I’m thinking about starting to blog regularly again.  One nice thing about blogging my spiritual journey was that in a way, the blog actually helped propel me forwards.  When I came to a new conclusion, or something stuck in my craw, the blog helped me reify the former and work through the latter (or in some cases, see that it couldn’t actually be worked through).  Since I’ve stopped blogging regularly, I’ve made some decisions and come to some new conclusions, but in some ways they haven’t made much of a difference because I haven’t done much about them.  Blogging would be a way for me to make my experiences real, and commit myself to my decisions by announcing them publicly, if that makes sense.

Also, having a blog is a way to, simply put, make sure things that interest me happen in the blogosphere.  Other people’s blogs are fine, but there’s a give and take, an ongoing conversation that is lost when I don’t blog myself.  The conversation suffers, I think.

On the other hand, I have some moderate concerns.  I’ve come a long way since I stopped blogging regularly, and I’m not sure if I would try to catch up, or just kind of pick up where I am now and fill in important details as I go.  I guess the latter is more realistic.

I also wonder if the public nature of the blog isn’t more than a little narcissistic.  Would my needs be better served by something like a diary or a journal?

I’ve really neglected this blog over the past couple of months while I’ve been tossing around new ideas, coming to conclusions, and maybe even figuring out what I actually believe, what I don’t believe, and why.  I haven’t really written about my experiments with and (possibly) final thoughts on Druidry.  I haven’t written about my experiences with trying to find meaning this Christmas without Jesus in my life, or at least without an obvious place for or a settled idea of what Jesus means, if he means anything at all.  I haven’t written about the frustration, anger, and tension in my family over the religion issue that has once again come to a head in the last few weeks.  I haven’t written about the intense series of conversations I have had about Self and no-self and how they may have brought me back full circle, in a sense.

There’s so much I haven’t written and things are moving so fast that I don’t know if I’m realistically ever going to write them, which is kind of sad, I guess.  But that’s just the way it is.

The thing is, I may have found Byzantium, or at least the closest thing to it that exists.  In any case think I may be ready to move beyond this blog and all it represents and into something new, into a whole new paradigm and a whole new phase of my life.  Things are in the process of changing, and I am as certain as I can be that they will never be the same again.  If you’re interested, follow me over to my new blog, because this one may be sitting in the harbor for a long time to come.

The problem with procrastinating blog posts on a blog like this one is that I wind up moving three or four steps past an old thought in my head before I write that old thought on the blog, so it seems pointless to write it for public consumption when it’s not even what I’m thinking right now.

This is fun.  I’m kind of tired of writing essentially the same angst-ridden religion blog posts anyway.  I kind of wonder if it’s not time to either 1. expand the scope of this blog to start talking about other things, or 2. start a new general-purpose blog.  I have one over at Blogspot, but I don’t like Blogspot, and I haven’t kept up with it in a really long time and don’t really feel like starting it up again.  It’s mostly politics anyway, and I’m just not the angry fiery liberal I used to be.  Anyway, here’s today’s ten:

1. “Cry of the Black Birds” - Amon Amarth
2. “Ancestor Cult” - Machines of Loving Grace
3. “Caleb” - Sonata Arctica
4. “Learning to Live” - Dream Theater
5. “Kullervo’s Youth” - Jean Sibelius
6. “Any Colour You Like” - Pink Floyd
7. “Little Lies” - Fleetwood Mac
8. “Amazing” - Aerosmith
9. “House of Sleep” - Amorphis
10. “Move Over Darling” - Doris Day

This seems more representative of what I’m listening to right now, except for the random Aerosmith song, not a particular favorite of mine.

My friend Bryant has been posting iPod Ten posts: you put your iPod on shuffle and post the first ten songs that come up.

1. “Beyond The Dark Sun” - Wintersun
2. “Papa Loves Mambo” - Perry Como
3. “Asteroid Belts” - The Lord Weird Slough Feg
4. “No Pain For The Dead” - Angra
5. “The Sacrifice” - Symphony X
6. “Farewell” - Kamelot
7. “A Swinging Safari” - Bert Kaempfert
8. “Anthem” - Kamelot
9. “The Human Stain” - Kamelot
10. “The Lady Is A Tramp” - Vic Damone

None of these are really favorite songs of mine, but the bands/singers certainly are favorites.  Lots of Kamelot there, but I ahve like four full Kamelot albums on my iPod right now, so that’s not really a surprise.

I have some posts I’ve been wanting to write that I’ve been procrastinating.  The new semester has started, and my beautiful and sexy wife is in her busy season at work (as well as fairly far along in pregnancy), and there’s been some extended-family drama.  That’s all to say that I haven;t had time really to sit down and compose myself enough to write about some of the things I’ve been thinking about.  I haven’t fallen off the earth, I’m just kinda busy at the moment.

So although I haven’t really been blogging very much, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and my life has also been changing in a lot of unexpected ways.  I’m reluctant to go into a great amount of detail, but I have something coming up that is big and scary and sort of looming, but also something that I am looking forward to.  In many ways in my life it will be an important threshold, a very real passage from one phase of life into another.

Because of this looming event, I am reluctant to make any kind of spiritual commitment, even a provisional one.  I fear that anything I start will be seriously disrupted by the changes in my life- changes that are going to last months.  At the same time, I am worried that I won’t have any kind of spiritual framework to carry me through what are doubtless going to be some very dark and difficult times.  In the past, in situations as similar as can be expected, my faith in Mormonism helped me a great deal.  This time I’m going through something unlike anything I’ve ever gone through before, but I feel like I’m on really unsteady ground.  I’m not entirely sure what to do.

We have stopped going to church as a family, mostly because I was so unsure of whether I believed in Jesus and whether I was even interested in Christianity, and church attendance felt like the spiritual equivalent of being on a moving train.  It was going somewhere that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go at all, and I felt that it was important to get off the dang train and figure out where I wanted to go, at least in some vague sense, before I got moving again.  This has been a deliberate decision with the understanding that it is temporary–I don’t want to merely get out of the habit of church or spiritual practice and simply become entirely secular by lazy default.

I have inklings and tugs in different directions at the moment that I’m going to blog about, but like I said, I’m reluctant to start anything both because of the chages that are coming in my life and because of a fear of spiritual commitment that is my unfortunate aftermath of a lifetime of faithful Mormonism.

I know I’ve been over this time and again, but it’s been on my mind for weeks, so I’m going to blog about it.  I’m just not sure what to do, say, or believe about religion.

I like Christianity.  I find it moving, relevant, hopeful, important.  I like the Bible, I like Jesus, I like the richness of Christian theology, I attend an Episcopal church and I like the liturgy.  But I just don’t know if I believe in Christianity.  I don’t know how to.  I know if I totally immersed myself in Christianity- literature, music, thought, etc., that all my doubts would fade, but that’s exactly what I did with Mormonism.  It’s not because the thing I’m busying myself with is actually true, but because I’m so busy with it that I get wrapped up in it and stop questioning it.  I’m unwilling to do that again because I believe it is a kind of self-brainwashing, and because I know it doesn’t necessarily last.

I like Mere Christianity, but I have major problems with almost every Christian denomination in practice (and in theology).  And even when I find an unobjectionable denomination (i.e. Anglicanism), I still am left unsure if I really believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that his life and what he allegedly did are significant to me as anything other than a historical curiosity.  I don’t want to be an atheist, but I’m afraid that leaving Mormonism has left me unable to deal with religion.  Even if I was sure I wanted to be Christian, I wouldn’t be sure of where to start.

Sorry, this is kind of two posts in one.

I’ve been struggling with belief and faith lately.  My wife and I are attending an Episcopal parish, but we’re still not sure if it’s the place for us.  I am strongly attracted to the Episcopal form of worship, but the attitude and the sermons always reflect a kind of “Religion Lite.”  It seems like every sermon is about how the Gospel reading isn’t as radical as it sounds, how it doesn’t really invite you to totally change your way of life, but is just telling you to think happy thoughts and keep on living the basically good life you’re living.

I don’t feel Challenged, invited to be more like Jesus and live a radically different kind of existence.  I don’t feel like this parish is about transforming us into New People, but telling us we’re fine the way things are.  It seems a little empty.

At the same time, I’m struggling with Christianity as a whole.  Do I really believe in Jesus at all, or do I just like Christianity?  There’s a big difference between the two, and unfortunately I think I may just like Christianity.  I’m not sure what to do about it.

I’m a little bit angry with a particular aspect of Mormonism today. Mostly, I find myself just caring less about the Mormon Church all the time, but when something directly affects me or my relationships, it’s hard to just grin and bear it.  even if it means coming out of blogging semi-retirement.

Mormonism teaches that if you pray to ask with a sincere heart, that God will tell you that the Church is True. It’s a guarantee- you do x and God will do y. That seems innocuous enough, until you apply it to the real world, to real people, and discover that actually plenty of people have prayed about the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, and Mormonism in general, and have not gotten a satisfactory answer. This is difficult to reconcile. God has supposedly made a promise, right? So either God breaks his promises, or the people who aren’t getting an answer are the problem. And Mormonism teaches that God is a God of truth and cannot lie. Therefore, people like me must be lying. It’s the only logical conclusion- or something like it. Either we’re being dishonest with ourselves, we’re blinded by our pride, we’re too far in sin or too caught up in the world to recognize the Spirit, or something like that. But any way you want to fold it, the result is offensive and insulting. This line of logic means that everyone who doesn’t join (or stay in) the Church is either lying or has allowed themselves to be in the bondage of Satan.

There are two ways out of this for Mormons. One is the fairly common idea that God answers prayers in his own time, and you’ve just got to have faith. That is total crap. Why should I have faith that God is eventually going to give me a satisfactory answer? How long do I wait? Forever? Why? Why would I do that? There’s a point where it just becomes more likely that the reason why God’s not telling you Mormonism is true is because it isn’t. If I don;t know the Church is true, what possible reason would I have to keep asking and persevering for my entire life until I find out that it is? If I want it that bad, I’ll wind up manufacturing it myself.

Plus, by that same logic, I should be just as persevering with any other Church or religion, if my only assurance is the testimony of others. What makes the people testifying the truth of Mormonism any more trustworthy or reliable than the people testifying the truth of Catholicism, Islam, Quakerism, or Atheism?

Furthermore, what good is a promise that will for all intents and purposes never be fulfilled, or fulfilled in a way that is completely unlike what you expect or is completely unlike what the plain meaning of the promise is, the reasonable interpretation of the promise. If God does that, then he’s wiggling out of his promises on technicalities, and that isn’t really being a God of Truth. Promising something that reasonably sounds like x when you really mean y isn’t honest, even if y is technically one possible interpretation of the promise. That’s not honesty and Truth, that’s deception, which is the opposite.

There’s one other way Mormons can escape the insulting reconciliation that forces them to brand everyone else a liar, and that is the ability to live with paradox. This is the best way, the most productive way- reconciling God’s promises with people who don’t get answers to their prayers by not reconciling it at all. By chalking it up to something they just don’t understand. This allows the Mormon to be a believer without assigning dishonest or evil motives to everyone else. It allows the believer to take people like me at face value, to not have to assume that I have a hidden motive or agenda when I say I just don’t believe the Church is true and I just don’t believe that the Holy Ghost has told me it is.

Unfortunately, not everyone can do this. Living with paradox means maintaining a kind of cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance makes people uncomfortable.

So instead of just accepting the paradox, most Mormons reconcile a (God’s promises) and b (people who don’t get answers) by assigning ulterior motives, by questioning peoples’ integrity, and by assuming that there’s some hidden but grievous sin. In short, reconciling Mormon doctrine with reality requires Mormons to pass exactly the kind judgment that Christ commanded us not to pass.