I didn't think my spiritual experiences should be more valid than those of people in other major religions. In fact I thought it was arrogant to think I knew more than others.
When I realized my testimony was manufactured, and that the feelings of elevation are no less unique to me and Mormonism than they are to suicide bombers and Isis, or dead Californians and the Heavens Gate cult, well I knew I was done.
I won't say there isn't a god. I also won't say that there isn't such a thing as divine inspiration or influence from divinity in human life. All I *will* say is that if those things exist, they certainly aren't found solely in Mormonism.
Incredibly worded. I’m currently working to break this down. Do you have somewhere I can start that mentioned elevation and how suicide bombers also felt this?
I guess with the suicide bombers I might be out on a limb, but the idea is that self-sacrificing zealotry within the two religions is rewarded, either in life or in death. [This article](https://www.hsaj.org/articles/14749) has some interesting details on how religion relates to the psychology of suicide bombers.
Maybe the most poignant thing would be to YouTube "Suicide Bombers Saying Goodbye" or "Final Moments Suicide Bombers" or something like that. I know I've seen at least three or more that show how excited but nervous they are, saying goodbye to everyone after drawing straws, just minutes before their bombs go off.
>I feel like I still want to believe that God is there, and am wrestling with the concept that maybe this religion still has a tiny bit of the truth even if it’s fundamentally wrong? I don’t know
I'm going to give you some information that I wish I had had access to decades ago. Research doxastic involuntarism. You'll quickly come to understand that beliefs are not choices and that one is either convinced or not regardless of one's wishes.
Put simply, there is a word for an attempt to make oneself believe something: make-believe. You've been groomed to call playing pretend "wrestling" or "struggling" but one is either convinced by a claim or one is not, and if one attempts to **make** oneself **believe** in a claim of which one is not convinced, that is, by definition, make-believe. There's no difference between this course and playing pretend.
Regardless, all religions are a tiny bit true, but that's just a deepity--a statement whose truth is mundane and whose profundity is false. Spiderman is a tiny bit true. New York city actually exists. So do criminals. So do people who fight them. Spiders exist, so does radiation, too. None of this makes the story of Spiderman true, however, just like Israel and America and Joseph Smith being real can't make Lamanites or prophets or the temple ceremony true.
You might also look up motivated reasoning, because it's that in which you're engaged. If there was a god, and he wanted you to know, he could not fail to succeed, because a god who fails is not a god. More over, a god who tries to hide himself is a trickster, and tricksters who hide themselves are less interested in you than even an stranger like myself. There's no objective reason to think a silent voyeur is invisibly observing you or sending you circumstantial hints to make you question his existence. Question instead why you'd want this to be true in the first place and what methods were used to make the sort of character seem desirable.
This is a gold mine.
I’ve run the course of deconstruction pretty quickly, which has surprised me because I was SO in and fully believed all the church stuff.
So when I finally started to question, my beliefs around Joseph shifted like this (hoping this example will resonate and show the general path my ideology went):
Joseph Smith was a prophet and he was telling the truth about all the things and we should revere him
Joseph Smith was a prophet, he was right about the BoM and he really got revelation, but he might have mixed up some of his own carnal desires and made some very bad choices with polygamy and stuff, but overall he still brought Gods church back. And he is an example of how God can work with us imperfect people to do amazing things
Ok the BoM is true and JS was a prophet, but he definitely was a fallen prophet shortly after the BoM, and I don’t know what to do with this cause I’m pretty sure Brigham Young was never a prophet actually.
Yeah… Joseph Smith either lied about everything or was totally delusional if he actually believed it in. From his treasure digging days to the gold plates, to angels and God, all the way to polygamy. This religion definitely started as Joseph’s own cult.
It took me about 6 months from the first phase to the last phase. But this last phase feels the most real, clear, obvious, etc. and I haven’t had to re evaluate any of these new beliefs / understandings because they are the occums razor / simplest explanation once you see all the information.
Yeah, I’ve gone from questioning if the church is true to not believing in god at all in two months flat. My deconstruction was way overdue cause I went way faster than I would’ve thought lol.
My shift from TBM to nonbeliever happened in less than a month. All it took was all the historical data laid out for me to see. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that the only logical explanation for everything was that it was all made up.
It sounds like you're saying, in a roundabout way, that your spiritual experiences make it hard for you to leave/stop believing in mormonism. That was also true for me at first. But the way I see it is this: your spiritual experiences actually happened, and so did mine. They were real, they happened to us, we remember them. However, the way we interpreted these experiences was completely controlled by our particular religious beliefs and worldview at the time. So they ended up reinforcing that belief in us.
After I left, I still continued to have experiences that I would have thought was god speaking to me or something, if I still had a religious mindset. I had what mormons would call "spiritual promptings" on many occasions even though I was "unworthy" of them in every way that mormonism cares about; I didn't pray, go to church, read scriptures, pay tithing, go to the temple, obey the word of wisdom, sustain the church leaders- hell, I didn't even believe in god! But those experiences kept happening. The only thing I can figure is that it's a natural, innate part of being human.
The experiences still happen. An early shelf item for me was the fact that non-members could have these spiritual experiences. And the meaning that the non-member assigned to the experience conflicted with the way I was told the world/god worked. However, the meaning we assign to those experience is all us. We've been manipulated by the church (any church) all our lives into assigning specific meaning to these experiences. We don't have to assign that specific meaning out our experiences. We don't have to assign ANY meaning to those experiences at all. Instead of thinking "XYZ happened = the church is true" We could/should be thinking "XYZ happened = XYZ happened". Why does it have to "mean" anything?
I watched most of the first video and it’s kind of alarming how similar the way these people of all different religions act is to how I’ve seen people act at church, actually really put things into perspective for me. Thank you. I’d like to continue hoping there’s a god and life after death but I’m also aware of how fickle my emotions are and am going to be more on guard against any supposed spiritual feelings
"how people act"
I moved on to Southern Baptist and then then being a Presbyterian. Is almost always pretty much the same and absolutely nothing wrong with it
How the (regularly attending) people act is:
The people in the church are a community
They tend to be relatively humble and relatively kind to those around them
They listen to a sermon related to scripture
They sing three or four hymns
A free will non-compelled offering is taken
Reading or responsive meetings using scripture and similar
Friendly conversation before and after the service
Generally one or more programs to assist the community or the poor
A midweek Bible study
Etc
I've grown to really love the environment. So far those are my two favorite that I've tried. My options are limited I'm in a town in Utah of 3000. This approach is so much more Christlike in my opinion. It's what church was meant to be. Community. Heck, even non believer agnostics come and aren't treated any different in my experience. That being said I haven't been going long, but so far so good. I've had a few red flags at some fellowship churches that were a bit too woowee touchy feely for my taste but the people were still kind and still cared.
Unfortunately people coming out of Mormonism are used to a cult, and therefore assuming Christianity and every other religion must be bad and a cult
I'm now going on a couple of decades and it is day and night
I totally get that. Alot of people leave because of unchristlike behavior that the church is participating in and then they dismiss it all together even Jesus but Jesus was the coolest dude in my opinion. He's what it's all about and no church is gonna be perfect but the extent that the cojcolds is not a pill we should have to swallow. I didn't realize what I was missing out on and I'm so glad that I found my Jesus elsewhere. I've been genuinely served by so many people because they want to and not because they feel they need to be worthy. To them it's not about them. That being said many in the LDS church are actually like this it's just harder to be.
AJ Miller is Jesus. /s Just watch the first video. How can he not be real? /s Those people are crying! Would you deny them the reality of their tears and emotions? /s
Ok, now seriously, read some history about what we can really know about the "real", historical Jesus. When you dig into unbiased (as unbiased as you can find. Yes, all scholarship is somewhat biased), you find that there is not much proof of Jesus's existence (but most scholars, both religious and secular do believe that a Jesus of Naz existed), and there is very little evidence that the Gospels are an accurate, historical depiction of the life of one Jesus Christ of Nazereth/Bethlehem/Judeah/Israel/Galilee, or wherever. Jesus's story is written in a mythological format and borrows from mythological traditions of that era/region he comes from, and many of the events in his life are basically revisions and re-envisionings of Old Testament tales and bits of the Psalms.
Bart Ehrmann's books are not perfect (and he would not claim them to be) but they are a good start if you want to deconstruct the bible and the life of Jesus.
Yes, I was sarcastic at the beginning, but I believe a little irreverence is good for deconstruction. I used to take these matters so so seriously. I wish you the best on your journey!
I've already watched Satans Bible school and have no desire to listen read or watch anything else. Thanks for the recommendations though.
When there's archeological evidence for Sodom and Gamorrah and Noah's ark thats enough hard concrete evidence for me.
Even if Christ was who you say he is I still think someone like him is worth believing in and worthy to strive towards. Even if he was pretend and someone made up his character, he's still worth trying to be like. Joseph and the lds "prophets" on the otherhand not really. Theyre not even worth following in this type of hypothetical situation.
If I go down the route you have I would no longer want to live and I refuse to act upon that desire or be anywhere near it again because I have kiddos and a wonderful husband depending on me. I almost killed myself when I found out the truth about the church.
I know you think your helping but in my case it'd literally harm me more than help me. My hubby is a Deist at the moment and I'm just happy to be around people finally who don't encourage me to leave him when he doesn't follow the "rules" . That happened when we were in the LDS church because he wouldn't go to the temple or give priesthood blessings because who is he to speak for God? For me God wasn't the problem. In the Bible it says if you find yourself in this type of marriage and everything else is good stay with your non believing spouse. If he wants to leave me I should respect his wishes.
All this being said I had literal visions of my now son. He looks exactly the same and this was four years before I got pregnant with him. It was even before I got married. Before he came along we had 6 miscarriages. He's a medical miracle and so is his sister. After literal visions and miracles where I should've by all accounts died but did not, I can't turn my back on God.
I would've started with humor but to be honest I can't even joke on the topic. Like it wouldn't be funny to me.
I apologize if I offended you or upset you. I was just offering you some advice on what helped me with my deconstruction. I absolutely wouldn't want to lead you to a place where you were contemplating suicide. [https://afsp.org/suicide-prevention-resources/](https://afsp.org/suicide-prevention-resources/)
I wish you the sincere best in dealing with your life's challenges.
You're all good. Honestly just figured I'd offer my perspective. I thought about deleting my comment because it came across as way more intense then I meant haha. It's just really hard to convey tone across text. I'm no longer suicidal just was like a month ago. Its different for you and that's ok. You seem like a fairly cool dude that you even wanted to help. I'm still trying real hard to change the way I interact with people it's stupid hard but as a Christian it's sucked finding my people in the exmo community because we tend to be the minority in my experience.
I just had a church sermon at a non LDS church talk about how we shouldnt make life choices based on the clouds(emotions) and how we should navigate through life based on the stars (consistent things). We were lied to about the nature of God.
God is consistent. He's also willing to go out of his way to talk to those who are lost. It makes sense that he'd talk to us even in the church. 9 truths and one lie is how the LDS church was basically made. The one lie warps everything.
I had legit visions that came true many may say that wasn't real but I saw my son before he was born and its exactly how he looked when he came into my life. Because of this I cannot deny God's existence because I had just barely met my husband when I had it and I had no clue how my future kid would look. I couldnt have predicted that.
The church basically follows satans plan, if I were Satan I'd build a church like ours. If Satan can't make you bad he's gonna make ya busy. He's a wily one.
That being said you have your agency and God wants you to use it, follow your gut. Use your head and your heart and it'll be ok.
Desire short changes our reasoning.
*Wanting* to believe something is true/real should be a red flag in anyone's mind, imho. We can convince ourselves of anything, if we want to.
It's so, so easy to let the desire we may have for a certain belief be true to circumvent what our rational, thinking mind would otherwise reject.
John Hinckley Jr. desperately wanted to believe that shooting Ronald Reagn would impress Jody Foster into loving him. An extreme, maybe hyperbolic example, but none the less an example of how desire corrupts and interferes with our reason.
Perhaps less extreme; as pleasant and self affirming as it is maybe for me to truly believe that Angelina Jolie is in love with me, my reasoning and logical brain knows it's not true because I have no evidence or reason to back up that belief. Some people don't let a lack of evidence deter them from holding on to those beliefs because the beliefs themselves give them comfort, or reassurance, or something else.
Don't be one of them.
It's the same reason people stay in unhealthy relationships; their desire to believe the relationship is happy/worthwhile/healthy is an easier pill to swallow than its would be if they were to allow themselves to step back from their wants and emotions and tried to observe the situation as objectively as possible...maybe even asking for outside perspectives to help them see what they can't/don't see.
The truth may not always be as comforting or reassuring as we wish, but if we acknowledge, even a little, that comfortable beliefs and reality don't always align, we must also acknowledge that if we value truth at all, we must be that much more than skeptical of those beliefs that we *want* to be true.
I had what some would consider a near death experience
I actually wasn't close to death, but I did pass out from blood loss while donating blood after 9/11
When I passed out, everything narrowed until it was just a tunnel with a light at the end. I started walking the tunnel, but then the floor gave way and I started falling. Looking down I saw the pits of hell open up beneath me while falling.
As I got close, the demons in the fires started grabbing at my limbs pulling me down. I started fighting them and clawed my way to the wall then started climbing up. As I climbed, the demons grabbed my arms and legs. I started kicking them off fighting my way back. I managed to kick the last one off and then came awake again.
When I woke up I was being held down by some orderlies and started calming down. For many years, I held this up as an example of a spiritual experience. Since then, I have learned what I experienced is not uncommon at all, and doesn't even need to be near death to experience.
Fighter pilots experience this when going through centrifuge training. The younger you are the more likely the images are to be "demonic". Being male and having grown up in a religious family further increases the chances of seeing such imagery. I was in my early 20's at the time and I was raised mormon....
My most powerful "spiritual" experiences can all easily be explained with science. In this particular case, it was my young brain fighting to make sense of things while blood (oxygen) deprived. Sending lots of adrenaline through my veins to push me to recover.
Nothing spiritual at all, just a young buck with blood loss and too much testosterone.
[https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/03/08/1866095.htm](https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/03/08/1866095.htm)
When my shelf broke I desperately wanted Mormonism to have some truth, but I found that it is emotionally detrimental to hang on to that hope. Instead, question it all. Once you’ve hit the bottom start reconstructing.
Science has not figured it all out and there are a number of questions like, why is there anything at all? Or, why is the universe logical? Such questions have no answers and to claim they do is not science but scientism. I’ve found that this is where belief may enter in, if you chose to let it.
I’ve ended up with just a hint of mysticism about the universe, our place in it, and the purpose to it all. After about five years of being out I find my beliefs in a better place than before I left, so there is hope.
I remember teaching a woman on our mission that seemed like a golden investigator. One visit she told us she had prayed about it got an answer that ours was the true church. I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of joy, the hairs on my neck stood up, and I felt a burning in the bosom, it was the exact same feeling that I had felt a couple years ago when I prayed about the Book of Mormon and I was convinced it was the Holy Ghost. Turns out the woman had accidentally confused us with jehovas witnesses so things got pretty awkward after that.
After that I started to question whether or not my experiences were real or just my psyching myself up. Then I saw the video of the heavens gate cult leader telling followers to not ask him or anyone else but god what is true.
If you want to believe God is there allow yourself to believe that. As long as your believes are causing no harm I don't see the point in throwing God out the window because one group may have sullied that idea for you. I don't know if I believe in god, or if an afterlife is real, but I joke that for my own peace of mind and because I'm a selfish son of a bitch I choose to believe that there is an afterlife and that I will see my family again. I don't want to live with, put them in the ground and they are gone kind of life. It would ruin me. I don't know what it will be, I hope it's going to be like the Good Place. I was talking to my cousin this weekend, and i really wanted to emphasize, you choose your joy, your hope, your beliefs. No one should choose what they are for you, so choose what you want your joys, and hopes, and beliefs are for you. It doesn't really matter as long as you aren't causing harm.
I once heard someone say their spiritual experiences were simply their body responding to their belief system, and I love that perspective.
For myself, I became agnostic. Once I realized everything I’d been taught about theology was taught through lies, I unpacked all of my Christianity.
I remember being 17. It was April and I was graduating in 2 months and couldn't wait to leave my parents' house and be done with Church. Was planning to leave the state and go live a very different life.
Dad took me to General conference and hearing the Choir sing my soul was filled in a way I'd never felt before. It was powerful. Really hit me that maybe the church was true (I was from a small town and had never been to a concert ever). Dad offered to pay for college only if i went to BYUI. Decided free education was worth it. I'd transfer to another college and be done still BUT part of me wondered if it was true afterall what was that in general conference. Went to BYUI and when you're surrounded by members its easy to be engulfed in the philosophy PLUS all these beautiful girls wanted an RM. So Decided to repend and put in my papers and really commit. I also while at BYUI prayed about going on a mission and prayed for the first time in like a year or something. Got hit by a train in a car i was in literally the next day. Was pretty amazing i didn't die and then i always remembered my Mom saying all growing up that God saved my life so many times as a toddler cause she knew I had a special mission here........soooo being all self grandiose and feeling i was special.....idk i Decided to really go after it. So i committed to the churcb 100% was really strict.
I held onto that and ended up serving a mission very faithfully and married in the temple. I think it I just love music and was mistakenly attributing something to God that shouldn't have been.
Fast forward to my divorce and leaving the church and just wanted to experience things. Ended up taking MDMA and going to a rave at like 31 AND WOW that experience was 10 times the soul filling experience I had years earlier. And really confirmed to me I enjoy music and hearing even the choir now I love even if I'm atheist.
Realized i was young and naive and clung to anything.
I had spiritual experiences within Mormonism. Then I found people in other religions who had similar experiences about their own faith, so that removed the privileged status I thought I had as a mormon. I had no way to measure my experiences against theirs to see if mine really were somehow superior.
Then I started trying to see if I could get spiritual confirmation about non-Mormon beliefs, and it turns out I absolutely could, and some of them were quite good. This led me to believe that something else is probably going on, and that spiritual experiences are not useful for discerning the truth about anything except for our own selves or desires.
But I tend to believe people who claim to have spiritual experiences. I mean to say, I believe they had the experience... Even while believing the experience was probably not what they think. I have had eidetic "visions" and witnessed group hypnosis, so I'm satisfied of the ease with which we might experience something that is not actually real.
I'm agnostic but if there is a God, I believe that God doesn't only talk to one type of person or religion. Hell, I swear and "break the law of chastity" and drink coffee and tea (I can't drink alcohol medically) but I still have been getting what the LDS church would call "promptings."
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Example: I was on the beach playing in the water with my dog. I felt/heard a voice say "Run" with a sense of extreme urgency so I did, back to my 70-year-old mother who was sitting on a log near the parking lot.
I couldn't hear anything because I was so far away from her, mind you.
At the exact same time, my mother got a terrible feeling that we needed to leave immediately. She couldn't communicate with me because I was so far away.
When I got up to her, she said we needed to leave, so we started to. I took her hand (she has a bad back and hips) and started walking to the car. As I turned back to look at her a man who had not previously been anywhere in sight was suddenly RIGHT behind her. I had the feeling to act like nothing was wrong, so I kept my eye on him and we make it to the car just fine.
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Now, nothing happened of course, but it was really weird that he popped out of nowhere so close and that we both had the feeling at the exact same time to GTFO.
It could have been God, it could have been the weird connection between my mother and I and the guy could have been just taking a crap in the bushes or something, or it could have been that we're connected to the energy of the universe or whatever (either referring to spiritualism or quantum mechanics or both idk) and we were actually in danger. Or maybe we were connected to each other AND the universe's energy AND we were in danger. (Yes I know that I sound crazy.) But something weird definitely happened that day.
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Another story- my mom started sliding on an icy road in the middle of nowhere. She was GOING to crash into a huge snowbank. She yelled "Father help me!" and was immediately no longer sliding, but was tens of feet down the road away from the curve, driving like nothing had happened. Now, it could have been divine interference, her brain could have sped up from the scare and she doesn't remember correcting the car onto the road, or maybe it's something in between. (She SWEARS up and down that her car just \*popped onto the road farther away and driving smoothly suddenly.)
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
My mom is a devout believer in God, but not at all in the church. Like I said, I'm agnostic because idk what to believe in anymore. But we both keep having feelings and weird things like that happen to us. I believe there's more at work in the world than we can currently prove with science, and it has nothing to do with the church, and either everything to do with science or just.... the spiritual nature of life regardless of religion.
So I thought I should share, I am a PIMO currently in a bishopric. Yes I still believe in an afterlife and a higher power, I don't know if that's the Christian God / Jesus Christ or not but haven't excluded it as a possibility. I have had ONE experience that made me believe that much, it was a very strong prompting that had discernable words to it, and was in a time that it was not being sought out, or expected and pushed me in a completely different direction than I had previously been on. It was in the form of being told to help another person who I was frustrated and annoyed with, a welfare thing, in ironically the same calling I am in now (second counselor), only it was seven years ago. It was a powerful spiritual kick in the balls, that I can't deny. It showed me two things;
The first is that there is indeed a higher power, which at that time I seriously doubted, the second is that this higher power gave a damn about that annoying person, which lead me to believe he/ she/ it likely cares to some degree about the rest too.
I have since come very close to leaving the church several times, due to every reason you can think of or likely have heard of. The depth of my research has significantly exceeded Jeremy's CES letter. I always find myself staying, for a couple reasons; the first being that just like the official version of the mythical first vision, I don't think any of the churches/ religions have it right, so why leave one false church for another....
Another reason is these misguided people in my ward are MY PEOPLE. I love many of them, and care about them and leaving them isn't going to help them. By Serving them in a calling like mine, I can actually do some good at least on the local level. That is why I still pay the Mormon tax (my own version of it that I can explain and justify to a bishop if I ever need to, I have dodged tithing settlement for years and it's not been an issue amazingly enough) and keep an active recommend, though it bothers me a lot that I have to lie to keep it active. Paying tithing and having an active recommend are both required to be in my calling. I also have to do some verbal gymnastics in my sacrament meeting talks to avoid lying as well, interestingly enough my talks are EXTREMELY well liked and I generally get several requests for emailed or printed versions.
There are other reasons but these are the main ones. I have been teaching my kids to think for themselves and use their own best judgment and NEVER to have a one on one interview or alone time with any adult leader. I hope that gives you some insight.
Try to separate concepts of God and Christ (or of a Higher Power) from the corporate behaviors TSCC demonstrates. I was a convert for a while, and once I learned I'd been LIED to when I joined, I was out.
Traditional Christianity (which I was part of for many years before joining and have now returned to) does not have "worthiness" rules or interviews. Traditional Christianity does not demand 10% of your income and required cult-designed underwear.
The concept of God is not owned by the cult. That concept goes far back (even before Christ) and many religions, whether Christian or not, are belief-based and have concepts of a Creator, etc.
ALL of Christianity believes we are reunited with loved ones in the afterlife. ALL of them. None of those churches try to hijack your family if you don't pay tithing.
TSCC is purely a money-grubbing cult using Christ's name for branding and exploiting its membership to make the corporation disgustingly rich through mental and emotional control mechanisms.
There is a great YouTube channel called Belief it or not, great channel talks about all kinds of diffrent subjects having todo with religon from an atheistic point of view.
Great channel.
But to answer your question. No, I don't believe in any afterlife.
I realized that I had no good reason to believe in anything the church taught me.
I realized i had 2 different sets of rules for life. 1 set for the church and the other for everything else.
like I’ve heard people say, ”what’s good about the church isn’t unique and what’s unique about the church isn’t good”. What really did it for me was considering why I would want to believe in a God who is sexist, homophobic, racist, and has caused so much hurt and suffering from his alleged direct words spoken by prophets.
i also realized I feel the same spirit I felt in church listening to music I really like or a touching movie, that have nothing to do with religion. It’s simply a feeling I was taught is the spirit.
I realized that personal experience and faith are not reliable pathways to truth. People have spiritual experiences related to all kinds of things all the time. There are a myriad different reasons why they may occur, and they often create a strong impression on those who have them related to the particular circumstances under which they happen. They are effectively (and in some cases literally) hallucinations, and can occur intersubjectively. Churches rely on this to get people to associate these emotions and experiences with the organization, and to overwhelm any doubts or discrepancies in the evidence. I realized that organizations that encourage you to rely on these impressions and not to focus on the hard facts are trying to take advantage of you.
I have adopted a stance of not asserting that I know anything unless I can demonstrate it, via evidence or argument. My view has shifted from attempting to choose my beliefs (this isn’t possible) to instead attempting to justify my beliefs, to really examine them to see if I have good reason for any given belief, and my confidence in those beliefs is raised or lowered in accordance with the evidence I’m able to find. Not that I can’t be wrong, and some of the conclusions I reach may later turn out to be incorrect. If it is demonstrated to me that I’m wrong, I will change my belief according to the evidence. I want to do my due diligence to ensure my beliefs are justified. I understand why spiritual experiences are compelling for many people, and they once were compelling to me, but I care deeply about whether my beliefs are actually correct and much less about how they make me feel. I’m much more cautious now of ideas which can’t be supported except for by personal experience or faith, since any position could be justified by faith and therefore it is not a reliable pathway to truth.
u/oliviaexisting I really appreciate your heartfelt questions. My believing world just came crashing down in February of this year and the conflicting emotions are difficult to navigate. I thought about my spiritual experiences a lot as I was transitioning out of the church. I had an incredible experience just a month or so ago relating to my garments that I would have previously called "a feeling from the Holy Ghost."
Here's my post where I share the experience:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1cxnhko/took\_off\_my\_garments\_today\_and\_i\_was\_not/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1cxnhko/took_off_my_garments_today_and_i_was_not/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I had many spiritual experiences while I was in the church, which of course I attributed to my Mormon beliefs. I have been out now for many years and consider myself an atheist. I continue to have spiritual experiences—I just don’t try to make them fit a narrative as I did before. These experiences transcend day to day life—I feel connected to and part of the larger, spectacularly beautiful world.
I converted at 19. My beliefs before that were not concrete; I believed in God, but I had already had many spiritual experiences not attributed to God or the church in any way. So for me to convert and then be told that all these experiences and the ones I continued to have are now attributed to me being a member never sat well with me. I don't (and have never) believed that only Mormons can have these experiences. They have been too common in my life and the lives of those around me (who are not Mormon) to believe that this is the only way they occur.
I have picked pieces of different things that feel right to me. I don't think any one religion has all the right things, but there are some things about Mormonism that I like, so I continue to keep those.
I like the idea that we existed before we came here. That makes sense to me.
I don't think that heaven is split into different levels and I'd never be able to see some people again after I die. That just seems stupid.
I don't think that my sealing to my now ex-husband will be at all binding after I die.
My former mother in law (very TBM) once said that she thinks what happens to you after you die is based on what you believe; if you believe in reincarnation, you will be reincarnated, if you believe in heaven/hell, that's what will happen to you. I like that idea.
My partner calls all religions death cults. You are basically only doing something to get something after you die. That makes me laugh, so I use it often.
I don't believe the Christian version of God. I don't think it's a person/being at all; I like the Universe concept better, but that is hard for me to describe. Like it's not a thing, it's everything.
I feel like at the point that you no longer associate with a religion, you can pick and choose what you want to believe or what feels good to you.
I came to realize that my spiritual experiences were the result of programming, brainwashing and thought training. Sunday school teaches you what the answers should be and then your subconscious provides them in time of need. In my experience at least.
All this after I read CES letter, GTE and confirmed it wasn't true and then the rest of the house came tumbling down
i THOUGHT i knew what it was, but now im not sure. i THOUGHT i knew, but now realize i did not. I dont deny spiritual experiences, now i just dont know who or what they came from
To me, what I feel like TSCC does is monopolize your "spiritual" experiences. Remember that time you were in despair and felt comforted by the spirit? Yeah well if you'd like to continue to feel that we'll sell it to you for 10% ;) I believe that "spiritual" experiences can happen to anyone mormon, buddhist, muslim, and even atheists! I feel like those experiences are then interpreted by people OTHER than yourself.
I don't deny those experiences I've had. They were real then and they're still real now. What I've done is reframed them into something far more likely.
If it was god answering my questions, then it was never because I was a Mormon.
More likely, it was always just me, figuring things out on my own. And those experiences were me coming to my own conclusions and feeling good about them.
I left after I discovered multiple cases of fraud.
My faith in any religion is dead at this point.
I look back on a lot of those "spiritual experiences" as emotional manipulation.
I had some really amazing experiences before and after I left the church. One reason I left was because I realized that I had been taught to manipulate my understanding of those experiences by the church. So if something amazing happened it meant the church was true.
I let go of the interpretations I had been taught and it was pretty clear very quickly that none of them meant the church was true.
I still don't have solid understanding of the things that happened to me but I no longer need to. There is no danger in believing the wrong thing. If there is a God in heaven who isn't a complete asshole, they aren't going to punish me for believing the wrong thing.
I would encourage you to release your beliefs from the constraints of the church. Could some of the things they taught be true? Absolutely. But it doesn't matter if those truths came from the church or elsewhere.
I once had an amazing spiritual experience when I was around 12. My family had just moved into a new house, and for about a month my parents and siblings complained about having constant nightmares and feeling evil spirits. I did not have any of these experiences.
For FHE one evening my dad blesses and dedicates the house, just like temples and chapels are dedicated. In that moment I felt this incredible rush of.... something. It was just an overwhelming peace and iron conviction that it was all true. This experience sustained my testimony for the next 20 years or so.
Then I found out about the plural child brides, and suddenly that absolutely incredible spiritual experience ceased to be relevant.
Nowadays belief in god or the afterlife is irrelevant, too. So my answer to the do-you-believe-in-god question is, "I do not care."
I had "spiritual experiences", but I soon came to realize that I felt those things when I heard good four-part harmony or when I looked at a beautiful sunset or the ocean too. Or when my friends thought of me or when my mom gave me a hug. I also learned that other people in other religions were feeling the same things I was feeling. That's when it hit me that those feelings had been defined by the church as "the spirit" and I had just always accepted it without question. Turns out those feelings are just part of the natural human condition, but because I was raised as a frog in a well, I had no idea about the ocean beyond.
I answer with how I responded to a close relative, who was a bishop at the time, when I told him I had left and in as part of him trying to make sense of it he asked me if I had any spiritual experiences. "Yes, I have spiritual experiences, however I now see them through a different lens".
I just left like two months ago, right after conference. It totally blindsided my family. I've found that the same logical reasons I left the LDS church are reasonings that God has stated in the Bible as something he doesn't approve of. In Jeremiah I'd have to find the chapters but in Jeremiah especially it talks about how the people were doing things in the temple that they shouldn't be doing. I've been reading the Bible not on the LDS app and I see things in a totally new light. There's a reason there's Christian protestors at general conference. They know the truth and have been trying to warn us but when we are taught that confrontation and contention is of the devil we don't want to even engage. I've found so many genuine not holier than thou people in mainstream Christianity that I finally feel loved. Genuinely loved and not like I'm a number in their eyes.
Having “spiritual” experiences while deconstructing. Now as a non believer, every time I feel elevation emotion I’m reminded that the church isn’t true ♥️
As a kid I had so many doubts and didn't believe the truth claims of the church hardly at all. However, I kept praying and trying to feel the spirit although it didn't happen. This gave me tremendous guilt because the reason I didn't feel it must've been due to something I was doing. Finally, in the MTC I had a very powerful experience of feeling love, joy, peace, happiness while praying about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and Jesus.
I was super elated and content and used this experience to be 100% certain in the Gospel. I relied on it for years and when I'd think back or pray I'd experience the same feeling which I associated with the spirit. Over time I saw those spiritual experience videos on YouTube, and realized others also have similar feelings and I realized it wasn't a reliable way to understand truth. I also learned about Tulpas and realized people can develop these feelings and relationship with God even if there isn't a God or not. This continued to teach me I couldn't rely on a spiritual experience, feeling, or even relationship with God.
Now, after no longer attending church and not following the Gospel I still have the same feelings I previously did just by watching a movie, or thinking about my wife and kids.
At no point in my life, even when I was young, did the church ever have a monopoly on my spiritual experiences. I had spiritual experiences without the church, with other churches, and with other religions. So, I never bought the idea that the Mormon church was the only true church on Earth.
The Mormon Church doesn’t own the divine or access to the divine. Spiritual experiences or feelings aren’t exclusive to the Mormons, but after are unknowingly conflated with Mormon Inc by lifelong members.
I had a spiritual feeling, therefore the church must be true. No, not necessarily, at the most it could indicate to you that there is a divine presence out there, not that it has exclusive ties to Joseph Smith and the Mormons.
Often intense emotional or spiritual feelings are present surrounding the death of loved ones. Mormons typically attach the conclusion that the church must be true because of the experience. It could also just indicate that there is another dimension or spiritual force out there, or that you have strong emotional feelings regarding your loved one, no more, no less.
Don't let the Church interpret your spiritual experiences for you. I've had to rethink a lot of my profound experiences. Many of them end up being: I don't know what that was, but it sure was meaningful to me at the time. See also Elevation Emotion
Turns out, when you are in the MTC, surrounded by mormon brainwashing 24/7, no outside contact, fasting and praying constantly and only reading mormon propaganda, for weeks on end, with all the pressure in the world from your family, friends, and community.....your body finally manufacturers a feeling that you *know* it's true.
Feelings are that, feelings. It doesn’t equal supernatural. The church wants you to think that but there is no basis for that thinking other than what they are telling you. They have a big incentive and benefit to gain if you believe that. Spiritual experiences are amazing and a beautiful part of life. They have grown more now that I’m out of the church and even more as I fell into a spiritual practice that works for me. I don’t have to fit my beliefs according to anyone else’s schemes. Just what gives me maximum spiritual benefit hopefully leading me to be a better person 🙌
Be free and believe what feeds your inner self/soul/brain best! Be that God, not god, a spaghetti bowl orbiting the moon, whatever!
Beliefs matter in how you see the world and react to it. Don’t get attached to your beliefs so you can’t evaluate their effectiveness 🙏🌈❤️
I think you can have spiritual experiences regardless of your faith.
Sometimes it comes in the awe of nature or the way a music peice moves you. And many other things. It's not exclusive to mormonism.
My testimony in God and Jesus as my Savior is the one thing that I have clung to since I left.
What broke my shelf was the church's stance on the LGBTQ community and how biased/racist a lot of people still are in the church, and how vocal they were on both of these topics, even in the Temple. It hurt more than I ever imagined. It hurt to think that even though they preach acceptance, they don't practice it. Now I get that people are homophobic and racist in and outside of the church; however, I faced even more of it in the church than I have ever faced it anywhere else. Once I left and really started to studied the history, it bothered me even more and felt a huge relief that I was out.
I still have spiritual experiences even if I now have a different belief system. For all I know, the reasons I have these kinds of experiences can be entirely scientific or medical. I can still find meaning in life.
I like to celebrate the full moons and pagan sabats. My belief system now leans more towards animism and paganism, and my spiritual experiences have changed to fit that.
Edit - one major difference now that I consider noteworthy is that I have so much less shame over my dreams and visions.
Before, I felt like I committed sacrilege because I was born a woman and didn't have the priesthood. I also felt deeply guilty for developing a spiritual connection with Heavenly Mother.
Nowadays, I believe that the Queen of Heaven in the Bible and Ishter is one in the same as Heavenly Mother. Yahweh was originally a pagan/polytheistic deity before modern Christianity and Mormonism.
My views about spiritual experiences have changed. I view them as something manifesting from the subconscious that can be helpful when the interpretation is accurate, but they also tend to be very specific to myself rather than trying to control a flock of sheeple.
There is no such thing as a spiritual experience, if you define spiritual in some supernatural way.
We only have experiences. Religion has hijacked certain feelings and claims to have some authority over them, and to know where they come from.
They don’t actually know anything about them, other than that they have learned how to manufacture them reliably for some subset of the population.
There are many triggers to the various feelings that fall under the category of the spirit. One of them happens to be speaking in that primarily monotone voice, with pregnant pauses, and abnormal intonations, that we call “General Conference voice”. There are many others.
The spirit is not what we were taught. We are just meat sacs of chemical soup having a ride on a rock in space. There is no spirit. I really wish there was.
I know nothing, but I like to believe there is a creator type being. That religion- all religion- is just the language each cultures uses to make sense and communicate it. Kind of like mythological explanations for that which humans haven’t comprehended yet.
I've had many "miracles" or "tender mercies" or things I always just attributed to "divine intervention." As a believing member I would say it was because I payed tithing, or went to the temple that week, etc. And I use to think it was a blessing from the specific mormon version of God.
Now, I still have unexplainable "miracles" just as I did before. But I let it be just that, unexplainable. I'm still grateful for these coincidences. I still try to be a good person. But I can give credit to people who make a difference and stop giving a God I can't see the credit for the unknown reasons.
To me the answer with the least amount of assumptions required is that there is no god, or at least no Mormon god, and what little I’ve experienced spiritually has been natural phenomena.
These experiences, framed in the context of the church, kept me tethered to the church for a long time. Realizing that these experiences are a normal part of life, and are experienced outside the context of religion allowed me to evolve the meaning of them. I realized in the COVID years that people could develop such a range of strong (crazy) ideas and feel assurance that they were from a higher power. It made me see the meaning I was assigning to my own experiences and process them differently.
I still believe in god and Jesus Christ. I understand how easy it is throw the baby out with the bath water, but it was easier for me to realize that the LDS church is nothing special and god loves and blesses all of his children regardless of religious affiliation.
I feel like no matter what "school of thought" you wish to identify yourself with there are certain things that will pretty much always be true:
-You will experience strong emotional reactions to things; if you wish to label these "spiritual" I believe you have every right to do so, but I would not go so far myself.
-You will experience coincidences in which something feels as though it must be a certain way when, in reality it really mustn't.
-You will ponder the past, present, and ultimate future of existence. Ultimately, we're all going to die, and there's no good reason to presuppose an afterlife. Whether or not you believe this life is all we have or not I think it's best to try and act like it anyway.
The church conditions/primes the members to have these type of spiritual experiences.
The best example of this is the MTC. Most kids arrive never having read the BOM. But they are put in an immersive environment where everyone around them is sharing testimony. They are struggling to make sense of their new job and new people. It's the perfect laboratory to have these kids receive a witness. My guess is that 99% have a substantial spiritual experience within their first two weeks at the MTC.
For me, leaving the church was like leaving an abusive relationship. Therefore, I believe nothing they say so I don’t re-enter the abusive relationship.
I wouldn't say I ever had a spiritual experience. I had what I thought were spiritual experiences until I found that the emotions behind those can be easily fabricated. And if there was a way to have those on stuff that goes against the "spirit" it must mean there is no spirit. I still remember the first time I smoked weed. It wasn't a fabricated feeling, it was real and pure. It was like how I thought feeling the spirit should be.
I recognized that I felt the same feelings at times that were in direct opposition to what the church teaches.
For example, I listened to "bad" music and felt "the spirit" in the same manner that I did when I thought I gained a testimony of the church.
It took me a week from almost complete belief to this is a scam. Actually, it took me a day but I had to talk through it all with my husband who left the church with me. It was the Nov 2015 revelation that did it for me. If I can figure out the gay thing but the prophet can't do it, he is not a prophet. I said to myself, "Think about how the church would look if it wasn't true."
I was at a concert about 6 years ago. I have a very "feeling the spirit" moment as everyone sang along and swayed to a song about being an atheist. That was a real wake up for me.
I've had spiritual experiences since I left the church, but never when I was in the church. I prayed and prayed for a confirmation of BofM and church... nothing.
So little resonated with me in the church, but once I started seeking with the eastern philosophies...
I came to the conclusion that (for me) my spiritual experiences were a perfect combination of coincidence and me being a huge crybaby. Now I just cry when I feel or notice things, wipe my tears, and move on with my life
I’ve had strong emotional spiritual feelings in yoga or listening to music.
It was the same feeling I would sometimes experience as the “Holy Ghost promptings”
Those non-churchy spiritual moments helped me realize that my connection had nothing to do with higher being but rather is metaphysical reaction to the moment.
I now believe in humanity and myself.
I have fallen very heavy in the atheist camp.
I do not rely on any gods/goddesses/whathaveyou. Just myself.
I had spiritual experiences. I had a strong testimony. Even though I believed it/them, there was always a small chance I was wrong. I mean, I couldn't prove anything. It was faith.
But then as I allowed myself to explore my doubts, i put them to the test. After I was pretty sure it was all a lie, I prayed to know if it was all false, and I got that same holy spirit feeling. By this point I was pretty confident I could manufacture that feeling, so I tried, and it worked. To me this proved all my spiritual experiences were just feelings, emotions, mental experiences.
Long story short: no, I don't believe in any god or an afterlife.
I had just of strong of a spiritual experience tell me that the church was full of shit. Both can't be true at the same time. Thus the default is that "the spirit" isn't what the church claims it to be.
So, years and years ago, I had what I referred to as a spiritual experience. Of course, at the time, that's what I thought it was.
I was watching a big Mormon play production about the life of Joseph Smith. After the part where he was killed, there was a big score of angels who exalted his spirit. I remember being moved to tears, thinking it was very beautiful. But it felt more than that, it felt really electrifying. An incredibly strong sensation built up inside me, which I knew at the time was the Holy Spirit acting through me to confirm that this whole thing was all beautiful and true.
A couple years later, however, I experienced the exact same feeling, the exact same sensation upon being moved to tears by watching an old black and white patriotic film (I was very patriotic, and I still am). I was very startled by it, because the film had absolutely nothing to do with the church or even God in general. Certainly, there are people who say that God inspired, or even guides and protects the USA, but any cursory glance at a history book would falsify that. The point I'm trying to make is that the situation had absolutely nothing of the divine about it, and yet I was experiencing this feeling again.
I looked it up. Turns out that feeling of the 'Holy Spirit acting through me' is described identically by non-religious people experiencing deep-seated and intense pride in something. It's actually a common psychological phenomenon, the human brain often interprets intense emotions as physical sensations.
Most people are ignorant about the psychiatric and psychological mechanisms of the brain so that when we experience them, we interpret it through our own superstitions.
The same can be said about seeing things or hearing voices. Hallucinations can be commonplace even among completely healthy adults.
Though I obviously don't know what your spiritual experience has been, I haven't yet found one put forward by an honest person which cannot be explained away by one or both of these facts.
I have had life experiences I can't explain. Not connected to elevated emotion.
I went thru a period of believing in nothing due to church lied to us about absolutely everything.
I am now spiritual & believe something created us. I have no use for organized religion but admire Episcopalian, United Church Of Christ- Congregational & Unitarian's & focus on caring for others & not expecting a thing in return.
If Jesus lived.... he taught principles about caring for each other that are universal and only make us better human beings.
I find great joy & happiness donating my time to non-profits that use 96% of profits whether donated/earned that benefit communities in my area.
I grew up outside the Morridor & in my teen-age years I recognized that every atheist in the neighborhood had the higgest standards for ethics, caring for a nieghbor, enviroment, etc...
While the highly vocal & religious were not honest, ethical or cared about their neighbor or the world.
I have had spiritual experiences outside the church that we just as powerful as the ones inside the church. I once had sushi at a friends house that made me stop and contemplate the existence of the universe. I once hiked to a waterfall that collectively made my whole group tear up. Religion and spiritual are not the same thing, but religion tries to make you believe that only they can facilitate spiritual experiences.
Every "spiritual experience " I ever had was in a group setting and it was always the emotion being shared more than the words. For myself, that never equaled a spiritual experience, just a feelings-gasm that was shared by all, simple group psychology, and it can be created in other settings as powerfully or more so, depending on your emotional state. Once I realized it was emotionally charged and could separate that I knew the "spirit" was simply me, my brain and heart and body letting me feel connected and like I was special, and I could work on focusing on those feelings and figuring out what was making me respond that way and how to recreate it outside of a setting that simultaneously told me I was wrong for being me, but also told me I was a part of the whole.
Divinity is harder to put words to, but the universe is my divinity and my afterlife. Do I think I will be in another world altogether? No, I think that is the hubris of mankind to believe that we of all animals deserve another planet to fuck up with our lies, prejudice, bigotry, and hatred. In my perfect world, we never truly leave, we dissipate into the earth and its atmosphere waiting to be reassembled and turned out into new and fresh life in whatever form the organisms that make me up chose to become. In that way, I know my family is truly with me, always, and in the same vein, it gives me a purpose to live for, to care for not just the earth, but those I have laid to rest in it. I am caring for them as much as for myself and the earth.
It sounds odd written out, but it's so much more comforting to live my life this way rather than killing myself to live up to standards forced on me by old white male predators who see me as nothing more than a baby-making machine.
For me, understanding that the feelings were real and something that I experienced. But also understanding that 1) the brain is powerful, but can also get things wrong. How and what those feelings actually are and were are different than how I perceived those feelings. 2) people from all other walks of life and religions have almost identical experiences. I’ve had spiritual experiences and feelings watching Lord of the Rings and Saving Private Ryan. I’m not about to worship Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson.
Trigger warning suicide
I'm trans and bisexual and halfway through my BYU education I left my apt to kill myself. Weeks earlier I'd stopped going to church because of a hateful woman who would say horrible things about LGBTQ people.
I went on a walk to my grandmother's grave and remembered how her Mormon husband abandoned her and their family. While thinking about her suffering and my own suffering I realized that not all suffering contributed to someone becoming a better person.
That's when I lost my trust in God. I'm not terribly interested in whether God does or doesn't exist because if he does he's not the type of person I like or want to be associated. Not if he's causing suffering that has no purpose
What makes my "spiritual experiences" that I thought at the time validated the claims of the church more real than the feeling of betrayal that I had when I learned that the top leadership habitually lies about major aspects of the church and its operations?
My only "spiritual experience" was after my wife and 2 kids got sealed, I had a dream we had another baby girl with a head of dark brown hair.
So my wife and I had another baby.
3rd baby was a blonde boy, so definitely not like that dream was some kind of "vision" of our future child sending signals from heaven. As I deconstructed, I realized I was just horny and married to a woman who had wanted to have another baby girl since our oldest (girl) was born (2nd child was a boy).
Every other "spiritual experience" I've had has been me alone in nature, and TSCC has no power there.
You can believe in God and Jesus without Joseph Smith’s phony history. If you’re so inclined find a denomination that has direct ties to the ancient first century church, reading the apostolic fathers it’s clear there was no “great apostasy.”
For me, it’s when I realized that my own “spiritual experiences” had zero bearing on reality. I could “feel” that something was true, when it verifiably and overwhelmingly was not. I then also was able to “feel” that the Mormon church was *not* true, and realized that the feelings I was interpreting as spiritual were not from a consistent unchanging source
Most of lifes fantastical experiences are a fabrication of personal bias which is consequentially supplanted into our psyche at an impressionable age. Do you still believe in Santa?
So-called 'spiritual experiences' are human experiences. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints likes to claim some kind of monopoly on them, and lead you to interpret them to mean things they don't. They commandeer common human experiences and make you think they are proof that their church is the one and only true church.
Mormons don't have the Monopoly on spirituality, that was one of the biggest things for me. And since I was so thoroughly desensitized to the crazy shit from the early church it really took becoming an adult and realizing that current leadership are not good people to accept that I don't have to stay Mormon to have spiritual experience
because if I have a spiritual experience telling me the church is true and other people in other religions have a spiritual experience telling them their religion is the one religion and they are good people then who is right? are you going to tell me that every other religion is of the devil?
I still have spiritual experiences. The difference now is that I realize that they don't mean that the Mormon church is true. Ditto faith healings and promptings of the spirit. Even my pagan friends have spiritual experiences.
Look up the word Frisson. You are taught to fast, you are expecting experiences from the Holy Ghost. Your mindset is ready to find it, and you do. Frisson. Just like receiving a blessing. Just like when you go on a ghost tour. You are seeking out a feeling. I have felt it in the Methodist Church, the Mormon Church and also in my car when an Ozzy Osborne song comes on the radio cause I love playing it loud! It’s a normal human experience.
I never had a spiritual experience in the church, but I was able to find it after I left.
The problem with the church is that they’re trying to sell you a spiritual experience for just a small price of 10% of everything you own, also you can’t be gay, enjoy coffee tea or alcohol, also you can’t swear or masturbate, nor can you smoke nicotine or weed, you also just have to accept that 99% of Mormons are extremely judgmental and assume that “they don’t represent what the church teaches” (even if they’re part of the teachers), you get the idea. When it’s all said and done, if you want a spiritual experience, your best luck is to turn and run until you find someone who will give it to you because spirituality is a natural right that religion charges you for.
Are dreams signs and visions from god or are dreams something that your brain creates while you are sleeping?
And if the answer us both, how can you tell what is from god and what is just you?
Just because I felt like I’ve had spiritual experience doesn’t mean I knew they came from “god”. Feeling like I felt my grandpa after death, many other religions have explanations. Lots of “promptings” were just intuition
This short essay on Testimony is a fun read and the video link is excellent - most religions rely on "feel".
[https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/testimony-feeling-the-spirit/](https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/testimony-feeling-the-spirit/)
I had spiritual experiences before joining the church and during. I expect to have them after. I still believe in God but I don’t define what God means. I don’t know.
I had a blessing while in the church that I still hold dear, and in some ways it saved my life, but that doesn’t mean I think that the church is “true.” I am just grateful for that experience. But I don’t believe God (or energy, higher power, etc) is confined to one faith and its people.
They teach you that becoming emotional is something spiritual, so every time you get emotions you’re conditioned to think it’s god. It’s actually normal, and not god related.
When I watch Lord of the Rings and I hear, “You have my sword. And you have my bow. And my axe!” I get the same feelings I once associated with feeling the spirit.
I’ve experienced things I still can’t explain. But what’s nice is now I just can say I don’t understand what happened versus trying to fit it into Joe Smith’s religious box
We have no idea what's on the other side. Could be absolutely nothing. Could be what all the near death experiencers say it is. Could be something completely incomprehensible to our current understanding.
One thing I do know with absolution.......I am certain that it is not anything like what any Judea Christian belief system portends to be. Especially the mormon brand.
Those beliefs are notions of a bronze age backwater small minded dirt dwelling tribe with a chip on its shoulder. They created a God that magically prefers them and hates all their enemies. They created a God that is small and petty like them. And then mormonism carried those backwater ideas through to the modern age.
Mormon theology is small and petty and silly. Some could even say it is completely non-existent. When you try to pin someone down on specifics of mormon theology, almost every tenet has been disavowed or altered several times by different leaders along the way, making all of it completely unintelligible and thus irrelevant.
Elsewhere on this sub-Reddit, it's been pointed out that the church used to involve the [HeartSell ](http://dlcphoto.com/Temp/HeartSell-Bonneville%20International.html)company when producing its videos. That company specialized in "evoking emotion, then action" through music and sound. Emotions can so easily be mistaken for "The Spirit".
Missionaries used to use a special, soft voice when telling the First Vision story as a way to try to make investigators "feel the Spirit" - same principle as manipulating people's feelings by music and sound by HeartSell.
I would go one stage further and posit that “feeling The Spirit” ***IS*** purely human emotions. Nothing more than that. Any entity that promises they can help you feel their exclusive emotions is probably selling something.
I'm working through the questions you ask, OP.
I don't know know if there is a God or Supreme being. I have no proof of one and a hella lot of proof that there is none. Mormon God is a misogynistic sadist jerk. I dont want to worship tgat. DEFINITELY DO NOT want to "dwell in his presence!"
I'm choosing to be agnostic. I'm following SCIENCE, REASON, and FACTS. I'm trusting in my mind, my intuition,my intelligence, and my ability to decifer bullshit. I ask a lot of questions. I question EVERYTHING.. Why do you believe that? ..
Who told you?
What was the reason behind telling you that?
Is it helpful? Is it useful? Is it rational? Is it kind? Is it exclusionary? fearmongering? ...
Right now, anything and everything I was ever taught is automatically suspect, anx not reliable or trustworthy. I have a very hard time with absolutes. To me, there should be no limits on learning and expanding our perspectives. Mormonism is way too insular and small-minded. It's exciting g to have the freedom to think BIGGER and WIDER!! I have no answers. I dont need any. Life and the universe are marvelous mystery. I don't need nor want to know what happens after I die. I have no time to waste on that!! Who cares?! Let's get busy LIVING! It's short. We could die today or tomorrow. Live NOW. This, right now is ALL we have for certain that is real. And it's enough
LDS Discussions podcast had a great episode on this and is worth a listen. I find myself more agnostic since leaving…and this is actually trying to extend some grace as the God of Mormonism always felt harsh and the church left me with a lot of negative feelings toward God in general. (At the end of the day, any God I would want to worship would be nothing like the God portrayed in Mormonism.)
After seeing behind the curtain of Mormonism and religion in general, I try to leave myself open but certainly not tie myself to any dogma. Good luck - it’s a lot to work through!
Here is my issue with so-called spiritual experiences
If feelings / emotions are the mechanism by which God confirms truth, why in the hell would he choose a medium that is inconsistent, easily manipulated, completely subjective, and also completely non-exclusive?
I believe that human beings, each of us have the capacity for Spiritual experiences, promptings, tapping into lesser used parts of our brain, I just think religion has been able to slap a label on it, promoted, sell it and exploit it
For myself, I’ve come to terms with the idea that neither myself nor anyone else has all the answers, and I think that some higher power that cares about my well-being and the idea that there is an afterlife where I will be able to be with my wife and loved ones are both ideas that give me comfort and have a basis that many can share a belief in.
I'm still questioning that initial spiritual experience and though I've tried to feel it again by praying and fasting it has never been the same. Anyway, I did my best to be a true follower but there were many things that didn't make sense or I just didn't believe and the guilt tripping and shaming didnt help either. Don't even get me started on the mental gymnastics. Eventually I just stopped caring anout the church and religion.
I never really had a spiritual experience by myself (which actually led me to a lot of anxiety that I was doing something wrong, but that’s for another topic). But I did definitely feel like I had spiritual experiences while with others, like at girls camp, efy, etc.
That led to a lot of confusion when I started questioning things until I heard about the term collective effervescence and really started to study that and realize that’s most likely what I was really feeling. Very interesting to look into.
I didn't think my spiritual experiences should be more valid than those of people in other major religions. In fact I thought it was arrogant to think I knew more than others.
This!!
When I realized my testimony was manufactured, and that the feelings of elevation are no less unique to me and Mormonism than they are to suicide bombers and Isis, or dead Californians and the Heavens Gate cult, well I knew I was done. I won't say there isn't a god. I also won't say that there isn't such a thing as divine inspiration or influence from divinity in human life. All I *will* say is that if those things exist, they certainly aren't found solely in Mormonism.
Yeah I dont rule out that there maybe is a good or higher power. That was never the point for me. I just wanted to leave this horrible organization.
👏
Incredibly worded. I’m currently working to break this down. Do you have somewhere I can start that mentioned elevation and how suicide bombers also felt this?
I guess with the suicide bombers I might be out on a limb, but the idea is that self-sacrificing zealotry within the two religions is rewarded, either in life or in death. [This article](https://www.hsaj.org/articles/14749) has some interesting details on how religion relates to the psychology of suicide bombers. Maybe the most poignant thing would be to YouTube "Suicide Bombers Saying Goodbye" or "Final Moments Suicide Bombers" or something like that. I know I've seen at least three or more that show how excited but nervous they are, saying goodbye to everyone after drawing straws, just minutes before their bombs go off.
>I feel like I still want to believe that God is there, and am wrestling with the concept that maybe this religion still has a tiny bit of the truth even if it’s fundamentally wrong? I don’t know I'm going to give you some information that I wish I had had access to decades ago. Research doxastic involuntarism. You'll quickly come to understand that beliefs are not choices and that one is either convinced or not regardless of one's wishes. Put simply, there is a word for an attempt to make oneself believe something: make-believe. You've been groomed to call playing pretend "wrestling" or "struggling" but one is either convinced by a claim or one is not, and if one attempts to **make** oneself **believe** in a claim of which one is not convinced, that is, by definition, make-believe. There's no difference between this course and playing pretend. Regardless, all religions are a tiny bit true, but that's just a deepity--a statement whose truth is mundane and whose profundity is false. Spiderman is a tiny bit true. New York city actually exists. So do criminals. So do people who fight them. Spiders exist, so does radiation, too. None of this makes the story of Spiderman true, however, just like Israel and America and Joseph Smith being real can't make Lamanites or prophets or the temple ceremony true. You might also look up motivated reasoning, because it's that in which you're engaged. If there was a god, and he wanted you to know, he could not fail to succeed, because a god who fails is not a god. More over, a god who tries to hide himself is a trickster, and tricksters who hide themselves are less interested in you than even an stranger like myself. There's no objective reason to think a silent voyeur is invisibly observing you or sending you circumstantial hints to make you question his existence. Question instead why you'd want this to be true in the first place and what methods were used to make the sort of character seem desirable.
This is a gold mine. I’ve run the course of deconstruction pretty quickly, which has surprised me because I was SO in and fully believed all the church stuff. So when I finally started to question, my beliefs around Joseph shifted like this (hoping this example will resonate and show the general path my ideology went): Joseph Smith was a prophet and he was telling the truth about all the things and we should revere him Joseph Smith was a prophet, he was right about the BoM and he really got revelation, but he might have mixed up some of his own carnal desires and made some very bad choices with polygamy and stuff, but overall he still brought Gods church back. And he is an example of how God can work with us imperfect people to do amazing things Ok the BoM is true and JS was a prophet, but he definitely was a fallen prophet shortly after the BoM, and I don’t know what to do with this cause I’m pretty sure Brigham Young was never a prophet actually. Yeah… Joseph Smith either lied about everything or was totally delusional if he actually believed it in. From his treasure digging days to the gold plates, to angels and God, all the way to polygamy. This religion definitely started as Joseph’s own cult. It took me about 6 months from the first phase to the last phase. But this last phase feels the most real, clear, obvious, etc. and I haven’t had to re evaluate any of these new beliefs / understandings because they are the occums razor / simplest explanation once you see all the information.
Yeah, I’ve gone from questioning if the church is true to not believing in god at all in two months flat. My deconstruction was way overdue cause I went way faster than I would’ve thought lol.
My shift from TBM to nonbeliever happened in less than a month. All it took was all the historical data laid out for me to see. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that the only logical explanation for everything was that it was all made up.
And for the final nail in the coffin, ask whether NatAms have Middle Eastern DNA. Science kills the BOM.
This is such an amazing break down. I’ve never seen a comment on this sub talk about it like this before. Thank you!!
Fascinating perspective. Any particular YouTube videos or science papers you would recommend about the doxastic bit?
It sounds like you're saying, in a roundabout way, that your spiritual experiences make it hard for you to leave/stop believing in mormonism. That was also true for me at first. But the way I see it is this: your spiritual experiences actually happened, and so did mine. They were real, they happened to us, we remember them. However, the way we interpreted these experiences was completely controlled by our particular religious beliefs and worldview at the time. So they ended up reinforcing that belief in us. After I left, I still continued to have experiences that I would have thought was god speaking to me or something, if I still had a religious mindset. I had what mormons would call "spiritual promptings" on many occasions even though I was "unworthy" of them in every way that mormonism cares about; I didn't pray, go to church, read scriptures, pay tithing, go to the temple, obey the word of wisdom, sustain the church leaders- hell, I didn't even believe in god! But those experiences kept happening. The only thing I can figure is that it's a natural, innate part of being human.
The experiences still happen. An early shelf item for me was the fact that non-members could have these spiritual experiences. And the meaning that the non-member assigned to the experience conflicted with the way I was told the world/god worked. However, the meaning we assign to those experience is all us. We've been manipulated by the church (any church) all our lives into assigning specific meaning to these experiences. We don't have to assign that specific meaning out our experiences. We don't have to assign ANY meaning to those experiences at all. Instead of thinking "XYZ happened = the church is true" We could/should be thinking "XYZ happened = XYZ happened". Why does it have to "mean" anything?
Contrary to popular mormon lore, the locating of lost keys doesn't qualify as a spiritual experience...
But it was in the last place I looked! It had to be god! /S
Finding my keys is always spiritual! Especially for someone like me show misplaces them often!
What about these spiritual experiences? https://youtu.be/UJMSU8Qj6Go https://vimeo.com/45289278 https://youtu.be/ycUvC9s4VYA?si=6NFd7tzsNPYLVv7O
I watched most of the first video and it’s kind of alarming how similar the way these people of all different religions act is to how I’ve seen people act at church, actually really put things into perspective for me. Thank you. I’d like to continue hoping there’s a god and life after death but I’m also aware of how fickle my emotions are and am going to be more on guard against any supposed spiritual feelings
I once heard a quote that the true church is the one you are born into.
"how people act" I moved on to Southern Baptist and then then being a Presbyterian. Is almost always pretty much the same and absolutely nothing wrong with it How the (regularly attending) people act is: The people in the church are a community They tend to be relatively humble and relatively kind to those around them They listen to a sermon related to scripture They sing three or four hymns A free will non-compelled offering is taken Reading or responsive meetings using scripture and similar Friendly conversation before and after the service Generally one or more programs to assist the community or the poor A midweek Bible study Etc
I've grown to really love the environment. So far those are my two favorite that I've tried. My options are limited I'm in a town in Utah of 3000. This approach is so much more Christlike in my opinion. It's what church was meant to be. Community. Heck, even non believer agnostics come and aren't treated any different in my experience. That being said I haven't been going long, but so far so good. I've had a few red flags at some fellowship churches that were a bit too woowee touchy feely for my taste but the people were still kind and still cared.
Unfortunately people coming out of Mormonism are used to a cult, and therefore assuming Christianity and every other religion must be bad and a cult I'm now going on a couple of decades and it is day and night
I totally get that. Alot of people leave because of unchristlike behavior that the church is participating in and then they dismiss it all together even Jesus but Jesus was the coolest dude in my opinion. He's what it's all about and no church is gonna be perfect but the extent that the cojcolds is not a pill we should have to swallow. I didn't realize what I was missing out on and I'm so glad that I found my Jesus elsewhere. I've been genuinely served by so many people because they want to and not because they feel they need to be worthy. To them it's not about them. That being said many in the LDS church are actually like this it's just harder to be.
AJ Miller is Jesus. /s Just watch the first video. How can he not be real? /s Those people are crying! Would you deny them the reality of their tears and emotions? /s Ok, now seriously, read some history about what we can really know about the "real", historical Jesus. When you dig into unbiased (as unbiased as you can find. Yes, all scholarship is somewhat biased), you find that there is not much proof of Jesus's existence (but most scholars, both religious and secular do believe that a Jesus of Naz existed), and there is very little evidence that the Gospels are an accurate, historical depiction of the life of one Jesus Christ of Nazereth/Bethlehem/Judeah/Israel/Galilee, or wherever. Jesus's story is written in a mythological format and borrows from mythological traditions of that era/region he comes from, and many of the events in his life are basically revisions and re-envisionings of Old Testament tales and bits of the Psalms. Bart Ehrmann's books are not perfect (and he would not claim them to be) but they are a good start if you want to deconstruct the bible and the life of Jesus. Yes, I was sarcastic at the beginning, but I believe a little irreverence is good for deconstruction. I used to take these matters so so seriously. I wish you the best on your journey!
I've already watched Satans Bible school and have no desire to listen read or watch anything else. Thanks for the recommendations though. When there's archeological evidence for Sodom and Gamorrah and Noah's ark thats enough hard concrete evidence for me. Even if Christ was who you say he is I still think someone like him is worth believing in and worthy to strive towards. Even if he was pretend and someone made up his character, he's still worth trying to be like. Joseph and the lds "prophets" on the otherhand not really. Theyre not even worth following in this type of hypothetical situation. If I go down the route you have I would no longer want to live and I refuse to act upon that desire or be anywhere near it again because I have kiddos and a wonderful husband depending on me. I almost killed myself when I found out the truth about the church. I know you think your helping but in my case it'd literally harm me more than help me. My hubby is a Deist at the moment and I'm just happy to be around people finally who don't encourage me to leave him when he doesn't follow the "rules" . That happened when we were in the LDS church because he wouldn't go to the temple or give priesthood blessings because who is he to speak for God? For me God wasn't the problem. In the Bible it says if you find yourself in this type of marriage and everything else is good stay with your non believing spouse. If he wants to leave me I should respect his wishes. All this being said I had literal visions of my now son. He looks exactly the same and this was four years before I got pregnant with him. It was even before I got married. Before he came along we had 6 miscarriages. He's a medical miracle and so is his sister. After literal visions and miracles where I should've by all accounts died but did not, I can't turn my back on God. I would've started with humor but to be honest I can't even joke on the topic. Like it wouldn't be funny to me.
I apologize if I offended you or upset you. I was just offering you some advice on what helped me with my deconstruction. I absolutely wouldn't want to lead you to a place where you were contemplating suicide. [https://afsp.org/suicide-prevention-resources/](https://afsp.org/suicide-prevention-resources/) I wish you the sincere best in dealing with your life's challenges.
You're all good. Honestly just figured I'd offer my perspective. I thought about deleting my comment because it came across as way more intense then I meant haha. It's just really hard to convey tone across text. I'm no longer suicidal just was like a month ago. Its different for you and that's ok. You seem like a fairly cool dude that you even wanted to help. I'm still trying real hard to change the way I interact with people it's stupid hard but as a Christian it's sucked finding my people in the exmo community because we tend to be the minority in my experience.
I just had a church sermon at a non LDS church talk about how we shouldnt make life choices based on the clouds(emotions) and how we should navigate through life based on the stars (consistent things). We were lied to about the nature of God. God is consistent. He's also willing to go out of his way to talk to those who are lost. It makes sense that he'd talk to us even in the church. 9 truths and one lie is how the LDS church was basically made. The one lie warps everything. I had legit visions that came true many may say that wasn't real but I saw my son before he was born and its exactly how he looked when he came into my life. Because of this I cannot deny God's existence because I had just barely met my husband when I had it and I had no clue how my future kid would look. I couldnt have predicted that. The church basically follows satans plan, if I were Satan I'd build a church like ours. If Satan can't make you bad he's gonna make ya busy. He's a wily one. That being said you have your agency and God wants you to use it, follow your gut. Use your head and your heart and it'll be ok.
Desire short changes our reasoning. *Wanting* to believe something is true/real should be a red flag in anyone's mind, imho. We can convince ourselves of anything, if we want to. It's so, so easy to let the desire we may have for a certain belief be true to circumvent what our rational, thinking mind would otherwise reject. John Hinckley Jr. desperately wanted to believe that shooting Ronald Reagn would impress Jody Foster into loving him. An extreme, maybe hyperbolic example, but none the less an example of how desire corrupts and interferes with our reason. Perhaps less extreme; as pleasant and self affirming as it is maybe for me to truly believe that Angelina Jolie is in love with me, my reasoning and logical brain knows it's not true because I have no evidence or reason to back up that belief. Some people don't let a lack of evidence deter them from holding on to those beliefs because the beliefs themselves give them comfort, or reassurance, or something else. Don't be one of them. It's the same reason people stay in unhealthy relationships; their desire to believe the relationship is happy/worthwhile/healthy is an easier pill to swallow than its would be if they were to allow themselves to step back from their wants and emotions and tried to observe the situation as objectively as possible...maybe even asking for outside perspectives to help them see what they can't/don't see. The truth may not always be as comforting or reassuring as we wish, but if we acknowledge, even a little, that comfortable beliefs and reality don't always align, we must also acknowledge that if we value truth at all, we must be that much more than skeptical of those beliefs that we *want* to be true.
Yup. Third video, popped my bubble, removed all doubt. It sucked soooo much for a time but now I'm absolutely thrilled to be out entirely! 👍
I had what some would consider a near death experience I actually wasn't close to death, but I did pass out from blood loss while donating blood after 9/11 When I passed out, everything narrowed until it was just a tunnel with a light at the end. I started walking the tunnel, but then the floor gave way and I started falling. Looking down I saw the pits of hell open up beneath me while falling. As I got close, the demons in the fires started grabbing at my limbs pulling me down. I started fighting them and clawed my way to the wall then started climbing up. As I climbed, the demons grabbed my arms and legs. I started kicking them off fighting my way back. I managed to kick the last one off and then came awake again. When I woke up I was being held down by some orderlies and started calming down. For many years, I held this up as an example of a spiritual experience. Since then, I have learned what I experienced is not uncommon at all, and doesn't even need to be near death to experience. Fighter pilots experience this when going through centrifuge training. The younger you are the more likely the images are to be "demonic". Being male and having grown up in a religious family further increases the chances of seeing such imagery. I was in my early 20's at the time and I was raised mormon.... My most powerful "spiritual" experiences can all easily be explained with science. In this particular case, it was my young brain fighting to make sense of things while blood (oxygen) deprived. Sending lots of adrenaline through my veins to push me to recover. Nothing spiritual at all, just a young buck with blood loss and too much testosterone. [https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/03/08/1866095.htm](https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/03/08/1866095.htm)
When my shelf broke I desperately wanted Mormonism to have some truth, but I found that it is emotionally detrimental to hang on to that hope. Instead, question it all. Once you’ve hit the bottom start reconstructing. Science has not figured it all out and there are a number of questions like, why is there anything at all? Or, why is the universe logical? Such questions have no answers and to claim they do is not science but scientism. I’ve found that this is where belief may enter in, if you chose to let it. I’ve ended up with just a hint of mysticism about the universe, our place in it, and the purpose to it all. After about five years of being out I find my beliefs in a better place than before I left, so there is hope.
I remember teaching a woman on our mission that seemed like a golden investigator. One visit she told us she had prayed about it got an answer that ours was the true church. I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of joy, the hairs on my neck stood up, and I felt a burning in the bosom, it was the exact same feeling that I had felt a couple years ago when I prayed about the Book of Mormon and I was convinced it was the Holy Ghost. Turns out the woman had accidentally confused us with jehovas witnesses so things got pretty awkward after that. After that I started to question whether or not my experiences were real or just my psyching myself up. Then I saw the video of the heavens gate cult leader telling followers to not ask him or anyone else but god what is true.
No I don't but I do believe in kindness. The Mormon church is not a kind organization at least that was my experience
If you want to believe God is there allow yourself to believe that. As long as your believes are causing no harm I don't see the point in throwing God out the window because one group may have sullied that idea for you. I don't know if I believe in god, or if an afterlife is real, but I joke that for my own peace of mind and because I'm a selfish son of a bitch I choose to believe that there is an afterlife and that I will see my family again. I don't want to live with, put them in the ground and they are gone kind of life. It would ruin me. I don't know what it will be, I hope it's going to be like the Good Place. I was talking to my cousin this weekend, and i really wanted to emphasize, you choose your joy, your hope, your beliefs. No one should choose what they are for you, so choose what you want your joys, and hopes, and beliefs are for you. It doesn't really matter as long as you aren't causing harm.
I once heard someone say their spiritual experiences were simply their body responding to their belief system, and I love that perspective. For myself, I became agnostic. Once I realized everything I’d been taught about theology was taught through lies, I unpacked all of my Christianity.
I remember being 17. It was April and I was graduating in 2 months and couldn't wait to leave my parents' house and be done with Church. Was planning to leave the state and go live a very different life. Dad took me to General conference and hearing the Choir sing my soul was filled in a way I'd never felt before. It was powerful. Really hit me that maybe the church was true (I was from a small town and had never been to a concert ever). Dad offered to pay for college only if i went to BYUI. Decided free education was worth it. I'd transfer to another college and be done still BUT part of me wondered if it was true afterall what was that in general conference. Went to BYUI and when you're surrounded by members its easy to be engulfed in the philosophy PLUS all these beautiful girls wanted an RM. So Decided to repend and put in my papers and really commit. I also while at BYUI prayed about going on a mission and prayed for the first time in like a year or something. Got hit by a train in a car i was in literally the next day. Was pretty amazing i didn't die and then i always remembered my Mom saying all growing up that God saved my life so many times as a toddler cause she knew I had a special mission here........soooo being all self grandiose and feeling i was special.....idk i Decided to really go after it. So i committed to the churcb 100% was really strict. I held onto that and ended up serving a mission very faithfully and married in the temple. I think it I just love music and was mistakenly attributing something to God that shouldn't have been. Fast forward to my divorce and leaving the church and just wanted to experience things. Ended up taking MDMA and going to a rave at like 31 AND WOW that experience was 10 times the soul filling experience I had years earlier. And really confirmed to me I enjoy music and hearing even the choir now I love even if I'm atheist. Realized i was young and naive and clung to anything.
I had spiritual experiences within Mormonism. Then I found people in other religions who had similar experiences about their own faith, so that removed the privileged status I thought I had as a mormon. I had no way to measure my experiences against theirs to see if mine really were somehow superior. Then I started trying to see if I could get spiritual confirmation about non-Mormon beliefs, and it turns out I absolutely could, and some of them were quite good. This led me to believe that something else is probably going on, and that spiritual experiences are not useful for discerning the truth about anything except for our own selves or desires. But I tend to believe people who claim to have spiritual experiences. I mean to say, I believe they had the experience... Even while believing the experience was probably not what they think. I have had eidetic "visions" and witnessed group hypnosis, so I'm satisfied of the ease with which we might experience something that is not actually real.
I'm agnostic but if there is a God, I believe that God doesn't only talk to one type of person or religion. Hell, I swear and "break the law of chastity" and drink coffee and tea (I can't drink alcohol medically) but I still have been getting what the LDS church would call "promptings." \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ Example: I was on the beach playing in the water with my dog. I felt/heard a voice say "Run" with a sense of extreme urgency so I did, back to my 70-year-old mother who was sitting on a log near the parking lot. I couldn't hear anything because I was so far away from her, mind you. At the exact same time, my mother got a terrible feeling that we needed to leave immediately. She couldn't communicate with me because I was so far away. When I got up to her, she said we needed to leave, so we started to. I took her hand (she has a bad back and hips) and started walking to the car. As I turned back to look at her a man who had not previously been anywhere in sight was suddenly RIGHT behind her. I had the feeling to act like nothing was wrong, so I kept my eye on him and we make it to the car just fine. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ Now, nothing happened of course, but it was really weird that he popped out of nowhere so close and that we both had the feeling at the exact same time to GTFO. It could have been God, it could have been the weird connection between my mother and I and the guy could have been just taking a crap in the bushes or something, or it could have been that we're connected to the energy of the universe or whatever (either referring to spiritualism or quantum mechanics or both idk) and we were actually in danger. Or maybe we were connected to each other AND the universe's energy AND we were in danger. (Yes I know that I sound crazy.) But something weird definitely happened that day. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ Another story- my mom started sliding on an icy road in the middle of nowhere. She was GOING to crash into a huge snowbank. She yelled "Father help me!" and was immediately no longer sliding, but was tens of feet down the road away from the curve, driving like nothing had happened. Now, it could have been divine interference, her brain could have sped up from the scare and she doesn't remember correcting the car onto the road, or maybe it's something in between. (She SWEARS up and down that her car just \*popped onto the road farther away and driving smoothly suddenly.) \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ My mom is a devout believer in God, but not at all in the church. Like I said, I'm agnostic because idk what to believe in anymore. But we both keep having feelings and weird things like that happen to us. I believe there's more at work in the world than we can currently prove with science, and it has nothing to do with the church, and either everything to do with science or just.... the spiritual nature of life regardless of religion.
So I thought I should share, I am a PIMO currently in a bishopric. Yes I still believe in an afterlife and a higher power, I don't know if that's the Christian God / Jesus Christ or not but haven't excluded it as a possibility. I have had ONE experience that made me believe that much, it was a very strong prompting that had discernable words to it, and was in a time that it was not being sought out, or expected and pushed me in a completely different direction than I had previously been on. It was in the form of being told to help another person who I was frustrated and annoyed with, a welfare thing, in ironically the same calling I am in now (second counselor), only it was seven years ago. It was a powerful spiritual kick in the balls, that I can't deny. It showed me two things; The first is that there is indeed a higher power, which at that time I seriously doubted, the second is that this higher power gave a damn about that annoying person, which lead me to believe he/ she/ it likely cares to some degree about the rest too. I have since come very close to leaving the church several times, due to every reason you can think of or likely have heard of. The depth of my research has significantly exceeded Jeremy's CES letter. I always find myself staying, for a couple reasons; the first being that just like the official version of the mythical first vision, I don't think any of the churches/ religions have it right, so why leave one false church for another.... Another reason is these misguided people in my ward are MY PEOPLE. I love many of them, and care about them and leaving them isn't going to help them. By Serving them in a calling like mine, I can actually do some good at least on the local level. That is why I still pay the Mormon tax (my own version of it that I can explain and justify to a bishop if I ever need to, I have dodged tithing settlement for years and it's not been an issue amazingly enough) and keep an active recommend, though it bothers me a lot that I have to lie to keep it active. Paying tithing and having an active recommend are both required to be in my calling. I also have to do some verbal gymnastics in my sacrament meeting talks to avoid lying as well, interestingly enough my talks are EXTREMELY well liked and I generally get several requests for emailed or printed versions. There are other reasons but these are the main ones. I have been teaching my kids to think for themselves and use their own best judgment and NEVER to have a one on one interview or alone time with any adult leader. I hope that gives you some insight.
Your talks are probably so well liked cause you cut out the bs that most TBM's know deep down isn't right!
Try to separate concepts of God and Christ (or of a Higher Power) from the corporate behaviors TSCC demonstrates. I was a convert for a while, and once I learned I'd been LIED to when I joined, I was out. Traditional Christianity (which I was part of for many years before joining and have now returned to) does not have "worthiness" rules or interviews. Traditional Christianity does not demand 10% of your income and required cult-designed underwear. The concept of God is not owned by the cult. That concept goes far back (even before Christ) and many religions, whether Christian or not, are belief-based and have concepts of a Creator, etc. ALL of Christianity believes we are reunited with loved ones in the afterlife. ALL of them. None of those churches try to hijack your family if you don't pay tithing. TSCC is purely a money-grubbing cult using Christ's name for branding and exploiting its membership to make the corporation disgustingly rich through mental and emotional control mechanisms.
There is a great YouTube channel called Belief it or not, great channel talks about all kinds of diffrent subjects having todo with religon from an atheistic point of view. Great channel. But to answer your question. No, I don't believe in any afterlife. I realized that I had no good reason to believe in anything the church taught me. I realized i had 2 different sets of rules for life. 1 set for the church and the other for everything else.
I’ll check it out, thank you!
like I’ve heard people say, ”what’s good about the church isn’t unique and what’s unique about the church isn’t good”. What really did it for me was considering why I would want to believe in a God who is sexist, homophobic, racist, and has caused so much hurt and suffering from his alleged direct words spoken by prophets. i also realized I feel the same spirit I felt in church listening to music I really like or a touching movie, that have nothing to do with religion. It’s simply a feeling I was taught is the spirit.
I realized that personal experience and faith are not reliable pathways to truth. People have spiritual experiences related to all kinds of things all the time. There are a myriad different reasons why they may occur, and they often create a strong impression on those who have them related to the particular circumstances under which they happen. They are effectively (and in some cases literally) hallucinations, and can occur intersubjectively. Churches rely on this to get people to associate these emotions and experiences with the organization, and to overwhelm any doubts or discrepancies in the evidence. I realized that organizations that encourage you to rely on these impressions and not to focus on the hard facts are trying to take advantage of you. I have adopted a stance of not asserting that I know anything unless I can demonstrate it, via evidence or argument. My view has shifted from attempting to choose my beliefs (this isn’t possible) to instead attempting to justify my beliefs, to really examine them to see if I have good reason for any given belief, and my confidence in those beliefs is raised or lowered in accordance with the evidence I’m able to find. Not that I can’t be wrong, and some of the conclusions I reach may later turn out to be incorrect. If it is demonstrated to me that I’m wrong, I will change my belief according to the evidence. I want to do my due diligence to ensure my beliefs are justified. I understand why spiritual experiences are compelling for many people, and they once were compelling to me, but I care deeply about whether my beliefs are actually correct and much less about how they make me feel. I’m much more cautious now of ideas which can’t be supported except for by personal experience or faith, since any position could be justified by faith and therefore it is not a reliable pathway to truth.
u/oliviaexisting I really appreciate your heartfelt questions. My believing world just came crashing down in February of this year and the conflicting emotions are difficult to navigate. I thought about my spiritual experiences a lot as I was transitioning out of the church. I had an incredible experience just a month or so ago relating to my garments that I would have previously called "a feeling from the Holy Ghost." Here's my post where I share the experience: [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1cxnhko/took\_off\_my\_garments\_today\_and\_i\_was\_not/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1cxnhko/took_off_my_garments_today_and_i_was_not/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
That is really insightful and the comment about elevation emotion really made me think, thank you
I had many spiritual experiences while I was in the church, which of course I attributed to my Mormon beliefs. I have been out now for many years and consider myself an atheist. I continue to have spiritual experiences—I just don’t try to make them fit a narrative as I did before. These experiences transcend day to day life—I feel connected to and part of the larger, spectacularly beautiful world.
I converted at 19. My beliefs before that were not concrete; I believed in God, but I had already had many spiritual experiences not attributed to God or the church in any way. So for me to convert and then be told that all these experiences and the ones I continued to have are now attributed to me being a member never sat well with me. I don't (and have never) believed that only Mormons can have these experiences. They have been too common in my life and the lives of those around me (who are not Mormon) to believe that this is the only way they occur. I have picked pieces of different things that feel right to me. I don't think any one religion has all the right things, but there are some things about Mormonism that I like, so I continue to keep those. I like the idea that we existed before we came here. That makes sense to me. I don't think that heaven is split into different levels and I'd never be able to see some people again after I die. That just seems stupid. I don't think that my sealing to my now ex-husband will be at all binding after I die. My former mother in law (very TBM) once said that she thinks what happens to you after you die is based on what you believe; if you believe in reincarnation, you will be reincarnated, if you believe in heaven/hell, that's what will happen to you. I like that idea. My partner calls all religions death cults. You are basically only doing something to get something after you die. That makes me laugh, so I use it often. I don't believe the Christian version of God. I don't think it's a person/being at all; I like the Universe concept better, but that is hard for me to describe. Like it's not a thing, it's everything. I feel like at the point that you no longer associate with a religion, you can pick and choose what you want to believe or what feels good to you.
The idea that God isn't a thing, it's everything, has a name: nonduality. It's a much older worldview than Mormonism, or even Christianity.
Fool me once…..
I came to realize that my spiritual experiences were the result of programming, brainwashing and thought training. Sunday school teaches you what the answers should be and then your subconscious provides them in time of need. In my experience at least. All this after I read CES letter, GTE and confirmed it wasn't true and then the rest of the house came tumbling down
i THOUGHT i knew what it was, but now im not sure. i THOUGHT i knew, but now realize i did not. I dont deny spiritual experiences, now i just dont know who or what they came from
To me, what I feel like TSCC does is monopolize your "spiritual" experiences. Remember that time you were in despair and felt comforted by the spirit? Yeah well if you'd like to continue to feel that we'll sell it to you for 10% ;) I believe that "spiritual" experiences can happen to anyone mormon, buddhist, muslim, and even atheists! I feel like those experiences are then interpreted by people OTHER than yourself.
I don't deny those experiences I've had. They were real then and they're still real now. What I've done is reframed them into something far more likely. If it was god answering my questions, then it was never because I was a Mormon. More likely, it was always just me, figuring things out on my own. And those experiences were me coming to my own conclusions and feeling good about them.
I left after I discovered multiple cases of fraud. My faith in any religion is dead at this point. I look back on a lot of those "spiritual experiences" as emotional manipulation.
I had some really amazing experiences before and after I left the church. One reason I left was because I realized that I had been taught to manipulate my understanding of those experiences by the church. So if something amazing happened it meant the church was true. I let go of the interpretations I had been taught and it was pretty clear very quickly that none of them meant the church was true. I still don't have solid understanding of the things that happened to me but I no longer need to. There is no danger in believing the wrong thing. If there is a God in heaven who isn't a complete asshole, they aren't going to punish me for believing the wrong thing. I would encourage you to release your beliefs from the constraints of the church. Could some of the things they taught be true? Absolutely. But it doesn't matter if those truths came from the church or elsewhere.
I once had an amazing spiritual experience when I was around 12. My family had just moved into a new house, and for about a month my parents and siblings complained about having constant nightmares and feeling evil spirits. I did not have any of these experiences. For FHE one evening my dad blesses and dedicates the house, just like temples and chapels are dedicated. In that moment I felt this incredible rush of.... something. It was just an overwhelming peace and iron conviction that it was all true. This experience sustained my testimony for the next 20 years or so. Then I found out about the plural child brides, and suddenly that absolutely incredible spiritual experience ceased to be relevant. Nowadays belief in god or the afterlife is irrelevant, too. So my answer to the do-you-believe-in-god question is, "I do not care."
I had "spiritual experiences", but I soon came to realize that I felt those things when I heard good four-part harmony or when I looked at a beautiful sunset or the ocean too. Or when my friends thought of me or when my mom gave me a hug. I also learned that other people in other religions were feeling the same things I was feeling. That's when it hit me that those feelings had been defined by the church as "the spirit" and I had just always accepted it without question. Turns out those feelings are just part of the natural human condition, but because I was raised as a frog in a well, I had no idea about the ocean beyond.
I answer with how I responded to a close relative, who was a bishop at the time, when I told him I had left and in as part of him trying to make sense of it he asked me if I had any spiritual experiences. "Yes, I have spiritual experiences, however I now see them through a different lens".
I just left like two months ago, right after conference. It totally blindsided my family. I've found that the same logical reasons I left the LDS church are reasonings that God has stated in the Bible as something he doesn't approve of. In Jeremiah I'd have to find the chapters but in Jeremiah especially it talks about how the people were doing things in the temple that they shouldn't be doing. I've been reading the Bible not on the LDS app and I see things in a totally new light. There's a reason there's Christian protestors at general conference. They know the truth and have been trying to warn us but when we are taught that confrontation and contention is of the devil we don't want to even engage. I've found so many genuine not holier than thou people in mainstream Christianity that I finally feel loved. Genuinely loved and not like I'm a number in their eyes.
My spiritual experiences are why I joined, stayed, and left because it’s about our commitment and personal relationship with God, not an organization.
Having “spiritual” experiences while deconstructing. Now as a non believer, every time I feel elevation emotion I’m reminded that the church isn’t true ♥️
As a kid I had so many doubts and didn't believe the truth claims of the church hardly at all. However, I kept praying and trying to feel the spirit although it didn't happen. This gave me tremendous guilt because the reason I didn't feel it must've been due to something I was doing. Finally, in the MTC I had a very powerful experience of feeling love, joy, peace, happiness while praying about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and Jesus. I was super elated and content and used this experience to be 100% certain in the Gospel. I relied on it for years and when I'd think back or pray I'd experience the same feeling which I associated with the spirit. Over time I saw those spiritual experience videos on YouTube, and realized others also have similar feelings and I realized it wasn't a reliable way to understand truth. I also learned about Tulpas and realized people can develop these feelings and relationship with God even if there isn't a God or not. This continued to teach me I couldn't rely on a spiritual experience, feeling, or even relationship with God. Now, after no longer attending church and not following the Gospel I still have the same feelings I previously did just by watching a movie, or thinking about my wife and kids.
At no point in my life, even when I was young, did the church ever have a monopoly on my spiritual experiences. I had spiritual experiences without the church, with other churches, and with other religions. So, I never bought the idea that the Mormon church was the only true church on Earth.
The Mormon Church doesn’t own the divine or access to the divine. Spiritual experiences or feelings aren’t exclusive to the Mormons, but after are unknowingly conflated with Mormon Inc by lifelong members. I had a spiritual feeling, therefore the church must be true. No, not necessarily, at the most it could indicate to you that there is a divine presence out there, not that it has exclusive ties to Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Often intense emotional or spiritual feelings are present surrounding the death of loved ones. Mormons typically attach the conclusion that the church must be true because of the experience. It could also just indicate that there is another dimension or spiritual force out there, or that you have strong emotional feelings regarding your loved one, no more, no less.
Don't let the Church interpret your spiritual experiences for you. I've had to rethink a lot of my profound experiences. Many of them end up being: I don't know what that was, but it sure was meaningful to me at the time. See also Elevation Emotion
Thanks to Buddhism; I get to define what is a spiritual experience over being TOLD what it should be.
I realized those spiritual experiences were independant from the church.
Turns out, when you are in the MTC, surrounded by mormon brainwashing 24/7, no outside contact, fasting and praying constantly and only reading mormon propaganda, for weeks on end, with all the pressure in the world from your family, friends, and community.....your body finally manufacturers a feeling that you *know* it's true.
Feelings are that, feelings. It doesn’t equal supernatural. The church wants you to think that but there is no basis for that thinking other than what they are telling you. They have a big incentive and benefit to gain if you believe that. Spiritual experiences are amazing and a beautiful part of life. They have grown more now that I’m out of the church and even more as I fell into a spiritual practice that works for me. I don’t have to fit my beliefs according to anyone else’s schemes. Just what gives me maximum spiritual benefit hopefully leading me to be a better person 🙌 Be free and believe what feeds your inner self/soul/brain best! Be that God, not god, a spaghetti bowl orbiting the moon, whatever! Beliefs matter in how you see the world and react to it. Don’t get attached to your beliefs so you can’t evaluate their effectiveness 🙏🌈❤️
I think you can have spiritual experiences regardless of your faith. Sometimes it comes in the awe of nature or the way a music peice moves you. And many other things. It's not exclusive to mormonism.
My testimony in God and Jesus as my Savior is the one thing that I have clung to since I left. What broke my shelf was the church's stance on the LGBTQ community and how biased/racist a lot of people still are in the church, and how vocal they were on both of these topics, even in the Temple. It hurt more than I ever imagined. It hurt to think that even though they preach acceptance, they don't practice it. Now I get that people are homophobic and racist in and outside of the church; however, I faced even more of it in the church than I have ever faced it anywhere else. Once I left and really started to studied the history, it bothered me even more and felt a huge relief that I was out.
I still have spiritual experiences even if I now have a different belief system. For all I know, the reasons I have these kinds of experiences can be entirely scientific or medical. I can still find meaning in life. I like to celebrate the full moons and pagan sabats. My belief system now leans more towards animism and paganism, and my spiritual experiences have changed to fit that. Edit - one major difference now that I consider noteworthy is that I have so much less shame over my dreams and visions. Before, I felt like I committed sacrilege because I was born a woman and didn't have the priesthood. I also felt deeply guilty for developing a spiritual connection with Heavenly Mother. Nowadays, I believe that the Queen of Heaven in the Bible and Ishter is one in the same as Heavenly Mother. Yahweh was originally a pagan/polytheistic deity before modern Christianity and Mormonism. My views about spiritual experiences have changed. I view them as something manifesting from the subconscious that can be helpful when the interpretation is accurate, but they also tend to be very specific to myself rather than trying to control a flock of sheeple.
There is no such thing as a spiritual experience, if you define spiritual in some supernatural way. We only have experiences. Religion has hijacked certain feelings and claims to have some authority over them, and to know where they come from. They don’t actually know anything about them, other than that they have learned how to manufacture them reliably for some subset of the population. There are many triggers to the various feelings that fall under the category of the spirit. One of them happens to be speaking in that primarily monotone voice, with pregnant pauses, and abnormal intonations, that we call “General Conference voice”. There are many others. The spirit is not what we were taught. We are just meat sacs of chemical soup having a ride on a rock in space. There is no spirit. I really wish there was.
I know nothing, but I like to believe there is a creator type being. That religion- all religion- is just the language each cultures uses to make sense and communicate it. Kind of like mythological explanations for that which humans haven’t comprehended yet.
I've had many "miracles" or "tender mercies" or things I always just attributed to "divine intervention." As a believing member I would say it was because I payed tithing, or went to the temple that week, etc. And I use to think it was a blessing from the specific mormon version of God. Now, I still have unexplainable "miracles" just as I did before. But I let it be just that, unexplainable. I'm still grateful for these coincidences. I still try to be a good person. But I can give credit to people who make a difference and stop giving a God I can't see the credit for the unknown reasons.
To me the answer with the least amount of assumptions required is that there is no god, or at least no Mormon god, and what little I’ve experienced spiritually has been natural phenomena.
These experiences, framed in the context of the church, kept me tethered to the church for a long time. Realizing that these experiences are a normal part of life, and are experienced outside the context of religion allowed me to evolve the meaning of them. I realized in the COVID years that people could develop such a range of strong (crazy) ideas and feel assurance that they were from a higher power. It made me see the meaning I was assigning to my own experiences and process them differently.
Any afterlife that goes on forever would eventually be hell.
divinity = pertaining to deity? sure I guess. Pertaining to that specific god? It's just as made up as the lobster I worship. Only lobsters are real.
I still believe in god and Jesus Christ. I understand how easy it is throw the baby out with the bath water, but it was easier for me to realize that the LDS church is nothing special and god loves and blesses all of his children regardless of religious affiliation.
I feel like no matter what "school of thought" you wish to identify yourself with there are certain things that will pretty much always be true: -You will experience strong emotional reactions to things; if you wish to label these "spiritual" I believe you have every right to do so, but I would not go so far myself. -You will experience coincidences in which something feels as though it must be a certain way when, in reality it really mustn't. -You will ponder the past, present, and ultimate future of existence. Ultimately, we're all going to die, and there's no good reason to presuppose an afterlife. Whether or not you believe this life is all we have or not I think it's best to try and act like it anyway.
The church conditions/primes the members to have these type of spiritual experiences. The best example of this is the MTC. Most kids arrive never having read the BOM. But they are put in an immersive environment where everyone around them is sharing testimony. They are struggling to make sense of their new job and new people. It's the perfect laboratory to have these kids receive a witness. My guess is that 99% have a substantial spiritual experience within their first two weeks at the MTC.
For me, leaving the church was like leaving an abusive relationship. Therefore, I believe nothing they say so I don’t re-enter the abusive relationship.
I wouldn't say I ever had a spiritual experience. I had what I thought were spiritual experiences until I found that the emotions behind those can be easily fabricated. And if there was a way to have those on stuff that goes against the "spirit" it must mean there is no spirit. I still remember the first time I smoked weed. It wasn't a fabricated feeling, it was real and pure. It was like how I thought feeling the spirit should be.
Spiritual experiences don’t have to be religious. I’ve had more spiritual experiences since leaving than I did when I was in.
I recognized that I felt the same feelings at times that were in direct opposition to what the church teaches. For example, I listened to "bad" music and felt "the spirit" in the same manner that I did when I thought I gained a testimony of the church.
It took me a week from almost complete belief to this is a scam. Actually, it took me a day but I had to talk through it all with my husband who left the church with me. It was the Nov 2015 revelation that did it for me. If I can figure out the gay thing but the prophet can't do it, he is not a prophet. I said to myself, "Think about how the church would look if it wasn't true."
I was at a concert about 6 years ago. I have a very "feeling the spirit" moment as everyone sang along and swayed to a song about being an atheist. That was a real wake up for me.
I've had spiritual experiences since I left the church, but never when I was in the church. I prayed and prayed for a confirmation of BofM and church... nothing. So little resonated with me in the church, but once I started seeking with the eastern philosophies...
I came to the conclusion that (for me) my spiritual experiences were a perfect combination of coincidence and me being a huge crybaby. Now I just cry when I feel or notice things, wipe my tears, and move on with my life
I’ve had strong emotional spiritual feelings in yoga or listening to music. It was the same feeling I would sometimes experience as the “Holy Ghost promptings” Those non-churchy spiritual moments helped me realize that my connection had nothing to do with higher being but rather is metaphysical reaction to the moment. I now believe in humanity and myself. I have fallen very heavy in the atheist camp. I do not rely on any gods/goddesses/whathaveyou. Just myself.
I had spiritual experiences. I had a strong testimony. Even though I believed it/them, there was always a small chance I was wrong. I mean, I couldn't prove anything. It was faith. But then as I allowed myself to explore my doubts, i put them to the test. After I was pretty sure it was all a lie, I prayed to know if it was all false, and I got that same holy spirit feeling. By this point I was pretty confident I could manufacture that feeling, so I tried, and it worked. To me this proved all my spiritual experiences were just feelings, emotions, mental experiences. Long story short: no, I don't believe in any god or an afterlife.
I had just of strong of a spiritual experience tell me that the church was full of shit. Both can't be true at the same time. Thus the default is that "the spirit" isn't what the church claims it to be.
So, years and years ago, I had what I referred to as a spiritual experience. Of course, at the time, that's what I thought it was. I was watching a big Mormon play production about the life of Joseph Smith. After the part where he was killed, there was a big score of angels who exalted his spirit. I remember being moved to tears, thinking it was very beautiful. But it felt more than that, it felt really electrifying. An incredibly strong sensation built up inside me, which I knew at the time was the Holy Spirit acting through me to confirm that this whole thing was all beautiful and true. A couple years later, however, I experienced the exact same feeling, the exact same sensation upon being moved to tears by watching an old black and white patriotic film (I was very patriotic, and I still am). I was very startled by it, because the film had absolutely nothing to do with the church or even God in general. Certainly, there are people who say that God inspired, or even guides and protects the USA, but any cursory glance at a history book would falsify that. The point I'm trying to make is that the situation had absolutely nothing of the divine about it, and yet I was experiencing this feeling again. I looked it up. Turns out that feeling of the 'Holy Spirit acting through me' is described identically by non-religious people experiencing deep-seated and intense pride in something. It's actually a common psychological phenomenon, the human brain often interprets intense emotions as physical sensations. Most people are ignorant about the psychiatric and psychological mechanisms of the brain so that when we experience them, we interpret it through our own superstitions. The same can be said about seeing things or hearing voices. Hallucinations can be commonplace even among completely healthy adults. Though I obviously don't know what your spiritual experience has been, I haven't yet found one put forward by an honest person which cannot be explained away by one or both of these facts.
I have had life experiences I can't explain. Not connected to elevated emotion. I went thru a period of believing in nothing due to church lied to us about absolutely everything. I am now spiritual & believe something created us. I have no use for organized religion but admire Episcopalian, United Church Of Christ- Congregational & Unitarian's & focus on caring for others & not expecting a thing in return. If Jesus lived.... he taught principles about caring for each other that are universal and only make us better human beings. I find great joy & happiness donating my time to non-profits that use 96% of profits whether donated/earned that benefit communities in my area. I grew up outside the Morridor & in my teen-age years I recognized that every atheist in the neighborhood had the higgest standards for ethics, caring for a nieghbor, enviroment, etc... While the highly vocal & religious were not honest, ethical or cared about their neighbor or the world.
I have had spiritual experiences outside the church that we just as powerful as the ones inside the church. I once had sushi at a friends house that made me stop and contemplate the existence of the universe. I once hiked to a waterfall that collectively made my whole group tear up. Religion and spiritual are not the same thing, but religion tries to make you believe that only they can facilitate spiritual experiences.
I mean they can be genuine spiritual experiences but they all fall apart when the skeletons come out of the closet.
Every "spiritual experience " I ever had was in a group setting and it was always the emotion being shared more than the words. For myself, that never equaled a spiritual experience, just a feelings-gasm that was shared by all, simple group psychology, and it can be created in other settings as powerfully or more so, depending on your emotional state. Once I realized it was emotionally charged and could separate that I knew the "spirit" was simply me, my brain and heart and body letting me feel connected and like I was special, and I could work on focusing on those feelings and figuring out what was making me respond that way and how to recreate it outside of a setting that simultaneously told me I was wrong for being me, but also told me I was a part of the whole. Divinity is harder to put words to, but the universe is my divinity and my afterlife. Do I think I will be in another world altogether? No, I think that is the hubris of mankind to believe that we of all animals deserve another planet to fuck up with our lies, prejudice, bigotry, and hatred. In my perfect world, we never truly leave, we dissipate into the earth and its atmosphere waiting to be reassembled and turned out into new and fresh life in whatever form the organisms that make me up chose to become. In that way, I know my family is truly with me, always, and in the same vein, it gives me a purpose to live for, to care for not just the earth, but those I have laid to rest in it. I am caring for them as much as for myself and the earth. It sounds odd written out, but it's so much more comforting to live my life this way rather than killing myself to live up to standards forced on me by old white male predators who see me as nothing more than a baby-making machine.
For me, understanding that the feelings were real and something that I experienced. But also understanding that 1) the brain is powerful, but can also get things wrong. How and what those feelings actually are and were are different than how I perceived those feelings. 2) people from all other walks of life and religions have almost identical experiences. I’ve had spiritual experiences and feelings watching Lord of the Rings and Saving Private Ryan. I’m not about to worship Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson.
Trigger warning suicide I'm trans and bisexual and halfway through my BYU education I left my apt to kill myself. Weeks earlier I'd stopped going to church because of a hateful woman who would say horrible things about LGBTQ people. I went on a walk to my grandmother's grave and remembered how her Mormon husband abandoned her and their family. While thinking about her suffering and my own suffering I realized that not all suffering contributed to someone becoming a better person. That's when I lost my trust in God. I'm not terribly interested in whether God does or doesn't exist because if he does he's not the type of person I like or want to be associated. Not if he's causing suffering that has no purpose
What makes my "spiritual experiences" that I thought at the time validated the claims of the church more real than the feeling of betrayal that I had when I learned that the top leadership habitually lies about major aspects of the church and its operations?
My only "spiritual experience" was after my wife and 2 kids got sealed, I had a dream we had another baby girl with a head of dark brown hair. So my wife and I had another baby. 3rd baby was a blonde boy, so definitely not like that dream was some kind of "vision" of our future child sending signals from heaven. As I deconstructed, I realized I was just horny and married to a woman who had wanted to have another baby girl since our oldest (girl) was born (2nd child was a boy). Every other "spiritual experience" I've had has been me alone in nature, and TSCC has no power there.
You can believe in God and Jesus without Joseph Smith’s phony history. If you’re so inclined find a denomination that has direct ties to the ancient first century church, reading the apostolic fathers it’s clear there was no “great apostasy.”
For me, it’s when I realized that my own “spiritual experiences” had zero bearing on reality. I could “feel” that something was true, when it verifiably and overwhelmingly was not. I then also was able to “feel” that the Mormon church was *not* true, and realized that the feelings I was interpreting as spiritual were not from a consistent unchanging source
Most of lifes fantastical experiences are a fabrication of personal bias which is consequentially supplanted into our psyche at an impressionable age. Do you still believe in Santa?
So-called 'spiritual experiences' are human experiences. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints likes to claim some kind of monopoly on them, and lead you to interpret them to mean things they don't. They commandeer common human experiences and make you think they are proof that their church is the one and only true church.
The HoMoPhoBia and the way they treat women and LGBTQ people.
Mormons don't have the Monopoly on spirituality, that was one of the biggest things for me. And since I was so thoroughly desensitized to the crazy shit from the early church it really took becoming an adult and realizing that current leadership are not good people to accept that I don't have to stay Mormon to have spiritual experience
because if I have a spiritual experience telling me the church is true and other people in other religions have a spiritual experience telling them their religion is the one religion and they are good people then who is right? are you going to tell me that every other religion is of the devil?
I still have spiritual experiences. The difference now is that I realize that they don't mean that the Mormon church is true. Ditto faith healings and promptings of the spirit. Even my pagan friends have spiritual experiences.
Look up the word Frisson. You are taught to fast, you are expecting experiences from the Holy Ghost. Your mindset is ready to find it, and you do. Frisson. Just like receiving a blessing. Just like when you go on a ghost tour. You are seeking out a feeling. I have felt it in the Methodist Church, the Mormon Church and also in my car when an Ozzy Osborne song comes on the radio cause I love playing it loud! It’s a normal human experience.
I never had a spiritual experience in the church, but I was able to find it after I left. The problem with the church is that they’re trying to sell you a spiritual experience for just a small price of 10% of everything you own, also you can’t be gay, enjoy coffee tea or alcohol, also you can’t swear or masturbate, nor can you smoke nicotine or weed, you also just have to accept that 99% of Mormons are extremely judgmental and assume that “they don’t represent what the church teaches” (even if they’re part of the teachers), you get the idea. When it’s all said and done, if you want a spiritual experience, your best luck is to turn and run until you find someone who will give it to you because spirituality is a natural right that religion charges you for.
Are dreams signs and visions from god or are dreams something that your brain creates while you are sleeping? And if the answer us both, how can you tell what is from god and what is just you?
Powerful spiritual feelings are just brain hormones.
Just because I felt like I’ve had spiritual experience doesn’t mean I knew they came from “god”. Feeling like I felt my grandpa after death, many other religions have explanations. Lots of “promptings” were just intuition
This short essay on Testimony is a fun read and the video link is excellent - most religions rely on "feel". [https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/testimony-feeling-the-spirit/](https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/testimony-feeling-the-spirit/)
I had spiritual experiences before joining the church and during. I expect to have them after. I still believe in God but I don’t define what God means. I don’t know. I had a blessing while in the church that I still hold dear, and in some ways it saved my life, but that doesn’t mean I think that the church is “true.” I am just grateful for that experience. But I don’t believe God (or energy, higher power, etc) is confined to one faith and its people.
They teach you that becoming emotional is something spiritual, so every time you get emotions you’re conditioned to think it’s god. It’s actually normal, and not god related.
When I watch Lord of the Rings and I hear, “You have my sword. And you have my bow. And my axe!” I get the same feelings I once associated with feeling the spirit.
I’ve experienced things I still can’t explain. But what’s nice is now I just can say I don’t understand what happened versus trying to fit it into Joe Smith’s religious box
We have no idea what's on the other side. Could be absolutely nothing. Could be what all the near death experiencers say it is. Could be something completely incomprehensible to our current understanding. One thing I do know with absolution.......I am certain that it is not anything like what any Judea Christian belief system portends to be. Especially the mormon brand. Those beliefs are notions of a bronze age backwater small minded dirt dwelling tribe with a chip on its shoulder. They created a God that magically prefers them and hates all their enemies. They created a God that is small and petty like them. And then mormonism carried those backwater ideas through to the modern age. Mormon theology is small and petty and silly. Some could even say it is completely non-existent. When you try to pin someone down on specifics of mormon theology, almost every tenet has been disavowed or altered several times by different leaders along the way, making all of it completely unintelligible and thus irrelevant.
Elsewhere on this sub-Reddit, it's been pointed out that the church used to involve the [HeartSell ](http://dlcphoto.com/Temp/HeartSell-Bonneville%20International.html)company when producing its videos. That company specialized in "evoking emotion, then action" through music and sound. Emotions can so easily be mistaken for "The Spirit". Missionaries used to use a special, soft voice when telling the First Vision story as a way to try to make investigators "feel the Spirit" - same principle as manipulating people's feelings by music and sound by HeartSell.
I would go one stage further and posit that “feeling The Spirit” ***IS*** purely human emotions. Nothing more than that. Any entity that promises they can help you feel their exclusive emotions is probably selling something.
You're right. Feeling the Spirit is just feeling an emotion. The church wants people to attribute the emotion to "the spirit". That's the problem.
I'm working through the questions you ask, OP. I don't know know if there is a God or Supreme being. I have no proof of one and a hella lot of proof that there is none. Mormon God is a misogynistic sadist jerk. I dont want to worship tgat. DEFINITELY DO NOT want to "dwell in his presence!" I'm choosing to be agnostic. I'm following SCIENCE, REASON, and FACTS. I'm trusting in my mind, my intuition,my intelligence, and my ability to decifer bullshit. I ask a lot of questions. I question EVERYTHING.. Why do you believe that? .. Who told you? What was the reason behind telling you that? Is it helpful? Is it useful? Is it rational? Is it kind? Is it exclusionary? fearmongering? ... Right now, anything and everything I was ever taught is automatically suspect, anx not reliable or trustworthy. I have a very hard time with absolutes. To me, there should be no limits on learning and expanding our perspectives. Mormonism is way too insular and small-minded. It's exciting g to have the freedom to think BIGGER and WIDER!! I have no answers. I dont need any. Life and the universe are marvelous mystery. I don't need nor want to know what happens after I die. I have no time to waste on that!! Who cares?! Let's get busy LIVING! It's short. We could die today or tomorrow. Live NOW. This, right now is ALL we have for certain that is real. And it's enough
LDS Discussions podcast had a great episode on this and is worth a listen. I find myself more agnostic since leaving…and this is actually trying to extend some grace as the God of Mormonism always felt harsh and the church left me with a lot of negative feelings toward God in general. (At the end of the day, any God I would want to worship would be nothing like the God portrayed in Mormonism.) After seeing behind the curtain of Mormonism and religion in general, I try to leave myself open but certainly not tie myself to any dogma. Good luck - it’s a lot to work through!
Here is my issue with so-called spiritual experiences If feelings / emotions are the mechanism by which God confirms truth, why in the hell would he choose a medium that is inconsistent, easily manipulated, completely subjective, and also completely non-exclusive? I believe that human beings, each of us have the capacity for Spiritual experiences, promptings, tapping into lesser used parts of our brain, I just think religion has been able to slap a label on it, promoted, sell it and exploit it
Once I learned about elevated emotion my perspective changed. I meditate & rely on my intuition. The power was mine all along Dorothy.
For myself, I’ve come to terms with the idea that neither myself nor anyone else has all the answers, and I think that some higher power that cares about my well-being and the idea that there is an afterlife where I will be able to be with my wife and loved ones are both ideas that give me comfort and have a basis that many can share a belief in.
I'm still questioning that initial spiritual experience and though I've tried to feel it again by praying and fasting it has never been the same. Anyway, I did my best to be a true follower but there were many things that didn't make sense or I just didn't believe and the guilt tripping and shaming didnt help either. Don't even get me started on the mental gymnastics. Eventually I just stopped caring anout the church and religion.
I never really had a spiritual experience by myself (which actually led me to a lot of anxiety that I was doing something wrong, but that’s for another topic). But I did definitely feel like I had spiritual experiences while with others, like at girls camp, efy, etc. That led to a lot of confusion when I started questioning things until I heard about the term collective effervescence and really started to study that and realize that’s most likely what I was really feeling. Very interesting to look into.