So, I thought this would be the same of all churches, and I agreed that I would go with him to his church one Wednesday if he would come to my church on a different Wednesday¹.

I have never gone to a pentecostal church on a Sunday, so I can’t say if Wednesday was the same as what Sunday would be, but when I went, there was preaching (where I was perturbed to find my friend was one one speaking about false gospels), there was a collection plate, there were people speaking in tongues. It wasn’t very fun. But what was particularly not fun was when some folks took me to a back room to interrogate me about being Mormon.

And IDK how much I’ve shared this story, but I was super clueless when I was a youth. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would essentially give testimonies about atheism that I totally missed because I used hedging language like “really” that to me, totally blocked me from connecting the parts that came before and after. (It would take until some point in college when I realized that “I don’t really believe in God” is basically equivalent to “I don’t believe in God.”)

In that room in the side of a Pentecostal church, when they were asking me how I could believe in the false gospel of Mormonism (which I wasn’t having any interest in trying to defend), I believe I framed it something like, “You know what? Atheism appeals to me.”

I guess that wasn’t the right thing to say, as they then ramped up their efforts in overdrive, talking about the demon of Mormonism was driving me away from God entirely.

…at the time, I would say: no, I think the behavior of other Christians did far more for that. But now, I wonder…was there something to what they were saying?

Since then, I would say that there’s probably 3 ways that Protestantism more broadly, but yes, I guess Mormonism as well, have primed me toward atheism.

1. Religious folks living poorly

The first is captured by my reaction to the Pentecostal experience (but also the general reaction to any of the Bible bashing classmates of high school): quite simply, the experience of non-LDS Christians, but most particularly countercult protestant Christianity is not appealing at all. At best, it just feeds the LDS persecution complex, but at worst, it doesn’t actually show evidence of a better way of living.

My main feeling about religions in general is that most religious practitioners of any religion just don’t feel made any different by their religion. It feels like they are doing exactly what they would be doing had they had no religion. (Maybe that’s not the case, but it feels this way.) I can think of a handful of people I know who seem markedly changed for the better by their religion or spirituality — people whom I look at and say, “oh, wow, what is it that they have?”

…but I can think of far more than a handful of people who are changed the other way…who do things that I find to be wrong (probably just because I’m a reprobate fitted for destruction who does not understand the ways of God, but what can you do?) because of their religion, who would not have done so without their religion telling them to do that.

But over time, there have been other stories and incidents that have made me realize that there are other things in Mormonism and Protestantism that have hurt in trying to conceptualize God.

2. Theistic Personalism

Sometime between high school and university when I would read and write blogs more regularly, I would get in conversations with other Christian denominations and people would just keep making this statement: “You don’t know what we mean when we say God because you’re Mormon.”

And at the time, I would protest: no, I can tell where Mormonism and other Christian denominations have differences of views, so I am pretty sure I can tell the difference in what you mean.

But over time, I realized that these comments were not just coming from any other Christians, but particularly from Catholics. And it took me so many more years to learn the term theistic personalism vs classical theism.

What is God? Who is God? In Mormonism and in Protestantism, God is a super human. I don’t man this in a flippant way. I mean that, generally, Mormonism and Protestantism prioritize God’s personhood first and foremost — and yeah, we don’t need to get into the weeds about how many persons are divine, but yeah. So, for Mormons, God is more or less an actual physical man (and the “more or less” just depends on which Mormon you talk to). Protestants probably will shy away from the “more” part of “more or less,” but the main thing is that God is still a person that you can engage and have a relationship with.

This view of God makes a lot of sense when you look at certain depictions of God throughout history. You know, old white guy with beard.

But this argument also made it very difficult to understand things like Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways as a proof of God (and I’m not saying I’m an expert at Thomism in any sense.) I couldn’t understand what people meant by “divine simplicity” and things like that. I didn’t know what people meant when they described God as the ground of all being. I couldn’t really make sense of pantheism and panentheism because it sounded silly, like describing the universe as being a bacterial ecosystem growing off God’s body. (Don’t get me started on the Essence-Energies distinction within palamite Orthodox theology).

Eventually, I don’t know when it clicked, but after reading enough blogs from Catholic bloggers (OK, I probably first really learned the terms from Edward Feser) , I realized that they don’t adopt theistic personalism. The God that Mormons decry as “amorphous” (and that Mormons believe revelation has improved upon) is the God of classical theism.

OK, so what about the Creation of Adam? Michelangelo was no theistic personalist, was he? From a classical theist perspective, God is so radically different that most descriptors we use are analogies (in fact, Thomism literally dives into “analogy” as a form of speech separate from equivocity and univocity, which I am not going to get into, but it’s very important precisely because Aquinas really wants to stress that when someone says God is [insert some trait], this definition is not exactly the same way we might say [some creature] is [insert some trait]).

At some point, I was describing atheism and I said something like, “God seems like a person that you hear other people talk about having met and befriended in a far off country, but that I have never met or engaged with personally. I can only remark based on the stories I hear others say about this person (and that many of the stories are contradictory), but I don’t have any personal experience to say anything more about.” And even though friends have given me contradictory phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses to contact this person, none of my calls, emails, or messages seem to go through.

I get that’s not the “hard” or “strong” atheism some people probably would expect — a statement that this person does not and could not exist — but what am I supposed to do with a person I’ve never engaged with and about whom I only know contradicting stories? For me, I generally don’t worry that much about such a person.

…the reason I mention this in particular is because it strikes me as a great way to talk about the God of theistic personalism. When theistic personalists emphasize so much about the imperative of having a personal relationship with God, then not having such a personal relationship (and not seeming to be able to engage in such a personal relationship) is a pretty great disqualifier.

But this doesn’t work quite so well for classical theism. Does it make any sense to talk about not having met *the ground of being* itself?

3. Preoccupation with Spiritual Experiences

The 3rd way is connected with the 2nd, I think. In Mormonism, I was raised to believe that you can “prove” things are true based on having spiritual experiences confirming those things. When you want to experiment on the word, then you know it’s right based on the burning in the bosom. (And supposedly, you know things are wrong when you get a stupor of thought…but if you have what you think is a stupor of thought to something that is supposed to be right, then it’s probably just you casting things out with your doubt.

I don’t really know if I would have ever considered myself to have a burning in the bosom for anything of the LDS church’s truth claims. The experiences that I recall myself thinking, “Oh, is this it? Is this what they mean by burning in the bosom” end up being for things that are so far away from anything religious or spiritual that I understand acutely why some folks dismiss all spirituality as simply emotionality. I try not to do that; I just mention that to say that for me, it makes sense for me to say I have not have spiritual experiences, rather than try to map the sorts of things that I could scrape together as maybe fitting the bill and calling them that (which would make a mockery of the very concept.)

But a while ago, I read an article, again from a Catholic source, and I realized again, that there are just different ways of doing and viewing things. I mean check out even just the title: Untangling Religion from Sentiment. Just to paste part of the conversation between a woman and her priest:

The conversation started amicably enough, but then it quickly spiraled downward. The woman expressed frustration not only with the sacrament but with me. She said she had accepted the call to make regular confessions, changed her schedule to accommodate her new resolution, and had dived into various resources to prepare well for the sacrament.

After giving a summary of her noble efforts, she told me, “Father, I did all those things, and I’ve received confession every month, and you know what? I didn’t feel anything. It made no difference. What’s the point?”

I was surprised. Did this Christian believer hear what she had just said? Did she realize what she had just said? Did she really mean it?

“But it sounds like you’ve made good confessions,” I said. The woman nodded, and so I continued, “Well, then, your sins are forgiven, and God’s grace has been poured into your heart. What else were you expecting?”

“I hear all these stories about people coming out of the confessional and feeling lighter and better and more motivated,” she said. “I thought I’d feel comforted. Or something.”

Okay, now I understood, so I asked her, “Do you know that your sins were forgiven, and that grace was given to you, even though you didn’t feel it?” She answered in a matter-of-fact tone, “But if I don’t feel it, what’s the point?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Did this Christian really just make those comments?

“Well, the point is that your sins were really removed, you were really given grace, and however your emotions did (or did not) respond has nothing to do with the reality,” I said. “Your sins were forgiven. You have received grace, which is God’s own life and power. That is reality!”

The conversation didn’t improve. As far as I know, the woman stopped going to confession because she didn’t feel consoled and decided that God had somehow not fulfilled his part of their presumed bargain.

We see the widespread belief in the West, even among Christian believers, that religion and worship should spark our emotions and make us feel good. The wayward conclusion is reached: if they cannot accomplish the demands of sentiment, then they aren’t worth doing. This is the sad, false reality that occurs when religion becomes sentiment.

I could quote more of this article, but it was the fact that this priest went back and forth several times with the parishioner, and annotated in the article that he couldn’t believe what he was hearing from a Christian, that really drove home to me how much something that would be not only commonplace in Mormonism, but a legitimate cause for consternation, would be seen as not only not a problem but a symptom of incorrect worship in Catholicism. I mean, guilty lmao.

Overall, I don’t think i’m becoming a crypto-catholic or proto-orthodox or whatever because of these things (who knows, maybe I’ll go on another hiatus and then pop back in with news of my catechesis or whatever lmao), but I do appreciate the very different take on religion and faith that end up coming from these other denominations that are basically ignored, misunderstood, whatever by more familiarity and socialization in a predominantly LDS and, yes, broader Protestant context.

1. OK, the worst thing about this story is that the guy lied. After the poor experience at his church, he said he couldn’t come to an LDS church because it was of the devil. It was his loss; we had a siiiiiick multi-room experience modeling the Plan of Salvation/Happiness. A+, great way to give the basics of that to members and non-members alike in a fun way. ︎

I recognized where the guy was trying to go with this, because I wrote about this in part about my post on gift giving and receiving. Namely, a conventional understanding and model of hell (a place of eternal conscious torture — a punishment actively inflicted by God) seems incongruous with most definitions of “love” we can come up with.

Although I believe that “love” is an amorphous term and discussions featuring it should quickly reveal that we are talking past one another, I would say that even if humans do not understand the ways of God, we can at least say that we, who are evil, know how to give good gifts (to quote Matthew 7), so it’s difficult to accept that a supposedly all good Father in heaven would give such worse gifts.

So, I tentatively responded to the guy by saying that there are other models of Hell. But this got me thinking (as I did when I learned about the difference between classical theism and theistic personality)…is this an area where modern conventional understanding is overwhelmingly overdetermined by Protestantism?

I don’t think this is the case, but let me try to think out loud…

To oversimplify, the “conventional” model of hell of one of eternal conscious torment has implications that this is something that God intentionally and purposefully sends someone to. There is an implication further that the torment is an intentional act and not simply a consequence of some other act. So, the argument against it goes something like, “Why would God choose to go out of his way for this?”

For an alternative model not to fall prey to the same critique, then the main differences that have to exist are pulling this away from God’s actions, and then changing the torment part away from God’s doing or responsibility.

(P.s., I know that there are other models such as universalism, annihilationism, and so on. I will not discuss those.)

As far as I’m aware, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and even Mormonism/Latter-day Saint theology attempt to address this. I am going to gloss over things but try to present an understanding in a way that would still be recognizable to believers. If I make any mistakes, then it’s probably my ignorance.

Catholicism

Catechism paragraph 1033 states:

We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”

This establishes a few things:

1. Heaven is the result a choice by humans (to love God)
2. Hell is similarly a choice of self-exclusion from that communion

There are of course, certain actions required to make those choices. Grave/mortal sin is incompatible with loving God, for example.

In this way, I could see a Catholic might attempt to say, “see, it’s not on God, it’s on people.”

If I had to give an analogy thus far, it might be something like: Heaven is like a banquet with family. God is calling humanity to join the banquet and come to dinner.

But like…if you don’t like your family, don’t like the food that will be served at the dinner, etc., you might say, “Nah, I’m going to pass.”

…I would like to make some conclusions here, but I’m not sure that the conclusions of the analogy work. For example, I would like to say that the “natural conclusion” of avoiding dinner is simply that the person ends up alone and hungry. This would seem pretty bad, and it would fit with the self-selection.

However, I’m not sure if that is all hell is, at least even under Catholicism’s own terms. Catholicism still agrees (as far as I’m aware) that there will be torment and hellfire, which seems to me to be “above and beyond” natural consequences of simply “being hungry”. Like, “why though???”

Like, the images of hellfire didn’t originate with Martin Luther and onwards, so this isn’t just a Protestant invention, as far as I’m aware. (I guess I could end the post here, but I’ve got a couple other models to discuss…)

Orthodoxy

My understanding of Orthodoxy is that it’s a little bit different. Rather than having a separation from God, my understanding is that Orthodoxy preaches that God is ever present, and heaven or hell is the human response to that presence. The common analogy is God is like the sun, and the sun can either be comforting or burning depending on our frame of reference. (sorry, i couldn’t find anything equivalent to a catechism for a direct, authoritative quote, but I hope this is acceptable.)

God himself is both heaven and hell, reward and punishment. All men have been created to see God unceasingly in His uncreated glory. Whether God will be for each man heaven or hell, reward or punishment, depends on man’s response to God’s love and on man’s transformation from the state of selfish and self-centered love, to Godlike love which does not seek its own ends.

…

Since all men will see God, no religion can claim for itself the power to send people either to heaven or to hell. This means that true spiritual fathers prepare their spiritual charges so that vision of God’s glory will be heaven, and not hell, reward and not punishment. The primary purpose of Orthodox Christianity then, is to prepare its members for an experience which every human being will sooner or later have.

“Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine”, Part 2: Empirical Theology vs Speculative Theology, John S Romanides

So, keeping to the analogy, Heaven is like a banquet with family. You’re already at the banquet, eating the food. You cannot leave the banquet.

But, if you don’t like your family and the food, then while everyone else is enjoying themselves, you will be fuming inside, wishing you could leave.

This explains the hellfire as not a separate external thing, but as the same glory of God just interpreted differently.

(For whatever its worth, I think the Orthodox presentation works a little better. Hell is not “extra” here. I can totally relate to the idea of suffering internally because I’m utterly unprepared to face an unavoidable meeting.)

Mormonism

If I think about LDS views of heaven and hell, with multiple kingdoms of heaven followed with a (hopefully sparsely populated) Outer Darkness, there are some similarities to the Catholic model, at least at a rough sketch. First, a discussion of the Sons of Perdition:

31 Thus saith the Lord concerning all those who know my power, and have been made partakers thereof, and suffered themselves through the power of the devil to be overcome, and to deny the truth and defy my power—

32 They are they who are the sons of perdition, of whom I say that it had been better for them never to have been born;

33 For they are vessels of wrath, doomed to suffer the wrath of God, with the devil and his angels in eternity;

34 Concerning whom I have said there is no forgiveness in this world nor in the world to come—

35 Having denied the Holy Spirit after having received it, and having denied the Only Begotten Son of the Father, having crucified him unto themselves and put him to an open shame.

36 These are they who shall go away into the lake of fire and brimstone, with the devil and his angels—

37 And the only ones on whom the second death shall have any power;

Doctrine & Covenants Section 76: 31-37

In this case, certain variants are that this state is reserved to those who knew God’s power, were partakers thereof, and then after that denied and defied that power. Maybe this is similar to the Catholic concept of mortal sin (which requires full knowledge of the gravity of the action), but in an LDS context, I think the conventional understanding is that very few actions can occur with that level of knowledge, and very few people will reach that level of knowledge to be able to perform that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.

So, what about everyone else?

LDS theology has concepts of temporary spirit prison and so on that (at first glance) do seem to match up somewhat with Catholic concepts like purgatory, but the LDS innovation (…depending on if you think theology needs ‘innovation’, i guess?) is on multiple levels of kingdoms within heaven. D&C 76 goes on at length about those bodies are “celestial” vs “terrestrial” vs “telestial”, and I won’t write so much for this, except to say that when discussing the telestial, D&C 76 says:

82 These are they who received not the gospel of Christ, neither the testimony of Jesus.

83 These are they who deny not the Holy Spirit.

84 These are they who are thrust down to hell.

85 These are they who shall not be redeemed from the devil until the last resurrection, until the Lord, even Christ the Lamb, shall have finished his work.

86 These are they who receive not of his fulness in the eternal world, but of the Holy Spirit through the ministration of the terrestrial;

87 And the terrestrial through the ministration of the celestial.

88 And also the telestial receive it of the administering of angels who are appointed to minister for them, or who are appointed to be ministering spirits for them; for they shall be heirs of salvation.

89 And thus we saw, in the heavenly vision, the glory of the telestial, which surpasses all understanding;

Doctrine & Covenants Section 76: 82-90

Later on (verse 103) helpfully adds that “these are they who are liars, and sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie.”

Here, we get the sense of hell meaning a couple of things. In this telestial sense, it is temporary (“they who shall not be redeemed from the devil until the last resurrection”)…but in the unending sense, it is reserved more for those who denied the Holy Ghost after having full knowledge. (This set of scriptures also allows us to question whether “eternal” may not represent an unending duration of time…as those who ultimately go to the telestial kingdom will nevertheless “suffer the vengeance of eternal fire” (D&C 76:105)

Apocryphally, Mormons tend to assert that the Telestial Kingdom isn’t that bad. It’s hard to nail down theology, but the quote I recall is:

The Lord has told us of three degrees of glory. There are three “heavens,” as it is often referred to. We call them the telestial, terrestrial, and the celestial. I cannot for a minute conceive the telestial being hell, either, because it is considered a heaven, a glory. The Prophet Joseph Smith told us that if we could get one little glimpse into the telestial glory even, the glory is so great that we would be tempted to commit suicide to get there

Eldred G. Smith, BYU Speeches, March 10, 1964, p. 4, as quoted on https://askgramps.org/is-telestial-kingdom-so-glorious-person-would-commit/)

The reason I put all of these up is that because when I was growing up, I got the sense that Mormonism was trying to prove that it could “address” the issues and shortcomings of other Christian denominations. Since the doctrine of hell is seen as a major issue, the various kingdoms of heaven are intended as a revealed “solution”.

(Obviously, people can have varying degrees on whether these things were issues in need of a solution, or if Mormonism actually engages the topics well enough to provide a reasonable answer. That’s not the purpose of this post.)

What strikes me is that even when talking about Outer Darkness and trying to make things be very much about human action and response, there is still the language about the “lake of fire and brimstone.” But again…like, why?

At the same time, the musings on telestial kingdom are supposed to assure us that even those we would conventionally recognize as bad (e.g., liars, adulterers, ….sorcerers?) will go to a place that is still of glory. In this sense, we can start to envision that maybe the telestial kingdom is like life on earth in a way — and here, we could easily envision how that could have its own problems (by definition, all of my anxieties and fears and issue are things I’ve faced on earth.)

Yet, it seems that even in these supposedly alternative models of hell, there is still an aspect of people being subject to hellfire — at least for a time.

My thoughts

I know, as a reprobate vessel of wrath fitted for destruction, that my thoughts have no significance. How dare the clay say to the potter, “What are you making?”

But, nevertheless, I cannot make the leap to hellfire. Positioning the consequences of our lives in terms of natural consequences makes sense to me. Positioning the consequences of our lives in terms of lack of development or preparation makes sense to me. Positioning the consequences of our lives in terms of an eternal “fear of missing out” or “regret of missing out” makes sense to me.

But that doesn’t get me to hellfire.

I have heard the problem of a fallen nature described in the sense of someone throwing themselves off a cliff. When someone does this, they cannot undo this. They will hurtle to the a painful, deadly landing to whatever lies below, and they cannot save themselves from this. They need to be saved from this fate.

So, to the extent this is what hell represents, then I could get that.

And similarly, I understand intuitively (ask me how I know!) of the anguish that comes from having unresolved anxieties, fears, guilt, etc., So, to the extent that this is what hell represents, then I could get that.

…but…it doesn’t feel like that is all people are trying to say Hell is, even when it is couched as a place of separation from God, or a place of an adverse reaction to God, etc., Hell in terms of fire and brimstone doesn’t feel like the rocky ground that gravity is inexhaustibly pulling one towards. It doesn’t feel just like guilt. It feels…extra.

I have some thoughts on why this “extra” thing is needed. I imagine that some people may commit crimes and sins that they never regret, that they never feel guilty for. That they never experience any other adverse natural consequence for. I can understand why someone would want to posit hell to catch these cases.

…and yet, that feels like addressing things from a finite human perspective. In other words, we humans have primarily retributive punishment systems because we have not evolved socially out of vengeful thinking — it’s harder to accept that our carceral systems represent the highest potential moral thinking on the matter, and yet, essentially, we’re supposed to envision that this in fact is such.

And I understand that because of all of the above, many of my conservative religious friends will read the below and say, “Andrew, you are missing the point!” and that’s part of this message:

Religion is *useless* to me to the extent that it insists upon a vision of perfection or a vision of the ideal that is not applicable to me.

(oh yeah, this is a post about LGBT rejection by conservative religious traditions, but it could apply to so much more.)

What’s an example of this? When someone says, “Well, LGBT relationships and life are a sin and you should just not do that,” that is not useful for me.

I say, “I would like to know how to be a better husband,” and all that certain varieties of religion can give to me are, “You should simply stop being a husband because your very attempt is sin.”

And maybe in an eternal sense, that is true, but that is not relevant to my life as someone who is completely insensate about things so vague as the eternal. Maybe for people with eyes to see and ears to hear, the pressures and sights and sounds of heaven and hell are loud enough and vibrant enough to motivate you, but I, blind to nearsighted as I am in matters of the spirit, have to focus on my life here and now, seeing through a glass, darkly.

I get that what I am suggesting sounds like an unacceptable compromise from the perfect vision that religious folks have. They would say: “Well, the church teaches the divine pattern and cannot stray from that.” But don’t you realize that when you insist that only the “perfect answer” can be abided by, taught, celebrated, accepted, that you drive away anyone who cannot and does not live up to that..?

I get that for many religious people, the thought may be impossible to countenance. It may be to them the same as someone asking, “How can I be the best abuser possible?” To which the response is: stop abusing.

Yet, from my vantage point, this doesn’t feel like the same type of thing. And again, it could just be because I’m a reprobate ignorant of the ways of God and so I just can’t see things clearly, but from my point of view — and this is an argument many LGBT people have made before and will continue to make — comparing LGBT relationality to things like alcoholism, a penchant for anger, etc., doesn’t work for us precisely because we do not see our relationality as bad. (and I get some people may say: some alcoholics don’t see their alcoholism as bad, so maybe this doesn’t actually move the needle.)

I know that every exmormon has their own story for why they left the church. There is a heavy pressure to leave for “good” reasons rather than stereotypical reasons. Good reasons: because they learned the “truth” about the church. Bad reasons: because they were offended, or because they wanted to sin.

When I stopped attending the LDS church, I still kept many of the practices I followed while in the church. To this day, I see that the LDS church taught me a form of respectability politics that I still adhere to (even though I also recognize this is problematic, leaving wasn’t due to wanting to break that paradigm.)

But at some point, I asked myself: if I leave the church, will my life fall apart? Will I become a worse person (in terms of the material effects I can see in this life, because I cannot see or judge whatever will happen in a spiritual or afterlife perspective)?

And the answer became apparent very quickly: no, my life will not fall apart. I will not become a worse person. In fact, rather than worrying about the things that I could not grasp — all of these spiritual questions that I could never figure out — I could just stop worrying and live my life. Maybe faithful folks would say: but you should worry more! but worrying and never getting anywhere doesn’t seem productive to me.

I’m not claiming to be a perfect person. I have my own issues. But the sort of issues I have and want to work on, the sort of things I want to improve about myself, are things that the church cannot or does not want to help with.

The last time I went to church was a Young Singles Adult college ward, where the classes were about finding a spouse and starting a family as soon as possible. I was not trying to date back then, so I would not say that I left to engage in “the LGBT lifestyle”. But I knew enough about myself at that point to know that anxiety about trying to be straight was not productive or relevant to my life.

But the miss that I see is that the church was trying to teach us young adults about forming families and being good participants within family life. But instead of meeting all of us where we were to provide us with guidance on this topic, it looked to some of us — us who are gay and lesbian — and said either, “You should try the same thing as your straight brethren and sisters” or “you should simply not attempt to participate in family life.”

(I know other conservative religious traditions have a telos to celibacy and a telos to not being in family life, but still…it does not call all people to that, and the LDS tradition is different in that it leans more strongly on the idea that it is not good that man should be alone.)

There is this missed audience of people who just want to be good participants with family life, but their families may look a little different…but because the church is so insistent on catering to “the pattern” or “the ideal” and rejecting anything else, it cannot provide anything to those who don’t fit the ideal.

So, instead, I want to simplify things down to terms I can grasp and discuss in a completely secular way.

What are the implications of a gift?

As I see it, a gift is freely given. You can’t “earn” a gift. You can’t “deserve” a gift. It’s freely given, without preconditions. This highlights the graciousness of the gift giver.

Now, given all of that, it may also seem like the gift comes with no conditions, And yet…it feels like the gift prompts a particular response. Like, even if there is nothing a recipient might do to “earn” a gift, we can acknowledge that there are grateful and ungrateful ways to receive a gift. If someone received a gift and then complained, “This isn’t what I wanted,” we might acknowledge that as some sort of faux pas. Or if someone received a gift and ignored it, that would register for many of us as a similar kind of “missing the mark”. Certainly, on the extremes, throwing a gift back into the gift giver’s face is something many of us would agree is…not…the best response.

At the same time, can’t everyone resonate with the experience of receiving a gift that they really didn’t want or need??? Can some ingratitude be excused???

I suggest this complicates things — it suggests that even gift givers might need to have something in order to know what gifts are best for the recipient?

(That being said, there’s a difference between what people might want and what people might need, and all of this conversation doesn’t change the fact that gifts are not “earned” or “deserved”, but are freely given.)

Can we acknowledge that even thought a gift may be freely given, it may in some cases not be free to receive? For example — and some of you may already know where this analogy goes, but I’m still trying to keep this purely secular — if someone gives me free piano lessons, then for me to receive that, I have to actually commit to practicing the piano. And that may be difficult and time-consuming, even if the financial price is already paid for. They can’t just “gift” me piano virtuosity (which might be the ultimate goal and desire). There is still work and effort required.

And yet, the gift was given freely. The work that signals that I have accepted the gift in good graciousness cannot be and should not be confused with me having earned the gift, or me “deserving” what I was given.

These are the things I keep thinking about. Much more important to me these days than what is the correct ordering of commandments or what is a mortal sin or how many angels can dance on a pin, I wonder about how much work I need to be a better gift recipient and a more thoughtful gift giver.

I find myself fascinated by those who document a life infused richly with spirituality and communication with God or gods. I find myself heartbroken for those who document the end of such life, the often involuntary cessation of their spirituality, the silencing of the communication. I have seen some of my friends ask for prayers that they might one day re-experience the presence of God. I’m not much for prayers, but I genuinely send some thoughts their way as best I can.

It is fascinating and heartbreaking to me because I am utterly unfamiliar with it. It is not my story.

I know only in an intellectual sense that people who have had experiences that they once attributed to God can come to reclassify those experiences, or mourn the loss thereof.

But for me, the heavens have always been closed.

I suspect there is a sort of pain that those others have experienced that I myself have not, and I am perhaps a bit differently situated from those others because of it. Maybe there’s a sort of raw wound from having had that faith and having it work for a while and then losing it? The dark night of the soul is probably altogether much darker when someone is acclimated to the light and has been thrown in the dark room.

And I thought about the recent awareness and visibility of protests regarding police brutality and racism.

I have had some people ask me if I am “ok.”

I have written a bit on Twitter and Facebook about how weird my thoughts are on this. Because I feel “ok”, and I don’t know if that is ok. I don’t know if that’s really me being “not ok” for so long it is a baseline.

But then I think about atheism.

I think about how many theists tell me that atheism to them is so dreary. So depressing. I think about how many disaffected former theists wonder about how they will overcome the dreariness of their new status quo.

I know some atheists appeal to a secular sense of awe and beauty and a way to rehabilitate spirituality without calling it spiritual.

But for me, these are not my strategies….it’s not that I don’t think there aren’t beautiful things in the world. It’s not that I don’t think I have experienced some forms of wonder. But I think I’ve said it before: it seems more respectful not to attribute this universe to a God. It doesn’t feel like I should be reclaiming anything in the realm of “spirituality.” (_{but the theists will ask: who put in you such lofty ideals about what the universe or what spirituality should be like?})

I think that many people are just beginning to be disillusioned, and when they ask me if I’m ok, it is perhaps because they think that I (like them) must be newly disillusioned as well.

But the thing they don’t realize is that this is my baseline. The world has not become disenchanted; it was always unenchanted.

I had someone ask me what could be bad about having hope and faith. It is something I have never understood — an immediate evidence of the chasm between them and me. For them, hope is a free action, or at least, one without critical cost. But for me…when I try to force myself to have hope in something that just doesn’t seem likely, the incongruence is an everpresent ache. Maybe it is a Sisyphean incongruence I feel called (_{by whom?, some theists might ask, but I would say my brain chemistry has given me less noble neuroses as well}) to bear, but an it is an incongruence nonetheless. When that hope is lost or betrayed, it is a wound. But when you don’t hope, you can’t be let down.

Is that ok?

It’s come so far that I’m seeing people who normally would never say much of anything now come forward and encourage others to speak out. I am heartened to see people from a broad range of interests (not just the typical lefty politics realms) connecting those interests to the questions of racial equity. More and more, I’m seeing people state that silence on this issue is no longer an acceptable “neutral” position. More and more, I wonder how my own relative silence on social media will be taken?

But…

I still see and hear the voices of opposition. My nature is to constantly, voraciously collect and consume data that subverts a clean, easy narrative (even if it’s hard to frustrate my own clean, easy narratives.) This holds me back in part, because I fear what will come back at me if I say anything (_{the scales only tip in favor of me pressing publish on this post because I know that very few people even read this blog any more}). I fear that I don’t have the resolve (or strength?) to fight if the voices of opposition speak out against me, because this isn’t some academic question to me.

I’ve seen this story before. Where people will insist that the cause is not worth supporting because its victims aren’t perfect angels, and its adherents aren’t peaceful protesters. Whether it be a criminal allegation, failure to provide proper deference to police, the violence of protests or riots or looting, I am well aware of those who will say: it’s just people reaping what they sowed.

And it’s made me think of Christianity and Jesus.

I don’t find Jesus relatable. I mean, I guess maybe that’s the wrong term. How can any of us reprobate wretches relate to a sinless God?

I guess what more I mean is that believers find something credible in the belief that Jesus can help them, that Jesus knows their struggles and can heal them. It’s a potent security for them that buoys them. But not me. That is what I struggle with.

But I think I get at an intellectual level part of what the pull is _{(the subversive me whispers: “you know nothing and make a mockery in your attempt to summarize faith”)}. Jesus’s death works because he was a sinless sacrifice, a perfect protest. Jesus’s death has the possibility to reveal the depravity of mankind because if we are to believe the stories about his life, then those stories reveal a life that is utterly incongruous with any of the rationalizations or justifications for his murder. There is only one answer: there is no good answer except for our own error.

I think of people trying to argue that protesters should be more like Martin Luther King (never mentioning what Dr. King had to say about riots, never mentioning that Dr. King’s message was often still considered too extreme at the time.) Others have correctly pointed out that, ultimately, Martin Luther King was also murdered.

When people say “violence only leads to more violence,” maybe this is so. Yet, with Dr. King, there was still violence.

I think when people talk about Dr. King, at worst, it’s because they prefer a response that can be ignored (and a non-violent response is much easier to ignore than a violent one.) But at best, if I am being charitable, then I think they want to evoke and inspire and advocate a Christian message that a non-violent response to violence is so incongruous that it is perhaps the only thing clear enough to possibly sever the cycle of vengeance and serve as a mirror on human depravity.

…but…

I keep wondering how this standard is destined to fail, because a crucial thing about Christianity is that Jesus is the only sinless one. And if that’s the case, then there will always be a way to find something to pin on anyone else. Of course people are willing to dig any perceived or real character flaw about anyone, Dr. King included.

And if this is the case, if it is possible that people can still ignore the sacrifice, ignore it and continue in the ordinariness of their lives, then what?

I had known Awer House for a long time, had carried its young lieutenants, known them as captains of other ships. Granted, no Awer suited for military serviced exhibited her house’s tendencies to their utmost extent. An overly keen sense of injustice or a tendency to mysticism didn’t mesh well with annexations. Nor with wealth and rank — any Awer’s moral outrage inevitably smelled slightly of hypocrisy, considering the comforts and privileges such an ancient house enjoyed, and while some injustices were unignorably obvious to them, some others they never saw.

In any event, Lieutenant Skaaiat’s sardonic practicality wasn’t foreign to her house. It was only a milder, more livable version of Awer’s tendency to moral outrage.”

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie. chapter 14.

and another quote from another character about the same (see the difference in sentiment!)

“All the Awers *seem* polite enough…They *seem* totally normal at first…but then they go having visions, or deciding something’s wrong with the universe and they have to fix it. Or both at once. They’re all insane.”

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie, chapter 19

I think a lot about this. About the description of this character (and indeed, her family) as being prone to moral outrage or prone to mysticism or both. Because those aren’t always together.

I think a lot about whether these two things do run together, in families or in individuals. If there is any basis, what happens when someone inherits one or the other but not both?

I think of course about religion, and about people who are known to be mystics. Are they always such polarizing figures?

If I had to liken it to my own experience, I’d have to say my father could be considered someone prone to mysticism. I, on the other hand, do not seem to be.

But I can totally get on board with the sense of moral outrage (and the selectiveness of it.)

I think a lot about this quote so much because it says so much about the other characters making the assessment.

I think a lot about how while this is the description given for this particular character and her house, within the text, she (at least to me) is not the character that one would associate as having a particularly finely tuned sense of moral outrage. Or at least, even if she is, one gets to see far more about which “injustices they don’t see” rather than the ones that they do. So, these summaries and descriptions say more about the other characters and about how they themselves see through the glass of their society darkly.

(The character who does have a more recognizable sense of moral outrage….doesn’t last so long.)

That gets me to the other line…I think a lot about how this *particular* member of the house is more adjusted to her society because she has a “milder, more livable version” of the family’s tendency.

I wonder if I am have a milder, more livable version of anything, or if I am simply insane.

I am aware that MBTI isn’t necessarily psychologically sound. However, to me, I have always chafed at the critique that the MBTI suffers from the Forer Effect — when I read about different descriptions and explanations, I can usually strongly intuit that some descriptors fit and some don’t.

Of course, there is also the gap of things I don’t understand how to process yet.

Going through the Enneagram has caused me to revisit MBTI, and to revisit my own understandings of myself.

See, if you had asked me a few months ago about MBTI, I would have said that for sure I knew I was I for introvert, and T for thinking….and then I would have been fuzzier on what iNtuition and Sensing really were about, and about what Perceiving or Judging were really about either. I didn’t know about functions and didn’t realize that even though two MBTI types might share several letters, they might be very far apart in terms of function.

So, back then, I would have said something like “I’m either INTP or INTJ.” (And I get that a huge issue with the scientific validity of the MBTI is precisely that it doesn’t allow people to stably and reliably retest the same.)

The overall impression I had of myself was as being a logical, critical thinker.

…and yet, if I think about this now, even I have to note that this was an ignorance of crucial parts of myself. I have just as strongly insisted in subjectivity, in the primacy of my own inner concepts.

WordPress recommended a decade old blog post of mine: “Being out of touch with humanity.” What a great way to encapsulate. Even a decade ago, I could identify the sense of difference, but I didn’t have a way to put it to words.

The enneagram has given partial words….yet, interestingly, it was a complicated process to get there.

When I first learned about the Enneagram, I was so sure that I was maybe a 5: The investigator. Intense, cerebral, secretive and isolated.

…but (un)fortunately enough for me, when I was learning about the enneagram, I was going through an emotional downswing because of the lack of success of my music YouTube channel, so I had enough working material to realize that 5 wasn’t enough to explain my emotional sensibilities.

And so I played around with being a 5 with a 4 wing (since wings are a thing in Enneagram). And then I had to wonder…what if instead I were a 4 with a 5 wing? The advice I heard from many others was to sit with whichever negative description hit closest to home. And so the 4 begins:

We have named this type The Individualist because Fours maintain their identity by seeing themselves as fundamentally different from others. Fours feel that they are unlike other human beings, and consequently, that no one can understand them or love them adequately. They often see themselves as uniquely talented, possessing special, one-of-a-kind gifts, but also as uniquely disadvantaged or flawed. More than any other type, Fours are acutely aware of and focused on their personal differences and deficiencies.

https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4

And also:

Average Levels

Level 4: Take an artistic, romantic orientation to life, creating a beautiful, aesthetic environment to cultivate and prolong personal feelings. Heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination.

Level 5: To stay in touch with feelings, they interiorize everything, taking everything personally, but become self-absorbed and introverted, moody and hypersensitive, shy and self-conscious, unable to be spontaneous or to “get out of themselves.” Stay withdrawn to protect their self-image and to buy time to sort out feelings.

Level 6: Gradually think that they are different from others, and feel that they are exempt from living as everyone else does. They become melancholy dreamers, disdainful, decadent, and sensual, living in a fantasy world. Self-pity and envy of others leads to self-indulgence, and to becoming increasingly impractical, unproductive, effete, and precious.

Unhealthy Levels

Level 7: When dreams fail, become self-inhibiting and angry at self, depressed and alienated from self and others, blocked and emotionally paralyzed. Ashamed of self, fatigued and unable to function.

Level 8: Tormented by delusional self-contempt, self-reproaches, self-hatred, and morbid thoughts: everything is a source of torment. Blaming others, they drive away anyone who tries to help them.

Level 9: Despairing, feel hopeless and become self-destructive, possibly abusing alcohol or drugs to escape. In the extreme: emotional breakdown or suicide is likely. Generally corresponds to the Avoidant, Depressive, and Narcissistic personality disorders.

https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4

(I was probably in level 6 or level 7 then. Fortunately, I have never hit Level 9.)

Anyway, the newfound acceptance of my emotionality then caused me to take another look at MBTI, where upon taking a few other tests, I ended up at INFP.

I’ve noticed a weird thing in my life (which I have no idea is just something I experience, or if it is something that others do….there’s my Enneagram 4 thinking here…) where if I tried to learn something at one point in my life, it can be entirely opaque and unintelligible…but somehow, with only the passage of time, I can somehow be better able to understand the same concept later on (even though I haven’t spent any conscious time trying to figure out that thing in the intervening years.)

So, there I was with the type functions for MBTI and Jungian psychology. I’m not going to claim to be an Jungian expert in any sense, but for the first time, I could read things like “Introverted Feeling” “Extroverted Intuition,” “Introverted Sensing” and “Extroverted Thinking” and start to relate these concepts to myself (or, as it turned out for other MBTI types, utterly not relate.) (For those who aren’t aware, the previously mentioned are the functions of INFP — Fi Ne Si Te.)

I hesitated to accept INFP at first because I didn’t and don’t see myself as an intrinsically touchy-feely person…yet, as I read certain descriptions of Fi (introverted feeling), I found some descriptions that resonated:

INFPs are deeply aware of and in touch with their inner landscape. Their dominant Fi is inwardly focused and adept at evaluating and handling their personal tastes, values, and emotions. Because Fi is introverted in direction, INFPs process their emotions and experiences on a largely independent basis. With each new feeling, experience, or idea they evaluate, their sense of self becomes a little clearer. 

https://personalityjunkie.com/infp-personality-type-profile/

Indeed, for me, everything comes back to a personal sense. I would like to think that this personal sensibility is somewhat logical, but if there’s a conflict, I have to live with myself first and foremost, even if it alienates me.

…on the other hand, I am not playing for myself. So, I struggle with the poor performance of covers that in all honesty I should have realized wouldn’t perform that well with “the algorithm,” or with a general audience.

So, there I am stuck, wondering if I actually enjoy music at all.

Obviously, that’s nonsense. Even though I get very mopey and discouraged about the performance of my music, I always go back to it eventually. Even though I dislike practicing, dislike music theory, dislike transcription, dislike like so much of the mechanical process, I like hearing the result of taking compositional ideas from my head and putting them in an aural space.

It’s much easier for me to write in a journal. Even though I haven’t written that much in this blog (or my group blogs) in a while, and to be honest, I haven’t kept very active with my journal, I note that I have much less anxiety about views. (Maybe that isn’t true. I do feel a sense of disappointment when my Wheat & Tares blog posts don’t hit a certain internal hurdle of traffic.)

But here at least….I know there are only a handful of people who are checking their emails and RSS feeds, and my lasting absence has probably been enough to end even that.

…and I am mostly ok with it.

Does this mean I am writing for myself whereas I am not covering music for myself?

I’m not sure if that is completely accurate. After all, there is a difference between a blog here that is published and a journal in my room that is not.

There is a difference between sharing blog posts on my facebook page and…not.

But still, there is a definite difference of attitude and I think that’s interesting.

Maybe it’s that writing is easier for me than transcribing, so the time commitment to jot one of these blog posts is that much less than that required of music? Maybe that means the stakes are accordingly that much lower?

The concepts I’ve been thinking of are instinct/talent and practice/discipline. I analogize these concepts to religious concepts like grace and works. Instinct or talent is an unearned gift — there’s nothing a person does to get whatever set of talents and instincts they have. At the same time, talent must be activated, and this is through practice.

To me, this illustrates the proper relationship of grace and works. You need the works. If you have talent and do nothing with it, then you won’t get anywhere…

And yet…relying solely on works misses the mark. Even if practice makes perfect, practice is enabled or force multiplied by talent. If I have talent, then even with a little practice I will rapidly increase. If I have little talent, then all the practice in the world may result in little progress.

I was feeling good about this schema at Sunstone…like I had come up with a good analogy with my video game analogy…and then less than a day after, doubt creeped in.

Chris Carroll Smith raised up a point at dinner one day that I hadn’t really considered…the concept of locus of control.

My grace-first (or talent-first) analogy relies on an external locus of control. That ultimately, what will be comes from without.

…but a works-first or practice-first analogy assumes something different. It starts from an internal locus of control, that one can control one’s own fate.

This by itself isn’t necessarily a problem…but as I read more about locus of control, I kept finding articles that suggested that internal locus of control is…better. Or at the very least, it’s more practical. Most articles talked about the benefits of having an internal locus of control and the steps to cultivating more of an internal locus of control.

I am not saying I disagree with the articles…but having such an external locus of control, it seems…unreal.

And yet…I know people who have the internal view, and who seem to be able to make things happen for themselves. There really is something to say that practice makes perfect. And people with internal loci of control don’t hedge that by talking about talent first.

In each of my hobbies I have hit a metaphorical brick wall…where I have been gifted with a certain level of talent…a certain instinctual understanding…and that has carried me a certain way…but now I have hit the limits of that talent. I am at the place where I now should develop further through practice.

But oh! it’s so painful! I’ve gotten by so far skating around easily, that now that there’s real work involved, I struggle. I want to sink back to my habits, my instinct. I gnash at the idea of work that doesn’t come easily.

Grace breaking in from works

Someone tweeted a provocative question: what if the goal of all of the works and commandments and checklists of Mormonism was to explicitly try to break you. What if it is a sort of “confusion hypnotic induction” — it gets around your ordinary senses by overwhelming them, and once overwhelmed, you enter the intended suggestible state.

In this case, after trying to juggle all the balls and check all the boxes, the idea that everything comes crashing down would be a feature, not a bug.

I liked this question, and the proposed answer. I liked the idea of grace breaking in from works.

My only issue was: Mormonism institutionally doesn’t seem to accept it. Rather than welcoming the weary member whose balls have fallen to the ground and are rolling away from them in every direction…rather than taking these members and wrapping them up in a hug and telling them they have arrived at the second half of life, where a new way of thinking is yet to begin…Mormonism simply gives them the unsustainable hope that they can always gather the balls back up and try again. (Isn’t the atonement grand?)

Practice breaking in instinct

I like to write, and I like to present. I even won a medal at the national US Academic Decathlon for the speech event one year.

But there was a point in time when I realized that my way preparing and performing speeches was flawed. It was based on an instinctual concept for the way words should flow into sentences, and sentences should flow into paragraphs. Even here on this blog, I usually write each post in one draft, with minimal edits. There is no outlining, no care for organization beyond what flows instinctually.

For speeches, I would write every word, and I would keep reading it aloud with all intended gestures until the entire speech was memorized.

I liked this way of presenting. I thought it gave my speeches a controlled regularity…every motion and every emotion was practiced in advance.

…but it wasn’t a perfect strategy.

One day, in a business case competition, I froze in front of the judges, having forgotten my lines. Since I was so dependent on memorization, I stood there for a good 15 seconds with nothing to aid me but my own retracing of my presentation. I then regained my place, and continued in my performance, wishing no one would remember that too long dead space.

But even that wasn’t enough to break the habit.

I took a public speaking class for college. Since I thought I knew everything I needed to know about public speaking, I deferred the class until a compressed summer school session. All of a sudden, the material that most students would learn in 18 weeks was compressed into 6. This included 4 speeches.

All of a sudden, it was not feasible to memorize 4 speeches in 6 weeks. So, I gave up on that. But there was something else that happened.

In the speech class, we learned about rhetorical and literary devices. We learned about the same sorts of things I had learned at an intellectual level in English classes. We learned about metaphors and similes; about repetition; about asyndeton and polysyndeton and all these other Greek terms for things that were either instinctual to me or not.

And during that class, I gained an appreciation for the checklist. Instead of relying on instinct…this gift of memorization…I thought instead about rhetorical devices to anchor me from point to point.

I saw the effectiveness. I made it through the class with another way.

Still…the class also scared me…and it scared me in a way that music theory also scares me. I know that literary and rhetorical devices are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are descriptions of things that have worked, rather than prescriptions for things that must be done. And the same is true of music theory.

…and yet…I like to feel that things are not so scientific. That you cannot tickle the heart through predictable steps.

…and yet…there is a heart, closed off to me. It is the collective heart of my prospective audiences for my music. I want to open its secrets. I want to believe that’s a matter of good instincts, talent, grace, and am not willing to practice the recipe that will make the magical into the mundane.