Posted by:
SusieQ#1
(
)
Date: January 29, 2015 01:59PM
People who are convinced their faith-based claims are 100% true will do all they can to try to get you to believe them.
This is true of every hoax or scam out there. In the LDS Church this is the testimony that is continually reinforced, even to the point of "doubt your doubts."
My experience regarding changing my mind from a faith-based testimony was one of obtaining factual information from reliable sources (from the LDS Church's own history) and making my own conclusion. No faith crisis. No doubts. Just good evidence from their sources. When we are loaded up with facts, verifiable evidence, we can be assured we are on solid ground.
We don't need to rely on faith or other spiritual techniques to verify the claims. We have the records from the original history.
As human beings, we make the best choice and decision we can with the information we have at the time. When we find new and better information we can adjust our thinking, change our mind. I did! I changed my mind about the claims of the LDS Church regarding. Every single one.
And I did it with a sense of humor. No need to take it all so seriously. (There are some exceptions that are very serious of course.) I giggled and laughed a lot. No way. People are still believing these claims by ..what?? Faith? Prayer? No way!! There were no golden plates, no angels, no translations from anywhere. ( Snicker! ) It was all a manufactured, plagiarized works and claims. Not an ounce of factual evidence to any claim.
My evidence came from these sources: See this list
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1495158,1496151#msg-1496151Plus web pages that gave info from those sources also.
The pattern of the Snake Oil Salesman works because humans are naturally gullible, attracted to someone who claims some special knowledge from God and want to be attached to something special--esoteric, religiously. (We see businesses today being caught up in big law suits for trying to sell a hoax, false claims!)
Now that the real information is readily available, (Hello Google God!), that "spiritual witness", in some cases, still cannot be dented. The info is seen as tainted or unreliable from the beginning. (This was true of my husband.) The faith based spiritual witness is very powerful. It is hermetically sealed/seared into the thinking of the person from birth. (This applies to all religious beliefs by faith, in my observation.) This made no sense to me as my husband was an engineer, scientist of sorts, understood physics, but that information was not allowed to infringe on his faith based beliefs since birth. The faith based claims seemed to be genetically transferred in his DNA from generation to generation as his history with the LDS Church went back to Nauvoo, seven generations. It had to be true. There was no question about it and no questioning as that meant questioning God - Heavenly Father.
I understand why some people cannot see the information that is presented as valid as it is incompatible with their preconceived acceptable conclusions. That's the power of faith.That spiritual witness to the claims by faith is so powerful it can completely discount any information that does not support them. Besides, what has been ingrained as right, true, and acceptable does not easily change to: wrong, false, and unacceptable. This takes some people a long time to digest. It's difficult to see it happen in our loved ones also. People need a lot of time to adjust to major changes.
That was the situation I found myself dealing with. I soon realized that my methods were failing and I needed to apply some basic successful human relationship techniques: respect and honor his rights to his beliefs just as I wanted for me, engage the Golden Rule: treat him the way I wanted to be treated, and as adults, we could come to different conclusions so we made an agreement to Agree to Disagree! I began to understand that he considered his underwear his choice and part of his commitment, while I found it to represent something I had changed my mind about. So I got rid of mine.
This worked for the last 15 plus lives of our marriage before he passed away two years ago.
It as hard at first, I'm a "fix-it" personality, noisy and happy to share information. But, he was not buying what I was selling! So we both adjusted. It was not easy for me, I was making a lot of changes, and he was not. I found if I learned to be respectful of his beliefs, not challenge him as it caused him a lot of stress, and shared funny experiences about the religion, he saw that I was not trying infringe on his core beliefs. It was OK for him to believe what he wanted. This was one of the smartest things I did to cement our relationship on positive ground. I was not going to give up my investment, either. And so, I supported what he wanted and he supported me. I just shared a post on how he bought me a coffee maker and surprised the socks off me!
Our relationship and family and investment in our lives was always so much more important that a difference of opinion over beliefs by faith.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2015 02:00PM by SusieQ#1.