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Roy wrote:
SilentDawning wrote:
Confirmation bias at work — there are scriptures that seem to give unconditional affirmation that righteousness leads to prosperity, but at the same time, we all know good people who are victims of violent crime, get cancer for no reason, and have other calamities befall them. But I think people want desperately to believe in the “just world hypothesis” to feel they have control over their safety (faith that if they pay their tithing, and have a TR all will be well, etcetera). But then calamities strike.
This describes me well. I believed that I could control my destiny. I once was asked what my biggest fear was. I answered that it was to be powerless. LDS doctrine offered me a feeling of certainty and I ran with it.
Ditto here. A big part of my faith crisis was feeling so lost, so directionless. I can’t say that part has gotten much better over time.
Roy wrote:
SilentDawning wrote:
Confirmation bias at work — there are scriptures that seem to give unconditional affirmation that righteousness leads to prosperity, but at the same time, we all know good people who are victims of violent crime, get cancer for no reason, and have other calamities befall them. But I think people want desperately to believe in the “just world hypothesis” to feel they have control over their safety (faith that if they pay their tithing, and have a TR all will be well, etcetera). But then calamities strike.
This describes me well. I believed that I could control my destiny. I once was asked what my biggest fear was. I answered that it was to be powerless. LDS doctrine offered me a feeling of certainty and I ran with it.
Yes. I accepted early in my life that such certainty doesn’t exist. We have very little control over what happens to us when faced with the random events in the universe. On one hand, you have people at church bearing testimony about how God protected them. Or expressing faith that if they trust in God all will be well. And then in the next breath, you have God’s people suffering imeasureably due to no fault of their own. We do have a certain amount of control over what happens to us — by NOT making stupid decisions, taking unnecessary risks, or establishing relationships with people of questionable character. But there are forces that go well beyond us that act on us without our choosing.
I believe that when the BoM says “if you are righteous, you will prosper”, it is referring to broad trends in civilizations. Righteous civilizations tend to survive longer than corrupt ones. Look at Nazi Germany which fell. On the other hand, other countries with generally good leadership propser over the long run. I believe it’s only a matter of time before North Korea falls…consistent with that principle.
I have been watching shows in Netflix called “Death Row Stories” which has really opened my eyes about the incredible amount of injustice in the world. Prosecutors withholding evidence that would strengthen the defense’s case, people framed because they happened to get too close to people in the drug trade who wanted to commit a crime and avoid the consequences. Prosecutors promising reduced sentences to criminals if they will testify in favor of the prosecution’s case, even though these criminals don’t have the truth. And then renigging on their promises. Police in cahoots with local criminals, or committing crimes themselves. Judges who are faced with star witnesses recanting testimony, new DNA evidence, etcetera, refusing to re-hear the case due to their personal pride or other reasons. People dying in prison who don’t belong there.
Frankly, life sucks for some people. It’s why I can accept the argument that some of us are in hell. Even though for some of us, it’s not that bad….I am agnostic about what this life represents now. I just hope I can get through it without too much suffering…
And for me, my shelf broke because I found the church did not live its values, did not support individuals in achieving its mission when temporal interests were at stake, etcetera. We all have our challenges, don’t we. And I think everyone’s assumptions are justified by what we hear at church. I can see how you would believe in the prosperity gospel, preached in an unqualified way in our Wards over the years.
How about when I took two steps back and looked at it with a little common sense it all fell apart rather quickly. It takes a significant amount of effort to maintain belief but is relatively easy to see the inconsistencies. For me, I think that it wasn’t necessarily a shelf breaking, but myself breaking instead. We had a rough 2 years that put a lot of my life in upheaval (career, house, state, new baby, health issues). Just when we thought that things were working out, something else would blind-side us or pop up.
Last year I “broke” in the sense that I could not longer handle life’s challenges at this time without medication. I felt like a failure because everyone else could choose whether they needed or not, but I was one of the ones who never needed it – and now I did. Now everything that I had put into place didn’t work anymore. Intellectually I understood the deck was stacked against me always being one of those people, and that I can and still could make changes to change that. I did go through my own grief processes regarding this – my pride at not being “broken” despite life circumstances was very enormous – and false.
My husband and I wound up having some hard conversations on where we were going, and what we really wanted. These experiences seem to have brought us closer together, but I still found them to be significant.
When our daughter underwent a learning evaluation and the tester mentioned that she could have Asperger’s Autism, it opened up a new way of seeing things. As I looked into it for her, I wound up seeing elements of myself in the mirror. It is very jarring to find out that your “Normal” is completely alien to everyone else’s “Normal”. It is equally the camo you set up to blend in with the world was paper-thin and everyone knew you weren’t fooling anyone with it, but was socially constrained not to tell you (or maybe they didn’t know what it as), and if they had told you, you would not have necessarily understood it anyways. My father had taught me about thinking differently, but he just ascribed it to some form of dyslexia – and there were things that are common to Asperger’s autism that he didn’t know about and I didn’t know about.
I still don’t have all the answers or jigsaw puzzles of my life put back together. I am not even sure I have any grasp on what the questions are:) And I think a valid case could be made that I don’t have the puzzle box to guide me in matching the puzzle pieces together. So, we are clearly winging it..
I look at the self-understanding I received from adding the description of Asperger’s autism to my definition of me as a chance to redefine my life. There are things that I struggled with that I now understand why I struggled with them. I have a greater theoretical understanding that most people don’t think or process information the way I do, and that there are things I can do to help bridge the gap. There are other things that I can re-prioritize now that I understand the emotional cost of doing it, instead of just doing it because everyone else was. I can allow myself to wear noise-cancelling headphones while listening to 4th of July fireworks because I can recognize that my ears are more sensitive in this area, and it is more cost-efficient to take measures to manage it instead of just dealing subconsciously with it at the time.
The main lesson I have taken from this board is take everything slowly and thoughtfully before making known life-altering choices and potentially decreasing the “cruising range”.
The first time around, it was the existence of God. This time around, it’s about culture and the way that some doctrines are taught or interpreted. The first time, the only reasonable alternative would have been atheism. Now, my only reasonable alternative to being LDS is deism, probably with a belief in Christ.
AmyJ wrote:
The main lesson I have taken from this board is take everything slowly and thoughtfully before making known life-altering choices and potentially decreasing the “cruising range”.
:thumbup:
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