Posted by:
Way Out
(
)
Date: October 23, 2010 08:12PM
I was super hardcore TBM during high school, the mission and then upon returning from my mission, I was still fully active and all the way in. But over the course of the next 13 years or so, I noticed a general softening of my own conviction of the Mormon ideas that "we're right, we're the only true church, everyone has to be Mormon or they won't have a shot at the CK, our priesthood is the only true priesthood, etc."
My belief about god morphed into a more lenient, "God is love" even though I still felt the full load of guilt for all my "imperfections".
I became friends with a guy who was an exmormon-turned-atheist and once in a while our conversations would center on Mormonism and the church. In these conversations, I would look at things from his perspective and offer up my LDS-style explanation for all the things he viewed as indicative of god not existing.
During one conversation, it was probably about 9/11 and why God wouldn't tell the prophet, "Hey, have them evacuate the twin towers prior to 6 a.m. EDST on 9/11/2001," my friend made the point that even though there's a somewhat internally-consistent LDS explanation for all these things, it still appears that life on earth proceeds just as it would if there were no god.
This wasn't the first time he'd made this kind of point but I remember trying to find some way of explaining why it was reasonable to believe in the face of a complete absence of anything concrete to support that belief. All the possible answers I could give were easy enough for me, playing devil's advocate, to brush away using the kinds of arguments he had already made.
It was at that point I told my friend that I believe in God/Heavenly Father because I wanted to believe. And saying that had a huge emotional impact on me. Once I realized that there were good arguments against believing in god that I chose to ignore because I wanted to believe, I realized I was being ignorant and had the natural desire to change.
I searched and found www.lds-mormon.com which guided me in my research that I happily undertook from that point.