When you see all the religious mechanisms used to generate belief in gods and supernatural beliefs, e.g. appeal to scripture as revelation, prayer to affirm faith as justified, the arguments for God (e.g. the design argument), apologetics, etc., all being used when you were Mormon to defend LDS beliefs and then you later learn Mormonism is not true and based on a fraud; it makes you VERY skeptical since the faith mechanism that led you assume Mormonism is true, are the same methods used in all other religions.
Yet my skepticism is tempered by science itself! You see, I have been reading a lot of books written by atheist scholars and scientists, who at the end of the day argue that we are pretty much designed by Evolution to be spiritual and theistic. They write this while saying they are hard core atheists, but they can’t ignore the data.
I find it interesting that if you really dig deep into the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and scholarly books on his life and philosophy, you’ll find that even though he is known as the dude who said “God is dead …”, when you actually read his writings and his Thus Spake Zarathustra in context, you find that there is a strong unconscious urge in him to not just remove dogmatic Augustinian Pauline religiosity, but there is a strong attempt to introduce a new Dionysian/Spinozian type of God-concept and mythos to help humanity affirm Life. My point is that we (or most of us) have a “spiritual brain” so to speak.
Even as skeptical as I am and non-theist leaning, I still find the transcendental temptation (as Paul Kurtz called it) popping up constantly as my right-brain battles with my left-brain from time to time. Even countries like Sweden and Norway still have a lot of spirituality type stuff going on. After studying the brain science of belief and spirituality, I now understand why I long for the transcendent even with my active frontal lobe.
Mormonism is a unique religion in that it is a recent historical religion that developed in a way that today is very easy to disprove once you choose to go digging. But a lot of the claims of Christianity for example are not as easy to dismantle as Mormonism. I mean there's no handwritten diary entry of Paul’s “First Vision” for example. We have all this empirical evidence against Mormonism which makes it easy to realize it's a fraud. We have court documents showing Smith was a fraud! We know very little by comparison about the NT persons and characters that is even remotely similar. That’s not to say that scholars like Bart Ehrman have not done a good job making me skeptical of the claims of biblical Fundamentalists.
My point is that unlike other churches, I think Mormonism, more than any other church is an “atheist factory.” I have heard from more than one source, that Mormonism produces a lot of nontheists (atheists and agnostics). I think Mormonism sets you up to be nontheist when you leave. First, because of the reasons I gave above. And second, the LDS church does a good job pointing out the dirty laundry in other churches, like the problems with the Protestant Reformers and their irrational and harmful ideas in many cases.
Third, Smith pretty much copied the exact same religious mentality and method of the preachers of his day, down to the same King James English, when producing the Book of Mormon. So when you get those religious "feelings" as a Mormon while reading the BoM that feels the same to you as when you read the New Testament, and then later see that the BoM is a fraud; it makes you realize that scripture-making to invoke a reaction is a skill that anyone can do. So is the same skill being used in the Bible? You then learn about other gospels and epistles that did not make it into the New Testament, and you start to think and ponder that, and why the New Testament documents that are in there now are any more "divine" and "inspired" than the BoM or Gospel of Thomas for example.
Another reason for the strong growth of non-theism in the post-Mormon community, is because I think Mormonism is split brained in way, in that it contains Smith’s own evolution of belief from Evangelical Protestant (BoM, 1830) to later becoming more of a Religious Humanism (Book of Abraham, King Follet Discourse in the 1840s, etc).
By the 1840s, Smith is defending anti-Monotheism and rejects belief in a Supreme Being while offering a religious humanism wherein Matter is eternal, and man’s soul is uncreated and basically divine; while the God of his earth was once a man; that is by definition a non-theist philosophy of sorts, because if by theism you mean:
Supreme Being > Matter > Earth > Soul of Man > Man/flesh, in that order from that which is Eternal to created ...
Then Mormonism instead has it:
Matter + Soul of Man ("Intelligences") > Earth > Man/flesh (and THEN Gods as exalted men), in that order from that which is Eternal to created. So that there is no Supreme Being. It rejects classic theism.
Thus for me at least, it was not a far step to go from belief in many Gods that evolved, and matter and my soul is eternal, and I am not depraved and punished for Adam's transgression; to then asking, why a deity and a blood sacrifice at all? I think the strong humanist-like bent of later 1840s Mormonism allows post-Mormons to break away from scriptural-theism easier than Protestants and Catholics.
So what now?
What I have tried to do is balance both my left-brain and my right-brain (I use these terms as metaphors knowing the brain is more complex than that), and have certain mythological beliefs I entertain in a Joseph Campbell kind of way, while maintaining my rationality and science-based understanding of the Cosmos. For example, some days I might entertain the God of say Wayne Dyer, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTCRWdYGE5AI find Dyer’s concept of God harmless and inspiring as a mythical idea, when I allow myself to entertain the idea, if only temporarily, without being overly skeptical and deconstructing which is my default.
Other days I entertain Eckhart Tolle’s "God" concept as not even a mind concept but nondualistic “Being,” other days I am more Einsteinian in my concept of God as the Cosmos.
Basically, I don't try to “know” something as absolutely true like I did when I was Mormon. Instead, I like the philosophy of possibilianism (see
https://www.possibilian.com/). Reading Eagleman’s book Sum: 42 Tales of the Afterlives, opened my eyes to wondering beyond the theist vs. atheist divide. That does not mean I don't ignore probabilities, but I now allow myself to hold different metaphysical and naturalistic views in the possibility space of my mind. So that some days I'm a hardcore materialist/physicalist, and other days I enjoy listening to non-theists describe a God as a Force or ineffable Presence, like John Shelby Spong or Wayne Dyer or whoever; and enjoy the sensations I get from my "spiritual brain" when I entertain a Cosmos infused with meaning and divinity. While other days my "rational brain" rules and I enjoy being a nontheistic Nietzschean “free spirit” and creating my own meaning in life (as also Logotherapy emphasizes).
In short, Mormonism demanded that I have certain knowledge in a clear and concise system of thought, that I was told I *had to know* for sure was absolutely true and was encouraged to repeat my pretend certainty every day or week bearing testimony to it. Today I say, "F*ck that!" I change my mind on everything all the time, I mean I recently moved a few notched one way on the political spectrum, so why should my thoughts on metaphysics be any different.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/2019 12:16AM by wonderfull.