Lingering doubt.
On my mission, I first started to deal with the gospel in a serious way. As I did, there were things that bothered me. Granted, when I “got busy” with missionary work, I mostly just didn’t think about those doubts. Ultimately I was able to conclude that although I had questions that I was unable to get satisfactory answers for, since I had a general testimony of the truth of the Church, I could trust that God had the answers, maybe even just the missing information, and that in time all would be explained.
So, what were these doubts? I’m not going to go into them in a detailed list, because that would simply invite point-by-point criticism from well-intentioned members of the Church trying to refute my doubts. No thanks. Maybe I’ll deal with them in detail in future posts, but here I only want to talk about them generally.
First, I had problems that were doctrinal. Since the restoration, we in the Church have been “blessed” with so much new light and knowledge, answering all the great questions of religion (as an aside, I think that one problem is that the Church’s light and knowledge mostly answers 19th-century questions about religion, many of which modern people think are irrelevant, or they have found other answers for, or shifting theology has simply left those concerns in history’s dustbin). Anyway, I often felt that the “answers” just resulted in more questions. However, unlike the general unanswerable questions of Christianity that were broad enough to have many possible answers, the further light and knowledge revealed in this dispensation sort of tightened the focus. The questions were no longer as general, since we already had specific answers to the general questions. Now, we are left with new questions that tend to lead to weird answers. And when you try to answer them, you’re told it’s not important for your salvation. That’s, in my opinion, a huge smokescreen. “Do not look behind the curtain.” But I digress.
I also had problems that were scriptural. On my mission, I read all of the standard works, some of them multiple times. Over and over again, I enocuntered scriptures whose plain meanings seemed to directly contradict Mormon doctrine. Of course, there were always answers to these concerns, but to me they always felt like they were reaching pretty hard. Like they were meanings the scriptures could conceivably have, rather than the meanings they probably have.
And I’m not just talking about the Bible. Plenty of parts of the Book of Mormon seem, on their face, to directly contradict current LDS doctrine.
(As an aside, when I recently re-read LeGrand Richards’s A Marvelous Work And A Wonder, and I was boggled by the inconsistency in scriptural interpretation: when the plain meaning of a verse supports Mormon doctrine, it’s “clearly” correct, but when the plain meaning contradicts Mormon doctrine, we’re supposed to use attenuated interpretive methods that result in conclusions that often seem to be the exact opposite of what the scripture plainly says).
My third category of doubt had to do with blessings, specifically my patriarchial blessing. Without going into too much detail (perhaps I will in a future post), when I got my patriarchial blessing, it was awesome- it seemed to specifically answer some questions I had and to make specific promises about my future. And almost none of them were fulfilled. Sure, in retrospect I can look back on my life and apply my patriarcial blessing to it and figure out all the indirect ways that it really was true after all, but that is meaningless. That’s how tarot cards and divination work- they tell you vague things and then after the fact, you “realize” that they had presicted the future after all! All you have done is retrofitted your life to the vague promises made by the divination tool.
When I got my patriarchial blessing, I understood it in a specific way as making specific promises. Anyone who knew me at the time and read it came to the same conclusions that I did (or at least, they realized that I would clearly cometo those conclusions). Unquestionably, God, if he was the author of the blessing, knew how I was going to interpret it. Why then would he give me a blessing that he knew I would misinterpret and be disappointed by? And what’s the use of promises that you misunderstand when they are given, and you only realize that they were”true” after the fact. It provides you with nothing right now, and later on it provides you with nothing that a telephone psychic or a tarot reading couldn’t have provided.
What’s the use of promises that you completely misunderstand when given? What good does that do you? Sure, they make all kinds of sense years later, but it’s way more likely that you’re imposing your experiences into the vague framework of the patriarchial blessing. So it isn’t even helpful as a kind of a “see, God had a plan for me all this time” reassurance later on in life because you’ve only seen what you want to see.
My final category of doubt was general skepticism. Can this really be true? I mean, really, really true? Am I going to die and then in fact, go to Paradise and then in fact be judged and resurrected by Jesus Christ and then in fact go tot he Celestial Kingdom for exaltation? Really? I mean, it sounded like a solid idea, but it seemed to be too removed from my own experience to always seem concrete and reliable. and so I had nagging doubts.
When I rolled up my sleeves and got intot he work, I was able to expel these doubts, sort of. It was more like I put them in a closet and forgot about them. Then, last summer, when I was questioning the truth of the Church, I decided to go back to that closet and see what was in there. and there was way more than I remembered. It all came tumbling out.
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