Final Fantasy Tactics…ahh, it was a fun game.

But I’m not quite sure if I agree with how the faith system works. Faith in that game powers magic. More faith = better magic.

This works in a logical way for the most part. If your wizard has more faith, his spells should be more powerful…if your priestess has more faith, her healing should be more effective. And so on.

But what if you have less faith? Well, it makes sense that if you have less faith, you are healed less (I guess faith healing is a placebo?).

But if you have less faith, then you also take less magic damage. So…want to avoid dying from spells? You can avoid the wrath of an angry god the FFT way simply by not believing. What?!

OK, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about…What I wanted to talk about were prayers from atheists. Personally, I don’t pray. When I have, I’ve only gotten the sense that my message is going to a wrong address. Lots of stupors of thoughts. Not so good for answers.

Yet, I always hear things like, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” Apparently, if you get the bejeezus scared out of you well enough, you will get the Jesus scared into you. (I think this is flawed for many reasons, but I won’t get into that.)

Instead, what I wanted to talk about was prayer as a ritual or a tradition. For example, whenever my family is going on a road trip, we always start with a prayer. Someone has to say something about avoiding the “destroying angel.” (Actually, seeing a destroying angel would be pretty cool, but that’s just me.)

But who will give the prayer? Hmm…

My dad knows I don’t believe, so I can’t help but think that he asks me to bear the prayer for some kind of purpose. What purpose? I don’t know.

But I wonder…let’s say prayer has efficacy. Wouldn’t its efficacy be maximized by someone who believed in it? Wouldn’t it be better for my father to pray than for me?

This is kinda morbid, but I always feel that if we do get into a crash on a trip that I’ve prayed on, then I’ll just say, “That’s what you get!”

Or maybe I have to be the one to pray because I have the least faith. Then, if the destroying angel does come, he will be completely ineffective to my apostate constitution.

In response to my last post, Seth commented:

…My feeling is that the LDS faith is about community forged by covenant first and foremost.

If you are supportive and loyal to that community and don’t do things to undermine or upset it, then you can actually get away with an awful lot of other stuff.

I responded by raising that the costs of loyalty to a community could be painful. He counterresponded with a quotation:

“Loneliness is the price we pay for being free in the world.”

I thought about addressing this in one of two ways…the first is that loneliness is just one side of a coin…the other side, solitude, isn’t a “price,” but a “reward.” But I suppose someone’s mileage may vary…instead though, I looked at the second part…freedom in the world?

If we are in a community, we may not be “free in the world” (for we are bound by covenant, explicitly or implicitly). But what happens when we don’t even escape loneliness? What happens when we face alienation?

What is the difference between someone who wants to stay in the church and someone who wants to leave the church? What is the crucial difference in motivating factors, that may make the former think the church is ultimately beneficial (though with rough spots) and may make the latter think the church is ultimately harmful (though with bright spots)?

I actually don’t know. But getting back to alienation as opposed to loneliness, I feel alienation is worse. With loneliness, you can search for your group. With alienation, you are in the midst of a group already, but it still is utterly unsatisfying. It is a double harm…because not only do you suffer once from being misunderstood, but you suffer again because you wonder why, in the midst of all these people, you don’t fit in. Why is that the case when for many others, the community is beneficial or perhaps even ideal?

If you’ve read through the Mormon Bloggernacle long enough, then you’ve probably come across Ray (aka Papa D of Things of My Soul.) Ray is noteworthy for a great many things (for one, I have never seen Ray lose his cool. I have seen him express strong sentiments against Calvinism at rare times, but he seems to be one of the most level-headed people I know), but one of the things I find most striking is his affinity for parsing. Here’s an example from his site with Alma 56.

Ray goes through scriptures, line by line…part by part…teasing the explicit meanings from the faulty inferences that people may make. By pointing out these faulty inferences, he frees himself from questionable and undesirable viewpoints. You can see more here and here. Others have written about the vagueness that allows this possibly being a gospel principle.

Lots of places have talked about “Middle Way Mormonism” recently. If we can call call “Middle Way Mormonism” an emerging, yet somewhat loosely organized school of thought, then I think that one common aspect of it is parsing. And although Ray is the resident parser, I find many people in the “John Dehlinistic” school of thought use it in some way or fashion. OK, so now I’ll have to explain…

As Ray said in a comment to a post “Freedom and Honesty,” one can still express heterodox opinions within the church…if one is not a threat, then one will not be seen as a threat, then one will not be treated as a threat. (And there are other posts from others about how to go about not being a threat.)

This comment seems minor…but I think it’s important to Middle Way Mormonism.vIt forms a major part of John Dehlin’s philosophy in “staying LDS” after a major crisis of faith, and I see that people who have coalesced around Dehlin (wow, this sounds so much more…epic…than real life actually is) in ventures such as Mormon Matters, even if they have not faced major crises of faith, exhibit this kind of thinking. So often do I read blogs from faithful members — who regard themselves as such, true believers — who seem to have quite heterodox views.

I think it’s because they have found a way to be authentic within their heterodoxy. I mean heterodoxy in a greater sense than “well, everyone picks and chooses.” Even while I look at John Dehlin’s “How to Stay” essay and wonder about his section on answer the temple recommend interview (which I covered here, but read Dehlin’s thoughts here and ctrl+f for “Temple Recommend”), I can’t help but feel that this approach is a meta-game…a game about the Mormon language that “takes advantage of” the system by parsing out expectations about particular words and answers and then ceasing to live by those expectations and assumptions. I feel uneasy about this…how could I answer in such a way when I still wholeheartedly believe that the “assumptions” and “expectations” I’ve just parsed out are what other members think about when I assent to certain statements?

I made some comments on a Mormon Matters topic in this vein. This “creative honesty,” if caught, could lead one to be seen as a threat. John Dehlin, after all, doesn’t lack ideological enemies or people within the church who view him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” So, I had a nagging suspicion that “creative honesty,” “parsing,” “the Middle Way,” and so on, were somewhat illegitimate. Somewhat sneaky. Somewhat underhanded.

But recently, I have come to realize that it’s not sneaky to use a tool of the trade…and in fact, perhaps the other side isn’t so innocent. I came across it from reading a blog post at The Post-Mormon Perspective responding to Daniel Peterson.

See, William, the post-Mormon in question, is reacting to apologist Daniel Peterson’s open and copious parsing with respect to the church and information about its history. Peterson’s contention (and a contention that some other apologists have shared) is that ex-Mormons harbor faulty, if popular inferences about the nature of inspiration, prophets, church history…and when these inferences are falsified, they become wrongly disaffected. The apologists would argue that proper parsing would show that Mormon prophets should not be held as infallible (despite what any popular interpretations of quotes, scriptures, doctrines, or rumors are), and in fact, one can see fallibility and defect from times of old to times today. The disaffection that so often strikes people when members learn “how history actually went” is unwarranted, because these members should’ve never believed in faulty inferences and unjustified conclusions about history, doctrine, no matter how plausible these seem or seemed. (So, apologetics often becomes something like, “Oh, yeah, so that seemingly negative claim about the prophet is…true. But it shouldn’t harm your faith; it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker because the prophet is still human.)

And then a thought struck me. If apologists or the church use this same system of parsing, cutting away what is believed to be “false expectations” or “faulty inferences,” (perhaps even “ignorance” and “sloth”) when it is convenient, then why should I have disdain for members who use this same crucial tool to take Mormonism back on their own terms? If everyone is playing the meta-game, then isn’t that meta-game fit and proper?

I feel that my upbringing in the church was just so different from everyone else’s…but in a silent, private way. This foreignness or alienation wasn’t about a difference in locations or labelings…because up until recently, I was in the *same pews* and the *same classes* as everyone else…and I took the same identifications as everyone else. I thought I was like everyone else, but it has only been recently that I’ve realized that other people — and particularly, other  Mormons — had different experiences.

I didn’t even know what atheism was so I could not articulate it (but as I said, growing up, I didn’t think there was any difference. I didn’t think there was any distinction between my peers and myself, so I had no reason to articulate anything.) So, I didn’t so much ‘become’ atheist as I realized 1) that I was atheist and 2) that theism means something different to theists.

What was it like to grow up?

Reading the scriptures was not engaging. I just assumed that everyone was as disengaged. I thought testimonies about finding parts of the scriptures being “amazingly relevant and timely” were just puffed up testimony-talk. The scriptures did not speak out to me; they did not accurately describe what I saw and perceived reality was. So, there was little way to relate them to the world, much less to my struggles.

(What I realized was the difference later on was that…my peers were disengaged because little kids and teenagers are disengaged. They were disengaged because antiquated language is disengaging. But I wasn’t engaged simply for these reasons. I was disengaged because the books, the words, were never appealing. I didn’t believe. I was an atheist.)

Prayer was not engaging. When people said they got answers to prayers, I had no idea what this could mean, so I assumed that people meant it to be rather vague things. People told faith promoting rumors, I thought, under the assumption that everyone knew they were rumor. I thought that everyone, like I did, would go home and laugh about the ridiculous and implausible stories they had heard…the answers they had gotten, and so forth.

(What I realized later on here was that some people did get what they felt were answers to prayers. They didn’t think these were “vague” at all, and they had true belief and hope in great stories happening to them. People *do* feel burnings in bosoms and are inclined to source these to deity; they *do* feel something they describe as God’s presence. Again, the difference is theism and atheism.)

When I was blissfully ignorant of these differences (and others), I didn’t even sweat. But as I became aware of the differences, that caused me some panic and stress. It was only when I realized that not feeling anything special from the Scriptures is abnormal that I began to lament my abnormality. Oh, how is it that I do not believe? How is it that I am not aware of God’s presence? How is it that I cannot see how “purposeful” this world, this universe, my life is? And so on.

Eventually, I decided that I had enough of that. I realized this was all counterproductive. I didn’t believe, so I didn’t need to castrate myself to this believer’s suffering. And I went on life as I had been before, aware of the difference and not lamenting it.

Even today, I recognize some differences. For example, ex-Mormons who didn’t simply realize atheism, but *became* atheist. As in, people who once had been ‘engaged’ by the Scriptures, felt the Holy Ghost, and on and on, and yet eventually came to disbelieve in this. When I speak about my experiences, I often implicitly forget about these very people who are my compatriots.

And of course, believers of all stripes. It is still utterly foreign when people say that they “feel an undeniable thing” that convinces them to believe in something they label as divine. It is still utterly foreign, incomprehensible to me even, when people say atheism makes (or made) them “miserable,” or that they don’t understand how atheists can be good people, and on and on.

UPDATE: I just remembered that I wrote a previous post about this similar topic at Main Street Plaza.

I have felt rather ambivalent to tithing. Since I’m recovering from a chronic allergy to working for pay, I can say that I’ve been able to get out of all of my recommend interviews as a 100% worthy member without paying a cent of tithe. (*sigh* this probably exposes me as a spoiled brat though).

So, I haven’t thought about it much. I don’t think I’m opposed to the concept, but I’m not all that thrilled either. Then again, I like the alternative tithe idea better (e.g., Not a member? Not comfortable with coughing money to the church? Save up 10% anyway and give it to some other group or cause that you care about.)

One thing that has bothered me is the LDS motif of tithing as intense sacrifice. People in destitute conditions who have next to nothing (and ramping debts and needs) are praised if they but give their share to the Lord…even if it seems to break the bank in the process. The idea? The Lord rewards.

I guess if someone wants to believe this, fine. I mean, I’m not totally against these faith promoting stories or any one’s personal anecdotes. However, I just wonder how financially sound that could be. Oh, I guess that’s just my heretic showing.

Anyway, as I’ve been thinking about the next semester and my family, I’ve been thinking about money more.

Next semester is my paid internship with a Big 4 accounting firm…my first real job. I will have to break out of several of my sheltered molds (driving…an apartment with rent…food from other places than fast food or campus restaurants…Geez, I’m pretty pathetic, guys.) and I’m somewhat apprehensive, but also somewhat excited.

But…the costs!

The apartment costs one thing. But I also have to pay for my dorm while I’m away! And I have a minimester before my internship, so I still have tuition and fees (it’s crazy how they can squish the cost of a full semester into a minimester that is a fraction of the length.)

And this raises greater conundrums. My minimester begins on January 4th. My dorm (which, I’ll remind you again, I’m paying for a whole semester, even though I won’t be living in it after mid February) doesn’t open until January 14th. So, I have to hotel somewhere until then. More costs.

Funding has been…awkward. I do have scholarships that cover for everything normal, so even though I’m paying for tuition, room, board, I have enough to cover that. My parents gladly offered to cover my hotel. My internship will provide the way for covering the apartment (and then some).

Honestly, I’ve kept myself aloof of the cold, hard numbers. This could either be great for my sanity or terrible for my finances. I hope there are no unpleasant surprises.

…so…why have I been talking about tithing? Am I preparing to become a full-time, worthy, active member any time soon? No, although it’s times like these that I begin to realize why some nonbelieving members stay for the social network that the Mormon church provides…moving to a new city is tough on your own (and that’s even with my parents and all of their relatives being *from* said city.)

Instead, it’s my parents. My mom lets out hints about tithing every so often, and my dad comments. My dad is a believer in tithing and its benefits, and so he makes sure — no matter what — that tithing is settled satisfactorily.

OK, OK, it’s his money. I don’t have an issue with it. But…what grinds at me are his comments…he worries if things will meet in a pinch. How can an unexpected hotel cost be factored into the budget? And oh! The heating system at home broke and needed to be fixed (darn these Oklahoma ice storms!)

I know that it’s a consciousness of growing up…as a kid, I needed not worry about such talk of finances. But now I feel intricately involved…as a leech. Feels bad, man.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were slighted, undervalued, underappreciated, or even maybe despised…but you couldn’t say or do anything about it, because that would only increase the slight, undervaluation, underappreciation, and despicability? So you kept on going, and you hated the situation.

you hate that you have to lie every day, pretending perfectly that everything is just great (because if you don’t, then you’re a whiner, and that’s despicable). you hate this awareness…that you know that you have to do this out of necessity (for example, you can’t just walk away from the situation. For example, the job you may despise is necessary for life sustenance. you must pay bills; you must support family.)

you feel stripped of a voice completely…even though what everyone else would say is that you completely have a say. It is your fault you don’t speak out. (But what you know is that this is a false choice…because if you do speak out, you so harm your cause in a way that is utterly self-annihilating. you know that the worst thing you could do is turn your cause into a Whiner’s cause, because then, you have certainly lost all credibility.) But you so desperately want to speak out. you just want to know that SOMEONE ELSE — anyone else — understands what you are saying.

In the end, you realize that you can’t face this situation authentically. you can’t face the problem head on, because you would sabotage your cause. So instead, you try to talk to other people — who are completely separate from the situation. you have this great suspicion that they too will not understand (a suspicion born and satiated by empirical data from the hundreds of other times you’ve tried to cry out)…They too will slight, undervalue, underappreciate, and even despise you for your criticism and whining. They’ll probably tell you to “get over it” or “do something about it” and resent your cowardice. And yet, even though you know you will be battered, you will be assaulted, you will be abused psychically, you continue to cry out on the hope that even one person will understand, even if you suffer a hundred blows for that one.

you know that even in the event that you never find that one, or that it is improbable that you will find that one, or perhaps even impossible, then even as you engage in this torturing task…this eternal damnation…you press onward.

Consider the cultivation of this bonsai tree.

Last Sunday, Hypatia pondered over whether it was a good thing for her parents to be taking her daughter with them to church. Her daughter is currently nursery-age, so I (and the others who commented) seemed to agree that there doesn’t seem to be much harm currently…but then the peanut gallery of single people commented on whether this might be a dangerous habit in the long run.

I thought it could have the potential to turn quite sour. After all, in the case that the child grows up believing, I wouldn’t have a problem with this, but I might have a problem if my child additionally picked up judgmental ideas about me as a nonbeliever. Isn’t it possible that a child could learn that his or her parents are sinful apostates, and then come to resent the parents (or resent parental authority)? SimplySarah thought otherwise, raising that she would like her children to understand the beliefs and practices of Mormons so they could better relate to cousins and grandparents. But what she said next was a bit worrisome to me:

I think some confusion can actually be a good thing. It has helped me in my own journey to know myself. I think it’s important for children to be able to experience confusion, to question, to struggle to make connections, and to seek understanding.

This made me think back to a Eugene England talk, “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” The idea here, which I heard echoed ever-so-slightly in Sarah’s comment (and which I meant to address a long time ago BUT NEVER GOT TO) is that the dissatisfying, troublesome, or annoying aspects of a human church (with all the imperfections that humans bring) might not be detractors from the church, but rather points of benefit. As England says:

Church involvement teaches us compassion and patience as well as courage and discipline. It makes us responsible for the personal and marital, the physical and spiritual welfare of people we may not already love (may even heartily dislike), and thus we learn to love them. It stretches and challenges us, even when we are disappointed and exasperated, in ways we would not other­wise choose to be stretched and challenged. Thus it gives us a chance to be made better than we may have chosen to be—but need and ultimately want to be.

There was another thing that England said that is actually interesting because it relates to a later post from Sarah (where I could be said to be arguing for England’s point. Heck, England’s comments about marriage kinda-sorta anticipate Sarah’s latest post about family life.)

…I know that there are exceptions, but the basic Church experience of almost all Mormons brings them directly and constantly into very demand­ing and intimate relationships with a range of people and prob­lems in their assigned congregations that are not primarily of their own choosing but are profoundly redemptive in potential, in part because they are not consciously chosen. Yes, the ordinances performed through the Church are important, as are its scriptural texts and moral exhortations and spiritual conduits. But even these, in my experience, are powerful and redemptive partly because they work harmoniously with profound, life-giving oppositions through the Church structure to give truth and meaning to the religious life of Mormons.

So, in addressing Sarah (and England), I don’t want to say that these challenges…these hardships, these confusions, are unimportant…rather, I want to address something deeper…do we require a church like the LDS one to find and serve in these capacities?

I would agree with Sarah that the church has, without a doubt, helped me in my journey to understand myself. I would be quite a different person without it. As I wrote in response to one of Madam Curie’s posts, “I don’t want my money back.“

But what I also recognize is this: there is trial, tribulation, hardship, and confusion in all places. It is something that life certainly is in abundance of. So, because my life currently isn’t daisies, and I have opportunities every day to navigate, to improve, to reflect, I would think the same is true for any potential children I might have. I don’t feel I need to purposefully subject them to the brand of confusion I faced just because I know confusion and trial can improve a person (in the same way my parents didn’t feel the need to purposefully subject me to a taste of the confusion they experienced in the 60s in the 70s as a black man and black woman, even though it certainly improved them). It seems to me cruel to subject someone to such.

But this doesn’t mean I would bubble my children. I would still let them face the randomness and accidents of life and learn to grapple with these things. Or when I perceive some greater benefit, then I might determine something to be worthwhile, despite the confusion possible. (So, if I believed in the church and the gospel, then I believe that would make me more amenable to England’s conclusion. Because I wouldn’t just be telling kids, “OK, go suffer,”…I would be trying to get them to learn valuable truths for a valuable purpose.)

Of course, I put a huge caveat at the end of this. I am in the Peanut Gallery of Single Folks who don’t know what we are talking about.

How do we come up with our worldviews? Why do we narrate the world in the ways we do? How are our many beliefs knit together? I have had time to think about this topic in several (really really really long) comments over at LDS & Evangelical conversations. I would advise reading through all of the comments in that thread when you get a few hours free.

I think that our worldviews, narratives, frameworks of belief systems represent what makes sense to us. These are the things we are inclined to believe, things that speak to our minds. Our narratives are things that bring us joy, peace, satisfaction, and accord with authenticity. I am sad that I have not gotten a chance to read Joseph Campbell in depth yet (seeing as I’ve brushed into him once before on the site), because I feel I am in complete accord with what he has said concerning “following your bliss.”

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

The issue is in trying to figure out what “bliss” is, trying to figure out what our bliss is, and then trying to figure out what relation that has with truth.

I suppose I have been put off by this kind of idea. It is often peddled around sites that look kinda new agey *or* Eastern (I guess that’s the opposite: really old agey), and I’m not all that into those packages. So I am conflicted about linking to a site like this, which on the one hand seems to have applicable stuff, but which on the other hand seems to be a packaging of everything fuzzy about the new age (I already feel iffy about using the very term bliss, but oh well.)

But I think these ideas relate well with mine regarding authenticity.

The worldviews we use represent worldviews that make sense of things to us. The narratives we tells represent the story that best makes sense to us. We believe when we are personally persuaded or convinced to believe.

Authenticity is when we are faithful to things that “make sense” to us. It is a weighing of all things we are faced with — ourselves and our families, friends, and associates. All the possible actions we could take…the environment and our reactions to the environment. And at the end, we must assess and evaluate to what extent we value each of these things. When we have conflicts, we conduct cost/benefit analyses.When we are authentic, we are satisfied with our part in the choices we’ve made, and we feel we are on *our* track.

Inauthenticity is a failure to live in such a way. What does inauthenticity do to us? It brings misery…it brings a sense of internal death…that we are killing ourselves at a deep level. It is because we sense what we were meant to be or do, and when we are inauthentic, we do something else, or try to be someone else. This action is an attempt to lie to ourselves about who we are…but we cannot lie to ourselves. So instead, we fully experience that we are trying to stifle and suffocate ourselves.

I feel I have to address terms, however. I think everyone goes through this calculus, and everyone seeks authenticity. Everyone seeks “satisfaction,” “bliss,” “authenticity,” “peace,” “joy,” or whatever. But what are these terms? I think when people misinterpret the terms, they inadvertently become inauthentic to themselves.

Satisfaction isn’t simple happiness. It isn’t day-to-day thrill. It isn’t the absence of sadness. It isn’t what people would normally think of as being hedonism or related to it. It isn’t necessarily easy. It doesn’t mean a life without challenge or struggle. You can be sad, but satisfied. Alternatively, you can be happy, but miserable (from inauthenticity). You can (and most likely will) face great challenges and struggles in day-to-day living, but have peace through it all.

Satisfaction is something deeper. It is when things in a person’s life click together. It is when a person has found out a way to make sense. Ah, so 2+2=4 and I finally grasp it!

But this gets us to the final question. What is the relationship with truth?

Well…unless mathematicians do something incredibly scary with mathematical theory, we say that math is true. It is correct. It is objective and absolute and ultimate.

Most things in our lives do not have this solid backing, though. See…when we go by “what makes sense to us,” this is a subjective call. It depends on the *us* part more than any objective sense-making. As a result, it could be that what makes sense to us (which will satisfy us) could be incorrect. (Like if, say, “2+2=5″ made sense to us.) Consider that in math there are a great many unintuitive truths. Take the Monty Hall problem. Most people (even many mathematicians) intuitively believe the answer to be 50%. This satisfies them and makes sense to them, despite objective incorrectness. Hearing the answer of 2/3s is jarring and disturbing…fortunately, math has proofs (unless, as I said before, mathematicians do something incredibly scary with mathematical theory, putting everything we once knew into doubt) through which one can try to make sense.

Yet we don’t necessarily have these proofs in other fields and even when we do, we may not know it. So instead, what we believe to be proofs is confused by the curious phenomenon that we believe the hypotheses in question to be proofs because they make sense to us…when this is subjective to begin with.

This does not mean that truth does not exist. However, if we are going by what makes sense to us, wandering without “proofs” to show us when we are wrong in unintuitive situations, then will the truth even matter to us until a critical point in the future? How can this truth have more impact on us than authenticity, which will bring us bliss (or misery, if we do not adhere) every single day of our lives?

I’ve been commenting back and forth at Dave’s Mormon Inquiry about Middle Way Mormons, because he wrote a comment in response to Madam Curie’s post “Is the Middle Way Actually Possible in Mormonism?“

Dave came to a rather short and simple conclusion. Of course it is possible. Because all Mormons are middle way Mormons. I felt that his curt conclusion failed to give weight to the true tensions involved that give us (at least, some of us) reason to even describe “Middle Way Mormon” or “New Order Mormon” as a distinct term. It seemed a hint dismissive, but it would take so many posts to try to dive into it.

In my comments, I guess I was pretty terrible and ineffective at articulating in on the distinction. Yet I feel that this distinction, despite my disservice to explaining it, truly exists.

Dave wrote in one of his latter-most comments (please try to read the entire dialogue though):

…I think that if you enthrone autonomy and authenticity to the exclusion of any other consideration or virtue, yes, such a person will have difficulty participating in (feeling fellowship with) any congregation or denomination. Such a person will likely perceive their quest for full autonomy as a deal-breaker.

Being part of a religious community, like being part of any community, requires some denial of self in the interest of fostering a community around a set of shared beliefs and values…

I guess in a roundabout way I am agreeing with you — personal autonomy and authenticity, taken to an extreme, can become subjective deal-breakers for those approaching life that way, and objective deal-breakers if they become too obnoxious while putting into practice their self-centered view of how the world works. But I don’t see that as a praiseworthy outcome for the individual, whatever label you put on it.

I’m guessing you are just pursuing this position for the sake of argument. If you have held a job for more than three months (i.e., you can get along with a supervisor and coworkers) or been on a team for a full season (i.e., you can get along with a coach and teammates), you have what it takes to be a happy and fulfilled member of a congregation, hopefully an LDS congregation.

I feel like I should give up now, since whatever I say next…I have the sneaking suspicion will be immediately discounted. The world according to Dave is that I’m “just pursuing this position for the sake of argument.”

Ah, such is classic Dave. I’ll disregard for now. But how do I begin? As I wrote in my last comment on his site…autonomy is treated to the exclusion of any other virtue. Rather, all virtues are weighed against each other. This is why there is tension to begin with! There is tension because people do value autonomy, people do value community, but they recognize that the demands of one may not necessarily agree with the other. When they do not, this is what produces a crisis of inauthenticity.

Dave points out that being part of a community requires some self-denial for the sake of fostering that community around shared values. So he notes that too much autonomy then, could become a deal-breaker. But what he concludes is that this excess autonomy is a “self-centered view of how the world works,” and “that is not a praiseworthy outcome for the individual.”

I have a few disagreements. I don’t know where to begin.

I guess the first is to address this self-centered view of how the world works. I sense (but maybe this is going too far) that Dave view this in a negative light…as if we should be willing not to be self-centered and instead we should be self-denying for the sake of the group. So, someone who does not deny the self is following a path that leads to an outcome that is “not praiseworthy.”

I disagree here. I think that self-centeredness is at the heart of what we want to do. The issue is sometimes, we find self-denial in our long-term self-interest.

Let’s take autonomy, community, and authenticity. As I wrote before, the demands of autonomy may or may not align with the demands of community. If they do align, does that mean we are being self-denialist and we are eschewing self-centeredness? Absolutely not…what it means is that our autonomy and community demands align, so self-denial is our self-centered conclusion. Mormonism (or any other community) brings something to us (a sense of peace, fulfillment, joy, salvation, exaltation) and so we want to sacrifice for that. We want to be obedient for that.

However…what if autonomy and community demands don’t match? Let’s say we still want peace, fulfillment, joy, etc., but Mormonism isn’t quite completely giving us that. There are beliefs and practices which detract from us. However, community demands still require some sacrifices (we can quibble on what those sacrifices are…but in the conversation at the Mormon inquiry, we seemed to settle that even if one believes in heterodox teachings, he should not speak publicly about these…or else be “obnoxious” about these.) In this case, we must weigh autonomy and community. We want to be autonomous and true to our beliefs…but what about the community? For people who also value the community (and the community can include people like family that are truly valuable to us), any compromise is a miserable and unenviable state.

I think Dave’s final analogy is quite conducive to what I am saying. We know that working a job for an extended period of time actually is not evidence, as Dave presumes, that we “have what it takes to be a happy and fulfilled member of a congregation.” We can most certainly work for a job over an extended period of time while being miserable in it. Such a lamentable conclusion, yes, but all our continued work for the job shows is that we can get along with supervisors and coworkers enough not to be officially or unofficially expelled from the group.

How could things roll out?

Well, it could be that we enjoy our job. In that case, getting along with coworkers and supervisors is what we do, and there is no conflict between community demands and our autonomy. So, in this case, we would be happy and fulfilled members of a community.

BUT is this what every employee experiences?

Couldn’t we imagine someone who hates his job, his supervisors, and his coworkers? (I would imagine that not only can we imagine this, but we’ve experienced it). But he knows that he has to earn money for family and children. (Again, isn’t this familiar?) He knows that he has status and role expectations to play. So he knows that fulfilling his autonomy would crucially disturb his duties to his family, so he denies himself for the sake of his family. As a result, he does get along with his coworkers and his supervisors…for if he did not…if he even even HINTED that he didn’t like his coworkers and employers, he would risk being expelled (whether officially or unofficially).

This person lives a miserable and inauthentic existence. We wouldn’t say this situation or outcome is praiseworthy. We would say it is a lamentable evil and the individual is “making the best of a bad situation.”

But you know what? If that person knew he could find a different job…if he knew he could find fulfillment, a sufficient salary, and joy elsewhere, most people would not hold it against him if he left the old job. Most people would not say this was a “self-centered view of how the world works” with a sneer. They would say that even if this view is self-centered, it is reasonable. It is admirable.

…Why, then, do we come to drastically different conclusions when we are discussing religion?

I was reading what is now a rather old post at Guide for my Perplexity entitled Wasteland…there’s actually quite a bit I could address here (it’s all so good!), but I think I want to address some comments from LDS Anarchist in that discussion. In his first comment, he says:

I also believe that there is a way out of the predicament that you find yourself in. I wish I could give you the “key” that would solve everything, but I can’t. The main problem that I see is that you are doubting the spiritual experiences you have had. I don’t know what experiences those were, but whatever they are, if you are doubting their veracity, then you have a real crisis of faith on your hands. Spiritual experiences are the anchor of faith.

As I read, I begin to gloss over…Spiritual experiences…they aren’t something I can grab on to…Anchor of faith…what a trite expression…

but then my eyes stop glossing, and I begin to think about commonality.A thought struck me…what if ‘faith’ is just a narrative? In this case, spiritual experiences are a tool that supports (and perhaps even anchors) that narrative. But spiritual experiences aren’t the only tools, and faith isn’t the only narrative. Instead of getting caught up on the one narrative, I should recognize the broader message of such narrative. I have tried to write similar thoughts in response to Seth’s guest post at LDS & Evangelical Conversations (which I probably should get to writing more about that too).

What are narratives? There are plenty of good links about them (ok, there are more than two links…but I never keep track of these.) Quite simply, though, narratives are the ways we are inclined to view the world and make sense of things in the world…I guess you could call them a part of worldviews as well, then.

When I thought about narratives (and some conversations I’ve had relating…even if tenuously, to the concept), I thought about a rather insightful video game quote (don’t judge me; video games rock.) I’ll tweak it just a bit.

Narratives are the key to telepathy. The mind wraps its secrets in narratives; when we discover the narratives that shape our colleague’s thought, we can penetrate the vault of his mind.

Right? As I’ve tried to express so many times recently…we get into these pissing matches…seeing past each other…we try to lob rhetorical grenades in order to puff up our position, our narrative, our worldview…when lobbing grenades will do nothing but invite grenades back. On the other hand, if we were to step away from our position and try to learn the other person’s narrative, we could, if we truly wanted, do much more damage than we ever thought possible. (Although I imagine that if we truly learned the other person’s narrative, it would defuse us completely.)

So, what about narrative…

I think narratives still need to be anchored…Narratives tie in well, I think, with my comments about authenticity. I think crises…such as crises of faith (or other narratives)…are when we realize that our authenticity is in danger…suddenly, every comfort we had about who we are and what we are about is cast into doubt…

So, what about narrative and spiritual experiences..?! It was in something LDS Anarchist had said:

I’ve gone through times when information has been presented to me that has led to temptations of doubt, but then I’ve always looked over the one type of experience in my life that was vastly different than the others: spiritual manifestations, and the re-analyzation of those experiences always brings me to the same conclusion: I can’t deny or doubt that they really happened. Those experiences are the foundation of my personal existence, meaning that those manifestations are more real to me than anything else I’ve experienced.

I glazed over his description of spiritual manifestations again (sorry!), but there was a line that I took heart to. “Those experiences are the foundation of my personal existence, meaning that those manifestations are more real to me than anything else I’ve experienced.” I don’t need to glaze at implications of objective existence to see an applicable, sincere subjective foundation.

And though the particulars may vary, I realize that I have experiences — though I don’t dare call them spiritual – that reach down to my core in the same way. I’ve seen it from inauthenticity…that’s allowed me to recognize what is authentic to me. I’ve seen it from the alienation, the doubt, the despair, the anguish…and that’s made me recognize what is not alienation, what is not doubted, what is not despaired, and what is not suffered in anguish. Though the universe, the world, and everything and every one may fail, these experiences cannot. They are etched in my existence, I can say. I can hardly share them with others without others wondering what’s wrong with me.

And then I realize.

Do I not do the same? Have my eyes not glazed over? Have they not rolled at others’ narratives being born so openly? Yet I DARE to lament when others have done the same to the foundation, the anchor of my narrative.

…I still don’t know how to bridge the gap though. I know that narratives are the key to telepathy, so to speak, but still, I am unversed in any other narrative but my own, and I don’t know how to begin to truly learn the second language without either immediately cheapening it or without irreparably changing the relationship with my first and native tongue.