Oh Ye of Brittle Faith

I originally started writing this for myself in order to organize my own thoughts. I wanted to put my feelings about the gospel into words that I could check myself against. For many years I was a very devout Mormon, and I imagine that many of my Mormon friends and family will be surprised to know that I have stopped practicing Mormonism. Many have already wanted to know why, so I decided to clean this up and make it available.

Please note that I speak frankly, and I make very good arguments. Some people may feel hurt or betrayed by what I have to say, but please don't take this personally. This is simply to help others understand where I'm coming from. Still, this may be hard for some of you to read, so I recommend this great little article to help open your mind to the thoughts I'm about to share.

When They Are Learned They Think They Are Wise

I am a fundamentally curious person. I love to learn. I love to ask questions, think critically, and explore. I want to know the whys and the hows. I love understanding topics such as science, philosophy, history, psychology, and politics. I love reading books from as many different perspectives as possible. But I especially enjoy reading about how we think. What makes us tick inside our heads? What is the nature of intelligence? Creativity? Reason? How do we learn? How do we make decisions? How does our brain process information and make sense of the world around us?

This is one of my core personal values, to keep my mind open to continually learn throughout my life. However, learning cannot occur unless you are able to consider the possibility that your current understanding is wrong or incomplete. You must have an open mind to new ideas and new perspectives. You have to admit that there is something you don't know. And yes, you have to be willing to ask: "What if my personal beliefs, values, philosophies, and understanding are wrong in some way?" I'm not saying you throw out everything you believe every time some new information contradicts what you've already been taught. You need to be just as skeptical of any new information. But you have to be willing to update/change beliefs when considering other perspectives and ideas. So many people in the church say "I know the church is true". Done. End of Story. They will not consider any other possibility, sometimes arrogantly so. And thus, they cannot learn something new---they think they are so wise.

The Parable Of The Wolf

I grew up in Alaska where it is all about the outdoors. If you see a river, you raft it. If you see a fish, you catch it. If you see a mountain, you climb it. If you see a bear, you wrestle it. It's just what you do.

When I was about 5 years old, we lived in a town called Wasilla. At our house, our backyard was very woodsy, full of trees and vegetation, and no one really had fences. My Dad was at work, my Mom and siblings were inside the house, and I was swinging on our little swing set in the back yard, alone. I was enjoying myself when I heard a noise in the bushes behind me. I looked and---"HUHHHHH!"

Staring out at me from the bushes was a wolf... I. Was. Terrified. My family were all inside the house. I knew I needed to get back inside, but if I ran, the wolf would chase me down and eat me! So I started walking slowly toward the house. But the wolf jumped out of the bushes and started circling me. I started panicking and was about to cry. But then I got this brilliant idea. I need to stay behind its mouth/teeth, so if I... climb on the wolf's back... I will always be behind its mouth... so it can't bite me!

So I did it! I climbed on the back of the wolf, chest down holding on to its fur! And the wolf wasn't biting me! Ha-ha! But... then the wolf started trotting... away from the the house... with me on top. Oh no! Now what do I do? I started panicking again, I started to cry. The wolf was going to take me back to be eaten by the rest of the pack. I was going to die! Tears kept coming down my face. Suddenly, the wolf started circling around and coming back to the house. The wolf came right next to our front porch, and I knew that was my chance. I jumped off the wolf, ran up the steps, and slammed the door behind me. I made it back safe.

I never immediately told my parents what happened. And as I've gotten older, I began to realize what an incredible story it is! I rode on the back of a freaking wolf! Yes, everything I've told you is true, it really happened when I was 5 years old. For years I would look back and be in awe of this crazy encounter with a wolf. It had a profound impact on my young self.

But... as I've gotten older and wiser... as I've become more experienced and educated... I look back on that experience and I've realized that that probably wasn't actually a wolf... It was probably just a friendly neighborhood husky dog that was running loose! That's the more likely explanation! At the time, I sincerely believed it was a wolf, I believed it for many years, and that belief affected me. Now, with more perspective and understanding, I'm certain it was just a husky, and I was never in any danger. My beliefs changed. It wasn't a wolf... it never was.

To Seek Truth or to Seek Happiness

Most people are terrified of losing their faith, so they either purposefully or subconsciously keep themselves in a bubble, and they refuse to confront hard questions, or to engage in certain discussions. Some people put on a show of stubbornness (unwilling to admit they could be wrong), but deep down it's fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of being thought wrong. I've met so many people who are afraid of reading books on evolution, or books on other religions, or even books on church history! Many people are afraid to venture outside their bubble. "I don't want to ruin my faith! So I'll only read the scriptures and other 'approved' writings." When asked hard questions, they often say things like "Oh, I just don't worry about that." They cut themselves off in the name of strengthening their faith. But really? Is their faith so brittle that they're terrified it won't hold up under scrutiny? If the church is true, what is there to worry about? Shouldn't it hold up just fine? (Remember, be just as skeptical of new information) Wouldn't it then help you become a badass missionary who could in turn help others overcome their concerns? And if it doesn't hold up, if you find out it isn't true, then thank goodness you were able to learn and figure that out! Thank goodness you no longer believe something that isn't true! As president J. Reuben Clark said, "If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed."

I'm not saying that change isn't hard---it is. Believing in something, whether it turns out to be true or not, can be a great source of comfort and happiness. As human beings, our minds are structured to believe in all sorts of things, for our own survival, that aren't necessarily true (more on this later). Uprooting your current beliefs can be a painful and difficult process. In fact, there are people out there who know perfectly well that something (e.g., the gospel/church) isn't really true, but they still act as if it is true. They would rather live a certain lifestyle, despite not actually believing, than having to restructure their life. Yes the gospel can help some people be happy, regardless of whether or not it actually is true. So perhaps you have to ask yourself what is more important to you. Is your primary goal to seek broader knowledge, truth, and understanding, no matter what it is? Or is it to be happy? If seeking broader truth and understand isn't as important to you, then perhaps you are perfectly happy living in a bubble. Which is fine, to each their own.

There are, of course, those of you who do ask the hard questions, who are not afraid of confronting the difficult issues, who do actively seek to understand the inconsistencies in the gospel, and who still believe in the gospel. You continue to do your due diligence and, thus far, have reached a different conclusion than me. That's great, I commend you. I was in your shoes not too long ago. The rest of this essay is perhaps mainly for you, so that you can understand what led someone like me to finally reach the conclusion that the Mormon church and the gospel are not true.

Ce N'est Pas Une Raison

Before I get into the reasons I don't believe, let me first tell you the reasons that don't apply to me. It has nothing to do with "sin" or wanting to live a "worldly" lifestyle. I've never had a problem living the gospel, and I still plan to live a moral life. It also doesn't have "that much" to do with social/political/historical issues. Although I certainly have my own opinions of and concerns with these various issues (I discuss it separately here), they are not "necessarily" deal breakers when it comes to the church. To me it makes sense that if there is a God, then he would know more than me and have a greater understanding. It would thus seem inevitable that my opinions and God's would eventually clash. My core value of learning actually helps me to believe in God in this situation. I can admit that my view of the world may be wrong and that God's view is one that I can learn from. In fact, I'd be even more skeptical of God if we always agreed on everything! Thus, it is "possible" that my views on, say, same gender attraction or questionable church doctrine/history, can be reconciled personally. My concerns with the church are more fundamental than these doctrinal/policy details.

Look, I would much rather continue to believe in the church. Part of the reason why it took me so long to leave was because I really wanted it to be true. I wanted to wait and continue giving it a chance before I made any hasty decisions. As mentioned before, change is difficult and it's a lonely road. I'm now in a hard transition period where I'm no longer Mormon enough to be part of the Mormon community, but I'm still too Mormon to fit in anywhere else. I'm not as close with my Mormon friends, yet I'm still figuring out how to even meet people and make new friends outside of the church. It's not pleasant and it can be lonely, but I can no longer pretend the church is true just for the sake of enjoying the Mormon community. I loved my time on my mission, at BYU, and in Provo. I am very grateful for my Mormon friends, and I hope that we can continue to be friends. I also still want to be a family man, husband, and father someday. I am grateful for the family values the church has taught me over the years. I am leaving the church because I have simply realized that it is not true (I'm agnostic about God), and I will no longer pretend that it is.

For the record, I kept reading scriptures, praying, and attending church long after I stopped believing. Like I said, I really wanted to believe, I wanted it to be true, so I still acted as if I believed for a while. I really tried to put it to the test. But being trained as a scientist, armed with critical thinking skills, having a broad education, and having knowledge of cognitive biases, the gospel repeatedly failed the tests.

Paradigm Shifts and Cognitive Dissonance

Reading this may make you feel uncomfortable because it may conflict with beliefs that you hold dear. That's called cognitive dissonance, and it is a normal human reaction. When we feel cognitive dissonance, our brains want to resolve the conflict as soon as possible, because it is stressful. One way our brains deal with cognitive dissonance is to just ignore the new conflicting information. Our brains either pretend it never heard/saw the new information, or immediately assume the new information is bogus from the start. This is tangentially related to confirmation bias, which is when we only seek information that confirms our existing beliefs. This is a form of denial and prevents us from correcting false beliefs and from learning new things. The new information may very well be wrong and worth ignoring, but we should make sure that it is actually wrong and not just something we don't like.
 
We are loathe to change our current beliefs/values and resist doing so, it hurts our "subconscious ego". However, when say, scientific evidence, becomes too strong to ignore, we deal with cognitive dissonance by incorporating the new ideas into our existing beliefs and pretend it was always that way. The advent of scientific discovery has caused this to happen to humanity as a whole on many occasions. For example, the idea that the earth was NOT the center of the universe has been around since 300 BCE, but it was basically ignored until the likes of Copernicus and Galileo started producing hard evidence. Despite the evidence, their ideas were disputed and they were persecuted because it contradicted with established religious belief. It wasn't until Newton's mathematical models did society as a whole finally start to really accept the idea. Of course, by then the religious ideology acted as if this was how it always was! "Of course the sun and not the earth is the center of the universe! The sun is the source of light and energy, so God obviously made it the center!" Though now we know that even the sun is not the center either!

Another huge paradigm shift came with the theory of evolution and genetics. "What! Humans were created by God, we didn't evolve from monkeys!" "What! the earth was created in 6 days! It hasn't been around for billions of years!" But as the evidence became too hard to ignore, religious belief adapted. "Oh of course evolution is legit, it's the tool God uses to create life!" "Obviously the earth is billions of years old; the 6 days in the bible is just a metaphor!" Although, some people still try to hang on to the literal 6,000 year old and 6 day created earth belief with some inventive explanations. "Oh, well, dinosaur bones were actually just left over from some other 'earth', and God just 'took of these materials' to create our current earth!" Um, really?

You may not realize it, but we are currently undergoing another major paradigm shift. With recent progress in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, we are having to confront the nature of our own consciousness and free will. What does it mean to think, learn, reason, and be a person? We will reach a point soon where we will be able create and manipulate new forms of real intelligence. These are ideas that often make religious people uncomfortable because the nature of self and free will are core to almost all religious ideologies. Many people (religious or not) have already and will continue to struggle with this one, because it's so personal and deals with what makes you you inside your own head.

When we confront the unknown, it scares us, and we seek explanations to understand it. Naturally, we use God as a way to explain the unknown for us. When science has provided new, detailed, and reliable explanations, we simply adapt to the next frontier of the unknown and use God again to explain it away. In other words, God is merely the God of the gaps. Mormonism is very good at this because it claims "modern revelation". This is especially evident with changing cultural/societal norms. The church didn't change their plural marriage doctrine until extreme societal pressure. They didn't change their blacks and the priesthood doctrine until, again, the social pressure was too great. The church then claimed "modern revelation!" with its changes. But why is it always reactive to modern society? If it's really modern revelation, why didn't the church lead the way in black civil rights? Why does it seem like the church is always behind the times instead of ahead of its time? I would not be at all surprised if the church eventually allowed women to hold the priesthood, or allowed same gender temple marriages once the societal pressure becomes great enough.

When Deductive Logic Fails

A lot of Mormons are generally very smart, educated, and successful. These people are critical thinkers, they are reasonable, and they know how to ask questions. So how can so many smart, educated people still believe in the gospel even if it's not true? Well, consider the following. If a > b and b > c, then it logically follows that a > c. Right? Congratulations, you just did some deductive reasoning! Deductive logic is used all the time to draw conclusions, make decisions, and reason about the world. However, the problem with deductive reasoning is that it requires some basic assumptions and/or axioms to start with. In the above example, we just assumed that a actually IS greater than b, and that b really IS greater than c. But how do we know that those statements are actually true? If we reason about things thinking our assumptions are correct, when they are actually false, then we end up concluding things that are wrong. Furthermore, what does it mean for something to be "greater than" another? How is it defined? Why is it defined that way? If you're playing rock, paper, scissors, then rock > scissors and scissors > paper have a slightly different meaning and concluding that rock > paper would be wrong.

Mormons and other religious people have basic assumptions about the world. There are established axioms and definitions whose validity and origin are taken for granted. Within this underlying set of assumptions, Mormons can make all kinds of logically sound and valid conclusions! Within this system, everything makes sense! When confronted with new information, facts, and observations about the world, religious people create reasonable and logically sound explanations that are consistent with everything! But these religious people usually never think to question the underlying assumptions and definitions! They never stop to think about how the assumptions/axioms/definitions came to be in the first place! If the assumptions are wrong, then their explanations and conclusions would become invalid.

Here's the thing. We can always provide an explanation to fit any data or any observation we find. There are literally an infinite number of ways to justify and merge all current scientific theories with the existence of God and Mormon doctrine. Given any set of observations/facts/assumptions/axioms, I can invent a theory/belief system that fits all of them. Doing this post-hoc is easy. What's hard is using that theory/belief system to predict and explain future events/observations. Einstein's theory of relativity isn't great because it explains observations (that's the easy part), it's great because it predicts the future. Instead of continually trying to jury-rig an explanation that fits all of our current beliefs and basic life assumptions with new information, maybe we need to consider the fact that some of our basic assumptions and beliefs are wrong. In statistics and machine learning (of which I am an expert), this is called the problem of overfitting, and it prevents a model from making accurate future predictions, despite explaining existing data very well. A good predictive model is able to figure out what data/observations are just noise (i.e., incorrect) and can ignore them as it learns.

Despite my love of learning, it still took me a while to finally admit that the gospel could be false. As I considered the hard issues/questions and other sources of knowledge, I was always able to find ways to justify the gospel and to devise clever explanations that reconciled dissonance between the gospel, these questions, and new scientific understanding. I was actually very good at it, I had some great explanations. But, when I was able to admit that the gospel could be false, instead of fixing that as a given and fitting everything else to the gospel, I could weigh its likelihood of correctness against any other contradicting explanation.

Did Not Our Heart Burn Within Us?

Our brains are pattern recognition machines, and our brains hunger to make sense of things. When given random input, our brains will try to understand it. Our brains will "see" things that aren't really there. Our brains will make assumptions and jump to conclusions. We want so desperately to understand everything we perceive that our brains will often fill in the gaps and invent "meaning" when none actually exists. Our brains do this for all levels of input, from sight and sound, to the emotions we feel, and even to higher order symbolic processing like language and narrative. If there is no readily available explanation, our brains will make something up! We see our brains doing this in everyday life. Any optical illusion will demonstrate how our brains sub-consciously assume things about the world and can get things wrong. Take a look at the following picture. What do you see?



If you said that you see an elephant, you are technically wrong, it's actually just a cloud. Yet most people also see the shape of an elephant. This is our brain working constantly to make sense of what it sees. The coincidental arrangement of water molecules in the sky happen to resemble the shape of an elephant, and our brain pounced on it! This is called pareidolia, which is the phenomenon of perceiving a familiar pattern where none actually exists. Other examples include seeing constellations in the stars, faces in ordinary things, and objects in blotches of ink. Our brain tries to fit the unfamiliar into something that is familiar. Of course, you're also familiar with clouds, so you're not actually fooled into thinking the cloud is really an elephant. It's just a fun game. But what happens if the input is something that isn't already familiar? In this case, we may make the mistake of not realizing when our brain has made a false assumption, or recognized a pattern that isn't actually there. We are wired this way for our own survival. Would you rather our brains see a predator in the shadows when there's nothing, or see nothing dangerous when the predator is there?

This phenomenon also happens often with our own emotions. Yes, our emotions are inputs to our brains, just as are sight and sound, and our brains are just as good at finding patterns in and interpreting the emotions we feel throughout our day. And yes, our brains are just as susceptible to being fooled by emotional illusions as they are by optical illusions. And yes, pareidolia happens with our emotions, but in this case it is usually referred to as apophenia, which is the more general version of finding meaningful connections and patterns from random input. We experience complicated emotions, and we "see" in them things that are not really there. This is what religious people call "feeling the spirit", or "a burning in the bosom". Just as we see shapes in the clouds, we "feel the holy spirit" in our own emotions. Visual input is more concrete, and we know what clouds are, so we are not fooled. But our emotions are much more vague and hard to pin down, so it is difficult for us to realize that our brains are trying to recognize patterns that don't actually exist, and we start to believe them.

To be sure, apophenia is not necessarily a bad thing. We need to find meaning in things. Emotions are what motivate us and drive us to succeed in life. We have emotional responses to things, experiences, events, and we derive meaning from them. This allows us to anchor our emotional responses to something that we can name and refer back to. Which then allows us to communicate that meaning to others and establish bonds by sharing the same meaningful emotions and experiences. This is part of what separates humanity from other animals. This is an important mechanism by which we can enjoy life, be in awe of nature, be motivated to push ourselves to greater heights, care about others, be creative, and invent metaphors. However, this same mechanism is also responsible for things like paranormal beliefs, conspiracy theories, the idea of bigfoot, reports of UFOs, jealousy, paranoia, superstition, and sometimes hate for certain people. Finding meaning in life is... well... meaningful---regardless of whether or not the meaning we derive is actually true. We need to do it for our very survival. We often enjoy it, even when we know that what we are seeing or experiencing is false. That's why we enjoy things like going to magic shows, or listening to fictional stories. We want to believe in something bigger and higher than ourselves because it's easier to find meaning in that, and so we look for it.

When something, like a religious organization, outlines ahead of time the "meaning", pattern, or "feeling" we're supposed to be looking for, then we are primed to "see" (or "feel") it more readily. Like when someone points out that a cloud looks like a certain thing, but you hadn't noticed, then suddenly you can't "unsee" the thing. This all eventually relates to other things too like culture, ideologies, groups, cults, organizations, politics, education, etc, but that's a whole different (and fascinating) discussion.

The Futility Of Prayer

Remember that scientific theories, like evolution, quantum physics, and Einstein's general relativity, are powerful not because they explain observations, but because they can predict the future. They allow us to build things and to manipulate the world around us. They allow us to travel to the moon, to communicate across the globe in an instant, and to perform life saving medical procedures. Their benefit is evident, predictable, and reliable. Prayer is none of those things. Yes, religious doctrine can explain things all day long, but it has little to no predictive power. Church doctrine teaches that prayer matters, that it is meaningful, and that God is listening and will answer you. It teaches that if you have questions, God will answer. If you are in need of something, God will provide. "Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened into you." "If any of you lack wisdom let him ask of God." In reality, it does not affect anything outside of yourself. At best it is a type of personal therapy. It can make you "feel" better as a form of placebo effect. But that's it. A series of simple cognitive biases and logical fallacies trick people into believing that prayer actually works. Strong claims? Allow me to elaborate.

The idea of prayer suffers from something called survivorship bias, or silent evidence. Suppose a ship full of 500 people sets sail and eventually gets shipwrecked, with only 10 survivors. Sad I know. You interview all 10 survivors, and every one of them tells you that, immediately prior to boarding the ship, they kissed their lucky rabbit's foot, and that's why they survived. Wow! The ONLY people that survived are the ones that kissed their lucky rabbit's foot! It must be that kissing your lucky rabbit's foot will save you from a shipwreck! Is that a valid conclusion? Well, what about the 490 dead passengers? What if every one of them ALSO kissed their lucky rabbit's foot before boarding? If so, then the rabbit's foot hypothesis is bogus. But we'll never know for sure, because those people are dead and we can't interview them. Their evidence is silent. We are biased towards the survivors because they are the only ones who get to tell their story.

Now, you guessed it, insert "prayer" in place of "kissing lucky rabbit's foot" and re-read the last paragraph. Does it still seem as obviously bogus? Is there really any difference between prayer and superstition? You see, we remember all the times our prayers were "answered". The "successes" are what we talk about. This, along with confirmation bias, leads us to only consider the "inspirational", "faith promoting" stories (i.e., the coincidences) and to ignore the vast majority of cases where prayer was futile---those stories never show up in the scriptures, or lesson manuals.

Next consider the "close door" button on an elevator. It totally does nothing (they haven't worked since the 90s), yet our desire to feel in control and our propensity to attribute cause and effect to everything fools us into thinking that pushing the button caused the elevator door to close sooner than normal. Same thing with many crosswalk buttons; a large portion of them no longer do anything, yet we have been conditioned to think that they do. These are called placebo buttons. We can get fooled in a similar way when it comes to prayer. To quote from the article I just linked (just replace "superstition" with "prayer"):

"Placebo buttons are a lot like superstitions, or ancient rituals. You do something in the hopes of an outcome – if you get the outcome, you keep the superstition. Dancing to bring the rain, sacrificing a goat to get the sun to rise – it turns out these are a lot like pressing the button at the crosswalk over and over again. Your brain doesn’t like randomness, and so it tries to connect a cause to every effect; when it can’t, you make one up."

Again with the randomness thing! Our brains love to find meaning and connections in randomness, even when they are not actually there. Many other cognitive biases and logical fallacies apply here as well and trick us into believing in prayer, including the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, regression to the mean, and sampling bias. I won't elaborate on all of them, but this article goes through several more in relation to prayer; I highly recommend reading it.

Here is what irks me most about prayer. Through all the promises about prayer, through all the wonderful stories you hear, through all the claims about its benefits, and through all the assertions of its effectiveness. None of it matters if it simply isn't God's will, which basically makes prayer completely arbitrary. The gospel has "engineered" itself an un-falsifiable contingency plan. "Oh, you got what you prayed for? God is great!" "Oh, you didn't get what you prayed for? Well it must not have been God's will." "Oh, what you prayed for hasn't happened yet? It's in the Lord's time, not yours." You see? It really does NOT matter what happens; an explanation has already been engineered for every situation. I could just as easily say that kissing my lucky rabbit's foot when I need something will cause the Giant Flying Rabbit God named Stan to bless me---if He wants to. If I get what I needed, it was totally Stan hooking me up! If not, Stan just didn't feel like it this time. How can you disprove me? You can't (see here and here). So what is the difference between my giant flying rabbit God Stan and your God?

And don't get me started on the whole "pray like everything depends on God, then act as if everything depends on you." Now you're just setting the stage for a self-fulling prophecy. If I succeed, it was because God helped me! If I fail, well it just wasn't God's will. But I will likely succeed anyway because I'm acting to make it happen myself---very tricky. Ultimately, this cheapens the idea of prayer. I could literally insert anything (like kissing the ol' rabbit's foot) in place of prayer and the statement is no different. Furthermore, this line of thinking has influenced many people to spend most of their life giving God all the credit for their success, but blaming themselves for all their failures. Not a healthy way to live.

So then what is the point of prayer? What makes prayer different from any other superstition or ritual!? Seriously, what use is it if God will just do what he wants anyway? I'm sure there are proportionately just as many successful and happy non-praying atheists out there as there are religious people. Furthermore, what about all the various religions that pray to different Gods? They each sincerely believe that their God answers their prayers. Why is your God so special? Why is your God so much better?

Many who read this will say something like, "You don't get it! Prayer isn't about getting the answer/thing/outcome you want! Prayer is really about aligning your will with God! Prayer is really about finding peace and comfort through life's challenges, not for the challenges to be taken away!" I see. So what you are saying is that you agree with me when I said that prayer is just a form of personal therapy?

Because of Reasons

Once you turn the corner and stop stubbornly adhering to the gospel, once you can admit and accept that it could be false, you start to see more clearly a lot of the flawed reasoning that goes into religious belief. When I engage in discussions with religious people about the inconsistencies of the gospel, when I ask hard questions, and when I point out flawed and circular reasoning, I get some interesting responses.

Some I have already covered, but another that I want to mention is along the lines of, "Hey man, we don't know all the answers, but that's why it's called faith! If we knew all the answers, then we wouldn't need faith!" Um, OK? I agree that it's important to have faith in certain things to motivate yourself, but why should I have faith in the gospel versus something else? You still need to convince me to have faith in the church, God, etc. If you can't explain why, but still insist that I just have faith, then to me that's basically saying, "I don't know why you should believe in it, but that's why you should believe in it!" Does that make any sense to you?

Lately testimonies I've heard from people follow this form, "I have never found more peace and joy anywhere else than when I'm following the gospel of Christ." Yes, well, have you really given other religions or ideologies a chance? I don't doubt that you find comfort in your beliefs, but how do you know that you couldn't find greater comfort elsewhere? Even if you have considered other ideologies, did you give them a fair chance? Remember, change is hard and uncomfortable, so you would need to give it an appropriate amount of time. I mean, isn't that what you say to Mormon "investigators"? "The transition can be hard at first, but trust us, it's worth it in the end!" What if you're just stuck in a local maximum? How do you know there isn't something greater if you don't venture out?

Inevitably, my "academic" arguments usually cause people to say something like, "You just think you're so smart, but you just don't get it." No, I don't think I am that smart; I bring up these issues and ask questions because I want to understand more, because I realize that I lack knowledge. If the gospel means so much to you; if you are willing to dedicate so much of your time, resources, and energy into believing and living it; then wouldn't you want to make absolutely sure that it is what it claims to be? Wouldn't you want to research closely the history and origins of it? Wouldn't you want to be skeptical of its doctrines at first? Wouldn't you want to make sure that you're not succumbing to common cognitive biases?

If you've noticed flaws in my arguments, holes in my reasoning, or information I got wrong, then by all means reach out and let's talk. Please, let's continue the discussion, I'd be really excited to keep learning. But let's have a real discussion. If you're going to just tell me that "I just don't get it", or that "I need to repent and humble myself before the Lord", then that's just ignoring my concerns and writing me off as a lost cause. If you can't articulate valid reasons why my conclusions about the church are wrong, then are you sure it's me who doesn't get it? Are you sure it's me who thinks they are so smart? Are you sure it's me that needs to be humble enough to admit that their beliefs are wrong?

If the first presidency and the apostles got up and told everyone that the church, Joseph Smith, and the book of Mormon are all a fraud, I am certain that there would be large handfuls of people who would stubbornly still believe and try to practice the gospel! In fact, some would even try to form their own branch of Mormonism to keep believing (claim another apostasy/restoration, etc). Would you be one of those people who would stubbornly not let go if that happened?

Choose Ye This Day

The astute reader will point out that all these problems/concerns that I've discussed don't just apply to religion/Mormonism, but they can apply to ANY ideology. Indeed, the only difference between an ideology and a religion is that a religion claims that it comes from a higher power. People with any ideology (e.g., liberalism or conservatism), can be just as dogmatic about their beliefs, just as intolerant to people outside their beliefs, and just as blind to their own logical fallacies and biases as with any religion. We always need to think critically and be open to new ideas, and be open to the fact that our beliefs, religious or not, could be wrong. It's ironic that I have seen many of my atheist/agnostic (and typically liberal) friends be so critical of religious dogma, yet they are just as dogmatic about their own ideologies. Whether liberal, libertarian, or conservative; whether religious, atheist, or agnostic; whether you believe in acupuncture, the power of love, vegetarianism, or are for/against vaccines; all these ideologies are susceptible to the problems I have thus far discussed.

You may ask yourself, so what now? Why should I attempt to believe in anything? What purpose can there be in life? If Mormon doctrine is false, and other religions/ideologies could also have problems, then what can I believe in? The answer is to believe in whatever the hell you want! At any given point in time, you have to believe in something. You have to adhere to some sort of ideology in order to have opinions, engage in discussions, make decisions, and affect the world. Being part of a community usually means that you take on that community's ideology. As humans, we need to be part of a group, to feel included, and to feel loved. Inventing meaning and purpose in life is one way to bond with others, and the church provides a great community for people to bond together. When I served in callings like full-time missionary, home teacher, ward mission leader, and elder's quorum president, I was able to reach out to others and bring them in. There is no question that this fellowshipping helped many people (my friends) to overcome loneliness, change bad habits, overcome depression, and feel inspired to succeed in life. These are good things, but it wasn't Christ's atonement that helped these people. It was simply that the human need to be part of a community that cares about them was missing from their lives, and the church community filled that void. That void could have been filled with just about any community that would have reached out. Thus ideologies/religions can be good, regardless of their absolute truth.

So choose your set of beliefs. You are free to make that choice. Yes, believe and adhere to the ideologies that make you the most successful and the most happy in life. It's OK if there is uncertainty in its absolute truth; learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. Take control of your own life, create your own meaning, and share it with others. It turns out, people can be quite happy without religious organization or a belief in God! 

I agree with the lesson in the book, Life of Pi, that a story does not have to literally be true in order to teach truth. Just remember that some ideologies are more correct than others, and remember that discovering truth is an ongoing and evolving process! This is why I value learning so much, because it can never truly end! Never be satisfied with your current level of understanding, always try to broaden your perspective, and continually seek knowledge and insight from multiple sources!

At least that's the ideology I currently adhere to, but I'm open to other ideas.

(See here for part two)