I thought that I was invincible, impervious to Satan's attacks. I saw a lot of people lose their faith. Some faded over time, others flipped like a switch. A lot of people seemed to be in the church when they felt like it but not when they didn't. That wasn't faith to me either and I was certain I would avoid those paths!
I saw and heard of people losing their faith due to something someone said at church. They were easily offended and for that they left the church. I wasn't worried about that because it takes a lot to offend me.
I saw people while I was growing up who decided partying and having a good time was more important than the church and being true to what they professed to believe. There were things I wanted to do that were incompatible with the church's teachings but I did whatever it took to avoid those temptations. I wasn't too worried about falling away due to fiery darts of temptations either.
If I thought I had a weakness it was Anti-Mormon material. I was told this was malicious material that only people who hate the church for no good reason put out to tear people away from their faith. I was a curious kid, I wanted to ask questions that others would avoid and I knew this about myself. So I always had my guard up when evaluating new ideas and new material. I wasn't going to fall into any traps.
But I did.
It wasn't a deliberate trap set by some scheming atheist or anti-mormon. It was more like a sink hole, just something that occurs naturally, something that comes at you out of nowhere.
You know what it was? Just an idea, nothing more. A small, innocent, innocuous, almost irrelevant concept. It was the theory, the proposal that perhaps with logic we could understand something that has previously been sacred knowledge, reserved for the Gods: Morals; what is right and what is wrong.
You know I watched Bill Nye as a kid, I've always loved the sciences. And ever since I can remember I've received my scientific knowledge, my knowledge about the physical world, from the scientists. They are the voices I listened too.
This might sound like it would create a problem; being religious and respecting the sciences, for they seem to teach contradictory things. But you know what, there is a very simple way to make this problem go away: Scientists don't know everything and God hasn't revealed everything to His church.
This leaves just enough grey area in the equation to allow people to come to issues of evolution and the like, shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, who's to say, really? It doesn't matter to my salvation, we'll find out when we go to heaven." And there are solutions besides that strategy of apathy. Its really easy to come up with an answer if you really want to. Here's how it's done: simply make religion a super-reality where the theories of science can be a subset of the doctrines of scripture: "Yes evolution is true and that's how God put us here." Cognitive dissonance dissolved!
But coming back to the moral thing, if there is a logical way to evaluate moral theories, we've got a problem. Since its deduced purely by logic if it contradicts the morals that religion teaches one of the two prescriptions is wrong. There can be no contradictions, a moral theory cannot be a subset of a super-reality. If it was then deceitfulness or violence as a rule could be a desirable thing for God but an undesirable thing for humans. It doesn't work like that.
I don't know if I'm being very clear but I hope that makes sense to you. What I'm talking about is applying reason and the Socratic method to moral proposals in order to determine universal moral principals. A moral principal must be universal to be a valid moral principal. Could it be called moral to say I have the right to steal your wallet but you can't steal mine? Is that fair? Certainly not.
Physics can be different from time to time and place to place. The speed of light might have been faster or slower at the time of the big bang, there is dark matter and dark energy, extra dimensions theorized by string theory, in physics there is enough wiggle room to believe in a super reality, but not so with morals. Morals based on logic is like math and therefore must be universalized. If 2+2 = 4 one place, it must be true fundamentally. And if we can't trust that 2+2 = 4 then why bother believing anything?
See why it seems so innocent? Its just an idea, right? But no, once I started learning about how to evaluate moral theories logically I realized, "um...this doesn't fit with what I was told...we have a problem; I know this is logical therefore my religion's morals must be illogical (for they contradict)."
Its like a virus that gets into your mind then blows up. Everything you believe needs to rearrange itself and that process can be pretty difficult. But I don't want to dwell on that process here, I just wanted to talk about what 'got me' and pulled me away from my religion and the God of my youth. (Or rather, what pulled Him away from me).
What I Was Taught
I never noticed before that I was told inconsistent things about morals. I was baptized at age 8 and told that now I was accountable for my sins. This concerned me a great deal. I wanted to know how to 'repent' and what constituted a 'sin.'
I was told that if I didn't know whether or not something was morally wrong (a sin), the light of Christ or the Holy Ghost would tell me. Adam and Eve didn't know right from wrong until they ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and now everyone knows good from evil, everyone has a conscious.
I was also told that we go to church so we can know right from wrong and stay on the straight and narrow. So, we go to church to learn something we already inherently know.
Evidently there can be only one moral code - the one Jesus lived by, He being the perfect man. And yet when I talk to people in the church moral theories are all over the place; everything is arbitrary, everything is a matter of circumstance, preference and even outcome. There can be no methodology whereby mortal man can evaluate moral behavior. That is the divine prerogative of God, for He is judge. And yet we all have the light of Christ in us, so shouldn't we just naturally agree on all moral questions?
When I ask someone's opinion about an act or behavior and if its right or wrong I get responses like this, "What does the church say? What do the scriptures say? What do the brethren say? Have you prayed about it?" This methodology for coming to a moral decision is an admission that any fundamental moral understanding eludes the speaker.
Isn't it interesting that I'm accountable for my sins as a child but God is the only one that truly knows right from wrong?
And besides there's no real answer to those questions. No one in the church leadership has anything to say about wars, violence, coercion, theft on the largest of scales except things like, "we ought to pray for our political leaders." And yet there is moral outrage and hysteria over the most insignificant personal choices of other people. Mountains are molehills and molehills are mountains. The moral teachings of the church are too lukewarm and avoidant of real issues to be considered God's word. The strategy seems simple demonize the other, avoid the controversial, present sanctimonious platitudes, reaffirm eternal rewards and punishment.
This is not to say the Church doesn't have any good teachings, they do. But good morals, good teachings can come from man; whats more, irrational morals can only come from man. The church is a mixture of both.
Definitions Misunderstood
Here's another interesting conundrum. I was told that the entire point of this life is to learn how to live well so that we can rejoin our heavenly parents. This is to be done by valuing faith in and obedience to a fundamentally unknowable God and His commandments above adhering to logic and what we are actually capable of understanding for ourselves.
I remember when I stopped going to church - I wasn't so sure if I believed in what was being taught but at first I felt guilty for skipping. "What if it's correct," I thought, "then if I don't go to church I'm making a big mistake." But the more I thought about it the more I realized that if I didn't believe it the only way to keep my integrity is to be true to what I believed to be true. There is no real honor in following the commandments out of fear. Is that what God wants of His children? Mindless, well behaved robots?
Expressing this line of logic to people didn't help my case in their eyes. "We're here to learn how to walk by faith," they would say, but all I would hear is, "yeah, I don't get it either but having faith in an unknowable God is more important than that 'integrity' stuff."
Experiencing that only furthered my belief that the true definitions of morality, integrity and honor elude most of the religious simply because in their minds it is more honorable to have faith in something they can't see than to acknowledge the truth of something they could see if they wanted to.
The Virtue of Faithlessness
In fact I began to question the virtue of faith itself. Faith isn't really like belief. If you believe something then you do not know it, but you usually have a reason to believe it. Not so with faith. The whole point of faith is that you must choose to believe without being persuaded by reason and evidence. Not only that but faith, in order to be faith must have the power to move you to act on your faith.
Think about that for a second. If I came to you as a friend and said, "I've made a life decision! I'm going to find something that I can't know is true or not, then I'm going to choose to believe it to the point that it'll make my decisions for me." How would you respond to that idea? I hope you'd explain how irrational, reckless and unnecessary that course of action would be. I began to see faith as it really is: not as a virtue, but a role of the dice. A role I had bet my life on.
Where Might This Attitude Come From?
You know who else has to adapt his or her behavior to a unknown and sometimes unknowable set of seemingly arbitrary commandments, a set of laws that seem more like a moving target than a standard? You know who else has to internalize a chaotic behavioral system and then make justifications after the fact when there are unexpected negative consequence to their behavior?
Children. Children have to deal with this and in cases of abuse or neglect its totally obvious that the psychological effects of this kind of conditioning are debilitating.
Could it be that this absolute infatuation with faith in the unknown and obedience without explanation is a result in part to the way children were and are treated? Maybe. I'm sure its something worth considering.
The True Nature of God
I did a thought experiment. I asked myself, "if I'm wrong and God does exist what will He say to me on the day of Judgement?"
I knew my heart was honest and my motives born from logic. I knew that any God worth worshiping would be a God full of empathy; He would understand me and He would even understand how well I understood myself. He would feel my pain as I lost faith and felt scared, confused and alone. He would care more about me being a person of integrity than He would care about blind obedience. And He would respect my decisions.
I cannot imagine He would turn me away on the basis of a lack of unsubstantiated belief in Him. And if He did I would gladly turn away because that means He does not possess the attributes worthy of being worshiped. (and neither would the company He keeps).
You see, as long as I'm true to what I believe to be true I'm golden, good God, bad God or no God, it doesn't matter.
Scriptural Proof
One last thing. I read the scriptures as I was growing up and especially in the Book of Mormon God is always warning the people of imminent destruction unless they shape up. This bothered me as a young teen. Doesn't God have better things to do? Nothing the people on earth could do really affects Him that much (He is God after all) so what's His deal? Maybe He's just a control freak. I couldn't figure it out until one day I had an epiphany, "God doesn't dish out punishment! He just warns people (mercifully) of the natural consequences of their actions!" All of the sudden God wasn't a childlike tyrant, He was a merciful, concerned and loving parent once again.
Then I got to the old testament.
God seems pretty brutal in the old testament He literally commands people to go abuse and kill other people. Almost everything in The Book of Mormon is defensive, not offensive. This seemed different; here He is actually dishing out the punishment Himself. Actually its worse than that. He forces His children whom he professes to love and watch over to risk their lives and commit these psychologically damaging atrocities without regard to their health and happiness. If that's love and concern...
When I discuss these seemingly immoral, (and if nothing else) hypocritical crimes that God committed, I get such responses as, "We don't know why God did that but it must have been the right thing to do." This is not an explanation but an admission that the speaker has no explanation. The other response I get is, "God asks us to do things we don't understand to teach us faith in Him." And what is the point of faith in a hypocritical and terrifyingly unpredictable violent God?
Then they say, "What? Are you judging God or something? Do you think you know better than Him?"
Well, perhaps, check this out:
Mormon 9:19
And if there were miracles wrought then, why has God ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would cease to be God; and he ceaseth not to be God, and is a God of miracles.
Even LDS scripture disallows for this kind of inconsistency and deviation from principal. There is a deeper doctrine in the church taught by John a Widthsoe and popularized by Cleon Skousen that the entire universe only obeys God (making him omnipotent) because God is perfectly consistent and always behaves according to perfect principals. Therefore if He deviated at all God would lose His honor and cease to have His power.
Well, If the inanimate matter of the universe can bother to check up on God's behavior and keep Him accountable, and only lend Him it's allegiance based on His honor and constancy I think we could do a little fact checking ourselves. If nothing else God should at least be consistent and unchangeable because if He is not consistent He's not a logical being in any respect and indeed He should cease to be my God.
In Conclusion
All moral theories, assertions or proscriptions are universal by their very nature. If its wrong for me to murder its wrong for anyone to murder, including criminals, cops, politicians or God.
I've always been interested in theology because I thought it was possible that our little world might be super imposed on some larger super reality. But when I learned about philosophy and how to evaluate moral assertions objectively and universally I realized something: the only logical theology is no theology.
Now, I could be wrong about every single thing I believe, related to this topic or any other. This is always the case. But if I'm wrong, and I go to heaven and get the opportunity to hang with God in His kingdom I'll probably decline the invitation because living in a world without any logically discernible, consistent moral values seems like Hell to me.
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