Navigating Death

One of the hard­est things to try to come to terms with — NOT know­ing. Is there life after death? Will we see our loved ones again? It was­n’t as scary when I ‘knew’. When I had my head in the sand. Feel­ing these fears is part of expos­ing myself, part of being hon­est with…

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Conclusion to Why I No Longer Believe

I’ve focused most­ly on the Book of Mor­mon, since I accept that it is the key­stone of the reli­gion, just as Joseph Smith, Jr stat­ed. The Book of Abra­ham and his oth­er trans­la­tions are close behind. Some of the oth­er top­ics that have affect­ed my tes­ti­mo­ny: Polyg­a­mous mar­riages of Joseph Smith, use of coer­cion, several…

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Nature of Spiritual Confirmation

I would first also address hope­ful­ly briefly why I don’t just rely on a spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tion as the con­fir­ma­tion of the true­ness of Book of Mor­mon or any oth­er church teach­ing, as most mem­bers do. As I stat­ed ear­li­er, we believe that the Holy Ghost will con­firm the truth of it to us by a…

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Why I No Longer Believe

This essay was writ­ten in Fall 2012, dur­ing my inves­ti­ga­tion into my faith. Read about how I began to doubt in my post How I Lost my Faith by Defend­ing it. Please see the table of con­tents to this series in the right side­bar, or if you pre­fer to see the full series in one…

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How I Lost my Faith by Defending it

I was raised in a very lov­ing fam­i­ly in Ari­zona. My par­ents were both raised as mem­bers of the LDS Church, and they decid­ed to raise us, their kids, as Lat­ter Day Saints as well. I was gen­er­al­ly a good kid who tried to do what was right. I fol­lowed the faith­ful path out­lined for…

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