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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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