Dear God: What a year can do

I like looking through my old journal entries. I especially like looking at the things I wrote one year ago, and seeing how I've changed since then. I found this in my journal entry for June 17, 2010:

Dear God,
I don't know if you're real. It would be awfully nice if you were, because sometimes my life sucks. It would be nice if there were somebody who were in charge of it all, who is making all the good and the bad work towards some ultimately good end. But I don't know for sure whether to believe in you or not. Why should I? I mean, I wouldn't want to worship a being who is needlessly cruel. I would find that to be morally reprehensible.

Which brings me to my question--why all the weirdness? Why on earth would you do something so dumb as to hide all overt evidence of your existence, and then threaten people with hell if they don't believe in you? Where's the sense in that? I mean, seriously. Do you have insecurity issues, control issues, or what?

Basically, it would be nice if you could be up-front about who/what you are, and what you want of people. Let's be reasonable here. I refuse to treat life like a college class where the syllabus is a contradictory puzzle with half the pieces missing, and grades are awarded arbitrarily. 

I've got lots more to say to you, God, but I'm really tired now. I have class in the morning. So just think about that, OK? If you're really there, why don't you start acting like a rational grown-up? Just a suggestion.

I was essentially an atheist at that point. In an earlier entry I describe myself as a "peaceful agnostic." But damn. On June 17, 2009, I wouldn't have dreamed of writing something like that. And now, I've given up the last shred of wishing-for-God that I still had in the back of my mind one year ago. A year ago, I was figuring out how to define myself in terms of religion. I didn't really believe, but God was frequently on my mind. But after that final night on the temple grounds, I stopped worrying. Now I never wonder if God's really there. I really did give him a fair shot. I really tried to believe, but he never came through.

And you know what? I can safely say that since that last prayer that night by the temple, I've been the happiest I've ever been. I don't wonder or worry like I used to that one of the religions in the world is true, and that I'm condemning myself to hell through my ignorance/non-belief. My whole life, the people I've known have insisted that atheism is the most depressing philosophy out there, that it implies that life is meaningless and empty. But I've found that the opposite is the case. Life without God is free of so many of the worries I had when I believed in God, or when I was trying to believe in him.

One year ago I was a baby atheist. I wasn't even ready to call myself an atheist--I called myself an agnostic, just to be on the safe side. It's amazing what a year can do for a person. God and his existence/non-existence is not really on my radar, to be honest. It doesn't keep me up at night anymore (and it sure as hell used to). Now, I am free.

Double Bind

I remember my mom saying that one of her worst fears was that one of her children would leave the church. At the time, I was sure she had nothing to worry about on that score. I believed in the church with all my heart; for one thing, I'd never known anything else, and for another, I was convinced that it made sense. Sure, I'd had moments of cognitive dissonance with polygamy and misogyny and racism, but they were quickly suppressed. I had learned at an early age that whenever I found something about the church that bothered me, the thing to do was "put it on the shelf" and trust that I would find answers eventually. The idea that I might leave the church one day was inconceivable.

When I did realize that the church wasn't true, the scariest part about the whole thing was the prospect of telling my parents. I knew they would be devastated. I considered never telling them, and just pretending to believe for the rest of my life, but that was a losing proposition from the start. I hate pretending to be something I'm not. For the record, they don't know yet as of this writing. I won't be telling them for awhile for various reasons, but I have plans to do so as soon as it's feasible. But I have absolutely no intention of  pretending for the rest of my life. 

But this dilemma of mine made me realize shortly after I stopped believing that the church was not a benign organization. A healthy organization would not cause a mother to feel that she's failed at parenting if her daughter leaves the church. A healthy organization would not cause someone's "worst fear" to be that a loved one would leave. That is manipulative and evil. 

The church uses family members to create a double bind on apostates. We are faced with a choice between pretending to believe something we don't, or devastating our families. That is not healthy. It is a giveaway sign of a cult. An honest organization does not need to rely on guilt and fear to keep people in. An honest organization can take criticism. 

From a believing Mormon's perspective, there is no legitimate reason to leave the church, ever. Members are taught that people "apostatize" because they have been offended somehow, because they wanted to sin, because they were spiritually weak, or because they were prideful. Ironically, the church actively tries to persuade potential converts to leave their own churches, even if this means disappointing their families. I have heard dozens of converts tell stories about their families being angry with them, being sad, or even disowning them because they joined the LDS church. And the church glorifies these people for their fortitude. But when the situation is reversed--when someone who is already a member leaves the church--they are vilified and judged. 

According to the church, apostates cannot be happier outside of the church than they were in it. People are taught to fear and vilify apostates, and when a loved one apostatizes the believing member is left with an awful choice. Either they must view their loved one as having "fallen from grace," so to speak, or else they must somehow accept that their husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, or sister had a legitimate reason to leave. Like the apostate, the believing member is placed in a painful double bind. It is disgusting to me that the church manipulates and coerces its members in this way. There is nothing of good report or praiseworthy about it. And as members become apostates in increasing numbers, the problem is only going to get worse. 

As I said above, the church's attitude towards people who leave it is one of the major reasons why I consider it to be a harmful and coercive organization. Families are forever, but only if everyone toes the line. The church uses fear and guilt to manipulate its members, and that is wrong. 

My Last Prayer

In previous posts, I've talked about my gradual change to atheism. The change didn't happen in a rush of realization like the loss of my testimony did. But if I had to identify a point in time when I realized that I was a complete atheist, it would be one night during the summer of 2010. That night was like many nights in that I was feeling very lonely and I had no idea what to do with myself. I went to the temple and sat on the grounds as the sun set and just thought. I thought about how much had changed since the last time I'd been inside a temple--it had been over a year. I looked up at the stars and wondered if there was anyone up there who cared about me at all. I had stopped praying a few months previously, because my desperate prayers just weren't being answered. But I decided to give it one last shot. If I was ever going to regain a belief in God, this was his chance.

I said everything that I had to say to God. I told him about how frustrated and lonely and confused I was. I told him how much I wanted to believe that he was real, but that I really didn't think it was fair of him to expect me to believe in him when all appearances indicated that he didn't exist. I asked him to help me know if he was real. I don't know what I expected. I didn't expect any kind of miraculous vision. I didn't expect a warm fuzzy feeling like the one I had been told to expect when reading the Book of Mormon. Even if I had felt something like that, I wouldn't have trusted it. I think that I was really expecting everything to suddenly make sense, that all my doubts and the apparent problems with a belief in God would vanish in a brilliant flash of logic. Whatever I was expecting, nothing happened. Nothing. In a way I wasn't really surprised by the nothingness, because that was all I had been getting for months, even before I lost my testimony of Mormonism. But this time was different, because I accepted it. No divine answer was forthcoming. I had done my level best to believe in God, and God had failed the test.

As I walked back from the temple to my apartment, I didn't really think much about what had happened. It was almost as if nothing had happened, because nothing had really changed. But I was finally at peace with God--that is, with his lack of existence. Since losing my testimony I had always wondered in the back of my mind if there really was a God, and if he really cared. I had now accepted that I was on my own and that there wasn't any supernatural force to guide me or comfort me, or even to lend me a listening ear. I had talked to God, and no one had heard me. I wouldn't even realize the significance of that night until later. Even though the experience itself was emotionally difficult, my reaction immediately afterwards was really just a shrug of my shoulders. So there was probably no God. That came as anything but a surprise. That night I let go of my angst over the God issue and got on with my life. I haven't worried since.

The Bliss of Heresy

I call myself a blissful heretic. I chose that name for a reason. I disagree with the old saying that ignorance is bliss; I have found that as I eliminate ignorance from my mind, I become a much happier person. During the final stages of my belief, the cognitive dissonance was very painful and I would not have called it bliss. When I embraced the truth, the shackles of dissonance fell away from me and I was free to explore reality, unhampered by obligations to ancient superstitions and corrupt authority.

I don't use the word "heretic" flippantly. There was a time when heretics were tortured and burned alive. I consider myself infinitely lucky to live in a time and a place where the worst consequences for my heresy are disapproval and possible rejection from my family. Even that's pretty bad. It's bad enough that, as of this writing, I am still "in the closet" to my family and friends about the fact that I'm an atheist. But the worst that could happen to me really is not that bad.

I have found that there is a strange bliss in heresy. I don't mean that I go about being contrary and unpleasant. But freedom of mind is blissful in a way that is unlike any other kind of freedom I have experienced. If a question needs to be asked, I'm no longer afraid to ask it for fear of the answer. I no longer shy away from difficult philosophical questions like free will and causation. I'm no longer afraid that the conclusions will threaten my "testimony." A friend of mine once asked me if my study of philosophy ever shook my testimony. Naturally, this friend did not and does not know that I am an atheist, and therefore could not have known the irony of her question. No, philosophy does not shake my testimony. Philosophy, philo sophia, is the love of wisdom. I am delighted to pursue my search for truth and wisdom wherever it leads. Perhaps it leads me wrong sometimes, for I am a fallible human being and I don't always think things through properly or have all the available evidence in front of me. But I am not afraid of being wrong, because I am always seeking to find what is right. My best defense against error is hardly going to be blind faith. I should keep my mind as open as possible, on the chance that my view of reality might be wrong or limited. I'm not afraid of my testimony, such as it is (or rather, isn't) being "shaken" because if something is false, it ought to be dislodged from one's mind, and if it is true, then it should stand up under scrutiny. The bliss of heresy is the utter fearlessness with which one can pursue wisdom.

Standing for Truth and Righteousness

The Young Women motto is "stand for truth and righteousness." When I was in Young Women, my group had a tradition on Sundays that during opening exercises, we would have a period of time during which anyone could get up and share with the class how they had "stood for truth and righteousness" during the week. Usually the girls who got up would get a small piece of candy as a reward. At the time I thought nothing of this tradition, but looking back it disturbs me.

The things that girls would share as "standing for truth and righteousness" varied widely, but they most commonly involved being Mormon in a profane world. Many of the girls in my group were in choirs or plays at school, and it was common every few weeks for these girls to share that they had altered their performance dress with sleeves and a higher neckline or that they had refused to say a petty swear word such as "damn" as part of their lines in a play. I'm all for standing up for one's principles, but the part that bothers me is the getting up and telling everyone every Sunday. Most girls would try to share something every week, both because they wanted their Sunday chocolate and because of social pressure. During pauses, girls would elbow each other to get up. I was no different from anyone else. For me, as I suspect it was for most girls, sharing the ways I had been "righteous" in the past week was almost a kind of high. I got to show everyone else just how righteous I was, and enjoy their admiration. It was an ego booster, but it also served to bind me more closely to the group and to cause me to base a lot of my self-esteem on how I was perceived by the other girls. Everyone judged everyone else. If one of the girls didn't add sleeves to her choir dress or chose to perform on a Sunday, everyone else would look down on her--even though no one ever said anything.

The real difficulty with this kind of "standing for truth and righteousness" is that no one seemed to think very deeply about what they were standing for, or why. Sure, we swallowed all the rhetoric about standing up for "values" and being a "light to the world," but what did that really mean? It really boiled down to following rules--the church's rules--even if they seemed silly. There were no exceptions to the rules, ever. The world was black-and-white.

We were encouraged to be "steadfast and immovable" in the gospel. But where is the value in that? Where is the value in sticking by something even if it doesn't make any sense? Why is obedience a virtue? In the church, standing up for "values" ultimately boiled down to being obedient, to doing what the prophet has told you to, even if it seems silly. We were taught that "obedience is the first law of heaven." In other words, the ultimate virtue was not honesty--it was subordination of one's own reason, intuition, and moral compass to a dictatorship of "revelation." The ultimate result of this is that if obedience is the first law of heaven, the primary and most important virtue, then honesty is vilified. The person who says, "that doesn't make any sense; I don't think I'm going to follow it" is not a moral hero, but a weakling or a hedonist. The young woman who asks why, exactly, it's wrong to have two sets of earrings, and refuses to obey that command until reasonable justification has been given, is not to be praised, but chastised. She is not standing for truth and righteousness--an ironic phrase indeed when it implies moral dishonesty.

Perhaps I am going too far in calling obedience moral dishonesty. Perhaps it's unfair of me to apply my own standard of ethical epistemology to everyone else. But in my own view of the world, "good" and "bad" must be justified. They can't be arbitrarily assigned. They have to have reasoning behind them. If one rejects this, then the whole concept of morality, ethics--whatever you like to call it--is utterly meaningless. If "good" is solely determined by what an authority figure says, then there is no point in calling that authority figure "good." It becomes a circular argument to say that the prophet's counsel is good. How do we know that counsel is good? Because it came from the prophet. How do we know he is a prophet? Because his counsel is good. And round and round it goes.

If you're going to stand for something, you have to have something to stand on. You have to have some kind of epistemological rationale, some kind of logical footing, in order for you to even say that you are standing for something worthwhile. The kind of ethics I was taught in church was completely empty in this respect. The kind of ethics I now espouse are not based on obedience and faith, but on honesty, truth, and humility--the humility to admit that I was wrong.

It Gets Better

I remember how scared and devastated I was when I lost my testimony. Life was pretty difficult for me for a long time. Mormonism was all I knew, and I had no idea how I was going to live outside of it.

I don't know how likely it is that a Mormon who is doubting their faith will stumble across my blog, but if any ever should, this post is for you. And my promise is that it gets better, if I may borrow a phrase used by the LGBT movement.

I think that the best thing I did when I lost my testimony was reach out for help. I started posting on an exmormon recovery board, postmormon.org, and the people there were incredibly supportive. Another thing I did that was incredibly helpful was doing research on grieving and how it works. For many, perhaps most people who leave the church, there's a grieving process involved. It was incredibly helpful for me when I realized what was going on and why--and that it would eventually peter out and I'd be okay. A useful model for understanding this is the 5 stages of grief. The important thing to realize here is that this process is not like a game of Monopoly, where you land on each square, pay your dues, and move on. Everyone will experience these emotions differently, in a different order, and sometimes simultaneously. You will probably experience some of the different stages more than once. People are complex things, and leaving the Mormon church (whether you leave only mentally, or physically as well) is a long process for many people. The church entwines itself so entirely into the lives of its members. It permeates quite literally every aspect of life--from big things, like philosophical epistemology, to little things like what you can eat and drink, to intensely personal things like sexuality and relationships. There is no area of life that Mormonism doesn't touch. When you are freed from the church, it's a wonderful feeling. Your life and choices are completely your own and you don't have an organization trying to impose its one-size-fits-all dogma on you. But because the church is so completely a part of everything, the process of extricating yourself can be long and painful.

Everyone's experience will be different, but I am going to give a quick run-down of what the process was like for me in the hopes that others will be able to relate to parts of it, and recognize the differences in their own experience. The process started when I was exposed to information about the church that contradicted everything I had been taught. This information was online, and my initial reaction was to defend the church. I was convinced that the information being presented was false, and by Jove I was going to correct that misinformation! Obviously, this backfired badly. I was having references to the Journal of Discourses and LDS canon scripture thrown at me, and ultimately I realized that the discussion was going nowhere and gave up. The information I received perturbed me, but not so badly that it really affected me aside from irritating me.

Over a period of about a month, I repeatedly encountered things that chipped at my resolve. These things fell into two categories--reasoning and evidence. The reasoning was really the most powerful influence on me. I remember one day in particular when I couldn't get the conflict between D&C 132 and Jacob 2 off my mind. After my classes for the day were done, I remember sitting at the kitchen table in my dorm with my scriptures and laptop, poring over the relevant verses and trying to reconcile their differences. I spent the better part of the afternoon on this. And things like this kept happening, on average about once a week. Every time my attempt to reconcile the problem turned out to be futile and I gave up. One night it hit me that the church might not be true after all.

Doubt is a curious thing. It's like belief; you can't just make yourself doubt something. The philosopher Descartes tried to find truth by doubting everything, and then building his worldview back up starting with the self evident truth that "I think, therefore I am." But as the pragmatist philosopher William James pointed out, Descartes didn't actually change his behavior. He still kept his hand out of the fire, still ate and drank, still interacted with his world in the same way as always even though he was trying to doubt that any of it existed. I think that James has a more accurate conception of doubt than Descartes--namely, that doubt is uncertainty as to how one should act. And you can't make yourself doubt. Try it--try doubting whether you'll burn your hand if you stick it in the fire. Do you now have any hesitancy about how you should act with respect to the fire?

When I started doubting, I had no idea how to act. It was painful. When you don't know how to act, you can't really function. One term for describing this is "cognitive dissonance"--the painful phenomenon of having two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. I believed that the church was true, yet I was aware of things like the contradiction between D&C 132 and Jacob 2, the heinous history of polygamy, Joseph Smith's false prophecy about the second coming of Christ being at the end of the nineteenth century, Brigham Young's Adam/God doctrine--and the list was growing. I didn't know what to think or how to act. The way we cope with cognitive dissonance is obvious--we suppress one of the conflicting ideas. So I suppressed my doubts. They were still there in a dark corner of my mind, but I ignored them so that I could function. I was in denial.

There came a point when I couldn't suppress the doubt anymore. I had shoved that "spiritual shelf" so full of different things that when I encountered one more problem--in my case, the Book of Abraham--it didn't fit on the shelf anymore and it came crashing down around my ears. I felt the full intensity of the doubt and uncertainty, and to this day I can think of only one other time when I was in more emotional pain (also connected to the church). It was then that I started posting on postmormon.org. Within twenty-four hours I was out. I had been resisting the notion that the church wasn't true, but by this time the only thing stopping me from admitting it to myself was intellectual honesty. I wanted to make sure that I had given the church a fair shake before I rejected it. But the pile of problems was just so enormous, the very honesty that made me initially hesitant pushed me to realize, it probably isn't true. The absolute relief that flowed over me when I made that realization was incredible. There was a long, hard road ahead of me out of the church still, but I entered into an acceptance phase for awhile. The last month of that semester at BYU was surprisingly pleasant. The month or so previously had been painful, and now I was free. I started exploring the boundaries of the new world that my mind was in, and found that it had none. I was as free as a bird, and it was exhilarating. In short order I accepted evolution as scientifically viable, gave myself proper sex ed with the aid of Wikipedia, and even started questioning the existence of God.

That last item was the one that drove me into another difficult stage of my deconversion. Atheism frightened me. I tentatively explored the idea with my mind, trying to get a feel for the world, and didn't find any God in this new, ex-Mormon world. It frightened me. About two weeks after I stopped believing Mormonism, I watched The Lion King with my roommates and ended up very distressed over the death of Mufasa. What happens when you die? I didn't want to lose my family forever. The problem of death kept me vacillating on the question of God for several months. At different points I was an atheist, an agnostic, a deist, and at one point almost a Christian. And then, after months of worrying that issue, I let it go. I realized that no easy answers were forthcoming, and almost imperceptibly, I began thinking of myself as an atheist.

That was the process of my intellectual change, but the emotional one was much, much more difficult. This is where the stages of grieving come in. Sometimes I would experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance all within a single day--sometimes a single hour. I knew it wasn't true, but sometimes I was still so emotionally attached to the church that I tried to make myself not know. Most often I was angry and resentful, which always seemed to throw me right into depression again when my anger proved utterly ineffectual. At one point I was so obsessed with the problem of death and whether or not life had any meaning that I was suicidal. The issue plagued my mind so much that it became like a vise on my brain that wouldn't let go. It was always there, looming in the background. I remember one dark night when my family was watching a movie, and I was so trapped inside my own mind that I locked myself in the bathroom, trying desperately to gain control of my mind, and the thoughts of death just wouldn't stop. Try as I might, I couldn't make them go away. There are few things that terrify me as much as not being able to control my own mind. I want to point out here that part of the problem in my case was that I have a history of problems with depression, especially in the winter months and as a side effect of PMS, and I have no doubt that this was an enormous part of the problem with my fixation on death. But it had never been this bad before.

My point in sharing this is that I want to show anyone who's in a similar situation that it gets better. You can move on, you can figure it out, and you can find meaning and purpose in life outside of God. It was really hard for me for awhile, and there's a chance that I might not have made it through. But I did, and I can promise that life on the other side is wonderful, and even better than life in Mormonism. It's going to be hard for awhile, and that's okay. Don't try to force yourself to be happy right away. It's okay to be sad. But don't give up, and if you find yourself seriously depressed like I was, please please please ask for help. Life is wonderful, and leaving Mormonism gives you so many wonderful options. Grieving is a part of letting go, but it doesn't last forever, and it WILL get better. :)

Music Theory

I think that in many ways, religion worships mystery. When I look at the history of religion, one of its main purposes seems to be to explain the unexplainable. Where did we come from? Well, Father Time slept with Mother Earth. Or Kukulkán and Tepeu made humans from maize. Or Yahweh made everything in six days. Where do we go when we die? Well, we go to the house of Hades. Or we spend eternity in some sort of paradise. Or... nothing happens. We're just dead. 


So, when I say religion worships mystery, I mean that it derives its raison d'être from humans' inability to explain the world. In ancient mythopoeic religion, humans explained natural phenomena by anthropomorphizing them. Everything had a persona behind it. There were river gods, rain gods, mountain gods, fertility goddesses, plant gods-- everything had a god behind it. These gods served to explain the natural world, which otherwise seemed completely nonsensical. 


In time, however, humans developed better ways of explaining things. For the Greeks, this was philosophia-- the love of wisdom. During the European Renaissance, "natural philosophy" was the study of the natural world. And this natural philosophy became what we now call science. I don't think I have to reiterate the story of how Christianity fought against science, how people like Galileo were persecuted for being so brazen as to undercut the church's monopoly on "truth." There's a reason that religion was so threatened by rational inquiry. If there were other ways of finding out knowledge, then religion was entirely unnecessary. 


Religion stifles knowledge and inquiry. It worships the gaps in our knowledge by filling them with gods. It tries to get us to be satisfied with answers that aren't answers, to persuade us that we don't need to know, don't need to ask why and how and when, tries to convince us that the ultimate virtue is ignorance. But they don't call it ignorance. They call it faith. 


And religion has been very successful in pulling this off. It has succeeded in convincing people that without ignorance, life is meaningless. Without faith, without mystery, without God, what meaning is there to existence? Without the promise of eternal reward and the threat of eternal damnation, why should one treat one's fellow human beings well? This is the great lie of religion. Ignorance and mystery add nothing to life except fear and misery. 


I'm a musician. For a time, I thought that studying music theory would remove the sublimity of music. Oh, how mistaken I was! I'll admit, my knowledge of music theory is limited, but what I do know has not diminished my admiration for music one bit. On the contrary, my understanding of scales and intervals and overtones has enhanced my love of music. 


Human beings love the experience called wonder. But there are two kinds of wonder. One comes from ignorance, and the other from understanding. Having experienced both, I can say that the wonder of understanding is much deeper, much more beautiful, and infinitely preferable to the wonder of ignorance. God is not necessary to explain the universe. We don't need religion to be good. These artificial, two-dimensional explanations only cheapen our experience of the beautiful universe that we are a part of.