I have been spending too much time over at RfM (Recovery from Mormonism). I question my purpose for visiting almost every time I pop over there. I think I do it because every once in a while some interesting tidbit appears from behind the 'Zion Curtain.' I find myself wanting to believe that the guy who is claiming to have worked at the COB, recently been a mission president, or some such, is actually the real deal. These guys have the unflattering stories that reveal the Church for what the skeptical among us want to see in it: a fumbling organization wherein the ambitious few prey on the good intentions and gullibility of the many.
Yup. It's not pretty. And this is really as good as it gets, at least for me. I am generally tired of all of the stories about the Church destroying people's lives, fabricating history, working for the Republican cause, etc. You see, I take all of that for granted by now. And, revisiting it for the umpteenth time is, well, boring. I know others out there really need to see that they are not alone, that the Church has hurt other people, etc. I generally find more people like myself out there on the good old DAMU. Different strokes, right?
One thing that I truly have lost patience for, however, is the declaration that a person has discovered that the LDS Church is "not true." I understand that for them this is a very important personal discovery, but others out there have discovered something even more worthwhile--that "true" was a problematic assertion in the first place. So if the expression that Church is "true" is fraught with problems and complexities, then the idea of the Church not being true is really vexed. Unfortunately, LDS people never had any discussion about what the former meant, so skipping right through to the "not true" part just leaves so many unanswered questions.
I can agree that I once thought that God had restored His Church through a farmboy named Joseph Smith. I once thought that this knowledge, and the life that I would lead on that understanding, would save me from some woes I now view as either imaginary or beyond fixing. I used to get up at Church and assent to all of this kind of stuff by using the expression, "I know the Church is true." I have to say, however, that I quit using that language long before I quit attending.
I think the problem with it, for me at least, was that it did not begin to cover the nuances of my actual thoughts and feelings on the issue. Such a statement, if used carelessly, could cover a multitude of doubts and misgivings in a manner that I found increasingly deceptive. This is the reason I quit saying it. Not because I suddenly thought the LDS Church was of no value, but because I wanted to express something of my real experience of it. At the same time, I understood that most people did not want to hear about that stuff.
Then I found the internet, and I felt a rush of liberation. I formed a Yahoo! group for liberal Mormons, and some interested friends and I started batting around the ideas and feelings that one is not comfortable sharing in the chapel. Having found that liberation, and having expressed those thoughts and feelings, I increasingly saw testimony baring as woefully inadequate. It was easy to drop it, because I now saw my statement encompassing so much I could not express, that I had no confidence I was sharing anything more than a gross banality. Worse yet, people listening to me say it could jump to whatever conclusions about me they wanted to.
In that wonderful spiritual journey, I grew into secular humanism. Ah, the dreaded evil. A spiritual humanism is the perspective that most appeals to me. Sure, there were many discoveries along the way about the inadequacies of Mormonism and the LDS Church. I found that most of what faithful Mormons believed about the LDS Church, its history, and its doctrine were things I no longer believed, at least not in anything but the most symbolic sense. This has not led me to say, however, that "Mormonism is not true." Somewhere along the way that expression lost all meaning to me. Instead, I came to understand that Mormonism was part of my learning process in life. For a time it gave me some valuable things, a long time. Now I no longer get out of it what I once did, and I do not want to participate in it or assent to it any longer.
Sure, I *could* say that "Mormonism is not true," and that would save a lot of time, but there is also something crass about it that would make me feel as though I never learned anything along the way.
