[deccan]

Narf,

A note: you haven't provided any rational arguments for believing the things that you do, and I haven't provided any for believing the things that I do as well. I don't think either of us expects to be able to convince the other to change his views, and so that's not the point of my Posts to you.

The point, for me at least, is to be able to better understand your emotional attachment to your religion, why it's personally comforting to you and why it makes sense to you, while on the other hand, I feel like recounting why most forms of organized religion seem so instinctively abhorrent to me.

It would be better if you had read "Living in Sin" in its entirety, especially the afterword by the author that explains how he'd always had a love-hate relationship with Catholicism and even pleads that he's written a novel that he thinks presents Catholicism in a rather sympathetic light. So, please don't think of this as your typical anti-Christian story. Instead, this is a story by someone who is truly in awe of the potential power of religion to fulfill the spiritual needs of people, while being perpetually frustrated by the gulf between religion and reality.

I happen to believe that "Living in Sin" captures quite well the imaginary scenario of an Old Testament style god existing in the world. God sets down rules yes, and the narrator of the story knowingly breaks them, partly because those rules don't seem to make sense to him (and of course, in Catholicism, God's rules don't need to make sense to humans, they only have to make sense to God and humans must accept that), because he thinks that bending those rules doesn't seem to cause any harm and of course, because the flesh is simply weak. Like me, he also deeply resents the thought that God gave humans free will solely for the purpose of being able to freely choose to worship God and sees that as a kind of anachronism.

In the story, God punishes sinners in clear, undeniable ways, though not in such a way that makes God seem like a mechanistic, automatic force, and the punishments are always personal and appropriate. In the story, the narrator expected that the punishment for having a child out of wedlock would be a deformed or retarded child, and is relieved when the child is physically okay. But then he finds out that the child is born to be a prophet, the living voice of God on Earth, utterly pure, powerful and inhuman, and in some ways that is an even worse punishment for the narrator.

My questions are: are you a Mormon mainly because you believe that the "hows" that it teaches are true, or mainly because the values and truths of Mormonism are comforting to you (or "feel right" to you)? If the latter, then which truths and values, and why those? If you truly believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God who has a specific purpose for you personally, have you ever, even once, felt resentful of that, or felt yourself running out of "elbow room" to create and define values and purposes for yourself?

I'll detail some of my own feelings and attitudes in a later post.