So I overheard my tbm bro and sis in law talking about how they think people who leave the church are so STUPID and how it doesn't MATTER that Joseph Smith married other men's wives and that the book of Abraham and the book of mormon are both Proven frauds and so on and so forth and how they need to STOP reading the Internet and PRAY about it. So does that mean that I should just PRAY and ask if Charles Manson was really Jesus Christ and just ignore the fact that he had people brutally murdered? Should I just PRAY that Warren Jeffs was told by God to molest young children? Does ignoring the facts and just praying about it really confirm that Manson and jeffs are good holy people? I mean gosh I just cant believe how smart people like my tbm family members can say something as crazy as "just ignore the facts they don't matter" just blows my mind!

My mom is one of those people. She would say its lies or that it doesn't matter. I think she NEEDS the church to be true. I think she would mentally fall apart if it wasn't "true". The world only makes sense through the lense of the church. The church being true is the glue that keeps her together. Its sad actually.

They can fall for the fraud because their entire world rests on the truth of Mormonism. Some people are willing to follow the facts to their logical conclusion--even if it leads to the destruction of that world--and some people (even "super smart" ones) aren't. I imagine there are theories as to why this is so, probably having to do with different personality types and levels of emotional investment that vary from individual to individual.

I have family that could be described as "super smart" and this explanation makes the most sense to me:


"smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

-Michael Shermer


The page below is worth a read:

http://www.michaelshermer.com/weird-things/excerpt/

Praying about it is not super smart. You can pray about Carolina winning this years SuperBowl, but the final score is still;
Denver 24
Carolina 10

I think the fact that something they believed for 20+ years is harder to analyze than something that recently occurred. That's why the church needs you to buy in since birth.

Praying about it is not super smart. You can pray about Carolina winning this years SuperBowl, but the final score is still;
Denver 24
Carolina 10

I think the fact that something they believed for 20+ years is harder to analyze than something that recently occurred. That's why the church needs you to buy in since birth

The only thing I can surmise is that Mormonism provides its adherents with something that they desperately need in their lives. In my case, I was a shy kid in an abusive family who needed a sense of purpose and to feel good about myself. Mormonism provided me with the feeling of being special. (Hey, I was a golden convert, thank you!)

I had never had sex, didn't drink or do drugs, and ne'er a fuck came out of my mouth.

When I became a real person, I realized just how the Morg drew me in and stripped me of my humanity. Once I began to question and didn't go on a mission, I was no long special or golden. The very human Boner.

I have wondered about this for years, how can some of my relatives seem so intelligent yet are totally devoted to that fraud. I think it has something to do with high intelligent is not the same as having a good sense of logic, good reasoning and not being gullible.

I suspect seemly high intelligence is partly just a good memory to depend on in gathering facts.

An example of "how people can fall", for Mormonism, follows.
In the "old" days (apparently before you were born), one didn't feel the need to question what one had been taught, and especially so when one's own close relatives were contemporaries of the J.S., B.Y. (such as my great-grandfather). In my "growing-up" ward, having a college degree was a very rare thing.

At any rate, you generally believed what you were taught (not even imagining we were being miss-taught, as were our parents before us). It was a far more innocent age.

Our family lived in the L.A. area. We never lied. Period. We were taught to respect our elders and those with a title (Presidents, teachers, officials, and so forth), as they had earned their stature in life.

We weren't a dumb family, we were smart and calculating. Our short-coming was being naive (as were most of the people living there in those days, being newly arrived country folk, like us). Unlike most others, we also were Mormons---persons very few other people knew anything about.

We were ripe for believing what we were taught (in our case, being "Mormons"), and were taught that Catholics were "the great and evil church".

No one I knew, outside our family, were Mormons. Not in school (we 6 children were the only Mormons in our grade school and Jr. High, which changed slightly in high school, where only some half-a-dozen or so were Mormons. (Similar for Negros in our school--only a dozen or so.)

One starts learning from one's own parents and family, and grows from their. Experience chop's away at traditions, and later, inexperienced persons such as your self, who "just don't get it", find they could benefit from a more expansive education.

Well it really comes down to this conclusion...

It depends on weather you believe in absolute truth or not. It also depends on weather there is a God, and would this God say truth or false.

To the tbm, they believe there is truth and that God reveals it.

I wonder about this myself. Maybe they're emotionally vulnerable, or BIC before the interwebs and don't have time to look things up now or are in too deep to extract themselves.

It's not what you know, it's what you want to know. TBMs would make great case studies for psychology research.

People have all kinds of reasons for not wanting to know the truth. Mostly they just want to avoid pain. But mature people understand that some kinds of pain are worth it. Maybe it boils down to the Lost Boys mentality. Become as a little child and stay like that.

This is something I've puzzled over as well. I know some extremely intelligent people who are very dedicated to the church and I just wonder, "How is this possible? How in the hell don't they see it?!!" And I don't know, maybe they do, but for reasons only known to them they choose to stay.

When someone is born into the church and their families are all in it as well, and they've literally built their entire lives around it somehow, I can KIND OF understand why they would stay and have all kinds of reasons to justify it. Leaving the church can be really hard, and cause some very big problems in one's life and with one's family. In my opinion, it takes a lot of courage and mental strength to be able to do it and deal with the fallout. And just because someone is smart doesn't mean they're brave, or have the courage to be an individual with their own thoughts and beliefs who doesn't care what their LDS families/friends/coworkers think of them.

I also think that perhaps some people, no matter how intelligent they are, simply need the church to be true for one reason or another. For example, maybe they made really big, life-changing decisions based on church principles thinking that it was the "right" thing to do, even if they weren't really happy with it. Maybe they even thought they would be "blessed" in this life or the next for sacrificing their own happiness to do right by the church--i.e. marrying someone they didn't really love instead of someone they did, going on a mission, having more kids than they wanted to, etc. So when they're faced with the possibility that the church could be false and they may have done these things "for nothing," even at the expense of their own mental health and happiness, it seems plausible that it might be too painful for them to admit that. And so at a high cost they continue to tell themselves it must be true, because they would've done things so much differently if they didn't think their eternal salvations depended on it.

Really, people stay in the church for so many reasons, and my guess is that at the end of the day, level of intelligence has little to do with it.

Boom!

TBMs never stop to think that those who've left the church HAVE prayed about it. When I first started questioning the church, it was my first instinct to pray. I prayed about it for an entire year and got nothing. That was my answer. If God really cared one way or another if I stayed in the church, he had many opportunities to influence me.

I think many stay in the church just because it works for them. I have a sister who has a terrific life. Things just always work out for her. She has a great marriage. She has always had plenty of money. She had the exact number of children she wanted and they're all beautiful and talented. She lives in a tight Mormon community with lots of friends. She thinks she's earned her great life by being faithful to Mormonism. She knows of lots of issues with the church, but doesn't give the information more than a second of her attention. Why jinx her perfect life?

Define smart....is reading text books and parroting info back on tests really smart...or just a great memory in action...jmo but i dont believe parroting info back has anything to do with real intelligence...in fact when it comes to logic or reasoning...they might be in inverse proportion...i present to you my educated brother who regardless of info presented ...still believes joey is coming any day now to set things in order...with that other guy christ who mayor may not be who they claim..hell it always comes to fisticuffs and personal attack when logic destroys his iron clad position...because he can juxtasuppose four textbooks simultaneously..yeah he really said that....the last thirty years has seen an explosion of tech and invention...seems some of it came from college or university washouts...appears they likely had more outside the box intellect than the profs teaching the course...imo we tend to worship folks with good memory skills...rather than good reasoning skills...ive known way too many doctors who cudnt get outside the box if the dam thing were on fire...now i could be wrong...something youll seldom hear a phd admit...and the fight is on...now im not saying theres anything wrong with education...just the smug arrogance that seems to come with lots of it...that and the ten dollar words they memorized...lookin at you nibley...looking at you dcp...lookin at you bro...haha...he wouldnt be caught dead here

I agree. Being smart has nothing to do with being well-read and having a decent memory. Many academics may have vast knowledge in a certain area, but that doesn't make them smart. Someone with an engineering degree that can't apply that knowledge to solve problems doesn't deserve to be called an engineer. As another example, you can have a doctorate in American studies from Yale and still be a dodo.

However, I know several people that I would consider very smart/wise that are stuck in the church. However, they're not nutjob apologists (I've yet to come across an apologist that I would call smart). They're people that refuse to look into the origin of TSCC, the BoM, etc... for one reason or another. They may never leave, but they're the kind of people that could never stay if they ever decide to dig deeper.

I honestly think that some very smart people may join for one of two somewhat similar reasons: Their ego is massaged and they are sold on the "exclusive knowledge club" aspect, or they are enticed by the "MLM aspect", sort of like Amway, and desire to rise to the top of the pyramid.

Speaking from my opinion of a couple of conversions I saw.

Well, I have two cousins (they are sisters) who both converted to Mormonism within the last three or four years, although one, I believe, almost immediately became inactive. Judging by her Facebook page, at least, the other sister is still hard-core TMB.

They are both still in their 20s, mixed-race, grew up in a very liberal area (the SF Bay Area), and have well-off, well-educated parents. (Both work in the medical field.) Both of my cousins attended a public university with a very good reputation and earned degrees in the sciences. In addition, the family is close and loving. So, it's not like they were drawn to Mormonism because of an unstable background, alcoholic parents, etc.

I'm not saying they're geniuses, but clearly, these are intelligent young women, and they've grown up steeped in the Internet Age as well. I personally believe they were drawn to Mormonism because they were raised with no religious beliefs or practices. (The mom was raised Buddhist; their dad was raised Catholic.) I don't think their parents are atheists; they simply didn't raise their kids with any religious teachings.

I'm not criticizing that, and I know it works fine for many people, but I do also believe that the impulse to have a religious or spiritual belief is very strong in many humans, and if not given some type of religious practice or tradition such people are especially likely to fall for a strict religion that seems so certain of the "truth," whether it's Mormonism, Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, whatever.

I know from my mom that the girls' father (who is my mom's first cousin) says he and his wife now regret that they did not raise them either Buddhist or Catholic, and they believe the lack of a religious background is what drew both of their daughters to Mormonism. Maybe, maybe not, but that's his take on it.

There is a lot of speculation about this subject. One of the more interesting things that I saw recently on a PBS documentary was on how our visual system works.

The short answer is our brains constantly lie to us about what we see. We only see little snippits of the full picture and our brains build an imaginary world view. Most of the imaginary view is based upon previous experience. People have different levels of doing this. Some people process and retain more information than others. Other people see different things based upon their experience.

I'll never forget taking my first walk in the woods after my Systematic Botany course. Suddenly the mass of green around me had descriptions and I could see hundreds of different species. It was amazing and blatantly obvious to my newly trained brain. A whole new world had opened up for me. I took the same walk less than 4 months before and saw none of the variation.

I suspect that the rest of the brain might operate like the visual system. We build a world view, make a conclusion, and then the brain attempts to maintain that fiction for as long as it fits. This could explain how almost all of us describe a sudden "Breaking of the shelf" with mormonism. Enough information that contradicts our previous world view is collected and the brain has to reassess everything. Since Mormonism is such a invasive cultural experience, there is a lot things that have to be rewired. This probably increases the resistance to the brain to even considering changing something so core to it's functional patterns.

There were doubters at the time of Christ: Thomas.
There were doubters in the Middle Ages: Luther.
There were doubters in JS' time: Hurlbut.
There are doubters today: RfM

Some were highly educated, some were dumb as rocks.

Either way, religion's message is: Pray til you stay - we want your money.

Nothing's really changed.

And the ones who stay in believe we're the ones who are truly deceived.

We aren't trying hard enough to see things the prophet's way.

We think too much.

Good Mormons aren't required to think about their theology. If they were or did, they'd come to the same conclusions we have.

Two of my brothers are dyed in the wool TBM. One served in military intelligence for eight years in his earlier life. He knows how to take orders well. It was an insecurity complex for him that has kept him stalwart all these years, I'm convinced. After our parents divorce he stayed with my mom while I and another brother went with our dad. Another brother was away from home at the time on his mission when our family fell apart at the seams.

My TBM brothers today (him and the RM,) will make mopologies for the church on any level. Excuse after excuse why the church is true, send their children off on missions, and basically live in denial.

Both college grads, both otherwise seemingly intelligent. They're afraid to leave because their world as they know it would be turned upside down. They cannot live with that kind of incongruity. How they could let themselves be deceived over a lifetime. It's easier for them to accept all the lies and untruths, because challenging them would destroy their semblance of order and reason. The church has been their "security blanket."

If you think "praying about it" (relying on your own emotions and/or those of an imaginary man in the sky) trumps facts and evidence, you're not "super smart."

You may be very intelligent. You may have learned a lot about your chosen field(s). You may have great skills in some intellectual pursuits.
But you're not "super smart."

It is not ultimately about smarts, or intelligence. It is about values.

Many so-called "smart TBMs" fully understand the issues and problems. However, they value personal spiritual experiences(what they deem to be revelation) as having epistemological value; i.e. as a valid indicator of metaphysical truth on a subjective, personal, level. As such, under this value system, overwhelming physical evidence does not necessarily trump what is deemed to be a personal revelation. Given one's personal spiritual experiences, every challenge can be spinned as necessary to preserve "the truth."

That is it in a nutshell. Moreover, this is precisely what the Church relies upon to sustain its membership.

Now, here is the difficult kicker: As indicated, this represents one's personal values as related to determining metaphysical truth; i.e. it is not about logic and reason, not about physical evidence, and thus not about irrationality. It is not about connecting the evidentiary dots. There are NO logical fallacies involved. Why? Because once one allows subjective experience to play a role in one's worldview, including one's metaphysical commitments, it is entirely a personal matter (not a logical matter) as to what one believes. Moreover, they might point out that ALL of our believes are ultimately based upon subjective, personal experiences.

Does this mean that a person can justify any sort of metaphysical belief; e.g. unicorns, fairies, the Easter Bunny, etc.? Well, technically yes. But the TBM answer to such a suggestion is that people do not have spiritual experiences that confirm the existence of such entities, but they *do* have experiences confirming both God, and Mormonism.

I think this explains some of it -

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.


― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

People do have bona fide metaphysical experiences. They can attribute them to God, or whatever the nearest snake oil salesman tells them. Pretending that they don't happen isn't helpful.

What is helpful is that the Mormon explanation isn't necessarily the only explanation. After almost two centuries, there may be more useful explanations.

If Joe is the kind of guy you would hunt to the ends of the earth, had you lived in that time and known what he did to your wife or daughter, his explanation of things might not be what you should pin your hopes on.

Their Thinking Cap can be removed at will.

Put it on for work, take it off when you get home.

If their "smarts" are shallow or deal with memorization or people pleasing, they aren't see through Mormonism. If the smarts center around critical thinking and in depth analysis, they might be more inclined to leave. It also helps if they are at a life changing point in their life or if the leaders treat them in a way that's impossible to handle. This might force them to use their good minds and figure out they need to leave to protect their own mental and physical health.

Those I know who have, by the university they graduated from, been exposed to critical thinking and can compartmentalize are the ones who mystify me. Seems to me so against what hopefully they learned in their schooling when they apply critical thinking in one place and choose not to in another.

I know people who are successful....computer engineers, electrical engineer, lawyer, psychologist, etc. who operate this way. It plain leaves me scratching my head.

Plus, it makes me want to shake some common sense into their heads.

Here's why. Most human beings are biased and most human beings are not interested in the truth if the truth goes against their long held biases. Also, human beings are programmed to be pack animals. They almost always favor their tribe or group, even if there is no good reason to. Its a tribe mentality. "Support the troops!"

Let's not make it too complicated. For the most part, they can't.

They call it faith.

I have said for years that some/many TBMs could sit in a room with the GAs or the profit himself and watch these men rape the TBMs children [and laugh at the parents for being so stupid while they watched their children getting brutally raped] and these TBMs would still say how wonderful the EVIL CULT is and how JS was a true profit of God etc. It is called throwing one's IQ in the garbage and ruining your children's lives while you have some shit eating grin on your face. MORONS.