{"id":47066,"date":"2024-04-25T11:21:15","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T17:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.timesandseasons.org\/?p=47066"},"modified":"2024-04-25T11:36:27","modified_gmt":"2024-04-25T17:36:27","slug":"my-atheist-conversion-3-a-lack-of-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/04\/my-atheist-conversion-3-a-lack-of-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"My Atheist Conversion, 3: A Lack of Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"

My own research<\/a> played a role in the atheist conversion I described<\/a> in previous posts<\/a>. Like I said, I believe I\u2019ve been able to track down the sources of all Mormon ideas from books to Joseph Smith, which, like I said, was something I\u2019ve been generally okay with. Again, this was a gradual process for me that I felt I could make spiritual sense of, and concluded that any means that God used for the Restoration was okay with me.<\/p>\n

Yet every now and again I\u2019d stop and notice how far I\u2019d drifted from orthodoxy. I recently did a podcast where I described it as occasionally feeling like this Naked Gun clip<\/a>: with so much on his mind while he wandered around, Frank finally said to himself, \u201cand where the hell was I?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Those brushes with atheism I described in those posts were two such incidents. I was concerned about other things, but noting that I\u2019d put together what looked to me like something of a naturalistic explanation added to my unmoored feeling.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d applied similar scholarly views to other scripture well as I would dabble a bit in biblical studies. At some point, I\u2019ll post on something of a construct I put together for myself of embracing scholarship on these scriptural issues, and believing that God can work through these human means. But ultimately not feeling like I need to embrace all historical scriptural claims.<\/p>\n

Again, I would generally feel fine spiritually with such a view, but in those atheist moments, such a view played a role in my atheist direction.<\/p>\n

Again, I reembraced theism by the end of the day, but as I did so, I began to piece things together in a somewhat different ways. There was a lot of context, but it reminded me a bit of Rosemary Wixom\u2019s talk<\/a> about the sister with a faith crisis. \u201cI felt I needed the answer to the question \u2018What do I really believe?\u2019\u201d Sister Wixom relays the story. \u201cHer first step to rebuild her faith was to start with basic gospel truths.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though I\u2019m sure there are many differences, I also felt a real stripping down of the larger structure of belief I\u2019d been handed. I was convinced that so much scripture and revelation came within human contexts that I did not believe I could take much (any?) as simple, face-value, divine declarations. In reembracing theism, I did believe in divinity and inspiration, but there was the simple question of what exactly was inspiration and what was human speculation in all that \u201creligion\u201d out there?<\/p>\n

So in asking myself a similar question to \u201cWhat do I really believe?\u201d in that moment, I decided that what I really knew were the things I\u2019d experienced personally. Again, felt like I\u2019d had a number of spiritual experiences, but many theological claims, I\u2019d not experienced: the afterlife, seeing God, or claims of people making such claims. This isn\u2019t to say that I decided to disbelieve in God or the afterlife, only that I wasn\u2019t so sure about absolute metaphysical nature, and I was okay with that.<\/p>\n

So in my \u201crebuilding\u201d (again this happened pretty quickly) I decided being okay to embrace my own spiritual experiences as my building blocks. These were important to me but somewhat amorphous: feeling directed by God throughout my life, but without a clear overarching theology. But trusting that God directed toward a generally \u201cgoodness.\u201d Again, I can\u2019t make any metaphysical claims about God and don\u2019t care to. I haven\u2019t seen the afterlife, I hope it\u2019s there and works in a good and just way, but I don\u2019t care to make absolute definitive claims about it. Etc.<\/p>\n

I do want to do God\u2019s work and I\u2019ve felt directed to continue to patriciate in the church. At God\u2019s prompting and my own investigation and experience, I feel that the church does do important, good work for the world and its participants. So I work to \u201clift where I stand\u201d as what I see as an important social and religious good.<\/p>\n

At times, I\u2019d would refer to myself as an \u201cagnostic theist,\u201d which I defined as believing in God but not really knowing what the whole plan was. In time, I think I\u2019ve moved away from that \u201clabel\u201d as I\u2019ve come to the feeling that while there\u2019s an abundance that I don\u2019t know, I do feel like I do have SOME knowledge. Again, I feel spiritually directed in ways I\u2019ve embraced that give me a sense of purpose and enlightenment, and also feel that human study grants some knowledge as well.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t feel the need or ability to explain ultimate issue of \u201cwhat it all means\u201d (though am curious about such things and hypotheses are certainly fine), the problem of evil, God\u2019s metaphysical nature, etc. A whole lot I simply do not know and don\u2019t take other humans’ claims on such topics as absolute.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what the term for my beliefs would be, but I\u2019m happy to embrace my theism and the direction it gives me within the realm of human scholarship and knowledge as well. Such a view has many key principles, but few absolutes about theological claims. And that works for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My own research played a role in the atheist conversion I described in previous posts. Like I said, I believe I\u2019ve been able to track down the sources of all Mormon ideas from books to Joseph Smith, which, like I said, was something I\u2019ve been generally okay with. Again, this was a gradual process for me that I felt I could make spiritual sense of, and concluded that any means that God used for the Restoration was okay with me. Yet every now and again I\u2019d stop and notice how far I\u2019d drifted from orthodoxy. I recently did a podcast where I described it as occasionally feeling like this Naked Gun clip: with so much on his mind while he wandered around, Frank finally said to himself, \u201cand where the hell was I?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47066"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47068,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47066\/revisions\/47068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}