Any Former Apostates Who Have Come Back Into Full Belief Here?

[Pandorian]

By that, I mean you had contemplated through study in the history or other areas of the Church in leaving, and then through continued study you have come back full circle into believing that the Gospel is as the Church says it is?

Just curious more than anything. It seems my faith goes through a wide spectrum over time, from almost agnostic/atheist to full belief in Jesus and the Church.

[why me]

Yes, there have been. But I can't name them by name for obvious reasons. And I have forgotten their screen names. But one is rather famous among the apostates and apologists who studied the fanny alger affair. He came back to the fold.

[bluebell]

There have been a couple that i remember, but i can't remember their names. Hopefully they will see this thread and participate.

[wenglund]

I don't know that any have come back into the fold by studying history. Rather, I believe they come back by way of the means God has established for growth in faith--i.e. through spiritual interaction with God (Moroni 10 and Alma 32).

In other words, they came back into the fold by reversing the means by which they left the fold--they returned to trusting God more than man.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Edited February 13, 2012 by wenglund

[Damien the Leper]

Just curious, would Avraham Gileadi fit into this category? From what I understand, his excommunication was for not including the church in his Isaiah works and prophecies.

[Calm]

From what I understand, his excommunication was for not including the church in his Isaiah works and prophecies.

Is this what he stated or someone else?

My understanding is unlike others at the time, he believed the Church was true and was rebaptized quite soon. Nor was the reason for his excommunication publicized by him or the Church, though others tried to do so for their own agenda.

[Matthew J. Tandy]

Just curious, would Avraham Gileadi fit into this category? From what I understand, his excommunication was for not including the church in his Isaiah works and prophecies.

I know a daughter of his and her husband (friends of my wife and I). Not going to go into their personal affairs, other than to say Avraham was always faithful, there was some confusion over what his writings were actually referencing, he thought he had corrected it to their satisfaction, apparently made a mistake, some thought it was on purpose, and when it was cleared up he received a personal call from an apostle apologizing and authorizing rebaptism. Avraham still went to church in the interim, and is still active today. He holds zero animosity towards the church and its leaders, and could not really fall into the category of apostate because he never spiritually left or rebelled.

[why me]

I don't know that any have come back into the fold by studying history. Rather, I believe they come back by way of the means God has established for growth in faith--i.e. through spiritual interaction with God (Moroni 10 and Alma 32).

In other words, they came back into the fold by reversing the means by which they left the fold--they returned to trusting God more than man.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

The one who wrote the article on fanny alger may have come back because of a restudying of ldshistory among other things.

[guitarist]

I once taught a family on my mission who were once LDS, and left to become fundamentalists (to my knowledge, they didn't actually engage in polygamy, but rather were in it because they agreed intellectually with the fundamentalists over the LDS church). They were still fundamentalists when we were visiting them, and over the course of many many months, they eventually became convinced of the truthfulness of the LDS church again. From there, we had to get a member of the 12 to approve their readmission into the church, which was eventually approved, and they were baptized again. I haven't talked to them in a decade or so, but last I heard, they were still very committed to the church.

[wenglund]

The one who wrote the article on fanny alger may have come back because of a restudying of ldshistory among other things.

If you are thinking here of Don Bradley, I believe you may be mistaken.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Duncan]

I love Bro. Bradley! but I don't know his story though and I can't even remember mine for that matter

[Maestrophil]

I would love to hear Don's story, if he indeed has one...

[altersteve]

For what it's worth, I was almost an agnostic/atheist at one point, but a strong spiritual experience I had helped me snap out of it.

[Maestrophil]

If it is not too personal, I would love to hear your experience, altersteve....

[Damien the Leper]

I know a daughter of his and her husband (friends of my wife and I). Not going to go into their personal affairs, other than to say Avraham was always faithful, there was some confusion over what his writings were actually referencing, he thought he had corrected it to their satisfaction, apparently made a mistake, some thought it was on purpose, and when it was cleared up he received a personal call from an apostle apologizing and authorizing rebaptism. Avraham still went to church in the interim, and is still active today. He holds zero animosity towards the church and its leaders, and could not really fall into the category of apostate because he never spiritually left or rebelled.

Thank you for clearing the air on this.

[Pahoran]

I would love to hear Don's story, if he indeed has one...

If it is not too personal, I would love to hear your experience, altersteve....

Ditto on both. However, I'm not sure this is the right forum for 'em. I sometimes wonder if Don would be willing to submit his to MST.

Regards,

Pahoran

[Pahoran]

Is this what he stated or someone else?

My understanding is unlike others at the time, he believed the Church was true and was rebaptized quite soon. Nor was the reason for his excommunication publicized by him or the Church, though others tried to do so for their own agenda.

I think that one of the reasons for the confusion is that those who are enamoured of the mythology of the "September Six" can't let him go; possibly because "September Five" doesn't quite have the same zing.

Regards,

Pahoran

[Damien the Leper]

I think that one of the reasons for the confusion is that those who are enamoured of the mythology of the "September Six" can't let him go; possibly because "September Five" doesn't quite have the same zing.

Regards,

Pahoran

I get what you're saying. I agree that the September Five would be more appropriate. However, knowing what the members of this group have spoken on concerning their roads to excommunication shows that they are a far cry from apostates. Maybe with the exception of Paul Toscano who claims to have made the decision to take Kerry Heinz's target off his wife and direct it at him since she was the original target shortly after her time at BYU.

[why me]

If you are thinking here of Don Bradley, I believe you may be mistaken.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

I think that he was impressed with the fanny alger story. And I am sure that if he found something terrible, he would still be outside the church. I was referring to the piece that he wrote.

But the main reason why he came back was because he has a testimony that the lds church is true. And tends to go with I was saying on a different thread. This experience of knowing the church is true based on prayer and spiritual experiences, are difficult to forget.

Edited February 15, 2012 by why me

[why me]

I would love to hear Don's story, if he indeed has one...

If he still has a blog you may find it there. He used to be on the boards but as since left the internet struggle. But he does return from time to time.

[why me]

I love Bro. Bradley! but I don't know his story though and I can't even remember mine for that matter

Here is don's story:

Leaving

I’ve always, since my earliest memories, been on a journey of intellectual discovery, digging (sometimes literally) to learn more about what’s true, why things came to be the way they are, and how the world works. That questing has often taken me far from where I started or ever expected to go, changing my worldview quite radically, as it did several years ago when I came to believe Mormonism was not what it purported to be and was not true.

But I’ve never been one to marshal all the evidence I can on one side of an issue, to persuade myself, and to ignore or explain away all the rest (with perhaps one exception in my adult life, which I’ll describe below). I’ve consistently acknowledged—at least since I was a teenager—that the evidence regarding Mormonism’s foundational claims was mixed. Hence my posts from back in good old ZLMB days to just the last number of months acknowledging what I saw as the best evidence for Mormonism, even though I was not a believer.

Such a longstanding approach to evidence is not something that easily disappears, particularly when the person taking it views it as a virtue, as I do. So I continue to view the evidence of history, philosophy, and science as multi-vocal. In short, I still see evidence both for and against foundational LDS claims.

The same basic logic I’ve used in the past also holds, though the way I weigh out a number of issues has shifted. I don’t think I’ve made any secret of the fact, for instance, that certain critical arguments—such as that based on Joseph Smith’s translation from the Kinderhook plates—are misdirected. I also now believe the same for regarding the Zelph incident, Joseph Smith’s reported visual translation of the Book of Mormon (with his head in the hat), and several other staples of criticism. These are conclusions I’ve drawn in the course of historical research projects, a couple of which I am finishing this summer for publication. (One will appear over two issues of Sunstone, beginning with either the next issue or the one after that.) And my exploration in Mormon history continues.

But my interest in Mormonism has not by any means been exclusively intellectual, nor has a journey of discovery ever been enough for me. Spirituality, also, is intrinsic to who I am. I was a spiritually minded child, and extremely devout as a teenager, as our board master Jason—a high school chum—should well recall. In fact, it was primarily my spirituality, and not my intellectual curiosity, that got me into doing Mormon history, since, to me, it was sacred history through which I might learn something about God, the meaning of life, and how I ought to live it.

As a teenager and in my early and mid-20s I judged purported spiritual truth by its spiritual fruits, the “light” I got from it, and the kind of person it made me when I put it into practice. In my later 20s I shifted to a more cognitive approach, believing I could distinguish truth and falsehood in the spiritual realm by an appeal primarily to historical evidence—i.e., by seeing if I could trace the intellectual “genealogy,” if you will, of purported spiritual truth back to what I could demonstrate was a reliable divine revelation. As I attempted this, the domain of what I regarded as spiritually true shrank—and shrank—until there was scarcely anything remaining. I stopped believing.

My new outlook left me spiritually cold—and hungry. I have always thought deeply about meaning. I think about it all the time. So even as an atheist I tried to find spirituality and larger meaning in my life, like what I had developed in my early life in the LDS church. I tried…failed.

My path to atheism had been paved by a combination of personal tragedy—witnessing up-close the effects of mental illness on someone I cared for deeply— and disillusioning historical discovery.

I was also terribly weary of trying to figure out religion. It didn’t seem to work and didn’t seem like it was ever going to. And I could not fathom that there could be a God of anything like the traditional type and the world yet have the evils and suffering that it does. So, I decided, it was time. I needed to give up on religion entirely and move forward with a secular life—the happiest and kindest I could live, but without any “illusions” of immortality or ultimate meaning.

Whereas I had previously been open to evidence on all sides of religious issues, I began to constrict that openness. My period of weighing things, of uncertainty and wrestling, was over. Now I needed to dedicate myself to tearing up the last vestiges of my illusions. I read atheistic literature as though that’s all there was.

The strange thing is that after I concluded the church was not true, it never, [seemed to me, as I recalled my earlier, believing life, like I had once thought the church was true, but really it turned out to be untrue. Rather, it always seemed like the church had once been true, and now—bafflingly—no longer was —and this despite my best effort to eradicate the vestiges of my old, “deluded” religiosity from my mind.

I was also distressed over religion because I was finding things in my historical research that I thought were necessarily at odds with Mormonism and that I could only publish at the cost of my membership. I could no longer see a place for myself in the church, and did not think the church would want me anyway. My life’s work, my research on Mormon origins, seemed fated to undermine a church that though not, to my perception, true was nonetheless good—a definite net positive in the world.

The cognitive dissonance of this was enormous. I had come to believe that my life’s work would undermine something good, and that this work would therefore be a net drain on the world, something not worth doing. Human nature being as it is, this was not a psychologically sustainable position. Unless I was going to sacrifice my life’s work, then, consciously or not, I would have to change my view of the goodness of Mormonism.

It was then that I read Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. Harris’s book argues, with clarity, wit, and forceful prose, that faith is a luxury that humanity can no longer afford in the age of weapons of mass destruction—that religious faith, unless toppled, will spell the doom of our kind. This is a case that I was ripe for. I wanted my historical work to have meaning—and here it was. Because my work, as I saw it, would inevitably undermine Mormonism, it would contribute to this quixotic cause of freeing humankind from religion, the cause of saving the world.

I left the church. I wanted to leave on my own terms, and not wait for the hammer to fall when others decided to punish me for, as I saw it, revealing the truth about Mormon origins.

[why me]

God

I don’t recall all the steps my thought took from there (though I recorded most of them at the time). But the essence is this: the position that religion in general and Mormonism in specific are net costs or threats to humankind was not one I could maintain. Memories of my personal experience, observations of others, and encounters with social scientific and medical studies on the benefits of religion increasingly jarred with Harris’s arguments for the evils of faith.

I initially resisted these counter-evidences to my new worldview, as I think we all do. But as the data piled up and the studies came out to be well-designed, I came to another fork in the road. I had followed the evidence, as I saw it, on the accuracy of various religious beliefs that impinged on science and history. Now, how could I consistently reject the evidence of social science and my own carefully re-examined life experience when it led to the view that religion is good for people?

I was motivated, by my very desire to make my life’s work meaningful, to perceive religion, particularly Mormonism, as bad, or perhaps neutral. But ultimately I could not.

Coming to believe in God again was a separate matter from concluding that religion was good. That began—ironically enough—one day while I was reading Skeptic magazine. There was an ad in the magazine for a book, endorsed by Michael Shermer (the magazine’s editor): Biocosm http://www.biocosm.org/by James N. Gardner. The book promised an entirely secular-scientific look at the meaning of our place in the universe. I was intrigued, checked the book out from a university library, and read.

The author delivers a stunning argument, documenting the “fine tuning” of the universe for life, disarming the popular evolutionary “baby universes” theory that I had thought explained that fine tuning, and then arguing that our ultimate purpose is to ensure the perpetuation of life in the next cosmic cycle or “big bounce,” by doing the fine tuning ourselves (meaning that our distant, distant descendants will do it).

I was quite persuaded of the fine tuning, of the inadequacy of the existing explanations for it, and of the meaningfulness of the goal of perpetuating life. There was just one pesky problem. Gardner’s argument involved the hypothesis that time is a closed loop, such that the universe we will be tailoring for life at the next “big bounce” is the one we are now living in—our descendants are our own creators.

This was and is a complete non-starter. The literal temporal circularity of the argument is, for me, pure fantasy. I started to wonder: why, exactly, does the author think the fixity of the past is up for grabs, but not even consider the idea of a Mind that stands behind the universe in the first place? The more I thought, the more perplexed I became. The God I thought I had banished from my intellectual universe returned with a vengeance. I could not make sense of the universe in which I lived without Him. I became a deist.

This broke everything open again. I stopped reading on only the negative side of religious issues, and I took religion back off the shelf, or, rather, out of the waste bin.

On reassessing, I found there were other strong reasons to believe in God. For instance, I had convinced myself, in good secular humanist style, that the various religions were mutually refuting: Jehovah was set against Allah, who was set against Brahma, etc., etc. But on closer examination, there was a core that persisted across all these faiths. All posited a Transcendent, and the adherents of all experienced that Transcendent. There was a core human religious philosophy (like Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy, about which Trevor told me), and a core human religious experience common to all cultures.

I also reassessed one crucial spiritual experience from when I was 18. It wasn’t an experience of a feeling, a “warm fuzzy,” or anything of the sort. It was a warning of something it seemed I should not have known was coming, a warning that saved my life. When I stopped believing in God I had convinced myself I could explain it, at least well enough. But I was willing to open it up to examination again. And my life circumstances, back in downtown Salt Lake again, which now put me frequently along the walking path where the experience had occurred, gave me another chance to analyze it. And analyze I did. I have replayed the experience in my head thousands of time, examining every little detail, and I have visited the place it happened over and over to try to figure it out.

Whatever the proper explanation of the experience, my earlier attempts to account for it naturalistically are an entire bust. They fail to do what I have learned from my history research that a real explanation does--actually account for the specifics of the thing under examination. I cannot reasonably account for the experience except by an appeal to an intelligence much more aware than I, one that warned me—and saved my life. By the natural course of events, my whole life since that day should have never happened. I am deeply grateful to be here, grateful to God.

[why me]

LDS Redux

Since coming to believe again in God, I have wrestled with what it means, with knowing what God would want, what He does want, with how I should live. And I have arrived at conclusions that have startled me.

My goal of assessing a purported spiritual truth by trying to construct its intellectual pedigree has been misguided. The best standard for assessing a proposed spiritual truth is the one given in the Sermon on the Mount, Alma’s allegory of the seed, and Moroni 7 (to name just a few religious texts)—that of assessing its spiritual fruits.

Mormonism has been, when I have embraced and lived it, a sure guide to spirituality, communion with God, and growing into the best person I am capable of being. When I have reflected on my own lived experience, this is what I’ve seen. Indeed, it’s probably why, when I stopped believing, it never seemed like I’d only thought the church was true, but that it had somehow become not true. Whatever I had concluded from the arguments in my head, Mormonism had—in fact—been true in my actual experience; it had delivered precisely what it promised.

Two truths have, for me, collided—at least in part. I believe I know the problems of Mormonism’s foundational claims as well as anyone. Hell, I’ve found new ones that others have not written on or presented. Some of the intellectual evidence is genuinely problematic for faith, and that evidence is surely mixed. But I also know Mormonism’s strengths, the realities of what it does spiritually. I can lie to myself and deny that there are intellectual problems. Or I can lie to myself and deny my life’s experience of its spiritual truth. Or…I can embrace both and find a way to integrate them. It is this that I have chosen and in which I am actively engaged.

I surely don’t have all “the answers.” And in many cases I suspect the answer might be that we Latter-day Saints have misunderstood our own faith or taken aspects of it too literally. But I am very much a Latter-day Saint. I believe, and do not doubt, that God is in it. I trust my own spiritual, moral, and communal experience when it tells me “the church is true.”

[why me]

Faith

I see many reasons for faith, and am groping out an understanding of faith that rises above the objections I had a few years ago to the very idea of faith.

There is a spiritual aspect to human nature. And secular culture, sad to say, does not satisfy or nourish this part of us, does not allow its unfolding, but stifles it. Yet to live disconnected from this part of ourselves, in my judgment, to live an incomplete life.

Thus, although I think religion—and Mormonism in particular—expresses much that is ultimately true about the universe and how it works, if it were not true in a theological sense, I think it would yet be an enduring source of wisdom and desirable for its ability to nurture our spiritual selves and fosters moral growth and communal bonds and harmony. In fact, there is an excellent, and atheistic, author who argues just this, whom I’ll cite below.

I know not everyone here will be inclined to agree that religion in general, and Mormonism in particular, make great contributions to health, happiness, communal stability, and the like. But this, I would submit, is due to a lack of acquaintance with the data that demonstrate just this. The following excerpts from recent posts will explain that, and offer references.

For anyone interested, they offer some of my current understanding of faith—of what it is and why we should cultivate it.

This is don's story. I don't want to link it because he gave it on a somewhat critic board.

Edited February 15, 2012 by why me

[phaedrus ut]

Just curious, would Avraham Gileadi fit into this category? From what I understand, his excommunication was for not including the church in his Isaiah works and prophecies.

I had always thought the issue was with his Isaiah teachings too but a number of years ago DCP corrected me and told me he knew it wasn't related to his writings but rather another issue. I can't be more specific because this was quite a few years ago and I would want to post my speculative memories and be wrong.

Phaedrus