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Wellness Wednesday for February 1, 2023

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).

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If you're looking for a religion, you fundamentally need one that not just teaches correct morality but is also true. There are a few reasons for this--it's impossible to back up morality without relying on truth, truth leads to good morality, believing in a lie is not moral--but I hope that the statement itself just rings true to you. You don't want to deliberately choose to believe in a lie, right?

So, given that, anything we sell you will be insufficient, and you will have to find the truth of it for yourself. I think philosophy can lead towards the truth, but at the end of the day it's hard to tell whether a given moral system truly "works" without "seeing its fruits" so to speak.

I could try to sell you my religion (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) but I think there are some more important principles that are worth discussing here. Why are we in this situation to begin with? Why does everyone not agree on morality? Alma 32 says:

17 Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe.

18 Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.

19 And now, how much more cursed is he that knoweth the will of God and doeth it not, than he that only believeth, or only hath cause to believe, and falleth into transgression?

In other words, with knowledge comes responsibility and accountability, so God will only give us the knowledge that we are ready for, as quickly as we are ready for it. Let me be clear here that by "knowledge" I mean "evidence"--knowing what the will of God theoretically could be is very different from knowing the will of God.

The rest of the chapter goes on to explain what is, in my opinion, the best method for finding the truth of these things, and I encourage you to read it. I'd share more detail, but honestly I'm pretty bad at starting from the beginning in these matters, so I'd give you an enormous rambling sermon rather than anything useful. I hope the chapter helps.

Haha I was reading the bullet points and my missionary brain just suddenly came surging back into full force, like that's a bingo. /u/Questioner1, you could always reach out to local missionaries in your area (google it, shouldn't be too hard to find an online chat to hook you up) - you can shoot the breeze with them, ask them whatever you want, if you grow tired of it you can tell them to get lost - might meet some interesting young people from who knows where.