When I first began questioning the church, and making thoughtful decisions about leaving, I had so many people talk to me about the spirit. The Mormon church places great emphasis on the reliability of the Spiritual witness to the veracity of everything related to it. The Church asks members to accept the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's Visions, etc, etc on Spiritual Witnesses.
I love this entry because it addresses the other possible sources to Spiritual Witnesses. Frankly, when you stop looking for the supernatural, or magic in everything, then you begin to be able to look for reasonable answers to life. When you are able to look for reasonable answers, then you begin to see things in a different light. You begin to see how those who want to make you believe 'anything' would use your emotions to their advantage.
It should be a huge clue to us that the professional scam artists that call up your aging mother/grandmother to ask her for money use emotional tricks almost exclusively in their strategies to part her from her cash.
Emotions are definitely real, but they just aren't reliable identifiers of the truth or the future.
Thanks for your story!
"I was naive to believe that religion is the relationship between man and god. It appears to be the relation between man and his own endorphins."
- My pestering prayers don't work like Joseph's | Post-Mormon Scrapbook (view on Google Sidewiki)
No comments:
Post a Comment