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After being essentially an atheist for a long time and not going to church, lately I’ve have the inclination that I want to start going to church again. Part of it is loneliness and longing for the community that I once had. Part of it is my disillusionment with moral relativism and my desire to be with people who actually have standards and expectations for behavior and who have the backbone to enforce them rather than just telling people to “do whatever you want.” Part of it is some recent events in my life pointing to the possibility that there may be more to life than just the material universe. Part of it is my socially conservative views and my desire to be with people who share my conservative views rather than working in institutions dominated by people who are members of the radical political Left. Part of it is my desire to be with people who often dress nicely rather than working at a respected federally-funded research facility where people show up to work dressed like homeless people. I generally like the Mormon lifestyle and I like most Mormon teachings about morality, and I’m quite disillusioned with secular humanism and with the debaucherous lifestyle and lack of behavior standards that is promoted by secularism and atheism. I realize that this is quite a different position from many people on this forum and from many post-Mormons. I’m on the outside looking in, wishing I could find a way to believe and participate again. Most of you are probably on the inside longing to get out, gazing at the vast world beyond the Church and wishing you could indulge in all that freedom. Many of you are probably liberals wanting to get away from all those conservatives in the Church. I’m a conservative wanting to get away from all the liberals where I live and work.
I still have that pesky obstacle of
not believing the beliefs. If you want to fully participate in the Church, you have to believe the gold plates were real, you have to believe that the Nephites really existed, you have to believe temples, tithing, etc etc. Trying to understand the point of view of guys like Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman has been sort of mixed for me. It seems that some people are much more predisposed to spiritual experiences than others – some people seem to regularly have prayers answered and they seem to have a host of mystical experiences, while other people try and try for years and get nothing. I’m one of the people who prayed for years and years and got nothing. I feel inclined to go back to Church again, but I’m not really sure what I hope to accomplish or hope to get out of it. Though I might be willing to believe in God, I am pretty firm in my belief that God does not answer prayers, or at least that God does not answer MY prayers. I’m not sure what kind of spiritual growth I might be looking for at Church given that I know most of the stories and can repeat the standard answers. In what important ways might I change? Is there some important service that I can render at church?
Given that I still don’t really believe in the literal historicity of the Book of Mormon, and it’s not clear to me at all that God holds anyone accountable for sins of any kind or judges anyone based on good or bad deeds (though I generally wish that God would reward good people and punish bad people), I don’t see how attending church will help me score points for the afterlife. There is no reason to believe that attending any particular church (or not attending) will help my status in any afterlife that might exist. If it’s all just metaphor – the scriptures, the temples, the stories, the rules – and I’m not actually scoring any points for the afterlife by attending church and keeping the rules, what am I accomplishing by participating in church, other than having my community back and hanging out with other conservatives?
If you can get things you need from an organization, in the here and now, to feel happier, more fulfilled, more at peace, etc, then associating with and in that organization is a good thing – as long as you are not getting more of what you don’t need and that actually is unhealthy and or damaging to you. Each of us here has our own unique things that make staying LDS a challenge to some degree. The specific nature of those challenges is not important for this forum; what is important is support for whatever those individual issues are. I personally know very conservative, orthodox members who struggle with the pace of the changes under Pres. Nelson, particularly some specific changes. I personally know members whose struggles have nothing to do with political or social issues. I personally know very liberal members who struggle with wanting more changes and/or specific changes – or even just one specific change. I know participants and lurkers here who are very, very, very different than others here – and that is great, in the sense that we don’t have to be exactly alike (or even mostly alike) to share with and help each other.
My primary advice is to decide what the core issues are in your own individual faith (the things for which you hope but cannot see), focus on those things at church, and work to ignore, overlook, or simply accept the organizational or group things that don’t fit within your own faith. That isn’t easy all the time, but you have identified the overall structure and belief system as being in line enough with your own view that your challenge is not to overlook the majority of things within the Church. That is a blessing in the arena of faith crises or transitions or struggles.
I think it would be difficult to attend church as a non-believer with complete honesty/full disclosure. If you are up front about not believing then you may not get fully accepted into the community as you might desire. However, keeping your unbelief to yourself also comes with a cost. You may feel like an imposter and that you don’t fit in or belong. I recall the amazing feeling of being a full believer. I assumed that our belief was homogenous and monolithic (for example, I would say stuff like “we believe”). I was part of an eternal team and felt instant kinship with those in my “tribe.”
I am not sure that I could experience this particular sense of meaning, purpose, kinship, and belonging again.
DW and I sometimes reminisce about a particular branch we lived in early on where we felt completely united and accepted with the congregation. We have pondered what it might be like to move back there. I know that it would not be the same. Sure, some things have changed about the area – but I think the bigger change lies in DW and me.
InquiringMind wrote:I still have that pesky obstacle of
not believing the beliefs. If you want to fully participate in the Church, you have to believe the gold plates were real, you have to believe that the Nephites really existed, you have to believe temples, tithing, etc etc. Trying to understand the point of view of guys like Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman has been sort of mixed for me. It seems that some people are much more predisposed to spiritual experiences than others – some people seem to regularly have prayers answered and they seem to have a host of mystical experiences, while other people try and try for years and get nothing. I’m one of the people who prayed for years and years and got nothing. I tried going back to church a few months ago despite being more of an atheist. I missed the community, and I recognized my lifestyle and values are still much the same as when I was a believer. But it was hard sitting through talks and lessons when it was clear I was expected to believe things I simply did not believe. I was never able to shake the feeling of being an outsider looking in. And it seemed like a lot of the community aspect had given way to more lessons hammering home the same doctrinal points over and over again. I really couldn’t find any way to meaningfully participate. As much as I would like to be a part of it all again, I don’t think I will ever be fully accepted again without those shared beliefs.
Arrakeen wrote:
And it seemed like a lot of the community aspect had given way to more lessons hammering home the same doctrinal points over and over again. I really couldn’t find any way to meaningfully participate.
I believe that those lessons hammering home the same doctrinal points over and over again where just as prevalent before my faith transition. However, before they were comforting and validating and now those same lessons feel discordant.
Therefore, if you are going to church for the community alone you might be investing hours of sitting through lessons that you don’t believe in order to cultivate those relationships. I further observe that some of my strongest church friendships have developed while serving in demanding callings together. That would represent an additional time commitment and additional challenges for a differently believing individual.
One possible avenue is to get on the EQ elder’s quorum email list and show up for every service project that you can. If you are not attending church also then I imagine that there would be less than full acceptance but at least you would be rubbing shoulders with the brethren and not sitting through hours of lessons.
InquiringMind wrote:
……..I realize that this is quite a different position from many people on this forum and from many post-Mormons. I’m on the outside looking in, wishing I could find a way to believe and participate again. Most of you are probably on the inside longing to get out, gazing at the vast world beyond the Church and wishing you could indulge in all that freedom. Many of you are probably liberals wanting to get away from all those conservatives in the Church. I’m a conservative wanting to get away from all the liberals where I live and work.
I still have that pesky obstacle of
not believing the beliefs. If you want to fully participate in the Church, you have to believe the gold plates were real, you have to believe that the Nephites really existed, you have to believe temples, tithing, etc etc. Trying to understand the point of view of guys like Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman has been sort of mixed for me. It seems that some people are much more predisposed to spiritual experiences than others – some people seem to regularly have prayers answered and they seem to have a host of mystical experiences, while other people try and try for years and get nothing. I’m one of the people who prayed for years and years and got nothing. ……..
I thought to respond to your post. In doing so I will apologize for my somewhat unfiltered response and tell a little bit about myself. I am retired and ended my little consulting business in industrial automation, robotics and artificial intelligence with the onset of COVID. In essence I am (was) a scientist and engineer by trade and happily dealt with atheists my entire career. To be honest I found working with atheists more intellectually stimulating than most theologians – I believe, for the most part that atheists are more connected to logic that theologians.
For all the responses – I am personally most impressed in the response by “Roy” and his reference to service. The point I would make is that nothing that I am aware of is accomplished without discipline. I am a 5th generation LDS member and personally believe that doctrine is the weakest link in true religion. I believe that service (helping others) is the true core of true religion and takes precedence over doctrine. I would suggest that if you feel any inclination to attend church that you do so as an act of service. I would also suggest that if you are inclined to deal with G-d or have him answer your prayers that you ask him how you can help and be of service to those in need. I am of the mind that the greatest discipline is service so also is the greatest reward and even doctrine. I have never encountered anyone that does appreciate someone willing to assist them in accomplishing important and worthwhile tasks that improve their lot of things that are of concern. Those performing service are always on the inside and for them there is no outside – just someone that need service – and then sometimes just a friend.
Roy wrote:
I recall the amazing feeling of being a full believer. I assumed that our belief was homogenous and monolithic (for example, I would say stuff like “we believe”). I was part of an eternal team and felt instant kinship with those in my “tribe.”I am not sure that I could experience this particular sense of meaning, purpose, kinship, and belonging again.
I’ve experienced this myself. Being a TBM was awesome in many ways, and I have never been able to fully replace what I had as a TBM. As a TBM I had a place in a community, and I felt I was doing an important service in the world, and I had a system of meaning and purpose, and also social support. I’ve never been able to replace that since leaving.
Since leaving the Church, I’ve spent much of my time working on a PhD in physics. In grad school I found a reasonable place to belong academically, but I had a harder time socially, because social life in grad school revolves around “party culture” with lots of alcohol and hooking up, and I’m not into that. I’ve spent quite a bit of time since my faith crisis going back and forth between wanting my TBM community back, but not being able to believe the beliefs enough to fit in at church. I found an ideological home as a scientific atheist, or at least a scientific agnostic. But the lifestyle was a different matter, as the scientific community (and university grad school community) diverged quite a bit from my more conservative lifestyle preferences, so I didn’t really belong very well.
Lately I have been going through some changes in my beliefs, and I’m rejecting reductive materialism for the possibility that maybe there is more to the universe than the scientific materialist worldview would allow. I’m thinking now that maybe there is an afterlife, and maybe God does exist. Perhaps we are indeed “souls on a journey,” and maybe we lived before we were born, and perhaps life continues after death. Perhaps this life is just one life of many lives that we live, and maybe we are reincarnated on this world or on other worlds. As I said in another thread, it does seem to me that my life is following some sort of plan, and I find it hard to account for this using scientific materialism alone.
The mythos that seems to most closely match my own life is the “Hero’s Journey” as described by Joseph Campbell. It seems that I’m not allowed to remain where I am, but instead am pushed by the Universe (often against my conscious will) to become something more through living some kind of adventure. This same process seems to repeat itself over and over in my life, as the Hero’s Journey archetypally does. Again, I can’t easily account for this using the tools of science. There seems to be a lot more going on in my life than just physics.
I’m not really sure where this puts me when I’m looking for a place to belong. Certainly I wouldn’t be the only one to hold such beliefs as I just described, but “spiritual communities” that hold such beliefs tend to be very loosely-knit and weak and unable to provide the kind of social support that communities like the LDS Church can. I find myself to be spiritually expanded, but religiously homeless. I like the Mormon lifestyle, the music, the culture, the holidays, the ward activities, and all that. But the beliefs put me in a tough spot.
I’m not sure where I belong, and maybe StayLDS (or anywhere else in the post-TBM community) isn’t the right place for me. I’ve followed the post-Mormon community on and off since my faith crisis, and I have become somewhat disillusioned with it because it seems to so reactionary – they stand
againstthe Church, but they don’t stand foranything. They seem obsessed with all the policy changes that they want the Church to make and they can’t stop talking about the Book of Abraham and polygamy etc etc. At some point that all gets boring to me and I really want to move on from that. StayLDS seems much better than most in this regard, as many of the post-Mormon podcasts keep re-hashing the same “faith crisis” stuff over and over, and they seem to actively want to destroy the Church. Old-Timer wrote:
My primary advice is to decide what the core issues are in your own individual faith (the things for which you hope but cannot see), focus on those things at church, and work to ignore, overlook, or simply accept the organizational or group things that don’t fit within your own faith. That isn’t easy all the time, but you have identified the overall structure and belief system as being in line enough with your own view that your challenge is not to overlook the majority of things within the Church. That is a blessing in the arena of faith crises or transitions or struggles.
This is something that could possibly work, and I’ve thought about it before. I could just do the things I like doing at doing at Church and not do the things I don’t want to do. I could believe the doctrines I like, and disbelieve the doctrines I don’t like.
My question is, what is the difference between this and a “cafeteria Mormon?” Sure, I guess I could pick and choose what I want to do in the Church. 2 hour church? Yes please. Service projects? Definitely. Food storage? Probably not. Tithing? OK, I’ll give 2%. Word of Wisdom? Absolutely. Temple attendance? You had me all the way up to the Masonic stuff. Christmas party? Wouldn’t miss it. Tithing declaration? I’ll skip that.
As appealing as that may sound, I don’t know if that’s going to work. Do people actually make that work? Mormonism seems like more of an “all in” religion.
Every Mormon is a “cafeteria Mormon”. There are enough expressions of nearly everything from top leaders over the years to make it impossible for anyone to believe everything that has been taught. Some of that could fit into the idea of an ongoing restoration – or gaining “further light and knowledge”, while some of it is from different apostles teaching the same concept in different (and even competing) ways – which has been the case since the days of Joseph Smith. Just as an example, there are multiple ways to look at the most central, core concept in the Church: the Atonement. There are formal Atonement theories, and even our sacrament hymns present those different views. We can believe any one, all, or none of them and be solidly within the overall framework of Mormon theology.
So, see things however you see things, making conscious decisions and seeing how they fit into Mormon theology (which is different than doctrine and culture). Find ways to say / describe those things in Mormon terms, if you want to share them with others – and, if not, simply believe them as your own view in the cafeteria that is around you.
Old-Timer wrote:
Every Mormon is a “cafeteria Mormon”. There are enough expressions of nearly everything from top leaders over the years to make it impossible for anyone to believe everything that has been taught.
I think there is a lot of truth in this, and it’s one of the reasons why I had a faith crisis in the first place. I wanted a belief system that was self-consistent, where all the “i”s were dotted and all the “t”s were crossed, that would be theoretically possible to live perfectly if one only was a perfect person. I wanted a belief system where it was at least theoretically possible to keep all the rules, and if I couldn’t keep all the rules then I only had myself to blame.
Sure, it’s true that you can’t follow every statement made by Church leaders because many of these statements contradict each other.
My approach here may be a little different than most. It seems that many people start by assuming that the Church is basically true, except for Doctrine A, Policy B, and Commandment C. So they’re able to stay in the Church while finding some kind of workaround for A, B, and C, but they still come from a place of believing that the Church, on the whole, is basically true, even though they don’t like A, B, and C.
My starting point is the assumption that the Church is
allfiction, and I’m looking for anything that I actually canbelieve or that is worth believing. I look at the Book of Mormon and start from the assumption that the Nephites never existed and that Joseph Smith made the whole thing up. But can the Book of Mormon still have great spiritual value even if Joseph Smith did make it all up? Or is there something even more woo-woo going on, with a very real God revealing a totally fictional book with great spiritual value to Joseph so that we can all learn important lessons? Were the stories never meant to be taken literally, and instead were written as templates and teaching tools showing us how to live? Truth from fiction, as it were? Or with tithing, I look at the Church’s $100 billion investment fund and I conclude that the Church doesn’t really need my money. So I could pay whatever I think my participation is worth and declare myself a full tithe payer. Is that fair? Can I feel good about that? I’m not really sure.
Or with the resurrection of Jesus. Is a metaphorical understanding of the resurrection adequate, or is literal belief necessary? Maybe the story of Jesus is a metaphor for how we can transform our lives and how we can be reborn again and again in a metaphorical way. But did the resurrection really happen? For real? Yeah yeah, I know – it depends on what you mean by “real.” Just because the resurrection never actually happened doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. I get it. But I want it to be real. I want to believe it literally, not metaphorically, the same way that I can believe the laws of physics literally.
InquiringMind wrote:
My starting point is the assumption that the Church is all fiction, and I’m looking for anything that I actually can believe or that is worth believing.
I think that I can get behind goodness. More interesting than if something is true, is if something is good. There is much that is good in the LDS community. There is much that is good outside of the LDS community. I think that goodness is its own reward and we should draw close to goodness and help to add to/expand it if we can.On helpful strategy is to put on your anthropology hat and sit through lessons like you would a researcher invited to witness the sacred rituals of an ancient people. You are not there to determine if this religion is true. You are there to better understand the meanings between the rituals, the social connections of the community, and how it impacts family relationships, etc.
Roy wrote:
I think that I can get behind goodness. More interesting than if something is true, is if something is good. There is much that is good in the LDS community. There is much that is good outside of the LDS community. I think that goodness is its own reward and we should draw close to goodness and help to add to/expand it if we can.
I’ve heard something like this a the “utility vs. validity” argument. So yeah, maybe it’s not as factually valid as I’d hoped but it’s still very useful because yes, there is a lot of good there.
Roy wrote:On helpful strategy is to put on your anthropology hat and sit through lessons like you would a researcher invited to witness the sacred rituals of an ancient people. You are not there to determine if this religion is true. You are there to better understand the meanings between the rituals, the social connections of the community, and how it impacts family relationships, etc.
I actually did this when I attended church for several months after having left about two years earlier. And yes, it was fascinating to look at it as a sociologist would, to see testimony meeting as each person’s attempt to demonstrate their allegiance to the group’s ideology, to see the social function of all the rituals and beliefs, etc. That was good, but at some point I want the rituals to be
truerather than just sociological curiosities. I mean, it seems like the answer here is that in the best case scenario, no one really knows whether Jesus was literally resurrected, or whether the Nephites really existed, or whether Joseph Smith really had gold plates; and belief would be a matter of faith without any hope of getting any solid evidence to support it, ever. In the worst case scenario, it’s all fiction, though it may be a very useful fiction and much good may come out of it.
But is there no belief system that is morally good, that also has the benefit of being factually accurate? Do I have no other option than to give myself over to “useful lies” and “guiding fiction”?
Can I not find a religion whose moral teachings are good and whose founding beliefs describe actual historical events and actual future events?
Can I not have factual accuracy in addition to moral goodness and an supportive community? Must a community be founded on a set of stories that are apocryphal at best and fictional at worst? Why can’t I have both facts and goodness?
InquiringMind wrote:
But is there no belief system that is morally good, that also has the benefit of being factually accurate? Do I have no other option than to give myself over to “useful lies” and “guiding fiction”?Can I not find a religion whose moral teachings are good and whose founding beliefs describe actual historical events and actual future events?
Can I not have factual accuracy in addition to moral goodness and an supportive community? Must a community be founded on a set of stories that are apocryphal at best and fictional at worst? Why can’t I have both facts and goodness?
I love these questions:)
For my part, I have ruefully decided that the answer is “No”. We don’t get both facts and goodness. In order for “facts” to be meaningful, relevant, and/or useful, at least 1 actual message/action has to be pulled from it and passed down. That act of extracting the “meaning” or the “message” personalizes it to that individual and translates into action (“goodness” here) and voids the “fact” part of it.
Analogy: The creation of a rainbowScientifically, rainbows are the result of the perception of a drop of water being split into bands of light. It requires an angle of 42 degrees, water in the air, and sunlight. No 2 individuals are going to have the same 42 degree angle splitting drops of water into bands of light. I don’t even think that the “rainbow” is the same rainbow for each eye – the angle is slightly different.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/optical-effects/rainbows/how-are-rainbows-formed ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/optical-effects/rainbows/how-are-rainbows-formed I think that “meaning” is generally individually tailored the same way that the creation of rainbows is. “Meaning” is individually tailored – no one sees the same rainbow and a general universal event (the bands of color are the same order for everyone).
I think that there are some communities that are based more on facts. I assume that there are scientific communities, educator communities, journalism communities, and more. Those communities are not religions and they are probably not as tightly knit as you and I have experienced in LDS wards growing up.
I feel like religion by definition doesn’t deal in provable “facts.” I am imagining a sliding scale where the greater deviation from demonstrable facts the greater the group’s sense of community and the lesser the deviation the lesser the sense of community. What’s the point of joining a sky is blue and grass is green club? Everyone already knows that.
Roy wrote:
I think that there are some communities that are based more on facts. I assume that there are scientific communities, educator communities, journalism communities, and more.Those communities are not religions and they are probably not as tightly knit as you and I have experienced in LDS wards growing up.
I feel like religion by definition doesn’t deal in provable “facts.” I am imagining a sliding scale where the greater deviation from demonstrable facts the greater the group’s sense of community and the lesser the deviation the lesser the sense of community. What’s the point of joining a sky is blue and grass is green club? Everyone already knows that.
I had a conversation with a professor of mine about this. Yeah, on some level it is actually the weird beliefs that bind people together. Groups based on obvious, universally accepted facts don’t have much to keep them together.
It’s looking like I’m going to have to go on a little longer journey to free myself from materialism as a worldview. And by materialism, I’m talking about the scientific assumption that the material universe is all there is, and that there is nothing “supernatural.” I’ve been doing some reading and it’s probably going to take some time.
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