At the moment, I haven’t left the Church’s community, so I don’t feel that loss just yet.
There’s a potential middle-way there.
I don’t know much about Mormonism, mind, but I watch and read a Biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, who’s skeptical of everything and then some. His YouTube channel, and other videos in which he appears, as well as his papers and books, are all in line with the academic consensus in Biblical scholarship, meaning he deconstructs every single Christian belief (and most Jewish ones too) to the point it’s easy to assume he’s a militant Atheist. But he’s actually a practicing Mormon, and his intense criticism extends to the books of the Mormon canon.
Contacting him might thus help. if someone like him can be an active member of the LDS church, even if it’s in some kind of minority movement, you might find a way to similarly keep both things going.
Arguably the one real-world religion that comes closest to my personal understanding of objective reality is Secular Buddhism.
That’s what I myself follow, mixed with some Taoism and Shinto. It’s a combination that works well for me.
If you go with Buddhism, it’ll help to familiarize yourself with the concept of Apatheism, which is distinct from Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, and see if you’d be comfortable adopting it, since that’s the Buddhist take on things.
To summarize: Theisms care about deities and affirm their existence. Atheism cares about deities and affirms they don’t exist. Agnosticism cares about deities and wishes it knew if one or the other take. As such, all three fall under the umbrella term Patheism: caring about the existence or inexistence of deities.
Apatheism is strict indifference towards deities. There are Apatheists who think deities exist, but if they don’t, nothing of import was lost. There are those who think they don’t exist, but if perchance they do, they still don’t matter much, or at all (though in that case it’s advisable to try and teach them Buddhism too, so they become better deities). And there are those who don’t know, and really don’t care. So Apatheism has equivalents to Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, but their Apatheistic counterparts are so weakly distinct it barely registers.
Buddhism is the Apatheistic religion par excellence, so adopting that rather than Atheism or Agnosticism makes it much easier to understand its philosophy and to put it into practice.
There’s a potential middle-way there.
I don’t know much about Mormonism, mind, but I watch and read a Biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, who’s skeptical of everything and then some. His YouTube channel, and other videos in which he appears, as well as his papers and books, are all in line with the academic consensus in Biblical scholarship, meaning he deconstructs every single Christian belief (and most Jewish ones too) to the point it’s easy to assume he’s a militant Atheist. But he’s actually a practicing Mormon, and his intense criticism extends to the books of the Mormon canon.
Contacting him might thus help. if someone like him can be an active member of the LDS church, even if it’s in some kind of minority movement, you might find a way to similarly keep both things going.
That’s what I myself follow, mixed with some Taoism and Shinto. It’s a combination that works well for me.
If you go with Buddhism, it’ll help to familiarize yourself with the concept of Apatheism, which is distinct from Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, and see if you’d be comfortable adopting it, since that’s the Buddhist take on things.
To summarize: Theisms care about deities and affirm their existence. Atheism cares about deities and affirms they don’t exist. Agnosticism cares about deities and wishes it knew if one or the other take. As such, all three fall under the umbrella term Patheism: caring about the existence or inexistence of deities.
Apatheism is strict indifference towards deities. There are Apatheists who think deities exist, but if they don’t, nothing of import was lost. There are those who think they don’t exist, but if perchance they do, they still don’t matter much, or at all (though in that case it’s advisable to try and teach them Buddhism too, so they become better deities). And there are those who don’t know, and really don’t care. So Apatheism has equivalents to Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, but their Apatheistic counterparts are so weakly distinct it barely registers.
Buddhism is the Apatheistic religion par excellence, so adopting that rather than Atheism or Agnosticism makes it much easier to understand its philosophy and to put it into practice.