I’ll start off by saying that I have never had a significant experience where I “felt” or “heard” the holy ghost. Looking back on my religious life, I remember times where I felt the spirit, or what I was lead to believe was the spirit, but never anything that I can relate to a solid experience.

One of the main reasons I decided to question the validity of the church was due to the fact that I began feeling the “spirit” at very random times. Growing up I came to associate “feeling the holy ghost” with what I call “the chills”. It’s a tingling feeling that goes down my spine and reaches my arms and legs, leaving goose-bumps all over. This feeling would come over me when I watched touching church videos such as The Easter Story or the old First Vision video.

I never put too much weight on it. I never “tested” the gospel because I “knew” it was true. How did I “know”? I don’t know. I remember finishing the Book of Mormon during High School and I knelt down to pray and I felt “peaceful”, thus I concluded that it was true.

I remember the time when I prayed fervently to know if the church was true and didn’t feel anything. Then, I had a random thought that translated to “You already know”. I already knew, so I didn’t have to find out again. But wait… I had also been taught to pray often to know that it was true, to re-witness the truth again and again so that your testimony can grow. Well, that obviously wasn’t going to work with me because I already knew and I didn’t need to go over it again just to get no real answer. The logic in this thinking is driving me insane. Wait, I think I’m already there.

Another experience was when I was in the MTC. I had not felt the chills for several days and it was starting to bother me. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I went to my instructor, who diligently probed to find out if I wasn’t worthy. I assured him that I had no sins that had been left unrepentant, and he instructed me to pray until it came. Well, I prayed at every opportunity and eventually I started to feel the chill again. Its weird thinking about that experience now, because I think it tells me a lot about how naive I was, and still am, about religious experience in general. Also, how was I supposed to teach others how to feel the spirit if I couldn’t feel the spirit myself?

Over the last several years I have noticed that I would feel the “holy ghost” in totally random settings… reading an article on the internet, listening to a popular song on the radio, thinking about my wife and kids. I Googled the topic and found that my way of feeling the holy ghost is typical of many who have spiritual experiences. And not just typical of religious people, but of the human race in general. In fact, its normal to feel that way when your thinking of things that are important to you, especially when thinking about nostalgic things such as how important your wife and family are to you. So, if this were true, then where does that take me with relation to the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and the church?

Let me pose a simple question… is it true that those who disassociate themselves from the church will automatically be cursed with trials and tribulations?

If this is true, then the sentiment that you will have trials if you are not paying your tithing or dutifully attending all the endless meetings would plague every TBM that decided to take a break. Is this true? Does it happen to everyone? Am I different?

Maybe He thought it wasn’t worth it to bother me with such trials. Maybe I have stored up mountains of treasure in heaven that I’m running on credit. Maybe He’s waiting for the perfect chance to “really teach me a lesson.” I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

Should I be preparing my family for the imminent doom that looms around the corner? Could whatever happens to me effect my family? Should I move out and keep the rumble to myself where they won’t be hurt? Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I don’t want my family to suffer for my sins.

Everyone has free will, correct? Yet, believers tend to think that God has a hand in everything that happens to them. Why does God let bad things happen? Free will of course. But if good things happen then it was a blessing from God. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Either His hand is into everything, some things, or nothing, but it makes no sense to me that we have free will until God decides to intervene.

Prayer drips in the same bucket. I was taught in the normal Mormon prayer template. Intro… We thank thee… We ask thee… Outro. I understand the need to be appreciative. That part of the prayer makes sense. Asking for such things as “Bless us that we may arrive safely at our destination…” makes no sense. It make sense to ask for such things if we knew that God would stop all of those crazy drivers from slamming into us at every corner, but free will steps on the toes of such ideas.

In my opinion, either we have free will or its all in Gods hands… I think that we are all responsible for our own destinies, but everyone else has a say in it. Everything any of us does can effect someone else, and we have to understand that so that we can live our lives in such a way that will better ourselves and those around us. I never really thought about the golden rule until recently, but I think that one simple phrase can have more influence on every humans life if everyone where to act according to that one dictate rather than the 10 commandments, the word of wisdom, or anything else contained in the thousands of pages of scriptures in all their forms.

Why is it that when a TBM first finds out that you no longer believe in everything “Mormon” that their first reaction is that you just can’t live the righteous life… meaning that you have problems with the word of wisdom or you’re having an affair or you don’t like your church calling so your rebelling.

I understand why… because I used to be the same way. Back then I couldn’t fathom why someone would “know” the truth and decide not to live it. The thing that bothers me about this now is that I haven’t changed anything in my life other than the fact that I don’t think the same as I used to.

I’ve never touched alcohol. I’ve never smoked. I’ve never touched drugs. I had a very sheltered life, and still do, growing up in Utah and still living in Utah. All of my friends growing up were TBM and were good influences on me. I went on a mission and arrived home with marriage plans already set. I asked her to marry me within two weeks of my return and we were married in the temple a couple of months later.

I’ve had a squeaky clean existence up until now, and nothing is going to change. So why do TMB’s automatically assume your the newly ordained prodigal son?

My honest feeling is that its a sense of self righteousness. TBM’s have a tendency to think that they are the most righteous on earth, being a member of Gods one and only true church, and anyone who thinks differently are just plain wrong. TBM’s see those who have turned from the “truth” as a very special sub-species of humans. In most cases, they know your going to hell and would rather not be tarnished by even knowing you.

I might be exaggerating because I haven’t told anyone about myself, but I have witnessed it with others. I have several family members who didn’t exactly leave the church, but they did go off the deep end; drinking and drugging and stuff like that.

All of them eventually “came back” and I know that it wore greatly on my mother and father due to trying to get them back. I don’t want to put them through that with me.

The short answer is “I don’t know anymore.”

The long answer is… well, we would have to hook up some mind reading contraption to my brain and have it record all of the ramblings and random thought processes that I go through related to this question. I don’t think it would be a good use of one post to record that kind of gibberish, so I’ll continue with a semi-short version.

I think I’m becoming an agnostic. I think it is impossible to say one way or another that there is a God. I have not personally witnessed anything that I would be considered as concrete evidence for the existence of a God. At the same time, I do realize that there is no possible way that we could disprove the existence of a God with 100% certainty. This is interesting to me because I remember talking to atheists on my mission where I would tell them that they couldn’t prove to me that there wasn’t a God, so that meant that there was a God.

I look at nature and naturally think that there is no way that nature could become this without having some kind of “higher power” or “intelligent design”. Yet, at the same time, I see the world and think to myself that there is no way that an “intelligent designer” would design this. I’d have to say that he would get a failing grade in design school if this is what someone decided would be a good project.

I hope there is something. I want to believe that there is life after death. I want to believe that I’ll be together with my family forever. I want to believe that this is not all. Yet, I haven’t been able to congure up any grand ideas on how to be certain of any of it.

The journey began several years ago. My family goes on vacation to California every summer. A few years ago we camped for a week in OC. My wife and I lived there previously for a few years and decided to go a little early to have a little fun with the kids before we hooked up with the rest of the family. We arrived on Friday and went to church one Sunday. We soon heard that the Newport Beach Temple open house was currently “open”.

We visited the open house and enjoyed it immensely. I was impressed by the temple and liked the architecture. While riding the bus from the temple back to the parking lot, I noticed a protester holding a sign. The sign read “JosephLied.com“. I paid no attention to it, but the website was so easy to remember that I decided to check it out weeks later. I can’t remember exactly what happened next, but I do remember noticing something about there being three versions of the First Vision.

Having been born and raised in a very Mormon family, I had never heard about there being more than one version of the single most important event since the first coming. It intrigued me. I decided to do find the three versions to see if there was more I needed to know about it. Possibly there were more details I could learn that would strengthen my testimony. Instead of adding to my testimony, all it provided were questions. The main question I had was “Why are the three versions so different, even contradictory?”

I didn’t delve into it then. I left it in the back of my mind and went on with life. Since that time, the summer of 2005 I believe, I have slowly discovered more and more information about the history of the church that continues to bother me, confuse me, irritate me, enrage me, and ultimately distance me from my former beliefs.