stelf

This is bold claim for which you have no evidence. If it is possible to progress sufficiently in a pre-mortal state that exercising agency in this life is not needed then I see no reason why anyone should be sent to earth before reaching that state. Additionally, this would imply that God specifically places these "special" spirts into those situations in which they will die young. No, I completely reject your reasoning. This is not a God worthy of trusting. This would be saying that we should trust God loves us, but we don't really have any idea what love even is.

I think whenever we discuss the problem of evil in the lds context there seems to be a heavy emphasis on agency and it pretty much always focuses on the agency of the perpetrator of evil and not on the agency of the victim. If someone murders a young child it is presented that they are saved. But this removes the agency of these children. They never get to make any decisions about their eternal welfare. This bypasses all the "essential" parts of life other than gaining a body.

I hope what I say does not come across as negative to you @bluebell or @Calm. I have a lot of respect for both of you and have found your comments both thoughtful and insightful. However, what these messages seem to be implying is that even God, the greatest of all, is unable to overcome our human inability to understand. I do not think this is true. I have communicated with other people in my life. I know I have not always done so successfully. I also know that I have improved and that currently I am able to both clearly and accurately communicate and understand communications from other people. I do not accept that an all powerful God cannot clearly communicate to me simply because I am human.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think I understand better where you are coming from. I also appreciate that you do not lump all criticisms into the groups of "genuine" and "disingenuous outcry" as to me it leaves room for other options or expressions. I would simply counter that one need not be personally harmed in order to be upset at a perceived wrong.

So basically you don't think there is a problem. Other people do think there is a problem.

I'm going to push back on this. You ask if there is any reason to assume divine communication should be better than human communication. I would say absolutely! Even among humans there are vast differences in ability to communicate. I would absolutely expect a perfected human that has access to all facets of human experience to be able to communicate ideas better than just a regular old human. I do not consider myself an excellent communicator, but I do have many years experience as an educator and a scientist. I would argue that my ability to function professionally has been dependent on communicating things accurately. Teaching a bunch of high school students how to solve algebraic equations required communicating. My job performance was in part based on how accurately I was able to do that. Were there problems? Of course. But not with most of them. Now it sounds like you are saying that even the very best and brightest of God's children (I'm assuming you are referring to lucifer) "misunderstood" even while in his presence. If this is true, you are making a very strong case that we really can't trust anything we think we understand from God. You also discuss God not interfering. I think this is largely true, but it breaks down for me with multiple counter examples. Now in each of these I do not think we have evidence that God is removing someone's will, but he certainly seems to arbitrarily intervene to stop the action. Alma the younger was stopped by an angel and struck dumb. This had nothing at all to do with what he was seeking or wanted. The man that was going to kill Ammon was instead struck dead before he could exercise his agency. Amulek wanted to exercise power and save innocent women and children from burning. He was told no so that when God used the lamanites to come wipe out the people of Ammonihah his anger would be justified. There are of course many many more stories from scripture that follow this pattern. Outside the scriptures I think of children abused by a trusted adult. At times these children then grow up suffering the consequences of extreme trauma and then themselves committing atrocities.

Yep, there seems to be an ever distant point where we can understand, but no one has ever actually achieved it. That's why we have to dismiss or minimize so much of what past prophets have spoken. They were just speaking as a man those times. I mean it sure seems like they thought they were speaking God's will because they actually claimed to be doing that, but we know better now.

I can understand this as a framework if you have a presupposed belief in Christ. But what if you don't? This just kicks the can down the road so to speak. Also, this would require a "correct" knowledge of Christ, but where do we get knowledge of Christ? From the scriptures and teachings of those who claim to have knowledge of Christ, but why should we trust those sources? Again, just shifting the problem in my opinion.

I suppose true equipoise is as you describe, a balance. However, my point is more about the practicality. We are not really ever truly balanced. We have biases, inclinations, suspicions, or hopes that cause us to lean one way or the other.

Well, I have a hard time seeing where anything I said implied I would be any different had I lived then. I simply said that they were terrible. I agree with @The Nehor that they were also just normal. That's kinda my point. My wife likes to read regency romances (I must admit that I too enjoy reading them). They romanticize the time period, but every time I read them I can't help but think that the situation of women was terrible in a lot of ways. Doesn't mean that it was out of the ordinary for the time. In essence, I don't think most past church leaders are any worse than I would expect any human leader to be for their time. However, I would hope that direct communication with an almighty, loving God would have elevated them a bit.

I appreciate this very much and as a paradigm I think it could work for me. However, it does not work for me within the teachings of the LDS church. You are of course free to disagree, but we indoctrinate our children to "Follow the Prophet" with a catchy song. President Nelson recently stated that prophets will always speak the truth. I think that claim is objectively false. So, then the question return as to how do we know what the prophets get right or wrong, and we are back to relying on the spirit to teach us the truth.

I don't think it's about not having faith or doubts. If there was no faith at all then we would never investigate new drugs or treatments. I think equipoise is much more about a lack of certainty. I believe @Navidad recently posted in a different thread about this. I think we run into trouble when we are so certain of things that they can't be challenged. I have many people in my life that are this way. Their conclusions are what comes first and so they dismiss anything that challenges those. I see this in my work at times as well. A researcher is convinced that a particular treatment will be effective and is resistant to the analysis we perform. As for spiritual truth, I feel the same way. I was brought up to be certain about the gospel and the church. I think we are explicitly taught this by the church leaders. I think the stories of Abraham, Moses, and Nephi are about demonstrating unflinching loyalty even when confronted with commandments that seem immoral. To me this is blind obedience. It is saying that we should trust in our conclusions even when everything is telling us to doubt. I no longer see this as a virtue. So, I was never spiritually neutral and I am not now.

I honestly can't fully express how grateful I am for the very thoughtful replies everyone has provided. I really couldn't expect less from this group though. As many others have said, I can count on one hand the number of "transcendent" spiritual experiences that I have had. Similar to @JVW one of mine was very similar in that was how l learned to let go of the shame and self-hatred I had carried for most of my life. I would also guess that many on this board would fully support and understand if my spiritual understanding led me in a different direction. What I am dealing with is very similar to what @bluebell mentioned above. I attached a certain narrative to my spiritual experiences that led me to the conclusion that I should trust the scriptures, the prophets, and that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the one true church. In essence, I really truly believed what the church claims about itself as a result of these experiences. However, I am now forced to reevaluate that narrative. As I said previously, I am not questioning the reality or power of those experiences, but I know that the story around them cannot be what I originally thought.

I think about this thing a lot. In my professional life I am a biostatistician that works in all areas of clinical trials. A key piece of being able to proceed with a clinical investigation is something we call equipoise. Basically, we can't have too strong a conviction one way or the other about how the results of the trial will go. I am convinced that this state of equipoise is the one we should maintain in order to best place us to discover truth. It is the state in which we are most likely to "objectively" look at data and allow actual evidence to update our beliefs. I know that my experience in the church, although common, is not universal. But I was never given any opportunity for equipoise regarding church doctrine. Instead I was essentially told what was right by my parents and church leaders from a very young age and I grew up with "church is true" as my default position. If we have a worldview that makes us unwilling to even entertain the idea that our beliefs could be wrong I think we are set up to not reach the truth.

I feel like I understand what you are saying and respect this interpretation. However, this does not resolve any issues for me as this kind of explanation relies on understanding long after the fact what the spiritual impression was actually about. Additionally, it flies in the face of many teachings that we are given about the simplicity of following God. So basically, we get promptings and we attach meaning to them. The meaning we attach is either right or wrong, but we don't know really. Then later we might learn more and rethink the meaning we attached. In some cases like you describe above we decide that the prompting was still from God, but our attached meaning was wrong. In others, I think we could decide that it wasn't really a prompting from some other source. So, taken as a whole this paints a picture in my mind that we as humans have these kinds of feelings and we create the meaning.

Yes, I can in all honesty say this has happened to me. I could possibly be convinced to share some specifics, but I don't know that that would further the conversation.

This is something I think about a lot lately. I have had incredibly powerful, life changing, spiritual experiences. It is from spiritual experiences that I know I have worth. It is how I know that all humans have the same worth. However, I have also had powerful spiritual experiences that are contradictory. I have had powerful spiritual experiences that I interpreted to mean something was true that I later learned was false. I have had powerful spiritual experiences that told me something would happen and I took steps to prepare for the event, which ultimately did not happen. I know I am not providing a lot of detail here and I apologize as most of these things are very private, but my point is that I am left unable to escape the conclusion that, although real and powerful, I cannot determine what is true using this method. The way I see it, either God is bad at communicating this way (e.g. the wrong message is sent or the transmission is faulty). This would explain why prophets can boldly declare eternal truths in general conference that are later recanted. Or, I am bad at communicating this way. This second option is entire possible and highly likely. The problem is that if this second option is correct then I have low confidence that I should trust that my spiritual impressions actually teach me things that are correct, because I'm bad at understanding them. It could be argued that this is the reason we have prophets and scriptures so that we can learn and measure our own spiritual messages against them. This doesn't fix the problem though since the reason I would trust that prophets speak truth is through one of my own spiritual experiences which I am bad at interpreting. Another option is that it is all just part of being human. We have these amazing experiences that we attribute to the divine (of whatever flavor or variety you were brought up with or are ready for) but are actually just our own minds. This last one is currently the one that makes the most sense by far to me right now, but I want to hear others thoughts.

Remember several years ago when 3rd hour was dedicated to studying teaching of the presidents of the church and we had those nice curated books that made it seem like all past prophets just taught things that we are ok with today? Yeah, me too. I hate that the more I learn about past church leaders the more I am convinced they were terrible people.

This is where I am right now. I want to know what is true. I am not interested in cultivating faith in something that is false so I must engage in a search for what is actually true.

I'm not sure how I feel about a monogamous couple with many children (there are of course physical limits to this), but I think I do have concerns. As an extreme example I would put forth the Duggar family. I am no expert on their situation, but from what I have heard or watched I definitely do not feel like they had lots of children because they were favored of God, although they may have believed it. I'm not sure how the comment about being a teacher applies. However, my first "real" job was as a math teacher. I remained an educator for a little more than 7 years. I can confidently say that splitting my attention between more and more students does not result in better outcomes. I had some advanced classes that I taught with small sizes and year after year I saw those students far exceed average performance on AP tests. I also had very large classes of honors students in other subjects. My approach and care of the teaching was the same in both. But in one there was far less of me to go around. I get the idea that having a lot of kids or students keeps you busy or "young" as the saying goes, but the idea that my eternity is going to be managing an ever growing number of children from potentially multiple partners sounds like hell.

This is a totally fair take, but I want to expand on what I mean a bit. I fully admit this is my own take and don't expect anyone to necessarily agree with me or feel the same way. However, I do not see any way that I could be married to more than one woman without some feeling of superiority coming along for the ride. Basically, I would be claiming (or at least acting) as though my abilities as a husband are good enough for multiple women. However much you partition my time, feelings, energy, don't worry I can handle another. This is to me laughable. I love my wife dearly and would do anything for her, but I fail as a great husband all the time. This doesn't even count my attention and caring for kids. I think we can see echoes of this phenomenon in the quotes from early church leaders claiming the monogamous men are weak “I have noticed that a man who has but one wife, and is inclined to that doctrine, soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality [of wives] looks fresh, young, and sprightly. Why is this? Because God loves that man, and because he honors his word. Some of you may not believe this, but I not only believe it but I also know it. For a man of God to be confined to one woman is small business. I do not know what we would do if we had only one wife apiece.” (Apostle Heber C. Kimball – Journal of Discourses Vol 5, page 22 archive.org ). To me, I believe their is a great evil hear because it relegates women to the role of adornments. Mere objects and trophies that show how much a man is favored of God. I find it utterly repulsive.

For most of my life in which I was aware of polygamy, I viewed it as a hard sacrifice that I didn't understand and was grateful I didn't have to practice. At this point I see no way that men and women can be considered equal in this kind of arrangement. As @bluebell stated "polygamous marriage is a multiplication for the man and a division for the woman". For me this is directly contradictory to the claim that God loves all his children equally. Even "coupled with eternally glory" it is an inequality.

Some of these responses are just wild to me. Am I crazy or was I taught to sing "Follow the prophet, he knows the way" or was that just for fun?