People Believe Whatever They Want

According to Reuters, Mormons are leaving the Church in greater numbers than usual. And if you believe the New York Times, Mormons who stay are oppressed and out of touch. In a day when long-deluded Mormons have access to all the truth the Internet has to offer, why would anyone still believe?

Responding to this idea could take a couple of years’ worth of blog posts. But if I could boil it down to one reason why I, a fairly educated and intellectual person, believe that God lives, He speaks to His children, and His words are found in the Book of Mormon, it would be this: I choose to.

I have weighed the evidence of personal experience, my most treasured values, opposing viewpoints, and plenty of harmonious ones to arrive at my belief system. Ultimately, after the weighing and the sifting, the contemplating and the praying, I am a Mormon because I choose to interpret the positive—at times miraculous—experiences I’ve had in this religion as coming from God. Likewise, I choose to interpret the few negative experiences I’ve had in the Church as coming from imperfect humans who have as much of a right to make mistakes as I do. Could I just as easily choose to believe I must have been deceived regarding the source of spiritual epiphanies that have convinced me Mormonism is true? Sure. But that’s the beauty of it. I get to choose.

Sometimes I think the value of faith (which the Book of Mormon says starts with a desire to believe) gets overlooked in our secular, scientific, show-me-the-proof kind of society. Believing in something mainly because I want to doesn’t seem like a very valid approach to life. Except we all do it—atheists and faithful alike. As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach pointed out, “Even men of science can believe things that can be construed as highly irrational.”

Whether you believe in the Book of Mormon or the big bang theory (or both), those beliefs are chosen in the midst of competing theories and criticisms. And there will never be enough evidence to force someone to believe or to prohibit him or her from believing. Why? Because it’s important to God that we participate in selecting our beliefs and that we choose them willingly. What we choose to believe reveals who we are—our most cherished values and our character.

But the choice itself is not the only important part. It’s also the motive behind the choice that truly defines me.

For example, do I choose to believe in LDS doctrine because I can skew it in such a way to congratulate myself, sit assured in self-righteousness, and look down on everyone who isn’t as enlightened as I am? Do I choose to believe because my position in Mormon culture, social life, and family tradition is comfortable enough—whether or not I’ve ever seriously studied the Book of Mormon or partaken of the deep spiritual experiences the Church has to offer? Do I stay because prayer, experience, and study have produced both evidence and happiness in my life that I could never discount?

As for those who leave the Church, do they choose to do so because they want to draw closer to God and they feel that their leaving is His will? Do they leave because they cannot muster the desire to have faith, and to stay would be dishonest? Do they leave because the lifestyle is inconvenient and they’d rather gain approval from mainstream society? Or do they leave because their position in Mormon culture, social life, and family tradition is uncomfortable enough—whether or not they’ve ever seriously studied the Book of Mormon or partaken of the deep spiritual experiences the Church has to offer?

Only God knows. 

I hope I have enough self-awareness to truly recognize which category I fall into.

Quotes I Like about Using Talents

The good, from Church member and National-Book-Award nominee Martine Leavitt (from an article that used to be on her website before she took it down):

My faith, my family and my friends make me happy. I’ll tell you: life makes me happy. But writing is my way of being alive. It is my way of being in the world, my way of experiencing it and understanding it. . . . [I have] a sense of obligation to develop a gift that the universe has given me. That way, I am able to give it my heart and my time, without feeling that I am taking anything away from my family.

The bad, from BYU dance professor Pat Debenham (and apologies to my friends who are tired of me sharing this article wherever I go):

We must be careful not to infer that our artistic gift, though divinely given, is a divine appointment. When we suggest that we are called or in some way appointed to use our gift, we precariously position ourselves as official representatives of God. In so doing we are presumptuous, I believe, and in danger of blasphemy. Of course we feel a responsibility to magnify our gift, but to represent it to either the public or ourselves as a calling possibly perverts the original intent and certainly distorts the source of the gift. A Church calling is directly from God as an appointment with all the pertinent rights and blessings bestowed upon us, but viewing our gift as a calling is a self-appointment.

Just as we can be seduced into believing that our gift is our calling, we can also be lured into thinking that our proclivities are equivalent to gifts given to us by the Holy Ghost or by the Spirit of God. When we interpret scriptural and prophetic references about gifts to mean our God-given proclivities, we confuse our talent with the actual gifts that God enumerates in the scriptures. . . . Nowhere do [the scriptures] mention the gift of dance, song, music, or painting. Nor do [they] mention the gift for building or troubleshooting machines, the gift of public speaking, the gift of medicine, or the myriad of other gifts that we often refer to. . . . What we label this proclivity that Heavenly Father has bestowed upon us can produce an exaggerated sense of what our abilities are for. . . .

We need to consider our professional involvement in the arts as a job. Pure, simple, and pointed. It is a job. Our work in our art form is a vehicle that allows us to accomplish other things in life. It is not . . .  a "calling." As much as I, the artist, the choreographer, the dancer-performer, have in the past reveled in perhaps even been self-congratulatory for my status in life, . . . discipline-related talents are not the spiritual gifts that God bestows upon us to assist in the redemption of mankind.

The ugly, from C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, wherein a heavenly spirit and a ghost from hell are talking:

“You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved to paint only as a means of telling about light.”

“Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.”

“One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—becoming interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.”

That's all I have to say about that for now.