Me and God: A brief history

Me and God:

A Brief History

My first encounter with God was in a tree. Well, the first one I remember, at least. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I had been playing in the yard, and decided that I wanted to climb the tree. I kept going higher and higher—it was the furthest up I had ever been when I suddenly got stuck. I couldn’t go any farther up, and I couldn’t seem to get down safely. I started to panic. But then I remembered a song we had just learned in primary. The only line I remember is the first one, “genealogy, I am doing it, my genealogy.” The song went on to talk about how genealogy could help us. I knew that stuck there in that tree in that moment I was in desperate need of help, and so I prayed out loud and said “dear Genealogy, please help me get out of this tree.” I honestly don’t remember how the story ends. I’m obviously no longer in the tree, so I’m assuming I got down somehow, but I do remember the feeling of desperation and reaching out for help to some distant power. I clearly misunderstood what genealogy was, but I remember the deep trust that there was a being out there who could hear me and who wanted to help me.

Every morning when we got up, my parents would have us all come together for family prayer. Every night we would kneel in a circle again, and pray, and then read a chapter in the Book of Mormon. Every time we prayed we had a little family tradition. Once the person praying said “amen,” we would all put our arms around the people next to us and say together “Our family!” and then put our hands out in the middle of the circle and say “I love you!”             

Between primary, family prayer and scripture study, and weekly family home evenings, I put together an image of God at a young age. He was a father different than my dad. He lived in heaven, which was somewhere up in the sky. He could answer my prayers and help me get what I wanted. After watching Disney’s Pinocchio for the first time, I realized that just like you could pray to God for things, you could also wish on stars to get things that you wanted. And so that night after going into my room to sleep, I went to my window and patiently waited for the first star to appear. When it came, I made my wish. It must not have been too important, because I don’t remember what it is I wanted. But I remember wanting it. And I remember having complete faith that the star, like God, could grant my wish. And I remember the disappointment I felt the next day when it didn’t happen. And then I began to wonder, if the stars can’t give me my wishes, then will God really answer my prayers?

Santa Claus also played a big role in my early thoughts about God. I believed deeply in Santa Claus. Every Christmas season I would beg my older sister to tell me stories about Santa Claus, and she would recount incredible tales of life in the North Pole, and my imagination would light up with scenes of Santa’s workshop and of all of his elves making hundreds of toys. Christmas was my favorite time of year by far. It was magical. So much of the magic and mystery was created because I believed in Santa Claus. And when my dad told me he wasn’t real, it was hard for me to rebuild the magic of Christmas. I remember sitting on my mom’s bed, and I asked her if dad was right, that Santa Claus wasn’t real. She confirmed it. And my next thought was, well then what about God?

Part of me could sense, though, that while stars and Santa Claus were kind of trivial, that God was something far more serious. And that He wasn’t to be questioned. By this age I was beginning to get the feel of prayer. We ask for things, but we don’t always get them. We pray for knowledge, but it doesn’t always come. And sometimes, when we’re lucky, we’ll feel something incredible as we pray. One time after family prayer, my oldest sister started crying and said that she felt the spirit. I tried so hard to feel it, too. I wanted to feel it so badly, but I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.

When I was six or seven an aunt and uncle came to visit us. My mom and dad went out to eat and go to a movie with them, and they left our cousin to babysit me and my brother and sisters. We had a great time, and our cousin, Andrea, took us out to the park across the street from our house for a few hours to play. We went back to the house a little while before the sun started to set. We found, to our horror, that someone had locked the door on the way out, and that no one had a key. We knew our parents wouldn’t be home until a lot later that evening, and we were scared of staying outside after it got dark. We played games for a while to distract ourselves. But we couldn’t get off our minds the question of what to do. I suggested that we say a prayer. We all knelt down in a circle in our driveway, and I said the prayer. I remember feeling naively certain that God would help us. And so I asked God outright to please unlock the door. After saying amen, we stood up and walked over to the door. Each of us had tried the door before, and it had definitely been locked. This time, it was open.

I wanted to tell everyone about what had happened. The next few weeks in primary, I could hardly stop talking about how God had opened the door for us. It was a miracle. It was proof that God was really there and that he really would answer our prayers. I was so sure of it, that a few months later when I got home early from a scouting activity to find no one home and that I was locked outside in the cold, I confidently knelt down on my knees, and uttered a quick prayer to God, asking him to open the door, and knowing full well that it would open. I stood up, but my hand to the door knob, and turned it. It was locked. It hadn’t worked. I sat outside for what felt like hours, but was really probably no more than fifteen minutes, until my mom got home from shopping.

I kept praying. I didn’t always get what I wanted, but sometimes it would happen. I didn’t pause until many years later to ask the question of why God would bother working the miracle of opening a door for a few kids from a middle class family so that they didn’t have to spend a few harmless hours in their front yard in the dark but leave countless hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death in distant places. I hadn’t yet stopped to contemplate the complexities of a God that claims to care, but brings his children into a world where they can’t help but experience pain. But those questions came all too soon.

As time went on, I began to recognize the feeling that everyone was calling the “spirit.” It was a bright feeling. It was a feeling of comfort. It felt like when I was little and I had a bad dream, and I would run downstairs and fall asleep in bed with my parents, feeling like their warmth was warding off the terror of my nightmares. Oddly enough, it was through nightmares that I first came to start feeling God. A few months after moving from St. George to Cache Valley, I started not being able to sleep at nights. One day near Halloween I heard people on the radio recounting their encounters with ghosts. Every night for months afterward I dreaded the time when the lights would be turned off, because I thought that if I closed my eyes I would see the pale white glow of a ghost coming to haunt me. I was bitterly frightened of the night, but was too embarrassed to tell anyone. And I prayed and prayed each night that God would help me to not be scared, but the terror persisted.

One night after family scripture and prayer, my mom told me that she wanted to talk to me. She said that the other night she was sleeping and had a really bad dream. She woke up, but the dark feelings wouldn’t go away. She prayed for them to leave, but they wouldn’t. And then suddenly she felt like God was telling her that this was how I was feeling each night, and that I was having troubles sleeping. And then she told me that if I prayed that angels would guard me from evil spirits that I would be able to sleep in peace. I was crying. I felt like my heart was on fire. I had spent months of lonely, frightened nights pleading with God to help me to no avail. And here He was answering my prayers in a moment through my mom. That night when I went to sleep I prayed that the angel Moroni , and Nephi, and Alma would all be in my room to guard me from evil spirits. And I prayed for specific angels to watch over each of my family members. And for the first time in months, I slept in peace.

 After that night, I never had problems with nightmares again. If I ever got scared, I would pray for angels, and the bright, warm feelings would come back to my heart.

I started to recognize those same feelings when I would read certain parts of the scriptures, or when I would pray, or sometimes during church. And I started to bear my testimony sometimes, and then I would feel it even more. And I wanted more of it. I wanted so badly to know more about God and to have more faith and be closer to Him. When I was fourteen years old attending my first EFY session, I remember sitting down and opening the Book of Mormon. It felt like the words on the pages that were on fire while Lehi testified that his soul had been redeemed by Christ that he was “encircled about eternally in the arms of His love.”

Inextricably connected to the history of my interactions with God was my experience with being gay. When it first dawned on me that the feelings I was having for other boys were what I was supposed to be feeling for girls, I turned immediately to God. I asked him to take it away. I asked him to fix me. I asked him to comfort me. I begged to know why I was this way, and why it was that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel anything I was supposed to for girls, while at the same time I couldn’t rid my heart of the feelings I had for boys. At first, God met my constant tears and prayers with silence.

One night during my junior year of high school, I was especially distraught. I fell asleep crying. Once I was asleep, I started to dream. In my dream, I was in my house at the kitchen table. My face was in my hands, and I was sobbing silently to myself. Even in my dream, I felt incredible despair. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. And I felt an electric, piercing feeling through my heart. Even before I turned around, I knew whose hand it was. When I did turn my head, I was surprised by His face. There was one picture of Christ that I had always disliked. It made him look so unappealing and weak. Staring back at me with eyes that pierced my soul was the face from that painting. I suddenly woke up, but I was still completely surrounded by a feeling of warmth and comfort that completely drove out all thoughts of despair. And I fell back asleep in peace.

During high school my thoughts of God matured. Instead of the magical being in the sky that listens to my thoughts and gives me things if I ask hard enough, God became an explanation. He became a purpose. I became deeply persuaded that God loved me and that He loved everyone. Pain, I learned, brought me closer to Him and taught me how to love people. For a time, it seemed like everything made sense. But no amount of dreams, warm feelings, or insights could take away the reality of my deepest secret. I felt like I was wearing a scarlet letter underneath my clothes. No one else could see it, but if they could I would be branded as different, and I would be hated. And no matter how much I felt God loved me, I still felt like this part of me was wrong. It wasn’t what He wanted. I had to change.

I left on my mission more sure of God than I had ever been before. I was so excited to share with people the love that had come to mean so much to me. I wanted so badly to teach people that they could personally communicate with God, and that He would answer their prayers, like He had so many of my own.

And I loved my mission. But in moments of honest reflection, I would often wonder just how many prayers of mine God had actually answered. At least eighty percent of them, I knew, could easily be coincidences that just interpreted as being from God. Most of the feelings I’d ever felt could just be positive emotions that I gave the label of “the spirit,” but really no different than I’d felt reading the seventh Harry Potter book. But try as I might, I could never explain the unlocked door. And remnants of the piercing feeling in my heart as I dreamt of Christ still lingered within, so I found the strength to go on.

As a missionary, I experienced many moments of clarity and closeness with God, but perhaps even more of deep loneliness and questioning whether or not God was really there. And when I got home from my mission, those questions continued. The spiritual experiences I had before my mission seemed to never come back to me, try as I might. And as I moved forward in confronting my sexual orientation, God seemed further than ever before. There were a few bright moments, such as when I finally asked God if I was okay the way I was, and felt peace. But the dark moments were manifold.

One night, all by myself in a hotel room in Changzhou, China, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I broke down into tears, lying on my bed. I started shaking and hyperventilating, and praying out loud. I was begging God to send me someone. Anyone. I needed something, because I couldn’t handle the pain on my own. I begged and pleaded, but the depth of emotional pain continued coursing through my heart and bursting through my eyes in the form of an endless stream of tears.

And a few months later as I travelled with classmates in Europe, I would pray and pray, but only ever felt enveloped in my loneliness. After a while, I felt completely abandoned by God. It was far worse than my nightmares as a child, because if it got too bad, I could always run down to my parents room. But there was no hand to be held in the depths of this new agony. There seemed to be no place I could go.

And as I returned from Europe and began questioning Mormonism, and everything I had ever believed, I found that so much of what I had experienced could be explained away. I began to doubt God’s existence more deeply than I had at any time since discovering the truth about Santa Claus. And I didn’t know what to think and what to do.

Looking back at this brief and incomplete history of my interactions with God is to me like looking out at the night’s sky. My experiences are like stars—seemingly random, chaotic, and senseless. God will open doors for me at one moment, while simultaneously leaving millions exposed to hunger. The vast majority of prayers I ever prayed were left unanswered. And yet He came to me powerfully in a dream. He was willing to alleviate the agony of my nightmares, but not the later agony of my nihilism. A starry night sky of experiences.

But we know what humans do with stars. They make constellations. They tell stories. And so I look at the random mess of my own experiences, and with them, I put together a constellation. I tell a story. My story is the story of a God who is a mystery. He is a God who may or may not exist, but if He does, I feel like He loves me. When I connect the dots of my own experience, I’m left facing a God as deeply complicated and paradoxical as the reality He created.

I now know that wishing on stars is useless. And I know that genealogy is not a mystical being that will help me get down from trees. But I also know that my life has been touched by the transcendent and is marked with the incomprehensible. I think I’ll choose to keep loving this God, this constellation born of my life experience, because doing so gives me meaning. Just like when I was a missionary, standing out on my balcony feeling lonely and so far from home, staring at the stars and feeling comforted by the sight of Orion, so, no matter where I go in life, will the story of God continue to give me meaning and inspire me to try to be a more compassionate person.

The Mormon Dilemma

Mormonism is not a mere set of beliefs that one adopts. It is a heritage. Weekly worship is almost meaningless without the Mormon Story, the vibrant narrative that colors and gives meaning to the life of ritual and service pursued by the faithful Latter-day Saint. This narrative and its heritage create a deep-seated sense of identity, allowing individuals to understand their position in relation to their community, the broader world, and with God. The uniqueness of Mormonism lies in the concepts of priesthood authority, which gives the organization its imperative as the “one true church,” and in continuing revelation, which is available to living prophets and apostles as well as to the individual. The belief in the ability of their leaders to ascertain the will of God creates a climate that allows for the canonization of culture and puts the mandate of God behind social norms. The Mormon Story creates a perceptive lens that shapes the contours of the world of the Latter-day Saint. This framework alters the way reality is approached, enhancing life for many, but not all. The dilemma of Mormonism is that it creates a world that does not live up to its own teachings and fails to take responsibility for its failures.

The Mormon Story is paradoxically rigid and loose. The words of church leaders (referred to authoritatively as “the Brethren”) are taken as the mandate of God, and to question them is to question the Omnipotent. On the same token, Mormons admit belief not only in what God has revealed and is revealing, but that “he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” The veneer of flexibility adds justification to inflexibility. What is being done must be right, because if it were not, God would simply change it. And so the Latter-day Saint accepts with joy that the current state of affairs is the way God ordains things to be, and that if they need changing, it will come from the top down, originating from God and being subsequently transferred through his leaders, who are not to be questioned.

The story that guides Mormonism is the story of a God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to set up a church for its inhabitants, and then to give his life for them. And in Mormonism, it is the institution of the church that takes precedence over the doctrine of the atonement. Mormons believe that like the prophets of old, Christ established an institutional church for the good of mankind. He ordained his followers to be leaders of the church by the laying on of hands, bestowing a priesthood authority upon them.  On the cornerstone of prophets and apostles, Christ laid the foundation for the work of salvation which is to be accomplished in and through the workings of his church.

Any good Latter-day Saint would immediately critique this thought, proclaiming that the atonement of Christ is the centrality of the Mormon Story, and that it is His death and sufferings are at the heart of the religion. To an astute observer, however, the center of Mormonism is not the sacrifice, but the covenant of which the sacrifice is a portion. The end goal of Mormon theology is exaltation, and while the atonement of Christ is a necessary step for its occurrence, the path walked to its obtaining is the path of covenants. The sentiment of Joseph Smith that all aspects of the church are only appendages to Christ’s atonement is not completely accurate in the modern church, because salvation is achieved through covenant making.

In Mormonism, a covenant is believed to be a two-way promise between God and man that is undertaken in some sort of ritual. The first covenant that one makes is the covenant of baptism, in which one is fully immersed in water to symbolize the death and resurrection of Christ, and likewise the death of the man of sin and the resurrection of the spirit into the life of His redemption. Further covenants are made in the temple, including the covenants of the endowment ceremony, and the highest covenant of marriage. Covenants are undertaken in rituals, and rituals demand officiators. The priesthood authority is therefore central to acts of ritual and central to the process of covenant making. Without covenants, one cannot receive the remission of their sins, attain salvation, nor achieve exaltation, which is believed to be the greatest possible eternal attainment of the human soul. Covenants are the steps on the path to salvation.

Christ’s atonement enables covenants to hold their power, but the nature of the covenant places the necessity of a worthy priesthood holder at the forefront as a requirement for salvation to occur. In Mormon theology, an individual cannot simply pray their way to exaltation. Priesthood rituals must occur, and covenants must be made. In Mormonism, the priesthood holder is as requisite to the salvific process as is the atonement of Christ, for each are necessary elements without which salvation cannot be obtained. In essence, priesthood holders stand between a person and God, officiating the rituals that open the door to their salvation.

The church is the organization of the body of the priesthood, and is therefore the vehicle of salvation for the people. The story of Mormonism is that God sent His son to establish a church, and then to die for it. Both steps are necessary on the path of salvation, but emphasis is most clearly placed on the necessity of the church, its priesthood, and its rituals, for they come a priori to accessing the atonement of Christ. The most ornate symbol of Mormonism, the temple, is a monetary enshrinement of the importance of covenants, and therefore of priesthood and of the church. These temples built as the home of a God who “dwelleth not in temples made of hands” are more clearly the home of a ritual celebration of priesthood authority than of the God that proclaims “heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool” and poses the piercing question, critical of a pillar of Mormon theology, of “what house will ye build me?” (Acts 7: 48-49)

The Mormon Story continues in an understanding of the “great apostasy,” in which Christ’s church, following his death, fell apart and lost the priesthood authority, disintegrating into bickering factions that each holds only a portion of the truth. In the 1840s Joseph Smith claimed that in 1820 God appeared to him in response to his prayer of which Christian sect was the true church, revealing to him that none of them were true, but rather that they were an “abomination in [his] sight.” Joseph restored the church of Christ to the earth, receiving the priesthood authority that is requisite to salvation, setting up the institution of the church to continue on after his death, and translating the Book of Mormon as the ultimate expression of his prophetic calling. The Book of Mormon is the key stone of the religion because if it is true, then everything Joseph Smith taught was true, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is God’s true church and the “Brethren” are called of God to speak for him.

Mormonism is the deification of an institution.  Its leaders are the doors to salvation, because they are windows into the mind and will of God. The Mormon Story is the story of a mandate from God communicated to mankind through voice of prophets. Emphasis is placed on obedience and obeisance to positions of priesthood authority, because they are our access to God and to salvation. This story holds not merely the weight of personal conversion, but of the sacrifices of thousands who died at the hands of mobs in the early days of the Church and those who died trekking across the plains on their journey to establish Zion.

Mormonism is not simply a set of rules. It is a heritage. The mandate of the one true church is shaped into the identity of every child who grows up into the church, and they know that it is their responsibility to continue the pioneer trek of their ancestors in establishing the kingdom of God on the earth. Mormonism is both a message and a mission, and it shapes the framework through which every Latter-day Saint sees their world.

The Mormon identity is so essential to the Latter-day Saint, that intellectual questions that bring doubt are deeply emotional and frightening. When Mormons are first exposed to historical facts that contradict the story that shapes their world, it feels as if the pillars that hold up their world are quaking and threatening to crash down around them, leaving their relationships with family and friends as casualties to their questions. Basic questions, such as whether or not Joseph Smith really translated the Book of Mormon and if modern prophets are actually receiving any revelation at all open the windows of despair, and can only be whispered about. To discuss them openly is to incur the wrath of testimony.

The idea of testimony plays a powerful role the life of a Latter-day Saint from the very beginning. Every first Sunday of the month, the central church meeting is focused on sharing testimony. The pulpit is open, and any member can stand up and share with the congregation what they “know” to be true. To the believing Latter-day Saint, such an event is strongly faith-promoting and is accompanied with the “feelings of the Spirit,” which manifest to the heart that what is spoken is true. Children are often taken to the pulpit by parents, who whisper in their ears the words they should say. Testimonies differ, but the most consistent variable is the inclusion of the declaration that “I know the church is true.” To an outsider, the event can seem bizarre, repetitious, and deeply boring. To the questioning member, it only serves to feed the fire of doubt.

A testimony is gained by personal witness from the Holy Spirit, a feeling that cannot be explained. As one commonly told story puts it, to explain how the Spirit feels is like explaining how salt tastes. Testimonies are most often born in reading and praying about whether or not the Book of Mormon is true, but also often come at other moments and other times, and they are deeply connected with prayer and the idea of direct revelation from God. Over time as an individual begins to learn how to recognize the spirit, however, it seems that emotions turn into messages from God, albeit emotions guided by the canon of the scriptures and the words of the prophets. If you feel positive feelings associated with anything contrary to the teachings of the church, it is most likely false revelation, because “even the devil can, at times, appear as an angel of light.” Negative feelings towards the church are ignored, because obedience is more important. Mormonism teaches you to rely on the feelings of the spirit, but only when they tell you that the church is true.

Testimonies of friends, family members, and church leaders only very rarely have their intended effect in the case of a sincere questioner. Often times, testimony only leads to further questioning, such as asking how it is that someone can claim to “know” anything based only on a feeling. If one experiences the same feelings of the spirit by which they came to “know” that the church is true telling them something that is contrary to the church, then how can they really know they ever knew the church was true in the first place? Can emotion really be trusted as a guide in what is objectively true and false? If we cannot know, then why are we basing our entire lives on what our emotions tell us?

Important questions concerning testimony are most often unasked by Latter-day Saints. For example, few people pause to question if the past experiences they label as revelatory could have any other explanations. It could be possible, for example, that a loving God was merely affirming his love for them, and they interpreted it as a revelation that Mormonism is the one true church. It could also be possible that there is no God and that the experiences were culturally induced. Mormons fail to ask this key question: all else held constant, if God did not exist, would it be possible for the experiences upon which I base my testimony to be explained by other factors? Another factor rarely considered is the role that incentives play in their testimonies. It is very easy for a person who stands to lose social standing in their community if they did not believe to interpret any positive emotions as reasons to believe. A cautious interpretation of past experience is commendable, but cautious interpretations are not what are being shared over the pulpit each month, but instead declarations of knowledge. Indeed, the oft repeated advice that to gain a testimony one must bare a testimony, beyond being an advocacy of openly bearing false witness, is confirmed by psychology to be a means of self-deception. Mormons regularly ignore the wealth of equally plausible explanations for their experiences, and instead translate them into a mandate for following the line of priesthood authority and upholding the deification of their institution.

Questions become even deeper when one looks at the fruits of the Mormon Story. On the one hand, it helps people to understand their place in the world and provides a sense of stability. But if we assume for a moment that the Mormon Story is not true, and then look at the ways it influences gay and lesbian members, members who, at no fault of their own, have not been able to get married, or whose families have fallen apart, or members who, for the life of them, cannot feel the spirit, then it becomes clear that the Mormon Story incurs psychological damage. The teenager growing up who discovers that they are only attracted to people of their own gender knows that if they follow those feelings to any degree, they will be disobeying the teachings of the church—disobeying the very voice of God. Who they are, must then be a mistake, or at least a temporary hiccup, or maybe a divine mandate for them to suffer through a life of celibacy because their natural feelings of love were not good enough for God. The member who never has the chance to get married must weekly go to church and be reminded that families are central to exaltation, and often face judgment and ostracization from other members. For the member who has no desire to get married it is even more so. Those whose families fall apart cannot escape the guilt and pressure created naturally by a system that tells stories about how a family ought to be, and that if one is righteous enough they can obtain it.

And so, the questioner of the church is faced with the world of pain caused by the Mormon Story and is forced to ask one ultimate question: is it true? Or is it just a story? The more one looks into the historical facts, the clearer it seems that prophets make false prophecies, change past revelations, and revise history. The more one looks into sociological facts, the more one finds that Mormonism seems to oddly create the very things it teaches against (such as the ridiculously high rates of pornography consumption in Utah). The more one really pauses to question the truth of the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the less it seems to be true, and the more it seems to just be a story.

The question remains of what the thinking person is to do. Should they abandon intellect and embrace a faith that perhaps transcends reason? Should they continue activity in the church because of social reasons? Or should they throw up their arms and be done with it all? When missionaries teach about prophets, they proclaim that it is by their fruits that you will know them. The fruits of the Mormon Story are diverse, and many of them are good, incredible in fact, while many of them are devastatingly tragic. In order to decide, one must answer the question of where your loyalties lie. For myself, I have determined that my loyalties are with people who suffer and are marginalized, many of whom are not even mindful of their marginalization because of the depth of their indoctrination to a system whose framework is resulting their daily despair. And so I abandon the world of covenants, church, and priesthood, and embrace compassion and advocacy. 

The Need for Change

I just posted a follow up to my coming out blog post about the need for change within church culture with regards to homosexuality.

http://perplextinfaith.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-need-for-change_23.html

Coming Out for Real

I just officially came out to the world by posting this on my new blog and sharing it on Facebook.

I'm so scared.

Families and Salvation

So I just wrote this post about families, homosexuality, and salvation... and then I was thinking... It's time for me to get a new blog under my real name. And so I've started a new blog. If you'd like to continue reading, it can be found here. Thank you so much to everyone who has read and commented on this blog. It's been a big part of my coming out process and has helped me quite a bit to come to terms with and redevelop a lot of what I believe. My new blog is going to focus a lot on issues with homosexuality and religion. If you're interested, you're welcome to keep reading and commenting. Thanks again to everyone!

Thoughts on North Star and Apologetics

Yesterday I joined the North Star facebook group. I was excited to read the comments and see what people were talking about. Unfortunately, to this point they have made me very frustrated. The reason seems to me to be the same reason that apologetics in general frustrate me: instead of a genuine search for truth, they are wholly based on the assumption of certain premises followed by the construction of cultural norms of conformity preferred over freedom of thought. To be fair, it's not so much a problem with North Star as it is a problem with the Church  culture that permeates North Star.
I don't believe that lasting peace and happiness come from untruths (probably because of my LDS background :) ). If discovery of truth is necessary for true peace, and if peace of mind is something worth arriving at, then we must have a reliable method for discovering truth. The method that seems to have worked the best in the past four hundred years is the scientific method.
I've always loved Alma 32 because of how similar the process of faith described therein is to the scientific method. It's a process of experimentation and judgment based on results. While there are significant differences between this spiritual method and the scientific method (like the inability to reproduce results in a demonstrable way and blatant subjectivity of the spiritual method), both methods are based on a premise that most apologists, in my estimation, at least, fail to meet. This premise is presented in the beginning of Alma 32 when Alma tells the people that they are blessed because their poverty has led them to humility, which is the prerequisite for gaining a witness and developing faith. In order to gain faith, Alma teaches, you cannot have already cast out the "seed" by your "unbelief."
Alma is teaching that the premise to the spiritual method of coming to know truth is approaching the question with an unbiased mind, having not already come to a conclusion beforehand. In the scientific method it is the same way: when the facts don't match the theory, you throw out the theory, not the facts. This implies a willingness to be wrong and produces a flexibility in dialogue not currently seen among apologetics nor in the communications I've read from North Star.
Apologists begin with the assumed premise that the truth is known to them and that no facts contradicting the truth are actually facts. Their view that contradictory evidence is the result of cherry picking and data manipulation leads them, in my estimation, to be even more guilty of the same.
Last night I read the reactions on North Star to a post on the "No More Strangers" blog, which was written about the dangers of celibacy. The speed at which people dismissed the message of the post and relied simply on anecdotes and pithy, faith promoting aphorisms frustrated me (though to be fair, the original article was also anecdotal in nature). In discussing whether or not celibacy can lead to a happy life, there was no discussion of data (such as the research conducted on the quality of life of celibate gay Mormons by John Dehlin) - only an already agreed upon theory.
I have to put out the caveat that I could be completely wrong about both North Star and apologists. My observations are only based on what I have been able to observe. It's more than possible that I've only observed a small portion. This is also not a commentary on individuals within those two categories, but rather on the cultural norms established in the way the groups approach problems.
In conclusion, I think that allowing myself freedom of thought and being willing to question my deepest assumptions has greatly increased my quality of life. I'm more authentic and honest than I've ever been, which has brought me a lot of peace. I would encourage all gay, SSA, and even straight Mormons (heck, I'd encourage every living person) to really, deeply question all of your assumptions. And if there are some assumptions I've failed to question or look at openly and honestly, please point them out.
And that's all I have to say about that.

On the Disorderliness of Lives

I'm currently taking a class on the history of the French Revolution, and the professor is incredible. He is the most brilliant individual I have ever met. Also, he is incredibly well-spoken and lots of fun to listen to. The other day in class he made a comment on which I have been ruminating. He was talking about the Terror, the period of the revolution where everyone started guillotining the aristocracy and anyone who betrayed the revolution, and he was trying to help us understand its causes and what it was like for people to live through that time period. And then he said it: "lives are not orderly." It was very simple, and yet so deeply profound.

Growing up in the church you are often led to believe the opposite-- that there is a distinct order and pattern to which one must adhere to in life. When you're eight, you are baptized. For boys, you receive the priesthood at the age of twelve. After high school, you go on a mission. After getting back, you get married as soon as possible. You go to school. You get a job. You have kids as soon as possible. And then you support your family. And that is the order of life.

But the problem with looking at life this way is that lives are not orderly. There is beautiful degree of chaos that seems to govern our interactions, and life is anything but predictable. Setting up a system of rigid expectations becomes harmful because when they fail us, we feel deeply discontent, even like we're failures for not adhering to the order of things. (Of course planning, preparation, and having some concept of orderliness is important--let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. But that's besides the point I'm trying to make.) I've found both in myself and in others that when things become disorderly to a certain degree, people begin to freak out and want to give up. But I think that being frustrated over disorder is missing the beauty in the ordeal.

Anyone who has talked to me for more than fifteen minutes about humanity will know that my favorite comparison is to trees. I always compare people to trees. (Sidenote--I was giddy with joy the other day when I read moral psychologist Jonathon Haidt say "I think a better metaphor is that people are like plants...") The reason I do this is because trees are messy. They grow in random shapes and the branches twist in different directions. No two trees are completely alike, and yet they all have an incredible, inherent beauty. And here's the thing I love most about trees-- they don't try to be beautiful. Nothing in the natural world (except people) really tries to be beautiful. Sunsets, oceans, and waterfalls are all just inherently beautiful. And you know what? We don't really have to try to be worth something either. Each of us has an inherent worth simply because we exist. Also, trees don't make mistakes... they just grow. Viewing our mistakes solely as awful infringements against some grand, eternal moral code has never sat well with me. I find more utility in viewing them as growth opportunities.

But with trees and forests and the natural world... there's an element of disorder to it all. And I think it's the disorder that makes it beautiful. So when unpredictable changes come and our lives seem to be falling apart, I think it's useful to ponder on the disorderliness of lives and to remember that the disorderliness is part of what creates the beauty.