gold plates

Three Truths for Mormons

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

Based on how I’m feeling at the moment, I would like to share with Mormons (and with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Nelson…) three truths that I’ve learned since I began studying church history, doctrine, and culture, as well as science, philosophy, and religion:

  1. There is no good evidence that anyone or anything exists yet that places specific thoughts or feelings in your mind or body other than you. Everyone should educate themselves on the latest and best science on the human brain, because we all have one and we are all nothing without it, so shouldn’t we understand it and take care of it well? As far as we know at this time, your thoughts and feelings are yours and yours alone, and they are a function of your body (especially your brain), which is a function of your DNA and your environment. This means that Satan has no way to tempt you and God has no way to inspire you, other than by acting on their own in objective reality. The correct answer to the age-old Mormon question “How do I know if it’s my own thoughts or The Holy Ghost?” is that it’s all you and it’s always all you. Personally I think this means that either God and Satan do not exist or that they do not exist in the form traditionally taught by The Church.
  2. There is no good reason for the gold plates to be withheld from the world. I think the two most popular explanations I’ve come across for why the rest of the world beyond the eleven witnesses cannot see Joseph Smith’s gold plates are these: that God wanted to protect The Book of Mormon from the kind of translation errors and worldly interference that are found in The Bible, and that God wants to test our faith. Neither of these explanations works in any kind of objectively true way. Even if the plates had ended up safe in a museum (which God could surely bring about, couldn’t he?), Joseph Smith still would have had first crack at a full translation, and if his translation was correct it would ultimately win out in the kind of world and culture we’ve lived in since 1830, thereby supporting and confirming his true prophetic calling from God. Also, if the plates were confirmed as an authentic historical artifact and were available for anyone to inspect in a museum, faith and conversion would increase, but faith would still be required to believe and know that the supernatural and miraculous events described on the plates were objectively real and actually occured. Knowing that the text of The Bible is authentically ancient has never removed the burden of faith from the believer as far as I know, and neither would it with The Book of Mormon. In other words, knowing with scientific proof that the ancient inhabitants of MesoAmerica actually recorded on gold plates that they had supernatural and miraculous experiences is different from whether they actually had those experiences that they claimed to have – faith is required either way, so God has no good reason that I know of to withold the plates from the world. However well-intentioned, withholding evidence like this is a classic technique of the magician and con artist. If Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” then shouldn’t we agree and remember that the truth does not withhold evidence of itself? Never trust that you have all of the truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence.
  3. Although he is all-knowing, God never says or does anything in the scriptures to indicate that he has any special knowledge or insight into why his children do what they do. The only reason he ever seems to give for their misbehavior is that they’ve misbehaved, they’ve sinned, they’ve chosen wrong because they’ve rejected the good and embraced the evil. Modern science and human experience tells us that in reality there can be a great variety of reasons that people do what they do, reasons over which they have little or no control, and that identifying and trying to work with those reasons seems to help bring about a rate of positive change that surely is as good and likely much better than simply commanding people to repent.

Email to Our Ward Missionaries – My Mormon Story, Condensed

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(I posted the following to r/exmormon reddit on 12-28-21:)

Earlier this week our ward missionaries left me a voicemail saying they hoped we had a Merry Christmas and that they’d like to come by and introduce themselves and share a spiritual thought with us. I sent them a text in response saying we have COVID at our house right now but that I would send them an email in the next day or so to explain a little about our current situation in regards to the church.

In case any of you find this interesting or useful in some way, here is the text of the email I sent them today (with the subject line “My Mormon Story, Condensed”). Since religion is their full-time job I felt it would be okay to go into some detail, but for a different audience I would probably shorten this down to a few sentences or a paragraph:

Dear Elder_____ and Elder _____,

Greetings and Salutations,

Thanks again for your voicemail yesterday and for reaching out. Hopefully you got my text response last night. I do want to point out that on the voicemail you said you wanted to introduce yourselves, and I believe we already met when you stopped by our house awhile back – not sure if you forgot that you met us already or if it was just a figure of speech.

I’ve been debating about the best way to respond to you, and decided it felt best to write an email to give you some details about our history and current situation in regards to the church so you can have the information you need to decide if it’s worth continuing to reach out to us or not. I enjoy writing, and I especially enjoy writing about religion, science, and philosophy, but I will try to be relatively concise and not go on for twenty pages or anything like that, even though part of me wants to.

Where to begin?

I’ll start with a simple statement to explain why we haven’t been to church (Zoom or in-person) for over a year and half:

Our beliefs have changed, and we don’t feel like we can be ourselves at church anymore without making conservative, faithful members feel uncomfortable or offended, and without risking being demoted to second class citizens.

I think my wife _____ and my kids _____ and _____ would all agree with that statement, and now I’ll add some more details but will speak mostly just for myself, even though they may also agree with some or all of the rest of the things I write:

I’m a lifelong member of the church. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family is a member and we have pioneer roots back to John D. Lee. I graduated from early-morning seminary, served a Spanish speaking mission in Boston (1999-2000), got married and sealed to my high school sweetheart _____ in the temple in 2002, and have had a variety of callings and experiences serving in the church since then.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with some aspects of being a member of the church, even back to when I was a little kid, but I always assumed I should just go along with it all because it was obviously all just as factually true as parents, teachers, and leaders had taught. In 2014 there were a few things that happened in my life that caused me to question the church in a way that I never had before, including my experience watching the series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I learned some things about science that I’d never heard and/or never paid much attention to before, and I had the thought “I wonder how all this science stuff squares with the church’s doctrine?” I looked things up on the internet about the church that I’d never looked up before, and so, just before my 36th birthday, I slowly began to learn that the church’s doctrine, history, and culture is not what I thought and not what I was taught. I went down a rabbit-hole that turned into hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of research – books, articles, websites, podcasts, and videos exploring both faithful and critical perspectives on the church (much of it from the church’s own materials, including the scriptures), as well as a lot of world religion, science, and philosophy stuff and over time as I found ways to rationalize all of the problems and continue to be faithful only to eventually revert back to a more scientific approach, I came to some important conclusions, and I’ll share just a few of them:

  • The church is true after all, but only subjectively. Objectively, it is not what it claims to be. In other words the church is true when you believe it’s true, but it isn’t true on its own. If a person truly believes something is true they tend to have much the same experience that they would have if it really was true, even if it’s not true. It’s fine to seek after and enjoy living a life and a religion based around subjective truths if it helps you to be a better person, but when thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and personal experiences are presented as objective facts that is where the conflicts begin, especially when it leads to the oppression of minorities and vulnerable individuals and groups who don’t fit in.
  • Never trust that you have the whole truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence. For example, the reason Joseph had to give the gold plates back to Moroni is because there were no gold plates in objective reality, or if there were, they couldn’t pass critical inspection. But, if you truly believe and have faith that there were gold plates then you end up having much the same experience as you would if there really were gold plates. The experiences of the three and eight witnesses are far more complicated and much more subjective than the church has a history of teaching. And, once I served on a jury and watched enough true crime documentaries to realize how many people have been wrongly convicted on eyewitness testimony, I realized eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in establishing the objective facts, even in the one true church.
  • I don’t believe in an embodied God who kills. Even if I’m wrong and this killing God is real, I wouldn’t want to worship him. It doesn’t make sense to me that a loving, immortal Father who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good would ever kill one of his children for any reason (especially innocent people, especially innocent women and children), particularly now that I’ve gained a better understanding of the natural world and how it works on its own. It does make sense that human beings would create a God who does this though. It’s ironic that 3 Nephi Chapters 8-10 come right before the chapter that I used to go around trying to get people to read on my mission. At the time I never thought very carefully about what’s really going on in those chapters, and don’t remember it ever bothering me before. I now see them much differently. If I had to blame losing my “testimony” on one thing and one thing only, I might choose 3 Nephi 8-10. I’m also now greatly troubled by a variety of other scriptures in the Book of Mormon (and other books of scripture as well of course) including 1 Nephi 4, Alma 14-15, and Helaman 7-11. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I do believe in “God” by the way, I just believe something very different from what the church teaches.
  • The church does a lot of good and it really works for some people, but it also does a lot of harm and doesn’t really work for other people, and that should be acknowledged and accepted by both the faithful and the critics.

Elders, there are hundreds of other things I would enjoy going into as well, but this is probably already too long for an unsolicited email, and so the question becomes, is it a good use of your time to visit with us and share spiritual thoughts? I would only enjoy it if I felt like I could express myself fully and freely (and politely of course), and it would most likely always turn into the kind of friendly but time-consuming debate that I don’t think the church wants its missionaries spending a lot of time on. Also, my wife and kids aren’t interested in having churchy missionary visits right now.

If you need someone to help you out of the church then I am your guy and we are your family. If you need someone to help you in temporal ways, we are nice people and would be glad to help. If you need someone to be a real friend on a human level, with no church strings attached, then we could probably help with that. But if your ultimate goal on your mission is to reactivate and baptize people through teaching and service, then you will be wasting your time with us. Maybe that will change someday, but at the moment, I doubt it. I would need some really good objective evidence that the church is true, and I’ve been looking for a long time and I’m still looking and I still haven’t found any, although there is a mountain of subjective evidence. By the way, back in 2013 I set a goal to read all of the general conference talks given in my lifetime and I am still working on it, and I hope that tells you something positive about who I am and where I am coming from with all of this. I am currently working on April 2013 conference and am excited to finish this monumental reading project. I’ve read well over 2,000 talks so far. I still love reading, writing, and thinking about the church.

I’m not going to be the guy who says don’t contact us, because it’s not in my nature, and I will always try to be nice when you or anyone does contact us, but in response to your message I felt you should know more about where we’re coming from to help you decide how best to spend your time.

Good luck with your missions, and I really do wish you the best!

Mormon Mouse

The Whole Truth

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

Never trust that you have the whole truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence.

In the case of Joseph Smith and the gold plates, his claim that he gave them back to the angel Moroni smells of deceit. When I had my faithful Mormon hat on, I accepted his claim without a second thought really. Of course he had to give them back to the angel Moroni because God didn’t want the world to mess The Book of Mormon up like it messed up the Bible, right? Now that I have my skeptic’s hat on I’ve realized that an intentional withholding of the very evidence that would validate your claim is a classic characteristic of con artists and magicians. Grant Palmer helped me realize that Joseph Smith believed the ends justify the means when you’re bringing people to Christ. The faithful might say that God withholds evidence to test our faith, but that doesn’t work in the case of The Book of Mormon (if ever). Why? Because even with a historically authenticated set of gold plates in a museum, it would still require faith to believe that the supernatural events that the plates describe actually happened and aren’t just ancient stories.