Eight Months of Hell

At first I thought I could be a cafeteria Mormon. While the actual cannon of Mormon belief is fairly small, the surrounding beliefs and cultural portions are varied and many. I started with a big list of things I needed to research more before making any decisions about cutting off 'parts of the body' as Paul might suggest.

The whirlwind of questions pelted me mercilessly. It was like the shelf falling off the wall set off an avalanche. Nothing to grab on to. Not much to keep me from going under.

I read Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Bushman, No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, more of the scriptures, almost the entire MormonThink website, various talks from The Journal of Discourses, hundreds of wikipedia pages, and various other websites; I listened to a bunch of the Mormon Stories podcasts, the Mormon Expression podcasts, and a few others; I prayed; I talked with my wife and another friend. This was an all-consuming quest for answers.

I would ask a question, see that it and three others would all depend on a larger question. Then move on to the larger question, only to see that it required another idea. I moved on until the only question out there looming in my mind was, "Is there a God?" If there is, he/she/it has a lot of 'splainin' to do. If not, my world makes a lot more sense because all those other questions are either not important ("Is Joseph a true prophet of God?") or no longer a question ("How does evolution fit in with the creation story?")

I ended up as an atheist. Maybe an agnostic. Whatever.