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 -
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.
Thanks.
To be clear, I think death is indeed an "easy way out," so to speak, for everyone. But we all chose to come here, because we were willing to suffer in order to grow, and killing someone (or letting them die) denies them their rightful opportunity for growth. I was totally wrong to say it was possibly good for her to have died--but I do think that for her, and everyone else, death is much more comfortable than life, which I hope is some consolation.
For what it's worth, I'm quite skeptical of that whole account. This deserves a post of its own, which I don't really have time for right now, but there are quite a few inconsistencies that make me think that, at the least, a lot of supporting evidence has been exaggerated and contradictory evidence omitted.
TW's username refers to his personal failure to see the fruits of Moroni's Promise. He studied and prayed many times and never felt anything. I had a fairly similar experience, with the enormous caveat that I actually did feel positive spiritual impressions a few times, but found myself entirely unable to trust those impressions. The brain is capable of manufacturing all sorts of sensations at will--it's certainly capable of giving me a feeling of peace if that's what I expect. Buddhists often report something similar when meditating. Nowadays I have tested that sensation of peace enough to lend it a small measure of trust, but at the time it was afforded literally none. I sought out alternative methods, failed to find any, left the church for a few years, and then the events I've described began, and led to my return.
He's clearly a conscientious, intelligent, neurotic person. Probably smarter than me, definitely more conscientious and more neurotic. Why did he not reach the same conclusion I did? Why should his absence of feeling mean anything more than my feeling did? Why did he trust that absence of feeling more? Moroni's Promise does not actually promise any specific spiritual sensation as a result of the prayer--that's a widespread modern church myth. It doesn't promise any spiritual sensation at all. He is, and was, aware of this if he's half the person I think he is.
But then I look at the original Reddit thread and they, including him, are completely unaware of that. They're using a different promise and are shocked that their version of it didn't happen. To be fair, they didn't invent that promise--there's probably been many an overenthusiastic mission president that thought his bolder version of the promise was the real deal. But they all should know better.
So we have here a single anecdotal account. It's written by someone who has spent years building up his reputation as a conscientious, intelligent person, someone who says he was desperate for truth and desperate for the LDS church to be true. And yet, not only does he get the promise wrong in a pretty obvious way, he doesn't even seem to realize it, even years later. There's no way he hasn't heard by now that he got the promise wrong. I can only conclude he's being seriously dishonest about all of it.
Anyways, that's just one detail, and if I had more time I'd go through the rest of the account, but I think it's significant since Moroni's Promise is the lynchpin of the whole story.
Oh, and one more thing, the Deutero-Isaiah chapters quoted in Second Nephi. Basically the issue is, Nephi quotes Isaiah as if Isaiah is one guy, but biblical scholars mostly agree that there were actually two or more Isaiahs, some of whom lived after the time of Nephi.
Regarding this issue, TW says "you can consider it the straw that broke the camel's back." But if you look into it seriously, it's obviously hogwash. It basically boils down to the majority of biblical scholars saying that the book of Isaiah must have had multiple authors because prophecy is impossible because God isn't real. And if you start from that premise, sure, Isaiah has multiple authors, but also if you start with that premise the Book of Mormon is already a scam. If he were the serious truth-seeking person he portrays himself as then he would know this. He's only a couple years older than I am, and I think I went through my faith crisis a lot younger than he did (I wasn't going to serve a mission before I knew the church was true, lol), so we were exposed to (and searching for) basically the same information at the same time. Completely satisfactory answers to things like this were available and pretty easy to find, so I can only conclude he wasn't as interested in the truth as he says he was.
Yeah, I get it. I don't think there's any way through the philosophical morass without personal, direct evidence. It's up to each of us individually. But seriously man--faith isn't something that just permanently dies. Even if your "faith muscle" is seriously atrophied, it still exists. My experience with religion has generally been that if I act on what I know is true, I receive a witness. This isn't sufficient evidence for me to know that it's true, it's nothing close to that, but it's enough to validate the original test and push me to try a bigger test.
Faith isn't knowing, or even believing, in things without sufficient evidence; it's earnestly acting on what you already know.
I'll finish by quoting TW again.
Yes, precisely, if you get a negative response, and it's a good enough test, then you need to listen to it, just as you'd listen to a positive one. The times I've seen the greatest miracles in my life have always been when I've "put myself out there" so to speak and risked it all. It's just so alien to me to read TW talking that way as if one shouldn't take Moroni at his word. TW is the last person I'd expect to think "it's better to live in ignorance than know the church is false." I've caught myself thinking like that sometimes, and run the test anyways to force myself out of it, because I'd rather know reality even if it means abandoning my faith. Every time, God has come through for me.
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