To answer your question: I guess where I’d disagree with your analysis, and the some of the analysis referenced over at FMH, is the phrase “just a feeling.” I think that our post-Enlightment and scientistic culture continues, unfortunately, to make a certain limited rationality the model for all knowledge and understanding. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not in favor of throwing rationality to the wolves, and it has gotten some undeservedly bad press among literary critics who’ve imbibed a little Derrida–or worse, Lacan–and run amok gleefully finding bad faith in all my favorite literature, to my ongoing irritation. But in the twentieth century it became clear that even the logical systems to which all other knowledge has been compared and found wanting, such as arithmetic, cannot ground themselves. What is the reason for reason? And why is feeling “mere”? Its at those points I’d take issue with a certain strain of rationalist religious critique, a rationalism that–in my humble opinion–often fails to recognize its own limitations.

However, I do take comfort, as well as despair, in my immense human fallibility and regularly pray the grace of God thereupon.

(Oh, people, people, why am I blogging??? I should be filling out my state income taxes. I’ve even got the thrilling website all cued up and the stack of forms right here by my laptop. My husband did the federals weeks ago. I find myself wondering just how is it that a human being can manage to be an accountant all day. That, my friends, is a deep and abiding mystery.)

Anyway, I’m glad you have found your way to a measure of peace.

Thank you for the thought provoking post. Isn’t their some consolation to your distress in understanding that certainty is just an emotion? (as in the FMH post you linked to) Doesn’t accepting your own fallibility as a human being alleviate the burden of responsibility?

Mark IV,

So why all the bitterness in the exit stories? Why all the claims of deception, and the denigration of believers as sheeple being led around by the nose?

I think you answered your own question. No one likes to feel like they’ve been made to play the fool. No one like to feel like they’ve been lied to, especially when they’ve invested so much in believing the lie. That bitterness and anger are the natural response to betrayal, something that most probably move beyond with time.

A number of people I love, including my husband, are in similar situations to yours, and it’s been my observation that much of the discourse aimed at doubters is not helpful and is sometimes downright hurtful, however well-intentioned it generally is.

In any case, the very best of luck to you.

I can understand how difficult it must be from your perspective and it is a perspective that I had not considered before. I don’t think I would want to trade places with you.

I don’t pretend to completely understand faith and its source. I have had it, and I have lost it. Perhaps I will have it again some day–who can say for sure? But I don’t recognize myself or others whose stories I know in John C’s post. It seemed so utterly foreign to my own experience. There is much more involved than a simple “choice”. Perhaps it is true that it is solely a function of our personal interactions with God. But if that is the case, God is a capricious God indeed.

John C., it may be that we’re basically in agreement. I think where I would disagree with your original post would be in the suggestion you make (as I understand you) that loss of belief has nothing to do with encounters with scholarly material or anti-Mormon material or other flawed human beings, that testimony is, as you put it, “a product of your interactions with and expectations of God.” Indeed it is, but I can’t agree that a testimony and faith stand in complete isolation from the constant, ongoing complexities of our human existences.

For example, because the church makes powerful claims for the reality of certain historical events, for example, articles or blog posts that call those events into question do shake and sometimes destroy people’s faith. The church implicitly recognizes this in its counsel not to immerse ourselves in anti-Mormon literature, for instance–as well as in the counsel to immerse ourselves in the scriptures, which strengthen our faith. And of course we have power, sometimes terrifying power, in each others’ lives. We can and do invite each other in and drive each other away, and we can and do leave our indelible footprints on one another’s faith. We simply don’t live the lives of isolated monads in which all that influences us are our spiritual experiences. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be enjoined to the almost constant community interaction at which we Mormons excel. Nearly every issue of the Ensign features stories about how a Relief Society lesson or a visiting-teaching visit or a ward activity or simply observing the behavior of a faithful Mormon strengthened someone’s faith. The unavoidable obverse is that our interactions with one another also have the power to weaken and destroy. That’s just the nature of community.

In short, I do think there are choices available to us in believing our doubting, but I think we need a much more complicated model than simple free will. We’re all acting under constraints, and the range in which we may exercise our choice varies enormously, sometimes for reasons that are completely inaccessible to the casual observer.

Geoff, as you observe, quoting John C., interactions with God are the foundation of my testimony, personally. But then there are people like Josh’s father (and in certain ways my husband) who appreciate the church community’s power for good without necessarily subscribing to its truth claims. There are people like Mark IV’s friend whose entire testimony, we might say, consists of a testimony of fast offerings and the PEF. Then there are people like Lost and like Ziff, to some extent, who are probably–OK, undoubtedly–more active and devoted than I am, but who can’t find the confirmation they seek (whereas I often feel that I can’t live up the confirmation I’ve had).

Things that make you go huh.

E. Victoria, you’re doing beautifully! We hope you feel welcome here and that you feel free to return and comment anytime. I particularly like your connection to Joseph Smith’s anguish at his inability to deny his own vision. And I too often feel I belong to the secular academic world much better than I do to the Mormon one.