they experience the natural stirrings of doubt. By isolating those who experience doubt, ironically, the church risks pushing them further away from faith.
I second the recommendation. Quote:What’s tough for Latter-day Saint doubters is that the whole process of living comfortably with doubt means having humility. I don’t mean humility in the way members typically define it, which is about not being prideful in our talents or life circumstances. I mean humility about what we believe, which means being able to say about both our belief and our nonbelief, “You know, this is what I am thinking and feeling right now, but next year or even tomorrow, that could evolve.”
Nelson and other leaders want Latter-day Saint doubters to be able to magically know how to do something we’ve never taught believers how to do, which is to understand we could be very wrong in what we are currently thinking about religion.
While attending another Christian church I heard the pastor explain a doctrinal position that the church had (I think it was something about “the rapture”) and then he said “we might be wrong about that and that is ok.” It was a relatively small example but it stood out to me as outside of my normal experience. We are not used to saying and hearing that “we (as a church) might be wrong about that (tangential doctrine) and that is ok.”
Late to this discussion, but I choose to interpret those statements as being about orthodox members who lazily accept everything they are told and put no effort into “real” understanding. I am sure that is not how he meant it – but I do believe his words are accurate, even if our “target audiences” are different.
This talk with emphasis on “lazy and lax” was the featured topic of our one SM talk yesterday. The person speaking obviously had no clue about the causes of FC and reiterated that faith is a choice. On Own Now wrote:
reiterated that faith is a choice.
I have struggled with disentangling the things that come naturally to me from the things that I choose to do. I speculate that most of us justify the things that are in our nature. I further speculate that a good number of us feel superior because our nature does not lead us to do some of the things that some other people do (again, those “other” people are probably following their natures just like most people do). I do believe that there is a component of acting against one’s nature but this appears to be less common than individuals might suppose.I have a rudimentary recollection of there being dueling schools of thought in the early Christian church between one person that always was a naturally obedient child and felt that righteous living was a choice within the power of all vs. another early church leader that lived a more rebellious life until he felt called/compelled by God into the ministry and felt based on his life experience and reading of the scriptures that it is impossible to choose God until God first chooses you through “irresistible grace.”
Our church of course leans heavily on the “choice” model because of moral agency being perhaps THE key doctrine is our theology.
if you think of faith as how you see the cosmos, then I don’t think it’s a choice. I believe that dinosaurs are extinct; I can’t convince myself to think they are still roaming the earth, no matter how hard I might try. If you think of faith as what you do with your views, then I do think it’s a choice. I believe in the Golden Rule, for example, but that doesn’t mean I always live it. Adhering to it takes conscious effort sometimes.
In LDS thought, I believe ‘faith’ is subconsciously tied to action more than belief. Belief is a given, agency follows. From a Church perspective, everyone in the Church believes, but some are more “faithful” than others.. Anyone can have belief just by opening up to it, because it is there sort of like sunshine. For example, if you pray about the BofM, you are guaranteed an answer. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally.” “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” But faith is what you do with it… In LDS vernacular, considerize the phrase “exercise faith”. Faith is an activity, rather than an attribute. Ergo, it’s a choice.
I think this is what makes most members think of not believing as a deficiency and as “lazy and lax”-ness as causes for faith crisis.
My wife has asked me several times, “Why can’t you just choose to believe?” I’ve tried to explain, but most of the time it just turns out badly and she and I both end up feeling frustrated and hurt. I don’t know that belief is a choice, although I can choose how I act based on my belief (or lack thereof). That action (to me) is faith and is a choice. So I can choose to exercise faith, regardless of whether I believe something or not. I would like to be able to “choose” to believe. But since I can’t, I’ll just excercise the particle of faith I have in spite of my lack of belief in certain doctrines, truth claims, and practices. I really have a hard time doing this – my tendancy is view things as black/white, so a lot of the time I would like to just throw the baby out with the bath water.
I think for some, having a spiritual witness is enough to “choose” to believe (probably more than one should). And that works for them. I get it. But not everyone is wired like that. I guess I’m just a lazy learner and want to rehearse my doubts with other doubters.
One thing that has helped me is Jon Ogden’s Book, “When Mormons Doubt.” (
https://www.amazon.com/When-Mormons-Doubt-Relationships-Quality-ebook/dp/B01D7T93CQ ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://www.amazon.com/When-Mormons-Doubt-Relationships-Quality-ebook/dp/B01D7T93CQ
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