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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (253470)	6/20/2014 2:47:52 PM
From: Katelew	Respond to of 541933

Bentway, you are such a gentleman and I'm so short on time. I'll be in SLC myself next Tuesday. First, let me say I was so relieved that you said you considered Mormons fine people. It does beg the question of how they got that way---nevertheless, we can set that aside for now. I was relieved because I've often wondered if it would be really hard to live there as a non-Mormon. If it might work against someone in the workplace, as in seeing promotions go to LDS person less qualified than a non-LDS. Favoritism and all. Second, Mormons are not a monolithic group. Speaking for myself, I have read the books you suggest as well as the website, plus probably a lot more than you might know about. I'm in a sub-group that has long wished for the Church to stop white-washing the history of it. And actually it is in the process of doing just that. BYU historians are being allowed now to publish articles that would not have been published 25 years ago. The church is really wrestling with how far to go with this, or so I hear from the inside. The fear being there would be loss of confidence, membership, etc. As one who has lived my life out in the "field' where conversions happen constantly, I think after the inital loss of membership much greater membership would grow. So many out here love their Mormon neighbors, find the organization of the church itself to be amazing but get stuck on the history of the founding of it. But, you may wonder, why I would stay in the Church since I question the truthfulness of some of its history? The short answer is this and it goes back to what I said about religion being one thing and God being another...kind of apples and oranges, maybe. My dilemna is that I've had a handful of powerful experiences that would go into a category of 'supernatural, mystical-magical thingies'. Without going into specifics, I reached a conclusion that God is probably real, and I made that leap into faith. Subsequent events plus reading details of other people's conversion experiences led me to move from a position of 'probably real' to complete conviction. Except for the first one, all these experiences happened while I was engaged in volunteer service for my church. So after pondering this for many years while struggling with church history, I reached the conclusion that it must not matter at all to God where I hang my hat. If he will reveal himself to me while doing work for the Mormon church, either he doesn't care about the way the church got started OR he doesn't care whether I'm part of any organized religion at all--just cares about the acts of service maybe. I mean that was my critical thinking process back then, can't argue whether or not it was correct, of course. So I stayed put. Now I'm old. This church and all my longtime church friends are like comfortable old shoes. Don't think much anymore about church history although I am following the possible two excommunications that are making news in SLC. One of them is a historian. Even though church history wouldn't budge me, I DO think about what would. I used to think it would take something in the realm of science to do it, a discovery of some kind. Now I think probably not. So much of what we think we know is actually theory and scientific theories keep getting tweaked. Hope this answers some things. And I sincerely hope you will always feel comfortable as an outsider in a somewhat strange land. Kate