OK, how many of you have been or are targets of a Mormon who thinks that if they can just get you to a church activity, you'll feel the spirit you once did, then you will repent of whatever led you away from the church and come crawling back to activity? My SIL has invited us to dinner with the missionaries twice and to her sons' Primary program last week. Today, my MIL called and invited us to watch Women's Conference with her at the Stake Center, where they are having a dinner beforehand. Neither of these women live anywhere near us so we know no one in their wards. I can almost read their minds "You believed once, you must know the church is true. If I can just get you to feel the spirit again, you'll become active in the church."

The problem is, Mormons just don't realize how weird it all is. How they come across to outsiders. We went to those missionary dinners because SIL is a single mom with a son on a mission. She really wanted to pay back Karma for those in South America who are inviting her missionary son to dinner. But the church won't let the missionaries eat at a single woman's home, even if two of her kids are there. Another adult must be present. That's the only reason we agreed. The missionaries didn't mention the church, except to leave a spiritual thought. Both times they were just awkward teenage boys who wanted dinner and to forget about being a missionary for an hour. The primary program (again, being supportive) was an exercise in creepy brainwashing and chanting. Women's Conference, which I declined, would have been an evening with a bunch of strangers, listening to "that voice" and probably finding insulting remarks in the comments about women in the broadcast.

Anyway, my point is their "spirit" has no power. What they think will generate warm feelings toward Mormonism is, in fact, just what they have been trained to feel good about. Like Pavlov's dog. It isn't a universal feeling they can share with others. People are more likely to be put off by what turns Mormons on. And not because they are hard of heart but because TBMs are properly trained by their master. It's one of the things I currently find most delusional about Mormons.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2015 04:23PM by CA girl.

I like to compare it to a marketplace.

Mormon culture and experience has to compete in a marketplace of thousands of meaningful and rewarding alternative options.

And the simple fact is that they CANNOT compete. At all.

On a spiritual and emotional level, I get more spirituality out of a simple one-instrument performance of beautiful music than I would out of 8 hours of pedantic General Conference. It's intellectually, physically, and spiritually stultifying!

While at church, in a group setting, where a persons is welcomed, talked to, smiled at, valued in some way- being the tribal creatures that we are, it is so very human to feel good about belonging. We evolved to feel good in such settings- Loners who didn’t wandered off and didn’t reproduce as well. Neurological tingles or warm fuzziness or just belonging or whatever you want to call it, while in a feel-good-group, is not an accurate way to divine truth about something else, like “ Could Joseph pull rabbits out of a hat?”.

About a year and a half ago I attended the American Atheist convention in Salt Lake City. When I walked into the large hall and saw all my fellow godless heathens guess what? Yep, neurological tingles galore! I laughed- Here was my tribe and it felt good. No rabbits, I knew what was going on.

Mormonism is an attempt to highjack a normal human response and insist it means something supernatural "-and pay us 10% for feeling good. You know you felt something... so Indians are Jews. Don’t you dare deny it, feels good to belong right?... so God lives on Kolob. It sure would feel bad if we with-drew our approval wouldn't it? ....So that means Mormon gods own all the universe ... and did we mention the 10%?"



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2015 06:32PM by druid.

I commented on another thread about the time Dick G. Spott visited my mission. He chose to give his talk in very broken Portuguese and pissed off all the Brazilian missionaries who couldn't understand him. He then bore testimony, in English, all about his "witness", how he had sure knowledge, etc..., strongly implying that he had seen Jesus.

If the spirit were real, and especially if this "apostle" had any spiritual gifts, the Brazilian elders would have understood, felt a powerful burning, etc... During his testimony, even if they didn't understand everything, they might have felt a strong spiritual confirmation that he was an apostle, special witness, etc...

Instead, as we lined up to go shake his hand, most of these missionaries couldn't even look at him. They were infuriated and some of them ranted about it for months. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these missionaries left the church, or at least started their journey out over this one encounter with an "apostle".

Someone must haave been feeling the spirit when they named the poor kid Dick G Spot.

Just last night, the Bishop and my FIL came over to give my TBM wife a blessing (she went to the ER yesterday due to abdominal pain on the left side - diagnosis: diverticulosis complicated by diverticulits). After all was said and done, blessing given, I followed the Bishop out to his car. He encouraged me to watch GC. To pray. To study the scriptures. To try one more Sacrament meeting.

Just to get back the spirit.

He's so full of balloon juice...(uh, that's hot air)

As for the blessing? No supernaturally speedy recovery so far. Still has pain. Still nauseous.

Still TBM.

Bruce, please pass along best wishes for a speedy recovery to your wife, with no "spirit" involved :)

+1

Bruce, my best to your wife. It took my SIL about a week to feel better after her last bout with this.

You're over it but if they get a little into your bloodstream, you might again become dependent.

This exactly. I do think Mormonism is an addiction of sorts - you get addicted to the high of feeling the spirit. So what you say makes perfect sense. They want you to remember how great that high felt so you'll show up and pay up.

Oh my.

Yes,

I suppose many forget that God moves in mysterious ways and not pedantically to any dogma.

I'm a religionist, but even i know that if i sat there long enough, with enough concentration, i could have a spiritual experience based entirely on my feelings.
If i could just invent a feeling of spirituality, why would i trust that "invented by expectations" feeling to guide my life choices? That's maybe one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
Trust your instincts, sure. They're there for survival. Trust a warm fuzzy feeling that you made for yourself? Not so much, that.

Human instincts/intuition are pure and real.

Implanted expectations, not at all reliable.

Emotions are just our brain processing external stimuli. "feeling" the spirit is a conditioned response to the external stimuli of Mormonism.

So when the Mormon missionaries finally got me (nevermo) to come out to SM and they were very, very eager to debrief me, they were hoping to find that my experience had caused me to "feel the spirit" like they do. It didn't. I thought it was unimaginably boring. Not to mention cross-culturally disorienting.

JAR

Yes - they are trained to feel the spirit in certain meetings. They can't usually see it through the eyes of someone who isn't trained.

I was invited to a missionary setting apart as my friend's son was leaving on his mission.

The contrast between how I feel now to how I used to feel was huge. I noticed how many times the word obedience was said in the setting part blessing. He was promised that no harm would come to him at all as long he was obedient. Implying if something happens to him then it is his fault.

The other TBMs in the room were wiping their eyes by the end. I just sat there bemused that I ever swallowed this nonsense before.

No spirit, no feelings of anything other than pity for the poor victim as he goes out. I certainly won't be crawling back to church any time soon as a result of this experience.

I can't believe that!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

____________________

My first time back at church visiting family, I noticed how strange it all was. I was in the chapel of my HS days, and there were lots of familiar faces, but the message and tone were bizarre. How did these people I knew so well still buy into this crap?

The longer you are out, the more strange it seems. You see TBMs try to wrap their minds around ridiculous notions that have no basis in reality. You see them lamely accept concepts that are irrational. They believe many impossible things before breakfast.

+1
Still trying to work out how grown up people do it... i guess it is mind over matter

I have yet to feel it in my 67 years.

RB

"27 But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words."


Alma is saying that you have to want to believe for it to work. If you want to believe in something, you will.

Most TBMs want to believe, not because it is factually convincing, but because it is socially necessary. To not believe means rejection by their family and friends, and in Utah, but their neighbors and employers.

Once you lose that desire to believe, it becomes obvious how silly it all is. Of course Indians are not lost Jews. Of course there is no such thing as Reformed Egyptian. Of course JS didn't stumble across the writings of Abraham. Of course BY stole the church from Emma Smith. Of course JS and BY used polygamy to justify adultery. Of course TM has no prophetic abilities. Of course it's all a scam to control you and take your time and money.

Like the Allegory of the Cave, it's impossible to go back and see the shadows as anything but shadows. Willful ignorance and a desire to belong are what keep most people in. It's hard to leave, especially when your loved ones don't want you to leave them behind. The desire to fit in and accept is strong, so many of us leave just because the social bonds were not strong enough to hold us back.

After outing my issues with TSCC my wife (and my folks probably will ask the same once I speak with them), "Haven't you felt the spirit in the Temple."

I turned to my wife and told her Yes and no. I said through all the ceramonies etc I havn't felt anything, if I felt anything it was a weird feeling through the endowment movie. The only place I felt the spirit was the Celestial room.

I said that the Celestial room is an incredibly quiet and peaceful room, I also quickly added that I felt that same feeling as I'm sitting alone in the woods when I have gone camping.

that I never got to sit down in the CR because I was too slow at getting through the veil (given I only went to 4 endowment sessions). I just knew if I could sit and ponder in the CR, I'd be able to get a real answer to my gay/straight marriage, but the only thing I ever felt in the CR was being rushed out.

Then the last time I went to the temple, they pulled me aside for sealings (not my husband, just me) and that was bizarre. I spent 40 minutes in the foyer waiting for my ex. It was peaceful in the foyer . . . I never went back. I didn't have to do anything, be on display, perform anything, feel violated. I just got to sit there.

And just because you feel something, doesn't mean it's God proving Mormonism true. Billions of people have those same feelings about their religion, about nature, about television commercials, watching the birth of a child or at their wedding and so on and so on. My guess is that a lot of what Mormons think is "the spirit" is also the self-satisfaction of turning in what they believe is an appropriate performance - that they are succeeding in life by the standards of the group they belong to. So when you are out, you realize not only that those feelings are found elsewhere too but you don't feel the validation of being a good Mormon. Combine that with a now-realistic view of how very odd and different Mormons and Mormonism is, what they deem "the spirit" is pretty hard for ex-Mormons to re-discover. Especially, as someone said, when you don't particularly want to believe.

That was very eloquently put CA girl.

Another thing one has got to consider, when thinking about feeling the spirit vs (as axeldc put it) how silly it all is, is what are the consequences of believing in something silly just because you want to, or just because it gratifies you to fit in with a certain crowd? If the belief system is wrong, from an objective standpoint, is it completely inconsequential to follow that path? Mormons seem to imply that religion is so meaningless in a person's life that they can choose to believe anything they want, without consequences. Indians aren't lost Jews. That's a fact. Does it matter if you believe they are, or you don't care one way or the other, you're just keeping up with the Jones'?

I think it does matter. Eventually, if a person stacks up enough wrong ideas, and then obeys someone simply because they've stacked up an even greater store of wrong ideas to profess to believe in, inevitably, that person will come to grief.

Great point. How many times did we attend a sac. meeting which
had us staring at the wall clock only to have the Bishop
announce, just before the closing song, "brothers and sisters,
the spirit has been very strong here tonight."

Part of Mormonism is a conflating and confusing of the ideas of
objective and subjective. As a Mormon you are supposed to make
objective conclusions based on subjective feelings. Unless, of
course, they run counter to what the Church wants. Then you
have shown that you are a bad person.

baura Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Great point. How many times did we attend a sac.
> meeting which
> had us staring at the wall clock only to have the
> Bishop
> announce, just before the closing song, "brothers
> and sisters,
> the spirit has been very strong here tonight."
>
> Part of Mormonism is a conflating and confusing of
> the ideas of
> objective and subjective. As a Mormon you are
> supposed to make
> objective conclusions based on subjective
> feelings. Unless, of
> course, they run counter to what the Church wants.
> Then you
> have shown that you are a bad person.

Yes, that's true! I had that experience many times. I would wonder why I didn't feel the spirit, too, like everyone else seemed to. I always thought it was because they were more righteous than I was.

You want to feel the spirit?

Go to an airshow and watch a 90 year-old tear up as he touches a restored B-17 for the first time in 70 years.

Or when your 4 year-old hugs you for no reason and then skips happily off to whatever it was she was doing 10 seconds before.

Or your first view of Half Dome when you drive into Yosemite on a clear spring day.

Just sayin'....

thanks CA girl, just love the pavlovian analogy, can't wait to use it, I get it now.....smith was Pavlov, tbm's are his dogs and the doctrine [reactivation effort] flows from their salivary glands when they feel the burning, prompted by their master[s]