and the dam bursts

"But [God] had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man's depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew no shame: he crawled into my dirtiest nooks.... The god who saw everything, even man- this god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live." -Nietzsche (who else?)

One of the most powerfully spiritual passages I have read is Nietzsche's description of the old crazy man telling everyone they've killed God and then realizing he's come too early. Nietzsche would likely hit me with a lightning bolt if he heard that I took this to in some way affirm theology, but there you go. He was the ambiguous type. I found it fascinating that Nietzsche portrayed man as the killer. I did think, anyway, that although Nietzsche seems a bit of an athiest, the passage was compatible with Christian thought. Even if there is a God up there, we may be effectively eliminating him on this earth just with our apathy towards each other. I don't know.

The title of this post is somewhat a misnomer. The dam has been bursting and repairing itself for years and years. This time it's going to take some major bandaids. If there is a God up there, and I am not killing Him, then maybe He will help me. I don't know.

When I was in seventh grade I watched a movie called The Body. I thought it was an amazing movie idea. In it, archaeologists think they have unearthed the body of Christ, disproving Christianity. It is about how the world reacts to such a debunking of a thorough way of life. There was this one part where they were talking about people committing suicide because they no longer had a religion when one man said something like "even if religion isn't true, it is a good thing, because it gives people morals and a good way of life." I believe in this strongly. I think that religion can provide people with a meaningful life, and aid in the instillment of morals that help society and humanity. However, I also read the news. I know what people do to each other over religion. I know how they kill in the name of their God. I know that religion can be a horrible thing, promoting bias and perversion and morals that are not conducive to society and humanity.

I have grown up Mormon. We've been going to church since I can remember, although when I was young my dad wasn't really into it. I have experienced, I think, both of the amazing benefits of religion and the horrible things that make me doubt it. I have seen our church do wonderful things for others. My church is really into service. 10% of my money my whole life has gone to causes I thought were greater than myself. My church's doctrine preaches love and tolerance. However, I have also seen the arrogance of the concentrations of my religion. I have seen the discrimination against non-Mormons in intensely Mormon areas. I have seen my friends that have rebelled been kicked out of their families. I have seen my church do service projects just because of the church image. I read philosophers, and I get confused here. Is it still good to help people if your motive is selfish? Nietzsche, I think, would say no. One gains something, yes, but one loses much more. (Not that Nietzsche advocates the idea of purely 'selfish' or 'selfless' actions.)

It never occurred to me until this year that morals could be derived from something other than religion. To me, religion was why I did and didn't do certain things. I was told by my church to follow a code of ethics, and to me my church produced that code. I didn't even think about the possibility that morals could be self-created the way Nietzsche argues. Every moral instinct within me, from my aversion to murder to my idea that it's wrong to hurt myself, comes from scriptures.

Let me tell you how I feel right now, now that I am realizing perhaps my morals didn't come from God: LOST.

My religion is very strong. It doesn't really, in many ways, make itself easy to question. One accepts, that is all. You can ask the missionaries questions, sure, but in the end you are converted to every single bit of it or you deny it all. It is the one church that is 100% true. If you disagree with one tiny tenant, you disagree with the foundation of the entire church. It creates a strong incentive to not disagree, I think.

There are a few questions I have always received, like why couldn't African Americans have the priesthood until all of the segregation problems started coming up? Isn't it convenient that during the 70's (or whenever my church lifted that ban) is when they were allowed it? I have always told people what I have been taught- we don't know. It's God's plan, not ours.

But we are people, 100% fallible. I know that our prophet is supposed to be pretty good, but even he can make mistakes. What makes our church any less succeptable to corruption than all of the others? I know that the Catholic church's doctrines were created mostly be a vote that occured at the meeting in Nicaea (sp?). I always thought, how can they believe their church, when their mode of baptism was decided by a bunch of old guys voting? How can they believe it is the truth?

But how can I believe my church is the truth when the answer to every difficult question is that I just must have faith? I have many problems with my religion, but my whole life I have been encouraged to just swallow them, to have faith, to not question. However, I am going to stop following that doctrine and tell you the truth: I believe that most religious corruption comes from the tradition of not questioning doctrine.

My church creates a huge incentive to never question it. If it is the only true church, and the temple is the only place to get married, and if those that have heard the truth will be responsible for having accepted it or not once they die, then we're totally screwed if we leave it. We won't get to be with the people we love after we die. We won't be able to ever reach the highest tier of heaven until we accept it. Therefore, if you're going to leave my church, you had better be pretty dang sure it isn't true.
Isn't that convenient?

Let me tell you what problems I have. First off, with God. How can God know everything that ever has happened and will happen and yet still be able to interact with the world to change it? That doesn't make sense at all. If God has free agency to act on the world, then he can't possibly know the fate of the world unless he himself has no free agency and is acting according to some even higher plan. My Book of Mormon (and the Bible I think) says that in the end, Satan will be defeated, for sure, no doubts. It says, in the part that was written 600 something BC, that Joseph Smith would come along and someone would lose part of the sealed plates. And yet it also says that if we pray and follow the commandments our lives will be blessed. Well, if I have free agency to pray and follow commandments, and God has promised he will change my life if I follow them, then I determine my future, and unless I don't have free agency, God has no clue what's going to happen. The best he can do is take a statistical guess. Statistics usually work. One can be sure of a mold of probability. But one, believing in free agency, can never be sure that one individual in all of time will fit into that probability. Chaos theory galore.

Second off, as Kierkegaard so kindly pointed out to me, why in the world would God require Abraham to kill Isaac as a test? To me, if the commandment is that 'thou shalt not kill,' and I am told to kill my son, I'm in a pretty big conundrum. Either God is testing whether I will follow his commandment not to kill people, or he really wants me to kill my son for him. But why would God deliberately ask me to break one of his unbreakable rules? That's not very consistent. However, in doing so, God sets up a very convenient imperative: these things are wrong, but if I tell you to do them, then they are okay. No wonder people in the middle east are killing each other.

Third, why does our salvation require one man to suffer and die? And if he didn't have a choice, what makes his sacrifice meaningful? What makes his action any different than all of the other martyrs that died for God, like the suicide bombers that smashed into the World Trade Centers- weren't they truly convinced that they were dying for God? (Hopefully I will not be smitten for comparing Jesus to suicide bombers...) If Christ did have a choice, how could prophets predict way before hand that he would die for us? As I mentioned earlier, God can only be sure of probabilities. No matter how well you know someone, there is a chance that they will do something you could have never predicted. Jesus, if he had choice, could have just as logically quit. He could have killed someone, done something wrong. Again, we have a problem here with free agency.

Fourth, why is wrath and anger usually wrong, but not wrong when Christ starts throwing things at the temple? It again sets up the Abraham-like deal where we are only to follow God's commandments unless such-and-such happens. Here, such-and-such is blasphemy against God. So if violence is justifiable in the name of defending the sanctity of God, what makes those people that are trying to kill Jews or gays or anything wrong, if they are just following their interpretation of this action? Religion can, in this case, prompt men to do things against the morals of their society, or even to do things that change the morals of their entire society (like with anti-semitism and the holocaust). This doesn't seem right to me.

Look at all the religions in the world. What is the probability that one, just one, is right, when they are all claiming their validity? How can I allow my morals to be taken from purely a religion when religion can do horrible things to morals?

When I read my Book of Mormon or the Bible and I am believing in my church, I feel comforted. The books tell me that because I am being righteous, I will be rewarded forever. However, when I read them last night all I read about was how I am going to burn in Hell forever. It feels like coercion to me. It seems wrong. I believe in a God of love. Why would God want me to burn in hell just for having a hard time believing in him? Doesn't it make sense that I'd have a hard time, with all of this confusion going on down here? Why should I believe in my religion just because I am afraid of the consequences it preaches if it is true and I don't believe in it? Shouldn't I believe in it because it feels right to me, and because it is the conclusion I come to in my heart? The only few books in all of our scriptures that I see as purely preaching love and peace are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with the exception of the temple incident. However, even those books go on about the horrible consequences to people that do not follow that doctrine of love. If I condemn all murderers to everlasting Hell, what makes me better than those murderers?

We are told in our church that experiencing the spirit is a tingling sensation, a sort of feeling of passion. It makes people cry. However, psychotic people that believe they are seeing demons or angels or God can cry too. Our minds can make us do anything. If I am expecting to feel a certain way at a religious function, can't I easily create that feeling with my mind? The first time I went to EFY (a church camp) a few years ago I really believed in my church, and the last few days I had a very passionate, spiritual experience. However, this year when I went I was doubting majorly. I kept praying to have those same feelings, but I didn't have them. God knew I was extremely vulnerable during that week- why couldn't he make me feel what I desperately needed to feel? When I eat a donut, I can make myself physically sick just by thinking about all of the calories dispersing. I don't try to make myself feel sick consciously; it just happens because of what I am thinking about. Why couldn't I make myself feel as if there was a tingling within me?

Could it be, then, that all of religion is really just created from some expectation? Ah, yes, but there must be a primary mover (thank you Aristotle). What if someone, one day, started to think about it, and realize how meaningless one life is if there is nothing greater than oneself, or even the human race? What if they got lost in that chaos, and determined there must be a God, there must be a God just to maintain sanity? What if that was the only way that they could live with themselves and life? Suddenly we have this concept, this concept of religion...

I think everything mentioned above makes a good case against religion. My whole life I have been told, in my religion, not to question, and that if I questioned I would be punished. This gave me a great incentive to just try to blindly believe. However, now that the questions have opened themselves, that admonition not to question just makes me question all the more.

This dam has burst before in my life, and I have patched it with spiritual tingling feelings and a complete fear of what a life without my religion would be like. Right now, I'm trying very hard to keep myself from doing this.

Not that I don't believe in God. I do. I believe that if spirituality arose with civilizations all over the world that weren't connected to each other, there must be some element of truth in it. But I think that the truth isn't derived through society or religion at all; the truth is just in the individual feeling- spirituality, not religion.

Religion, as I mentioned, can cause people to do very good things. But do these things really matter if they are only doing them to help themselves, here or in some after life (this was my main argument with the Homeric hero when I started writing in this blog 1.5 years ago)? If we are to do things out of selfishness, where is the virtue in that? Should we not do things out of love?

If there is a God up there, he is the champion of spirituality, of love, of humanitarian feelings. He isn't limited to those that acknowledge him; he exists in everyone. The only real way to get to him is through the self. All of the good things that religion has doon, the genuinely good things based on a real love for other human beings, I believe are really the products of spirituality, not religion. I don't believe that I should derive my morals from my religion; I believe that I should derive them from myself, and then, if I must, I should find a group of people with similar self-derived morals and belong to that. I should try to get people to believe in their own values, not try to impose my own values or beliefs on them. I should care more about others and love than anything else; peace comes from this. If I am a part of society, I should belong to it more for a love of others than for a need to aquire benefits for myself. God is about love; he isn't about who is right and who is wrong when it comes to semantics. The only commandment that we really need is love; all of the other commandments fall into place after that. Therefore, God only needs to be a God of love to produce spirituality that causes peaceful societies to spring up.

If all of the good things about religion are really just residual effects from spirituality, then what do we get from religion? I tell you what we get, if we forget that it is about the individual, not the institution- we get fear, we get stories created to coerce us, we get corruption, we get murder, we get confused values, we get disfunctional societies, we get biases, we get hatred, we get discrimination, we get anger, we get superiority complexes. All of that, from an institution that forgets itself.

I know that my religion preaches a God of love, and above all else it preaches love. I see the wonderful things the spirituality in my religion accomplishes. In this sense I am very much a Mormon. But I also see what people have done to this church, and to every church, and left with the doctrine of love that my religion preaches and the actuality of fear and corruption that religion embodies, I can only turn away from the institution and back to the spirituality.

I DO BELIEVE IN MORALS. I am not amoral at all. I thought that to believe in morals I had to believe in my religion, but I don't. I have started to question all of these things, and now, because of the lovely system my religion built in my mind, I feel lost in a chaos. I want to run back to the institution; I want to cling to it, to a place where there was clarity and control. But there were so many contradictions there. I guess I can live with a lot of contradictions. But I cannot live with something that contradicts a God of love.

Through this God that I believe in, I believe in real human nature, uncorrupted by society (I suppose I am turning into Rousseau). More than anything in the world, more than any commandment, more than any church sermon, more than chaos theory or string theory, more than the quadratic equation, more than the proteins on the surface of red blood cells, more than my own hands that are typing this, more than my own consciousness that is dictating this, more than EVERYTHING, I believe in love. I believe in caring about other human beings. If that view is not compatible with certain parts of my religion, so be it. In my heart I know that I can't believe that my church, as it exists now, is 100% true. I believe perhaps that it is 80 or 90% true, but the real truth I get from love cannot be found in human corruption.

I know that even my own views inherently carry contradictions. But if you get anything from this dam-burst, let it be that I believe in love, and all of my morals are aligned with that belief. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in the liberation that all of this brings me. I believe in the morals that my church teaches, in not swearing and not having sex until I'm married and such, but not because my church preaches them- because I believe them, first, without the church.

But let me tell you what else is the problem. I will also keep going to church. I will get married in the temple. I will try to believe, because I am afraid. I am afraid of going to Hell. I am afraid of not following my church, just in case it is 100% true. Because I'm sure in trouble if it is, and I haven't acted in accordance to it.

If there is a God up there, though, and I believe there is, then he will know all along what I really believe in, because like Nietzsche said, he is the first and last witness.

I'm scared. I'm really, really scared to type all of this. It is so against everything I have been taught. But if it is my conclusion, doesn't that make it's truth even more likely, if it denies my education?

*Waiting for the lightning bolt to strike me down to Hell*