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.
From a non-Mormon perspective, the sophisticated argument for prayer is that it changes a person’s disposition or spirit, and that this is what it means to receive something from God. This would have especially strong results where the desired object is itself a change of disposition, eg the addiction OP mentions. How could prayer help or cure addiction? Addiction entails the pursuit of pleasure where pleasure goes against one’s own social, prosocial, identity-determined goals. God solidifies a person’s social identity in ways impossible to accomplish with secular language or materialist understanding alone, for a variety of psychological reasons. Prayer works to recollect and elaborate upon social identity. It makes prosocial decisions salient and forefront, and even existentially significant. It involves an omnipresent social superior, social confident, and social lover. Many more things can be said about this. But there’s a reason even Huberman the neuroscientist prays every day.
The statistical evidence that prayer works is that religious people, especially those who pray to a loving God, have greater wellbeing and are protected against addiction. Really, all that we want at the end of the day is greater wellbeing. So it works in toto. If establishing prayer in your life is more conducive to your happiness than otherwise, then it is established that prayer works and ought to be done, as any reasonable organism seeks greater wellbeing.
Regarding disasters —
Unsophisticated shepherds dealing with unsophisticated dangerous feral sheep have often claimed that natural disasters are allowed by God or are the punishment of God. This is to promote society-wide prosocial behavior in an efficient way. But it is not the case.
Many, but they die in hope and conversation with their perfect Love One. The alternative is less prayer is unlikely to be more conducive to success and wellbeing. But the advice should never be “only pray” — of course you do everything else, but you also pray.
You make some great points, but not any that I don't already agree with. I fully admit that greater wellbeing and protection against addiction are great things and can reasonably be attributed to belief in God, prayer and everything else that goes with it.
Critically, @Tenaz's posts are going outside the scope of this and claiming that prayer can positively affect factors outside of your control, as long as you're praying for things that God wants. If he kept inside the scope you and FCfromSSC typically stay within when you talk about prayers being more about relationship with God, I would never have posted what I did.
I wish more people mentioned the tower of Siloam as you have. The Christians I have talked to have not noted its significance, and they don't usually have very well reasoned responses to my problems of evil, which goes against what @AnonymousActuary says when he writes
Many of them have not thought about it.
I think "why is this bad thing happening to me" sorta a diet-problem of evil is an extremely common thing for people to think about? But yes, I doubt the median Christian has read the Bible through even once. I remember when I was ~10 talking to a Sunday school leader and mentioning I was starting my 3rd time through reading a chapter a day and he was shocked. I was like "wait doesn't everyone do this?" haha.
And the Bible as a whole definitely addresses it frequently - think the Tower of Siloam story, the story of the cripple ("who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?") or like, the entire book of Job. I don't think the answers that come out are ones that are going to intuitively solve the problem for someone who doesn't already believe, but it is certainly considered.
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I think there is still value to this sort of “illogical prayer”. Imagine you want to run a marathon. If you’re constrained to logic, then you can pray for the spirit (mood / feeling / aim) to practice every day; the praying would help to increase salience and craving for the activity. But you can also enter into the post-logical realm: you can believe that God guarantees that you will complete a marathon, and actually changes reality provided that you practice. And now you have no wavering or double-mindedness about your practice and pursuit. There’s now no room for doubt about whether you obtain it, it’s just a matter of when. It’s hard to convey this beneficial goal certainty without eschewing logic, but you see it in a lot of high-level performers across domains, eg Magnus Carlsen saying that the optimal mindset for chess is “between delusional and confident”. It seems essential for the instrumentalization of cognition toward a goal.
Humans need to be certain that they will accomplish a goal and “God will make it so” is no less delusional than “I simply believe it” or “if you believe you will achieve” (at the very least, religious language is more poetic). But the utility of prayer is more clear when you factor in more variables: someone is more likely to take the time to pray when they believe (when they know) that they will be heard, answered, and gifted something materially. It’s easier on the mind and increases interest. “My act of praying gives myself a spirit” turns a person into an actor playing a part. “My loving Father is eager to give me my request and only asks for prayer and practice, that I prove my interest and allegiance” turns someone into a social animal, a human. It’s simpler, there’s no pretending. And it activates much more cognition and interest, because every time you pray you are speaking to the maker of all things and the ruler of time. That dogma itself will make the content of your prayer more striking in your mind, increasing the chance of it occurring.
As for the problem of evil, my view is firmly in the minority but I believe in a sovereign force of evil which evades the problem completely. From the Wisdom of Solomon:
I read this as a sovereign force of evil always existing, later in the form of the devil, who unleashed death when our archetypal ancestors disobeyed the Good in paradise. The evil in the world is both due to evil as a force and mankind’s own alliance with it (Adam isn’t just “first human”, but we all existed in Adam and we inherit his temperament etc). This is very satisfying. God has ultimate control over everything in the end, and ultimate control over the Good, but there currently and forever was a sovereign evil force. Every attempt to make God all-powerful including over evil is ultimately making Him less moral and less loving.
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