Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters
The really difficult situation is when you feel like you have received spiritual witnesses of the truth of the gospel, but that you are not confronted with somethingi that feels wrong.
How much easier it would be if we had neve received spiritual witnesses. It would be like walking away from a plate of brocolli and mustard greens.
It's the paradoxical ground that many of us have to deal with, and for many of us, we are able to reconcile this by realizing the church has been and always will be populated by and administered by imperfect human beings. But that does not diminish the role of the divine in our lives.
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Well stated, and I agree, a dilemma - but then again, so much in life is a dilemma.
I believe in a higher power, but with my lousy spritual antennae I tend toward a Deist view of things. My take is there may be something to the spiritual witness people experience, but whatever communication might be sent to us is pretty general in nature, and human beings wrap anthropomorphic structure, ceremony, ideology, doctrine & interpretation around it all, much of which is simply untrue, at least in the literal sense human beings seem to gravitate to in assessing truth.
From my way of thinking, Buddha, Shiva (et al), Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, The Creator, and Joseph Smith all may have been exposed to similar "insights" on the devine, but the divergence in ideology & practice is due to their humanity, their spin on things. For example, did the Lord specify particular ordinances to the prophets of old, the Popes, the newer prophets, etc? To me there is too much detail & ritual, things that become the seeds of disillusionment as people come to view the specifics as being arbitrary & superficial.
The banality of religion is what prompts atheism (which I find to be equally "unprovable" to a base belief in a higher power, at least from a scientific standpoint).
In terms of religion's assertions, IMO we know far, far less than the structured ideologies and traditions suggest.