http://www.connorboyack.com/blog/doubting-your-doubts-before-doubting-your-faith
"The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true." ~ Terryl Givens

I am a critic of Mormonism. I find it hard to empathize with many Mormons. So I'm biased.

But I think I can understand what "certain grounds" Mormons would have that are "reasonable" to believe Mormonism "is true."

Honestly, I'm having a hard time coming up with some.

The ones that easily come to mind are the old "best place to raise a family" type trite reasons.

Since "The Essays" have come out, there is no hiding the first 100 years of Mormonism's many many reasons to believe it is NOT true.

I think these Mormons and my little family included are looking for Mormonism preservers to hold onto in order to be able to doubt their doubts. The single most reasonable reason I can think of to hope Mormonism is true is the ready made community it offers people. It wouldn't matter if Mormonism held Thomas Monson up as a demi-god, their homogeneity in creation of community and one that can claim kinship with "Christianity" at large is about their most compelling reason in my opinion.

Just peruse FairLDS websites and you will see so many ridiculous props, ballasts, and duck dynastic tape to creating Elder Utch's Rameumpton of doubt doubting righteousness that Given's "reasonable" grounds seem about as firm a foundation as a live volcano on the planet next to Kolob.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/07/2014 06:12PM by Pagag.

Well, in terms of how most people establish truth, it's one of several ways:
-- Provable
-- Theoretical but statistically validated
-- Anecdotal
-- Personal

Provable would be something like the law of gravity. Inescapably, gravity will always be true.

Second, theoretical but statistically validated. Scientific studies use something called a confidence interval. A 95% confidence interval means a result had a 5% probability of being obtained by chance. In other words, it's 'probably' true.

Now, people can stretch this too far or otherwise arrive at false conclusions by confusing correlation with causation. For example, children of single parents highly correlate to greater delinquent behavior. That doesn't mean single parenthood causes crime in youth, however; just that the same underlying factor (poverty, usually) contributes to both. The first statement (children of single parents highly correlates to criminal behavior) is true; the second (single parents cause their kids to commit crime), however, is not.

Anecdotal is the third way people arrive at truth. For example, it is 'true' for some people here that Mormons are bigoted hate-mongers. For others, it is 'true' that Mormons are kind people who are super-awesome. For most of the country, it's 'true' that Mormons are somewhat earnest non-alcohol drinkers with big families. This is anecdote-based truth.

Finally, there's personal. Categorize any kind of vision, telepathy, psychic, or otherwise intangible, unprovable, unverifiable experience here.

Bringing up the essays -- that's window dressing. Most people believe in the church for one of the last two reasons (personal or anecdotal). Essentially, it provides cover for people who are split between their 'personal' truth of the truth of Mormonism and the 'truth' that the verifiable history of the church indicates otherwise. It's not intended to convince a non-Member to join; it's there to give existing members cover to stay.

I'm okay with anybody believing in something that sounds good, leads them to treat themselves and their fellow man with honest, fairness and compassion, and doesn't harm anyone else.

Where I can't condone are beliefs that are bizarre or without purpose, beliefs that cause the believer to treat themselves and/or others poorly, and beliefs that fly in the face of firmly established facts or common sense.

georgesaint Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Where I can't condone are beliefs that are bizarre
> or without purpose, beliefs that cause the
> believer to treat themselves and/or others poorly,
> and beliefs that fly in the face of firmly
> established facts or common sense.

Mormonism, isn't it about all these?

bizarre? Baptize dead people

without purpose? Baptize dead people

treat themselves and/or others poorly? Gay self-loathing and Baptize dead people (can't they rest in peace?)

beliefs that fly in the face of firmly
established facts or common sense? Baptize dead people

And having gay people hate themselves and baptizing dead people is just scratching the Mormon surface.