One of the unexpected side benefits of leaving the fold is you are almost certain to upgrade your vocabulary with exciting new words.
Without a doubt, my favorite has been: Epistemology.
As a good Mormon I was familiar with the concept of epistemology, but I didn’t have a label for it. Epistemology is the study of belief structure. How do you decide what you believe? What are your criteria for validity?
This is, of course, a very Mormon question, and Mormonism has an extremely well-defined epistemological framework. It is most famously represented in the Book of Mormon in Moroni 10:4-5.
And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.
This is the very heart of the Truth PropositionTM of Mormonism. But it requires a follow up. How does this Holy-Ghost-Manifestation business work?
LUCKILY, GodTM was kind enough to provide the Church with further light and knowledge in D&C 9:8-9.
But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.
But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.
I submit that the combination of these two references forms the cornerstone of the Mormon concept behind finding the truth. You will FEEL it. (Anyone who wants to read the bottom line synthesis of this concept need look no further than Boyd Packer’s gem for the ages, The Candle of the Lord)
Moroni seems to think that this is acceptable for any type of knowledge needed. He may have appreciated these thoughts from Stephen Colbert:
Colbert is one of the brilliant satirists of our time, but Mormons don’t blink an eye at the idea of feeling their way to enlightenment. They may not attempt to feel their way through calculus or mechanical engineering, but MAJOR LIFE DECISIONS are expected to be felt, rather than calculated. These include what job to take, whom to marry, when and how many children to have, how much money GodTM needs from me to get by, and of course (the big Kahuna) how to “know” the Church is true.
Apostates laugh derisively about this. What silliness.
One of the calling cards of LDS disaffection is a cry for greater rationality. Apostates want to abandon the open embrace of feely truth, and get down to the serious business of thinky truth. Not surprisingly, this feels right to me, too.
Neuroscientists, on the other hand, are waggling their goatees knowingly.
It turns out that humans are LOUSY at thinky truth. Jonah Lehrer explains in How We Decide that reason is pretty much always used post hoc to support our conclusions. In other words, we feel the thing that we think is true, and then our brilliant minds quickly construct a platform to support those ideas.
This was recently (depressingly) elucidated on the Freakonomics podcast as well.
Those pesky neuroscientists keep coming up with more and more data to suggest that in decision making, the more complex the decision, the more muddled we get by trying to rationally study out the arguments. In a complex situation, evolution has wired us to make the best decisions based on… our gut instinct. (Jonah Lehrer again)
But this seems wrong. In fact, it feels wrong, too. There is a game being played on us. (Is it ironic that the empirical data that informs us that feelings are the way to decide, itself, feels wrong?)
This is problematic for me as an apostate.
And so, the second guessing begins.
So, was I wrong to conclude that the Church’s truth claims can’t be true, and that it is better for me to leave an organization so overtly hostile to gays and covertly hostile to women?
Good question.
Is the intellectual dream of a reasoned world a complete pipe dream?
Do the feelies have it right?
Hmmmm.....
Let’s clarify for a moment: Lehrer (and his neuro-nerdy cohorts) is not talking about arriving at truth. He is talking about arriving at DECISIONS.
Mormons conflate the “decision to believe” that the Church is true, with some arrival at objective truth. We then confound the visibility of that fact to ourselves by using the (ever-so-reassuring) phrase, “I know” when what we really mean is, “I believe”.
Reassuringly, the search for truth, also known as science, is unimpaired by this disturbing news.
The Church is still as simply (and objectively) untrue today as it was in 1830.
Phew.
I feel better.
One of the unexpected side benefits of leaving the fold is you are almost certain to upgrade your vocabulary with exciting new words.
ReplyDeleteWithout a doubt, my favorite has been: Epistemology.
I learned this word as an 18-year-old Mormon in a survey of western civilization my freshman year at a thoroughly secular state college. So I would say it's not so much about leaving the fold as simply engaging with knowledge, learning, and belief in the ways the rest of the world does.
that's not impossible as a believing Mormon, though it's certainly easier once you leave the fold.
I guess I could say that becoming aware of the term epistemology and the huge field of thinking and writing and logic it represents was one of the things that helped me examine the ways in which the church is lacking, and contributed to my departure.
which might be why we were always being warned about all the evil we could encounter in the big bad university beyond the institute.
I enjoyed this post, but as a purely editorial comment on your stylistic choices, I think that the hat trick at the end (where you use your thinky reasoning to support the feely belief that you already held, despite the lack of strong, logical correlation between the former and the latter) needs to be a little more explicitly self-conscious.
ReplyDeleteIt took me a minute to decide whether you meant to do it, or whether you just did it reflexively. It's a very Freakonomics type move, but it's a little too abrupt.
I don't usually feel compelled to make editorial comment, since they're a little obnoxious, but there was just a little too much...um...Shyamalanism there, and it made me sad.
We all feel. We all lie. But we don't all pretend that our lies are impossibly true. The last part is what destroys my ability to participate actively at church. Not all liars are equal. I prefer liars who acknowledge that they are liars.
ReplyDeleteHolly, I am a little chagrined at my historical lack of vocabularial prowess, but I'm working on making restitution for those sins.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I think you would agree that there seems to be a strong correlation between being aware of the study of belief structures and the dismantling of those that simply don't hold up much.
Lycidia, great comment, and well received. I do want to flesh this concept out a bit more over some additional posts. This morning I just didn't have the inner gumption to really keep going. Please rest assured that it was an intentional wink, which doesn't do anything to justify its existence. I do hope you will feel free to call me out on my BS shortcuts in the future.
Hermes, I prefer that variety as well. Although it makes them impossibly bad liars in the process.
Well said!
ReplyDeleteI like it!
ReplyDeleteThis morning I listened to an address that Richard G. Scott gave at BYU in the summer of 1978. It wasn't that great but one thing he mentioned that I liked was that there is a new way of discovering Spiritual Truth and it combines the scientific method (thinky) and the going to the one true source (feely).
ReplyDeletehttp://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=470
What I want to understand is how some people feel/think that they need to leave the church to learn new words ;) and how some people don't. I get the idea that the church doesn't treat everyone as fairly as some think possible but what or who does? Is there anyone without any prejudice and without pride. If we divorce ourselves from all of those things, we'll be all alone.
I'm going to argue that epistemology is not the study of belief structures - it is the branch of philosophy dedicated to the study of knowledge. Belief is just one element of knowledge. I know you know this, but lumping it all into belief or de-bunking belief is a limiting definition. Belief is an integral part of acquiring knowledge. Anyway, epistemology is like mental masturbation since its just really fun to think about but it doesn't really matter since we can't get out of our own brain anyway :) And for the record I learned epistemology my senior year in high school as part of my IB curriculum. No wonder Utah tried to ban the International Baccalaureate program...
ReplyDeleteGreat point Mere. But if you're coming into this neck of the woods trying to argue that masturbation is without merit, you're going to run into some pretty stiff resistance.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to have to be more careful in the future about how proudly I wear vocab ignorance on my sleeve :)
ha ha, no, not not without merit. Just beautifully self-indulgent. And my comment was in no way to mean I wouldn't extol the virtues of epistemology, quite the opposite :) You know, its just not the whole picture, when we contemplate the vast universe, we're really just in a room by ourselves...
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't discount all this research in intuition and please don't lump "feelers" into a camp of irrational nitwits. I think it is progress that science is learning to catch up with the lesser understood aspects of the complex relationship between emotion and rationality. You can make good and bad decisions based on information and intellect and you can make good and bad decisions based on emotion, its all relative. A world filled with only thinkers would be incredibly boring, pedantic and dismally unpoetic.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the best decision-makers are both thinkers and feelers: they use thinking where it is good (i.e. plotting for the long-term), and feeling where it works best (i.e. reacting to short-term danger, and evaluating the "livability" of thinky plans as they play out moment to moment). Bad thinkers flip things around, trying to make long-term decisions by feeling and justify snap judgments with elaborate rational backstory (that is just pretty nonsense most of the time).
ReplyDelete