The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This past Sunday, I received baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
As some of you may be aware, I have been passively orbiting this church with various degrees of interest over the course of my entire life, as a result of family connections and several very close friends. Like most non-Mormons, I found various reasons not to pursue any active interest in the church: the total lack of anthropological/scientific evidence for historicity of its central religious text; the concerning signs of Joseph Smith’s charlatanry and general strategy of “making it up as he went”; the onerous lifestyle restrictions; the financial burden which tithing imposes, etc.
Furthermore, I’m occasionally cited here as an able critic of Christian ideas about theodicy, the efficacy of prayer, and the apparent contradictions between the idea of a loving and omnipotent God on the one hand, and the sheer amount of random and wanton suffering present in our world on the other. People have linked to my somewhat recent discussion with @FCfromSSC regarding this matter as an example.) Thus, it may strike many users here (and does seem to have struck at least some people in my IRL life) as surprising to see me commit myself to this church.
However, about eight weeks ago I was approached by a pair of pleasant-looking young sister missionaries at the mall while leaving the gym. Although I was sore and tired and just wanted to go home, I couldn’t resist stopping to speak with them. We had a conversation about what I believed about the Book of Mormon, and about my research into, and interest in, the church. They invited me to attend services with the local Young Single Adults ward that upcoming Sunday, and I accepted. I decided that this would probably be my last opportunity to sincerely immerse myself into the church, at least on a provisional basis, and see what my experience would be. I also, for reasons I’ll keep personal, saw this as at least possibly an answer to prayers I’d offered not too long ago. Since that day, I have consistently attended Sunday church services (both the sacrament meeting and the subsequent scripture discussion sessions, where I’ve been an active participant even since my first week of attendance as an “investigator” of the faith) and plan to continue doing so. I have successfully given up coffee (not caffeine entirely, although I’m actively working to reduce my daily caffeine consumption and dependence) and pornography. (I had already drastically decreased my alcohol consumption, so reducing it even further to zero has been trivially easy.) I’ve attended various social events organized by the ward, which has allowed me to ensconce myself into a community of bright, wholesome, surprisingly-mature and well-grounded young people. I finally decided that baptism is the next important step — a costly signal of my escalating commitment.
It is difficult for me to articulate the reasons for my decision in a way that would meet the intellectual standards of this forum. I still have many of the same doubts I did before accepting baptism; I still don’t believe that the Book of Mormon is a historically-accurate description of real events that took place in the pre-Columbian Americas. (Rather, I currently believe that it is an allegorical text, intended by God to usher in a new dispensation by providing a scriptural text which would be narratively and intellectually compelling to the specific audience to which He intended it to be presented, given their particular interests, level of historical understanding, and literary/religious frame of reference.) I still have a lot of questions about Joseph Smith’s character, intentions, and leadership qualities. I’m still working on wrapping my mind around what it actually means to aspire to live a Christ-like existence; toward what political/philosophical positions and actions does this obligate me? There are, however, many elements of Mormon theology and the Mormon lifestyle which appeal very strongly to me. (Ideas about the Plan of Salvation and the nature of the afterlife being chief among the theological appeals, and the sexual conservatism being the primary secular/lifestyle appeal.) I was strongly influenced and encouraged by a post a few months ago by @2rafa — arguably my favorite poster here, and the one with whom I probably feel the greatest degree of intellectual and personality kinship — in which she implored people here to embrace the benefits of a loving and welcoming religious community and to try hard not to ruin the experience by thinking too deeply and skeptically about the inner workings of the theology. I decided that if she could do it, I should probably try to see if I could as well. So far it has been more enriching than I could have imagined.
Over the coming weeks I will undergo the rites of the lay priesthood common to all male members of the church, set myself up to begin automatically tithing, and begin working towards obtaining a “temple recommend” allowing me to enter LDS temple buildings. I am actively working on finding a spouse with whom I can raise a family; I’ve already been on a lovely date with an intelligent and creative woman (one of the few female members of the ward somewhat close to my age, as most are closer to 18-20) and have another one already arranged. I expect at least a few of these people to become long-term friends. I don’t know what else to expect in terms of how this will affect my life trajectory, what will be asked of me, etc. All I know is that right now I am finally beginning to taste what it might be like to truly believe that I have a Heavenly Father who loves me, that my Redeemer lives, and that he has provided me with a way to dwell with Him eternally along with my loved ones.
I am increasingly happy to have turned down invitations from two pairs of hot bubbly blonde Mormon missionary girls in a row, I had an intrusive thought pop into my head, perhaps I should attend their sermon that Sunday, I wasn't doing anything important and it would be funny. I'm glad I didn't, because I look at this and think "there but for the grace of
Godmyself go I".I find the invocation of @2rafa's advice particularly interesting. Her argument, as you present it, is to "embrace the benefits of a loving and welcoming religious community and to try hard not to ruin the experience by thinking too deeply and skeptically." This is a known strategy, but coming after a discussion on the downsides of wireheading, it creates a certain cognitive dissonance.
At the end of the day, humans are very prone to rationalization. You are clearly benefiting to some degree from compromising your epistemics. You've landed a date, and it might lead to marriage. You've found a sense of community. Is the cost of lying to yourself worth it? That's for you to decide. My concern is that you will likely succumb to the deep pressure to suppress your doubts, to fall in line and parrot the party line so hard you forget that you once didn't believe it.
Maybe you're the exception. Maybe you've found a way to have your cake and eat it too. Or maybe in a year or two you'll be writing posts about how you used to think the Book of Mormon was allegorical but then you prayed about it and received personal revelation that it was literally true, and I'll be reading them through my fingers like a horror movie.
The part that really gets me is how perfectly optimized the whole system is. The missionaries approaching you at the mall when you're tired and vulnerable. The Young Single Adults ward (which I'm convinced was invented by someone who read about PUA tactics and thought "what if we made this... holy?"). The way every social incentive pushes toward deeper commitment. It's like watching a chess grandmaster play against someone who's only just learned how the pieces move. Someone who, deep down, doesn't want to win, and would benefit in obvious ways from throwing the game.
If you had been capable of living a lie, of snatching all the benefits of their community without compromising yourself (leaving aside the virtue of not being a liar), then I'd be marginally less concerned. Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
I’ll combine my response to you with my response to @Amadan, since you’re both basically making the same point here.
So, let’s take epistemics totally out of the equation for a second (since that’s all just stuff happening within my own head) and focus on the material tradeoffs here. Cost-benefit analysis. Supposing for a moment that the theology is all total bunk, let’s assess what I’m likely to get out of it, versus what I will be asked to sacrifice.
I’ll start with the sacrifices, as they are substantial. Obviously I will have to give up alcohol, coffee and tea; those are all things which have featured heavily in my social life at various points in my life, and all things which I enjoy consuming. (Others would probably also struggle with giving up tobacco, vaping, or drugs, although fortunately I never got seriously into any of those.) Tithing ten percent of my income will be a significant financial outlay, and will likely considerably reduce my discretionary spending, at least in the short term. I will likely be asked (although not forced) to take on duties to support church functions, including things like periodically performing baptisms for the dead. I will likely lose some friends who will be outraged by my joining a church whose stance on homosexuality and transgender issues they find repellent/offensive. Probably most notably, I am removing from my potential pool of romantic partners any woman who would not be comfortable converting to the church in order to be with me; this means closing off a great many possibilities and massively reduces my options. (There are also epistemic questions in terms of how I will explain/justify my beliefs to others, including my future children, but I’ll put those aside for now.)
Okay, so what do I get in return, materially speaking? As you’ve both noted, I get access to a pool of chaste young women with good values, who come pre-selected for being interested in children and family. (This is not actually the primary reason I’ve made this decision, although given my complaints about dating on the Motte in the past, I can understand why you both zeroed in on this topic.) I become enmeshed into a social network of upwardly-mobile people who may provide employment opportunities. I get to be around people — women, even! — who haven’t elected to make their entire personality about how queer they are and how much they hate anybody to the right of Hasan Piker. I get to feel (and to be perceived by others as) useful, respected, and necessary as I’m guided toward a position within the church that can utilize my talents. I get a good, airtight excuse not to even be asked to engage in behaviors that could be harmful or addictive to me. And, if necessary, I even get access to the church’s housing assistance program and other pieces of the famous “Mormon welfare”.
Again, this is all leaving aside questions of whether or not any of the religious claims of the church are true. I’m becoming far more comfortable with the proposition that at least the stuff about the afterlife (and the pre-mortal life, which is another cool aspect of LDS theology) is true. As for my other concerns about the church? I’ve been very transparent with the missionaries about those, including the guy who did my “baptism interview”, and it hasn’t been a problem.
The thing is, religious practice, for the vast majority of human beings who have ever existed, has probably always involved a delicate dance between public and private beliefs. It’s not like I’m getting constantly grilled to make sure that I really super seriously believe and know that ancient Levantine Jews sailed to America and built a continent-spanning civilization that lasted for centuries. That’s not actually very important to me, and doesn’t have any tangible effect on my behavior in the here and now. It could potentially pose an issue later on when I have to be a proper paterfamilias and spiritual teacher and guide to my future children. This is something I’ve already thought a lot about and will continue to figure out how to navigate.
You’ve both expressed horror and consternation at the thought that at some point I might actually convince myself that it’s true. As if this would be some catastrophic loss for me. But I honestly have to ask both of you: why would this be bad? What actual bad effects would that have on my life? I wouldn’t get to win any more arguments against sincerely-believing Christians/Mormons? Okay, what am I actually getting out of participating in those arguments now? I’ll have a flawed/incomplete model of the cosmos? Okay, how is that actually going to negatively impact my actions? Like, I agree that epistemic hygiene is a virtue, and that reducing cognitive dissonance is good, but clearly these things are not the only terminal values a person can have. What other concerns do you actually have about this decision? Do you just find it yucky? What would you have me do instead?
Will it harm you to believe in an ancient Levantine civilization that spread across the Americas without leaving behind any archeological or anthropological traces? No, not in itself. Nor would believing that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the Quran to an illiterate 7th century Arab goatherd. Nor would believing that the sun revolves around the Earth.
For me, anyway, epistemic hygiene is pretty close to my terminal value. Truth is the highest virtue. Without truth, no other principles are meaningful. Yes, I know, no one can ever know the truth, we're all fumbling towards the closest approximation of the truth we can perceive, but you should be striving towards it, not averting your eyes from it. You and @2rafa are basically saying "Truth is less important than other things, like living in a nice community with people who make life pleasant even if they believe silly things."
I cannot adequately express how strongly I disagree with that.
I could live in that community. I could agree to follow their rules. I could tolerate their silly beliefs. I could not lie about what I believe. (I mean, if my life depended on it, I guess I would pretend. I'd feel dirty about it, and murderously resentful.)
I understand why some people choose to believe things that are beneficial to them, or at least go through the motions of believing and studiously avoid looking behind the curtain. But I can't do it and I kind of look down on people who do, to be honest.
To take this slightly out of the religious context: I live in a very blue bubble and most of my friends and family are very woke. Despite being pretty liberal compared to the average Mottizen, I'm basically a dissident now. I have never lied about what I believe, but I do frequently stay silent when certain topics come up, because it's not worth the fight. Recently, even my silence has occasionally been noted and my inability to make convincing sounds of affirmation is probably going to lose me some friends.
I resent this, and I don't see it as being a lot different than pretending to believe in the Angel Moroni and Joseph Smith's golden tablets, if my social relationships depended on pretending to take them seriously.
On the subject of "Believing things that are convenient, or at least pretending to believe them because they are pro-social," I'm going to bring up a more pertinent example for you. I have made the point before that if HBD is true, it's going to be a very hard sell to, for example, black people, that they should just accept their lot in life (specifically, the lot that white supremacists would like to assign to them). I got downvoted and scolded for that on the mistaken assumption that I was advocating the Noble Lie, that we should pretend HBD isn't true even if it is. But that is never what I said. What I did say is that I can sympathize with people who are unwilling to believe something that might be true but which has brutal implications for them and their loved ones, and that whatever social contract we negotiate based on that is going to have to take that into account. But other people would absolutely embrace the Noble Lie. Indeed, I personally think a lot of liberals have–on HBD issues, on trans issues, on immigration–in other words, they know the truth but pretend not to, and will actively attack those who speak it. This is, from their perspective, pro-social. You, I am pretty sure, would disagree. But in the realm of religious beliefs, the Noble Lie is what you are advocating. "Even if Joseph Smith never discovered any golden tablets and the Lammanites didn't exist, pretending to believe it gives me access to a great community." Well, okay then. I understand why you would make that decision. But I don't respect it.
I guess I find it odd how many mottezians we have who have a great deal of interest in religion, despite serious, even fatal, reservations about fundamental principles of religious belief. I guess "religion as community" is simply something that has never appealed to me; while my own faith is deeply personal to me, I've never particularly liked churchgoers as a whole that much -- so many seem naive, status-seeking, obviously instrumental in their approach to faith, and indifferent to ideas; not to mention wildly hypocritical. I don't understand, really, the attraction to church girls, although they're perfectly fine people. For my tastes, they so often have a dead-eyed stare, like they've never had an original thought in their lives.
I know many red tribers who grew up in church communities, but drifted away because of the many foibles of religious institutions: corruption, status games, petty disputes over leadership or music selection, purity spiraling, legitimate doctrinal concerns that go unaddressed, personal betrayal by leadership, and of course the one as common as weeds: famous head pastors banging their subordinates. If anything, red tribers as a whole are just as skeptical of religious institutions as blue tribers -- they just express it differently. "I don't need these corrupt religious institutions, I have my bible and my mind," is a quintesentially red tribe take on religion, even -- actually especially -- in the Bible belt.
I think people who grew up without faith in their lives or community often over-romanticize what religion is really like. And while I wish people all the best in whatever choices their conscience compels them to make, I can't help but find it quizzical why someone would be compelled by the idea of giving up their Sunday morning, and even a small iota of their behavior, to an institution whose most sacred truth claims, and indeed claims of authority, come from sources they believe are fundamentally incompatible with the facts of reality.
I think it's true that there are many areas in which people adopt the mantle of organizations whose founding principles they don't believe in; after all, we live in a world where the US Congress exists. But I guess politics feels like an area of human activity where instrumental use seems valid; after all, we live in a world where politics has power over you whether you like it or not. But religion no longer does. Any authority the Twelve Apostles or the Bishop of Rome has over you is an act of personal choice. My view is that if your authority is voluntary, you had damn better well earn it, and be supernaturally impeccable in every possible way. But my ancestors were Scottish Covenanters: rejections of purported religious authority are in my blood.
This kind of shift feels dominated by a sort of backlash against wokeness, like because wokeness is wrong, it's necessary to go out and find the least and most vociferously un-woke place imaginable, and join it. I'm not convinced that's wise. While I can't deny that my own backlash to contemporary progressive beliefs influenced my journey of faith, I can also say that it was absolutely dominated by positive attraction to religious truth claims on their own terms, in in their own grammar. I simply find much of Christian theology beautiful, in terms of what it says about the human person, his significance, his destiny, and the love that God has for him.
Contrary to the impressions some might gain from speaking to intelligent Christian commentators (myself included), there is little that is complex in the fundamental offering of Christianity. The spiritual and esoteric elaborations on this fundamental offering are the work of thousands of years of marginalia -- powerful, often compelling, but ultimately unnecessary for salvation. They are the easter eggs of the Christian faith, not its essence. And there are just as many historical footnotes and easter eggs in Mormon history; in fact, adopting the idea that the LDS church's doctrine is completely simple, basic, and easy is a heroic level of drinking the institutional kool-aid. I agree the LDS have declared it so, but the history of the institution belies this interpretation. So I suppose I find it odd to approach such a religion, or even the LDS version of it, by wagering that the mortal benefits are better than the sacrifices. It's like arguing for drinking a fine French wine "because on the antioxidants," or approving of a neoclassical architecture plan because of the chemical properties of marble.
So, I don't know. There's a big part of me that finds fundamentally instrumental approaches to faith extremely strange, and foreign. But I also think it's true that religion for most of human history had major connections to instrumentality and power -- which early Christianity, with its intensely personal and conscientious nature, struck up against firmly. They dared to say that loyalty to the state did not necessitate loyalty to the state religion, and even described the imperial cult in the most intense language accessible, while being willing to be brutally tortured rather than submit to it. It's that element of Christianity, not the ways in which it has, at times, contorted itself to usefulness, which I admire. It's obvious to me that the later rejection of Christianity by conscientious rationalists in the Enlightenment followed this pattern.
More options
Context Copy link
But I already told you that I don’t believe that. It’s actually not required for me to express that belief! At least, nobody has required me to thus far. As I said, the missionaries who spearheaded the process of my baptism are aware that I don’t believe that! It was part of the very first conversation I had with them, before I even went to church with them!
Now, there are things I was asked to affirm in my baptism interview to which I could only answer “yes” given a non-literal interpretation of the question. An example would be, “Do you believe that the Church and gospel of Jesus Christ have been restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith? Do you believe that [current church president] is a prophet of God? What does this mean to you?” Now, the Church does have an official stance on what it means that “the gospel was restored”: because of the Great Apostasy, God revoked the keys of the Holy Priesthood from all earthly churches, until finally providing several otherworldly visions to Joseph Smith in the 1820s and then leading him to discover and translate the plates containing a historical account of Christ’s true teachings to the Nephites. This account shows humanity how to return to the pure gospel and worship practices given to Adam and promulgated among the first generations of human prophets.
I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.
The church’s concept of “continuing revelation” and its relative youth mean that its theology is still very much being built and codified and refined as we speak. It can respond in a more agile way to emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics, archaeology, and astronomy. It’s not beholden to millennia-old canon. To me, all of that is what I mean when I say that this church is “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ”. Whether or not the golden plates were literally written by ancient Hebrews is irrelevant to me.
When we’re assessing the value of a particular Noble Lie, we have to assess what belief in that lie actually demands of its believers in the here and now. I would argue (and have argued) that the belief in universal human cognitive homogeneity is bad not simply because it’s false, but far more importantly because of the specific object-level beliefs and political actions which it obligates. If somebody agreed with all of my political positions, but did so basically by accident as a result of false-but-useful beliefs, it would be counterproductive for me to try and reason him out of those beliefs.
Furthermore, many Noble Lies have a neutral or even unambiguously positive effect on their believers. For example, let’s say I was actually adopted at birth, but raised to believe that my adoptive parents were my biological parents. Now, we can come up with reasons why knowing the truth might be (or might at some point become) instrumentally valuable for me: perhaps I have some hereditary predispositions toward certain conditions, and knowing my true parentage may help me more effectively navigate my medical decisions; also, if there is some not-insignificant chance that my true parentage will be revealed to me later in life against my will, it would have been better for me to have been made aware of it early and in a gentle way, so as to reduce the feelings of betrayal and identity crisis. That being said, for most adopted individuals, it’s actually far more adaptive and identity-affirming to go their whole lives believing the “lie” rather than to be confronted with the truth.
So, is any given religious belief more like a lie that makes its believers stupider and more evil? Or is it more like a harmless lie that is, on average, equally as — or more adaptive than —knowing the truth? Certainly the religion to which I’m converting does demand some pretty specific object-level beliefs and actions. I happen to think that, with the exception of the prohibition on coffee and tea, the demands it makes of its members all have very clear benefits from a consequentialist perspective, and generally make its believers into better people, with better political beliefs and a better lifestyle, than the alternative. Go peruse /r/Mormon, and especially /r/ExMormon, and you’ll get an idea of the sorts of people who hate the church: the most cynical, MSNBC-brained, Reddit-poisoned people in existence. If those are the church’s enemies, I have to say that I prefer those who have figured out how to live with the Noble Lie.
I mean the problem with this approach is that the church fathers have written down things from the beginning. We have a pretty good idea of what they believed about the gospel, Christ, sacraments, church structure and so on. It does not match with Smith’s restoration. Ignatius of Antioch refers to Christ as God before we have a codified New Testament. There are references to bishops in early Christian texts, there are references to sacraments. The earliest known Christian catechism is the Didache, it’s pretty short and you can read it online. It’s not Mormon. There’s no mention of preexisting souls, God once being a physical being, or Christ and Lucifer being related, etc. it’s not present in the early church.
This makes even a metaphorical restoration nonsense.
More options
Context Copy link
Your Mormon apologia isn't of much interest to me–I can get similar superficially convincing treatises on why Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam is Actually Very Sound and Rational and The Best Way to Understand God from their adherents. You've chosen to believe, and it looks to me very much like you wanted a religion and went shopping and chose the one that suited your goals and lifestyle. Cool. But choosing which things you believe ala carte is very much against the spirit of most religious practices. That is of course between you and your faith. Whatever.
But your defense of the Noble Lie is profoundly unconvincing and even amoral. Adopting a false belief system and pretending to believe in it is wrong even if you find it instrumentally useful.
If someone accidentally agrees with all of your political positions because he thinks God told him you're a prophet, you might appreciate his support, but it would still be wrong of you to encourage him to believe you are a prophet. Telling an adopted child he's an actual biological child? In fact, I do believe you should tell an adopted child the truth (at an age-appropriate time and in an age-appropriate manner), and that not doing so is, in some sense, evil. There was another thread recently about Santa Claus. I don't have strong beliefs about letting little kids believe in imaginary things, but I will say there is definitely a point at which you should stop encouraging it. I am not saying telling a lie is never, ever justified under any circumstances, but in my opinion, those circumstances are extremely limited, both in situation and time.
If you think religious Noble Lies are good because it makes believers behave in an appropriate manner, I wonder why they can't be persuaded to behave without those beliefs. I am sure you are familiar with the old dialog between a Christian and an atheist: the Christian tells the atheist he's scary because without belief in God, the atheist can just decide that murder is good. The atheist responds that the Christian is scary, because he's saying it's only his belief in God that keeps him from murdering.
Needless to say, I find the atheist position more convincing. I think people should be convinced murder is bad without resorting to "Because God says so." If you want people to live a Mormon-ish lifestyle, you should be able to sell them on the virtues of that lifestyle without fables about Lamanites and golden tablets.
As for measuring them by who hates them, that seems a particularly poor way to choose who's right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. In my blacker moments I won't say the thought of voting to make wokes cry hasn't occurred to me, but I've never considered joining a church to own the libs.
Then you have clearly missed what I have said, both here and elsewhere, about this church specifically. My mother was born into, and baptized into, the LDS church, before leaving it as a teenager. I come from several generations of Mormons, going all the way back to one of the earliest waves of Scottish converts. It is the only extant religious tradition to which I can claim to have an authentic ancestral connection; my dad’s side of the family, so far as I can tell, has not had any serious religious convictions for several generations now. Mormonism is all I’ve got in terms of an inherited faith.
One of the primary things that attracts me to this church is precisely the fact that I’m not just choosing it a la carte from a menu of options. If I was, this isn’t the one I would pick! I would just pick one that still allowed me to drink coffee and beer and a nice glass of white wine. I would pick one that didn’t have such an improbable origin story and didn’t require so much epistemic legwork to accept. The fact that I’m instead twisting myself into some knots epistemically in order to make sense of this church’s claims should be evidence to you that I’m not just opening up a menu of religions and picking the one that suits me the best.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Everyone is at liberty to value truth and internal coherence as much as they care to, or not at all.
At the end of the day, the cost-benefit analysis is your own. I can only lay out the reasons I faced what seems like a very similar choice, down to the church and cutesy missionary girls ambushing me on a bridge back from work, and still turned them down.
The costs are honestly not awful, at least the material ones. Giving up drinking? That's just plain healthy for you. Coffee and tea? Stupid to rule out really, but not that big a deal. 10% of your money? It also buys you a strong social-safety net.
My last driving instructor was a Mormon. Very pleasant person, hardworking, open-minded and patient with my foibles. I was a bit concerned when I learned that he didn't believe in health or home insurance, trusting the church would have his back, but that seems to work out for him. Honestly, Mormons seem decent enough, even if I sincerely believe they're crazy, more so for believing in a religion that is even more of an obvious fraud than the rest. You could do much worse by becoming a Scientologist or joining the Nation of Islam.
No, really, that's about it. I wouldn't do what you're doing precisely because I value epistemic hygiene that strongly. I am a big fan of having true beliefs about the world, as true as I can make them as imperfect, computationally bounded entity in an uncertain world. Truth doesn't have to comfortable, and it often isn't. It is hardly the only thing I value myself, but the primary reason I see little appeal in Mormonism or any other religion is because they're false.
That's enough for me.
I suppose it is easier if you're on the fence, epistemically speaking. I have no idea how you got there, and honestly, there's no point talking about it. We know how debates about religion end on the margin. As I've said, you could do worse. You're selling your soul for a relatively low price, and getting quite a lot for it.
Your beliefs are the map by which you navigate the territory of reality. Willfully accepting a major inaccuracy in one part of the map, even a part that seems purely metaphysical, creates a kind of intellectual vulnerability. It sets a precedent that comfort, community, or spiritual fulfillment can override the process of evidence-based reasoning. The problem is not that believing ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America will cause you to miscalculate your taxes. The problem is that it requires you to build and maintain a cognitive partition, a special zone where different rules of evidence apply. Over time, it becomes very difficult to keep that partition perfectly sealed. It creates a pressure to harmonize your other beliefs with the core tenets you've accepted, which can lead to further distortions down the line.
You might not win arguments against Christians anymore, which you correctly identify as a low-stakes loss. But you might be asked to make decisions about your children's education, about medical care, or about political issues based on principles derived from a flawed foundation. A worldview is not a collection of independent propositions; it is an interconnected system. Introducing a known falsehood is like introducing a single line of buggy code into a complex operating system. It might not cause a crash today, but you have created a systemic instability that may manifest in unexpected ways later.
Unfortunately, as your nod to your future status as paterfamilias suggests, you're not just selling your soul. You're selling those of your future children.
That? Beyond the pale for me. I think religion is bad enough as is, but it's even harder to shake off when it's drilled into you from birth, and just about all of your social status and community hinges on staying within its framework. My understanding is that while Mormons aren't as hard on apostates as, for example, Muslims beheading heathens, it's still social death to deconvert. If your children wanted to leave, they'd likely lose you. And then you'd face the choice of being with them, or keeping your own standing.
Every incentive, from the Young Single Adults ward to the social pressure against apostasy, is optimized to keep people within the fold. From a systems-design perspective, it's a very neat trick.
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family. You are trading their future intellectual autonomy for their present (and likely future) social stability and happiness. This might even be a good trade. But it is a trade you are making on their behalf.
What would I have you do instead? The honest answer is that the alternative is much harder. It involves the difficult, atomized work of building a community from scratch, of navigating a dating market full of misaligned incentives, and of finding meaning without a prefabricated script. It offers no guarantees. It is easy for me to sit here and champion the virtues of a difficult and uncertain path that I have chosen.
So I cannot tell you that your decision is wrong according to your own values. I can only report that, from my perspective, you are accepting a deal that I would have to refuse. That I recently refused. You are trading a commitment to accuracy for a suite of tangible and powerful social benefits. You may even be correct that, for the average human, this is a utility-maximizing strategy. My concern is that the price is higher than it appears, and that the bill will be paid not just by you, but by the family you hope to build.
Good luck. I genuinely respect that you are going into this with a level of self-awareness that is uncommon. I hope the trade-offs prove to be worth it for you.
But it very likely means he's having a family and children. The LDS attorneys I know are out-reproducing the non-LDS ones by a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 (actually more given all the ones I know with zero children, such as myself). At what cost epistemic hygiene if it means no children?
Being an atheist doesn't make you infertile, so that's a questionable question in the first place. I really doubt that that's the tradeoff he's facing, if it is, I'd recommend getting a mail order bride or becoming a sperm donor.
I agree it doesn't cause it, but the correlation is present.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Probably very little to none, as you've stated before.
The cost would be eternal damnation in the afterlife. Pascal will take your bet, and I'll offer him some default swaps on the side.
Choosing to get baptized into a transcendental faith, especially (a nominally) Christian one, after or because of creating a list of temporal pros and cons is wildly contrary to the faith itself. The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't know enough about Mormon theology to offer any specific guidance or raise any ideas for you here. Personally, I consider it to be basically a multilevel marketing cult.
I don't think this is what Christian faith is about (obligatory note: I am not a Christian and have no authority to speak for them). There are some people in it that do that, but it's in no way an universal requirement, at least to my extent of observing many Christians.
More options
Context Copy link
This sounds more like Gnosticism than Christianity.
More options
Context Copy link
I didn’t say that this list is why I got baptized. But if I’m trying to justify/explain the decision to people who are totally uninterested in any non-secular reasons, it makes sense to actually take stock of what is happening on a secular level.
That being said, I will openly admit that I have no interest in “hating the world”, nor in spending my every waking hour preparing for the afterlife. I don’t actually believe that this is what Jesus demands of me, and if it is, then I’m going to fail to live up to his demands. I do think the things of the world, including the world of man in the material world, are beautiful and important and meaningful and worth preserving. I’m not especially concerned with the prospect of a rapture that will sweep away the civilizations of men and totally remake the world; I will leave that for future people who will be around for it to consider more closely. I think there are benefits to trying to check my own animal instincts by weighing them against the example of Christ-like charity and temperance, but I certainly do not plan to sell all of my possessions and forsake all material desire, as seemingly demanded by the Jesus of the Gospels.
(also @sarker and @JarJarJedi)
Here's a post from Catholic Answers that is already more fleshed out than what I could scribble into a comment: LINK
@Hoffmeister25, specifically:
We'll probably just hard disagree here, but there is no "weigh against." It isn't okay to be just the right amount of selfish. In the Imitation of Christ, we continually make hard attempts towards sanctification. We can make progress but will always fall short of his perfect example. That's the inevitability of sin. The good news (Good News?) is that through grace we can be forgiven our inevitable sins. But they remain sins nonetheless. I get worried when I see things like your phrasing "weighing against" -- because this can easily become an obstinate habit towards sin paired with a self-forgiveness.
Yeah so my problem with the idea of Christ as the “perfect example which all of us must try to emulate” is that Christ was basically exempt from a lot of our terrestrial concerns, on behalf of being a divine being with magic powers. I obviously cannot emulate Christ’s supernatural healing powers, nor can I emulate his ability to rise from the dead. If I attempt to emulate those, I will actually just make my life worse, and look very stupid in the process. Furthermore, there are aspects of Christ’s life which I actively wish not to emulate: the whole “being tortured and then martyred” thing, obviously, but also the part where he died unmarried, childless, and penniless. Things like material resources and a familial posterity were unimportant to Christ because they were distractions from his mission (which he knew to be fairly short-lived in a temporal sense), but they are (and should be) extremely important to humans. Taken to its logical extreme, a world in which every human tries to live the most “Christ-like” life possible is an anarcho-primitivist proto-Communist world, devoid of the concentrations of wealth and power that allow for anything resembling higher civilization to take shape. This is a world to which we can aspire only if we truly believe that Christ’s return is literally imminent within our lifetimes, rendering any need to build for the future irrelevant.
So, which elements of Christ’s life and personality should I, or can I, seek to emulate? I can emulate his kind-heartedness, his boundless self-control and resistance to temptation, and his leadership qualities. I can strive to extend grace and the benefit of the doubt to those around me, and I can strive to eliminate within myself passions and temptations which lead me to harm myself and others. I can imbue my actions with a greater import because I know that I am being watched and that there is a higher plan toward which I should focus my efforts. This, to me, is the most a religion can really demand of its adherents. That’s also what, to me, separated something like Mormonism from a “cult” in the way modern people use the term. A literal reading of the Biblical Christ’s imprecations would lead an adherent to give up all material possessions, to abandon his or her family and loved ones, and to eagerly await the rapidly-approaching end times. Since the end times did not actually occur during the lifetimes of the church’s early converts, I think it’s safe to say that not everything Jesus said was meant to be interpreted totally literally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link