Take aways

Mormons have a reputation of being reliable, kind people. They have high standards that they seem to honestly believe in. They're a lot like Boy Scouts in that they strive to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. All of those qualities are, in my mind, excellent qualities to have in many situations, and I'm not embarrassed to say that when it comes to take away lessons on life the Scout Law might sum up a great deal of what Mormonism taught me.

A couple of other beneficial life lessons learned through Mormonism would be learning that it's a good idea to ask questions and that we should seek out the original source when trying to learn about something. The Joseph Smith story is all about "lacking wisdom" in a world of confusion and challenging that confusion with personal investigation. You can't simply rely on others to get you through; you have to do the work for yourself. Joseph questioned authority and eventually found his own.

I admire people who constantly question authority and scrutinize sources. People who request to see the data for themselves and who want to investigate the texts on their own show a great deal of Boy Scout bravery, in my opinion, not to mention self-respect. I want to be someone who is unafraid of research and investigation and I think Mormonism can teach people to be that way.

On the other hand, Mormonism has had some negative effects on me. Mormonism taught me an unhealthy reverence for authority, it taught me that circular logic is okay, it taught me that I am offensive by nature, it taught me to equate virginity with beauty, cleanliness, and morality! Mormonism taught me bad history. It taught me that we already had the "answers" that mattered and that I should wait until the afterlife to understand the non-salvation-related questions I had (boy, oh boy, did I want to know why God ever bothered with dinosaurs!).

Mormonism taught me to make excuses. I was making excuses constantly for Mormonism. All the crazy shit that didn't make sense even to a child was excused away. Oh, God hasn't revealed that yet! We're not ready for that yet! It's not important to our salvation! They're just men, they're not infallible! I need to work on my faith! It's just a bunch of "anti" bullshit! The world doesn't understand! If only everyone else would listen to the Gospel as taught by the One True Church! Our prophet is so inspired, they'll let us know as soon as God wants us to know more!

Losing my faith in Mormonism taught me to stop making ridiculous excuses.

The dawn of Man

The story of Adam and Eve was an easy favorite for me as a child, second only to the story of Noah's ark. Probably because even though it had just as many animal species it lacked the adventure of the roundup and the violence of the Flood. I loved that Adam got to name all the animals and live with them and Eve happily in a kind of Tarzan-Jane-like existence. Even thinking about it now makes me happy.

Despite the thrill of such a wonderful story I knew there were some problems with it. For starters there were the likes of these guys

and plenty of others. Then again my parents never showed any indication of subscribing to young earth creationism. In fact my dad had taken me and my siblings out trilobite hunting once or twice and he was sure to explain that the fossils we found pre-dated the dinosaurs, who were themselves hundreds of millions of years old and probably never in the Garden of Eden. I was told at home, in church, and later at BYU that the details of the Creation would be revealed to us at some point after we died, so I kept the whole issue of where prehistoric creatures came from on the shelf labeled "We won't know, so we don't care" for a surprisingly long time. Admittedly I noticed the shelf bowing horribly when I was studying the Old Testament on my mission and read quote after quote from general authorities stating that the Church's stance on the matter was unbendingly pro-young earth and therefore aggressively anti-scientific. It hurt to read that kind of senselessness. I didn't want to be wrapped up with it, nor did I want to place my faith in something so demonstrably inaccurate.

Now let me return to the question of Adam and Eve. I was taught that they were literally our "first parents", meaning that all human beings can trace their ancestry back directly to them. I believed that my physical existence resulted directly from their procreative efforts so many millennia ago. (No, Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve do not fit the biblical narrative, people!) As a youngster I oscillated between thinking they were folks who looked like my family and our church-going neighbors and thinking they were probably special cavemen who had, you know, touched the obelisk or something.  

It's embarrassing now to think back on these things. It's painfully embarrassing to hear people defend creationism and attack evolution. The last two times I've attended LDS church services I was treated to witnessing explicit attacks on Darwin and the scientific method! Of course this was only a couple of months after Mormon apostle, Russell Nelson took a stab at refuting the Big Bang in General Conference with a snide and ignorant remark about an explosion in a printing press producing a dictionary... 

How does anyone stay a believer when this stuff is obviously wrong even to a small child? These are issues that extend far beyond Mormonism to all of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. How could this absolute nonsense persist and flourish still today among billions of people? I'm guessing that many people do what I did: they doubt their doubts and not their faith.