Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
For those of you who were not born into/raised with some kind of religion, how did you find your way to it in your adulthood?
I'm a male lawyer in my mid-40s. I was raised by irreligious boomers (who have drifted into extreme anti-religion in their old age). My childhood experience of religion was essentially zero. I'm not a hard atheist or anti-religious, but I also don't feel a "god-shaped hole" where many people seem to try to shove some kind of belief system (including the Current Thing) in an attempt to fill it. It seems more like I'm lacking the socket where some kind of faith module would even go.
I do much outdoors (pondering hiking the PCT next year, which wouldn't be my first thru-hike) and enough time outside will have me thinking "this has to be intentional Creation to explain why it's so amazing in so many ways." But it's a big gap from there to "sin is real and Jesus Christ was the son of God and sent to cleanse me of my sins" (yes, I'm aware that gap is where faith comes in).
I have investigated some churches around me, but all feel very culturally Alien (discounting the ones that would clearly be a bad fit since their doctrine appears to be "We Support the Current Thing, but we do so with a sprinkling of Jesus"). Church websites alone are enough to give me that Alien feeling. It's like the "Women Lawyers" associations that are technically open to all (to avoid problems with anti-discrimination laws) and some men do join, but it would take a Hannibal Lecter gurney and straitjacket to get me there--it is so obviously Not My Place that I would never go voluntarily. I get that feeling from any church I've looked into, too. So I can't say of the options I have near me call me into trying to learn more.
I am cradle LDS but needed to find my way back to the church after an atheist period.
For me, the beginning was reading the Sequences and realizing the LDS church had extremely satisfying answers to every anti-religion argument they made. Our answers for theodicy, the Invisible Dragon in the Garage, the nature of consciousness, free will, etc. are all quite good imo, if you are starting from a rationalist-adjacent perspective.
But what really brought me back was simple, undeniable, tangible evidence. I decided to try to pray for something (freedom from an addiction I had) and the result was spectacular, far beyond anything I'd have expected. I then set about more formally testing prayer and related things and found consistent, similar results.
I think "sin is real" at least should be fairly self-evident. There are self-destructive behaviors which both make you feel worse as a person, and decrease your capacity. Making an effort to avoid them makes us both happier and more capable of accomplishing unrelated goals. One can (and I have) run a series of tests to confirm this.
As far as faith in Jesus, I don't think there are any knock-down philosophical arguments that prove Christianity more true than, say, Hinduism. But I do think there are practical tests that work. Prayer and fasting get results. God doesn't ask for totally blind faith (that would be silly) nor for us to rationally consider philosophy in a vacuum to determine the correct religion (something very few, if any, humans are capable of). He provides hard evidence to those looking and ready for it.
The fact that prayer is what brought you back is really strange to me. Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works? What about other statistical evidence, like people who live on coasts that have earthquakes tend to die more to tsunamis? Completely area-based, unless you make the argument that people who live on coasts are more sinful and thus encounter the wrath of God more often. How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out? Knowing that statistics has incredible predictive power is enough to dissuade me that prayer does anything at all.
I don't understand why you think someone could believe that prayer sometimes works and not also believe that plate tectonics exists?
It's the idea that absolutely awful things can happen to you for reasons outside of your control at any time for many multitudes of reasons that were decided by seemingly nobody.
I honestly can't tell if this is some kind of gotcha or you are trying to make some profound point that is whooshing right over me haha
I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if @FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.
But it's an old question: the problem of evil, the problem of random things inherent in nature hurting you for no reason. Why are there so many things that are absolutely awful, caused by immutable nature, and are only explainable to us modern humans? To ancient humans, it seemed functionally equivalent to being smitten by God to get tuberculosis and die slowly. They likely thought that prayer had something to do with getting bubonic plague and dying, similar to Tenaz's idea that prayer causes better outcomes. The Aztecs thought that sacrificing people was statistically likely to keep the world from ending. Perhaps they sacrificed something and felt some sign from God twitch within themselves. But they couldn't have been further from the truth. Do you think we modern humans are more pious than ancient humans? Not a chance.
I have seen from some young earth creationists the idea that it's because humans are fallen ever since the Tree of Knowledge was eaten from by Adam and Eve. But that only works in a young earth model of the world. If there is no young earth, there was no Adam and Eve, and we are just animals, and the world was always fucked up, right from the start, before any human was involved at all.
The LDS model is that God is not conceptually omnipotent. He is not capable of preserving human agency and simultaneously allowing us to grow of our own free will. We can remain like Adam and Eve, in an innocent, childlike state forever, or we can venture out into the fallen world, separated from God, with all the suffering that entails, and grow in the process.
The reason suffering exists in this fallen world is due to the absence of God--because God is voluntarily choosing not to constantly exert his power at all times in all areas. God in our view did not create the universe ex nihilo or invent concepts such as good, evil, joy, or suffering, and the universe in its natural state (without God) is one of evil, disorder, and suffering.
If God were to exert his power more, not only would the suffering disappear, but our freedom would as well. There would be no meaningful distance between action and consequence. In this world, evil actions are often rewarded. In a world closer to God, they would be punished instantly, and good actions would be rewarded. We would remain children, lacking any opportunity to exert ourselves physically, intellectually, or spiritually. I'm not sure we'd even know what exertion is; nor would there be any reason to try to do anything, since God would provide for our every need. The Bible hints at this (1, 2), but it's a primarily LDS belief as far as I know.
There would be no need for effort in the first place. We wouldn't even be capable of exerting effort. Effort is intrinsically tied to suffering, after all.
"But it doesn't have to be"
Remember that I'm talking about LDS beliefs here, not broader Christendom. Our God can't reinvent concepts at a whim.
"But can't God at least step in for the worst suffering?"
If he steps in too much then he limits our agency and our ability to grow. But I believe both that he does step in, and that suffering is very, very rarely so bad as to be intolerable. I struggled with severe ulcerative colitis for nearly a year, and found that even at the very worst moments, if I just focused on taking it one step at a time, life was still significantly better than neutral. Even in the throes of physical agony, things are basically fine. I expect this follows for literally any level of physical pain.
The worst pains we experience are losses of joy. The loss of a loved one hurts much more than any amount of physical pain. I think it should tell us something that life is, for most people, so good that our worst moments are when we lose just one of the many sources of joy given to each of us.
And then we die, our proximity to God increases, our suffering and ability to improve as people are greatly diminished, and we enter what's been aptly called a "rest".
"What about dead children? Why is a human lifespan eighty years instead of a thousand or a million?"
I can go into more detail here if you want, but suffice to say that there will be other opportunities for moral growth, and I have faith we're all given what we need to flourish.
"But what about animals?"
They have spirits too. We don't know as much about why they need to be here (it's not nearly as relevant to us humans) but they probably do have some degree of agency, and thus moral growth, and they definitely have the capacity to distinguish pleasure from pain, good from bad, on some level. They're learning just as we are. Anyways, their main form of suffering is physical.
With that out of the way. My wife read what I wrote here and told me (in nicer words) that I was being excessively callous and autistic. Sorry about that. What I wrote was not even correct, really--God doesn't ever want his children to commit suicide. But he'll also never make a choice on our behalf. His ability to step in without harming our agency is ultimately pretty limited.
In the end I have faith that your friend will be okay, faith based not in high-and-mighty philosophical arguments from first principles, but in my personal experience with God's love. I understand if you don't feel the same. Probably the most consistent response I have seen to prayer is when I have asked for relief. I can't think of a time I was suffering greatly and asked for relief and it was not quickly given to me. I sincerely believe that if you take a minute to say a prayer now, and ask for relief, or ask God if he loves you, you'll feel peace and comfort. This is nowhere near proof of anything I've said--but it's a start.
I do appreciate your sincerity, and your honorable attempts to explain the gospel remind me of the valiant and zealous missionaries of the past, as shown in movies like Black Robe (1991). Growing up, I thought Mormons were really weird, and you are another in a long string of non-weird Mormons who challenge that stereotype. I thought the same about Catholics, as well, until @SubstantialFrivolity made a post giving quite the steelman of the branch. Like him, you are perfectly willing to wade into the difficult stuff.
No problem. To be honest, you did articulate something that it is not polite to think, yet I think many people think it privately to themselves - that some unpleasant lives would be better off if they were not alive. It is humanitarian to strive for the best for everyone, and that they continue living for as long as possible, but in many cases, the thought springs up anyway. If we actually take that thought seriously, we get some scary hypotheticals, like "at what point is it acceptable for lifelong chronic depressives to just give up and step into traffic", or "maybe you should kill your kids so they don't get a chance to lose the faith as adults". And if it was okay for her, as an abuse victim who was awfully messed up herself, to take her own life, then that has bad implications for other people who struggle with chronic depression or bad childhoods. I shouldn't have gotten mad at you, though, especially since you realized your mistake later anyway.
I hope she will be okay too, but an entire childhood of fundamentalism telling me that people who commit suicide go to hell and unbelievers go to hell cannot be washed away by the same fundamentalists backstepping with "God is perfectly just, so you can trust Him to make the right decision". You didn't say that, but there are so very many interpretations of the Bible that many people who genuinely were looking to God to give them the interpretation came to it. All of them genuinely feel their way is the right one and can cite scripture and cite their own internal spiritual uplifting upon praying. For Mormonism, the problem is even more acute, as @TracingWoodgrains found out through testing Moroni's Promise on an open minded Christian.
For these reasons, and more, I am afraid my faith is permanently disrupted. I don't think it's a good thing, so I appreciate your defense anyway.
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If anyone satisfyingly resolves the problem of evil in a forum post they are clearly misusing their talents.
I also will not solve the problem of evil for you here either. There are lots of books you could read by smarter people than me if that is what you are searching for (including books of the Bible), though it seems like you are just hoping bringing up the problem of evil will somehow magically turn someone atheist again like they've never thought about it in their life?
Based on a few interactions on this forum, I think everyone who brings up the problem of evil is personally pretty troubled by it and convinced it's a big problem. It may also be an argumentative tactic, but not a disingenuous one.
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I'm not asking anyone to become atheist. But the idea that prayer does anything is chafing enough to me to cause me to comment. As I said elsewhere, I think religion is healthy, though I struggle to accept the good with the bad.
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