LessWrong people generally don’t have enough exposure to the LDS church or the Book of Mormon to have a reason to take it seriously, and their worldview is so different that it would be hard for them to even understand why Mormons take it seriously in the first place.
But as a former Mormon, who was born into the church and attended church almost every Sunday for at least 30 years, I’d like to summarize my journey (briefly, as this discussion died off long ago):
I read the Book of Mormon three times, taking it seriously each time. I was often confused by parts of the book and other doctrines, but I generally assumed it was something wrong with me instead of the book or the doctrines. (edit: as I matured I was forced to see it as obfuscation by God or, in the most nonsensical cases, evidence that he was evil or did not exist, interpretations I was very reluctant to accept, of course; at most I would ask what the evidence compels me to believe. Remember also that even scientists do not throw out a hypothesis without a better one to replace it: the failed Michelson-Morley experiment did not cause everyone to suddenly decide there was no aether, because there was no Special Relativity to replace it; similarly, the theory of evolution was not a workable alternative to me, partly because I had learned about it only from those who were incompetent to teach me about it, and partly because I was quite sure that I had a soul, which evolutionary theory could not explain. Therefore I often thought about a third alternative, which was the idea that our world was some sort of experiment by ‘researchers’ who were messing with us for some reason.)
I prayed many times, hoping God would keep Moroni’s promise but He never did. I have taken morality seriously since I was a child and always tried to do what was right; my only significant failure was my inability to stop masturbating. I tried for 20 years to fight my own sexuality. I supposed (hoped!) that this was the reason why God wouldn’t answer my prayers. It was emotionally very painful that God wouldn’t answer my prayers; in my depression, I would think of worthiness like a high-jump competition in which the bar is invisible, and you can’t measure how high you or other competitors are jumping, and you just have to keep jumping and hoping that someday you will clear the bar. This felt unjust, but I had no way to be sure that God was just. I often met with my bishop, who could not answer my questions and often had to rely on backstop answers like “God hasn’t revealed all the answers to us yet”.
Edit: also, on rare occasions I felt a warmth in my chest, or sometimes a feeling of peace, that I hoped was “the Holy Spirit”. However, there was no discernible pattern to it. It seemed to happen at random, and my mind received no information this way. Something that seems important, in hindsight, is that most other LDS people would “bear their testimony” by saying “I know the church is true”, whereas I would say “I believe the church is true”, which was both honest and in line with scripture. I was conscious of this before, but I also avoided thinking about what it meant. For me today, it symbolizes the irony and hypocrisy of cherishing honesty except regarding the most important questions. Many people in the church have trained themselves to talk as if they’re the Brother of Jared after he saw the finger. You know, my brother left the church many years before I did, and the reasons he gave were things like being “tired of feeling guilty”. I felt these were not legitimate reasons to leave. The only reason to leave would be if it wasn’t true―and so I stayed. I believed.
I sometimes heard internet atheists talking about silly aspects of religion, but always in a dismissive way that preached to their own choir (I had not discovered Luke M’s commonsenseatheism.com). Their analyses were superficial and not persuasive to me. It seemed to me that I had to take evolution seriously, but I didn’t realize how little I knew about it, and I found an “intelligent design” video persuasive (the video did not talk about God, did not support “creationism”, was designed to sound scientific, and was ostensibly about scientists challenging the traditional “assumptions” of evolutionary theory).
I began to worry that if God was real, he sure wasn’t very nice or trustworthy. I found the following quote, which resonated with me: “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” If God was just, he wouldn’t condemn me for the legitimate reasons I might have for suspecting he was unreal or unjust, and if he was unjust, I shouldn’t even worship him at all. This quote was crucial in giving me permission to follow the evidence wherever it led.
As I began to take seriously the possibility that God wasn’t real, I engaged in a two-pronged strategy where I paid 10% tithing and also gave 10% to charities. If God wasn’t real, tithing was useless and I would have to do good some other way, but if He was real, I needed to show Him I was willing to be his faithful servant. This lasted maybe two years, and then I reduced my tithing to 5% as my faith waned.
Somehow, I don’t remember how, I came across the CES Letter in January 2015. After reading it, I understood that the church was false and I left the church immediately. Having done this, I quickly understood some other important things. First, I noticed that I wasn’t willing to go back to church and share the CES letter in any major way. I wasn’t willing to print copies and share them, or give a dramatic talk where the Bishop cuts off my microphone. When I told my best friend about the CES letter, he had no interest in reading it (and remains a Full Tithe Payer to this day). So now I understood survivorship bias—the reason I was surrounded by believers for 30 years, with no one seriously challenging my beliefs (see also evaporative cooling of group beliefs). Second, I noticed something about the evidence that Mormonism was false: the evidence existed only because Mormonism is recent; the church started in the era of the printing press, and there are many surviving records from the 19th century. Suppose for a moment that Christianity is false, and that in the time of Christ there was a lot of clear evidence it was false, just as there was evidence against Mormonism. What would have happened to that evidence? The believers would make many copies of their Holy Book, but the unbelievers ― having no printing press, and caring much less about fighting Christianity than the Christians cared to support it ― would not reliably preserve the evidence that it was false. 30 AD was a very different time, where even the truest of true believers, the disciples of Jesus Christ, seemingly didn’t care to write the Gospels until “forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus”. So, I concluded that Jesus was no more the messiah than other people whose followers called them the messiah.
I learned more about LessWrong/EA/SSC in the years afterward, became a regular visitor and read Rationality A to Z. I also discovered and signed the Giving What We Can Pledge at 10%, tithing level―an easy decision.
Edit: Since then, I’ve felt an amazing clarity of mind that I never enjoyed as a Christian. I used to feel confused and conflicted on a regular basis, understanding neither God nor Evolution properly; at long last I grok both, leaving behind only the mystery of the Hard Problem Of Consciousness. It would’ve been far better to learn about all this earlier in my life! My life has a new foundation now: Mature Consequentialist Utilitarianism built atop two axioms. It was an awful thing to gain the understanding that death is annihilation, but I also learned the Litany of Gendlin: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. Nothing actually changed: death was there all along; heaven was a myth. Surprisingly, I’m happier now, and a more effective person too.
LessWrong people generally don’t have enough exposure to the LDS church or the Book of Mormon to have a reason to take it seriously, and their worldview is so different that it would be hard for them to even understand why Mormons take it seriously in the first place.
But as a former Mormon, who was born into the church and attended church almost every Sunday for at least 30 years, I’d like to summarize my journey (briefly, as this discussion died off long ago):
I read the Book of Mormon three times, taking it seriously each time. I was often confused by parts of the book and other doctrines, but I generally assumed it was something wrong with me instead of the book or the doctrines. (edit: as I matured I was forced to see it as obfuscation by God or, in the most nonsensical cases, evidence that he was evil or did not exist, interpretations I was very reluctant to accept, of course; at most I would ask what the evidence compels me to believe. Remember also that even scientists do not throw out a hypothesis without a better one to replace it: the failed Michelson-Morley experiment did not cause everyone to suddenly decide there was no aether, because there was no Special Relativity to replace it; similarly, the theory of evolution was not a workable alternative to me, partly because I had learned about it only from those who were incompetent to teach me about it, and partly because I was quite sure that I had a soul, which evolutionary theory could not explain. Therefore I often thought about a third alternative, which was the idea that our world was some sort of experiment by ‘researchers’ who were messing with us for some reason.)
I prayed many times, hoping God would keep Moroni’s promise but He never did. I have taken morality seriously since I was a child and always tried to do what was right; my only significant failure was my inability to stop masturbating. I tried for 20 years to fight my own sexuality. I supposed (hoped!) that this was the reason why God wouldn’t answer my prayers. It was emotionally very painful that God wouldn’t answer my prayers; in my depression, I would think of worthiness like a high-jump competition in which the bar is invisible, and you can’t measure how high you or other competitors are jumping, and you just have to keep jumping and hoping that someday you will clear the bar. This felt unjust, but I had no way to be sure that God was just. I often met with my bishop, who could not answer my questions and often had to rely on backstop answers like “God hasn’t revealed all the answers to us yet”.
Edit: also, on rare occasions I felt a warmth in my chest, or sometimes a feeling of peace, that I hoped was “the Holy Spirit”. However, there was no discernible pattern to it. It seemed to happen at random, and my mind received no information this way. Something that seems important, in hindsight, is that most other LDS people would “bear their testimony” by saying “I know the church is true”, whereas I would say “I believe the church is true”, which was both honest and in line with scripture. I was conscious of this before, but I also avoided thinking about what it meant. For me today, it symbolizes the irony and hypocrisy of cherishing honesty except regarding the most important questions. Many people in the church have trained themselves to talk as if they’re the Brother of Jared after he saw the finger. You know, my brother left the church many years before I did, and the reasons he gave were things like being “tired of feeling guilty”. I felt these were not legitimate reasons to leave. The only reason to leave would be if it wasn’t true―and so I stayed. I believed.
I sometimes heard internet atheists talking about silly aspects of religion, but always in a dismissive way that preached to their own choir (I had not discovered Luke M’s commonsenseatheism.com). Their analyses were superficial and not persuasive to me. It seemed to me that I had to take evolution seriously, but I didn’t realize how little I knew about it, and I found an “intelligent design” video persuasive (the video did not talk about God, did not support “creationism”, was designed to sound scientific, and was ostensibly about scientists challenging the traditional “assumptions” of evolutionary theory).
I began to worry that if God was real, he sure wasn’t very nice or trustworthy. I found the following quote, which resonated with me: “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” If God was just, he wouldn’t condemn me for the legitimate reasons I might have for suspecting he was unreal or unjust, and if he was unjust, I shouldn’t even worship him at all. This quote was crucial in giving me permission to follow the evidence wherever it led.
As I began to take seriously the possibility that God wasn’t real, I engaged in a two-pronged strategy where I paid 10% tithing and also gave 10% to charities. If God wasn’t real, tithing was useless and I would have to do good some other way, but if He was real, I needed to show Him I was willing to be his faithful servant. This lasted maybe two years, and then I reduced my tithing to 5% as my faith waned.
Somehow, I don’t remember how, I came across the CES Letter in January 2015. After reading it, I understood that the church was false and I left the church immediately. Having done this, I quickly understood some other important things. First, I noticed that I wasn’t willing to go back to church and share the CES letter in any major way. I wasn’t willing to print copies and share them, or give a dramatic talk where the Bishop cuts off my microphone. When I told my best friend about the CES letter, he had no interest in reading it (and remains a Full Tithe Payer to this day). So now I understood survivorship bias—the reason I was surrounded by believers for 30 years, with no one seriously challenging my beliefs (see also evaporative cooling of group beliefs). Second, I noticed something about the evidence that Mormonism was false: the evidence existed only because Mormonism is recent; the church started in the era of the printing press, and there are many surviving records from the 19th century. Suppose for a moment that Christianity is false, and that in the time of Christ there was a lot of clear evidence it was false, just as there was evidence against Mormonism. What would have happened to that evidence? The believers would make many copies of their Holy Book, but the unbelievers ― having no printing press, and caring much less about fighting Christianity than the Christians cared to support it ― would not reliably preserve the evidence that it was false. 30 AD was a very different time, where even the truest of true believers, the disciples of Jesus Christ, seemingly didn’t care to write the Gospels until “forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus”. So, I concluded that Jesus was no more the messiah than other people whose followers called them the messiah.
I learned more about LessWrong/EA/SSC in the years afterward, became a regular visitor and read Rationality A to Z. I also discovered and signed the Giving What We Can Pledge at 10%, tithing level―an easy decision.
Edit: Since then, I’ve felt an amazing clarity of mind that I never enjoyed as a Christian. I used to feel confused and conflicted on a regular basis, understanding neither God nor Evolution properly; at long last I grok both, leaving behind only the mystery of the Hard Problem Of Consciousness. It would’ve been far better to learn about all this earlier in my life! My life has a new foundation now: Mature Consequentialist Utilitarianism built atop two axioms. It was an awful thing to gain the understanding that death is annihilation, but I also learned the Litany of Gendlin: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. Nothing actually changed: death was there all along; heaven was a myth. Surprisingly, I’m happier now, and a more effective person too.