Dakotah wrote:I have heard so often through the years of 'losing your testimony' for such reasons as reading too much, not attending meetings, listening to the wrong stuff from almost anywhere and many, many others.
I KNOW the sun comes up each morning. It has since I can remember and I have faith it will do so tomorrow. So what if tomorrow is heavy clouds or forest fire smoke blots the sky out and I can't tell day from night, I KNOW the sun is coming up.
If I 'KNOW' the Gospel is true/Church is true, why are so many so worried I will lose this knowledge or faith? What is it about this 'knowing' that is so tenuous that we are in constant threat of losing it? Is it possible there is little 'knowing' and a lot of wishing and hoping but little actual faith?
To that which is truly faithful, I say: no, it is not easily lost, nor perhaps will it ever be. I lost my trust of men, my awe of church leaders, when I found that their feet are as clay, as cloven as any other man's. My faith in God is intact, and I see no cracks in the walls of my testimony of God's love for me. I cannot verify nor testify of his love for anyone else. That is beyond my scope. My faith in God is in no way connected to my lack of trust of the men who lead what they claim is his church. God has never let me down; men often do.
Dakotah wrote:If I 'KNOW' the Gospel is true/Church is true, why are so many so worried I will lose this knowledge or faith?
1) Because the words "know" and "believe" are used synonymously in the Mormon chuch. Once you understand the accepted definition in whatever language you speak it in you KNOW the difference.
2) Because it's not all true.
3) When you discover that not all is true, you recall that the prophets have reminded us (ad nauseum) that either ALL of it is true or NONE of it is true.
4) Your faith is then destroyed if you believe this lie - so you may be tempted to reject it all.
5) You may eventually come to your senses and realize it's not all lies. Besides, the church isn't the originator of much of the good material anyway. Now you begin this long journey in search of what's missing.
Very nice. Actually, all knowledge/belief is subjective, IMHO. But if you use the commonly accepted definition of knowledge, it is impossible to know the things the knowledge of which is professed during testimony meetings.
Runtu wrote:No, a testimony is not easily lost. It takes a painful collision with reality before you begin to question the validity of a testimony. You cling to it for dear life, hoping against all hope that your faith will be vindicated, even in a small way. When it becomes clear that your faith was wrong, it is one of the most painful experiences you can have.
No, it's not easy to lose a testimony. I think of KA's sitting alone, sobbing at the realization of what the church really is. I think of my wife and I holding each other, tears streaming down both our faces because the church isn't what it says it is. You tell me how easy it is to go through that.
This has been my soul wrenching experience as well. I'm still musing over the words "nailed it" in a previous post.
I think the word losing is a uniquely Mormon term in this respect.
I know that I did not lose my testimony.
Once I began to understand what the wind and waves were doing to what I had embraced as my foundation, I realized that the founders of my rock had described it's composition incorrectly. I had little choice but to reject it. It could not bear me.
I know exactly where my testimony is if I wanted to reclaim it.
I could go to the beach and fill a bucket of it anytime.
Dakotah wrote:I have heard so often through the years of 'losing your testimony' for such reasons as reading too much, not attending meetings, listening to the wrong stuff from almost anywhere and many, many others.
I KNOW the sun comes up each morning. It has since I can remember and I have faith it will do so tomorrow. So what if tomorrow is heavy clouds or forest fire smoke blots the sky out and I can't tell day from night, I KNOW the sun is coming up.
If I 'KNOW' the Gospel is true/Church is true, why are so many so worried I will lose this knowledge or faith? What is it about this 'knowing' that is so tenuous that we are in constant threat of losing it? Is it possible there is little 'knowing' and a lot of wishing and hoping but little actual faith?
I KNOW the world is flat! I mean, just look at it! Flat! and I know for a FACT that the sun travels around the earth. I can watch it go!
Nothing can shake this complete and total faith that the -- oh wait. A picture from space? Oh... it's round? Aha, and lookit that, the earth and all the other planets are going around the sun. Huh. Who knew?
keene wrote:I KNOW the world is flat! I mean, just look at it! Flat! and I know for a FACT that the sun travels around the earth. I can watch it go!
Nothing can shake this complete and total faith that the -- oh wait. A picture from space? Oh... it's round? Aha, and lookit that, the earth and all the other planets are going around the sun. Huh. Who knew?
It's clear that you had a weak testimony of the flat world. Had your testimony been strong, you would have realized that the purported pictures from space were fabricated by those Sons of Perdition who conspired directly with Satan to deceive the faithful. And if they ever take you out in space and invite you to look out the window and see for yourself, don't fall for that! The window is actually a screen displaying a fabricated video. And why do you think they've been telling you you need to wear that spacesuit when you get out of the ship? You would die if you take it off? Seems a little too convenient, don't you think? The real reason is this: they need to be able to project the image of the round Earth inside your helmet to prevent you from seeing that the Earth is really flat.
You see how easily you've been duped by those anti-flat Earth bogus claims! You must have never had a testimony to begin with.
keene wrote:I KNOW the world is flat! I mean, just look at it! Flat! and I know for a FACT that the sun travels around the earth. I can watch it go!
Nothing can shake this complete and total faith that the -- oh wait. A picture from space? Oh... it's round? Aha, and lookit that, the earth and all the other planets are going around the sun. Huh. Who knew?
It's clear that you had a weak testimony of the flat world. Had your testimony been strong, you would have realized that the purported pictures from space were fabricated by those Sons of Perdition who conspired directly with Satan to deceive the faithful. And if they ever take you out in space and invite you to look out the window and see for yourself, don't fall for that! The window is actually a screen displaying a fabricated video. And why do you think they've been telling you you need to wear that spacesuit when you get out of the ship? You would die if you take it off? Seems a little too convenient, don't you think? The real reason is this: they need to be able to project the image of the round Earth inside your helmet to prevent you from seeing that the Earth is really flat.
You see how easily you've been duped by those anti-flat Earth bogus claims! You must have never had a testimony to begin with.
Or as the Illuminati card game said, "The Flat-Earthers may be odd and deranged but they know something." Controlling the group gives you a +2 to search for resources.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
If I 'KNOW' the Gospel is true/Church is true, why are so many so worried I will lose this knowledge or faith?
Because it isn’t knowledge that is the basis of an LDS “testimony.” It is based on feelings. The missionaries don’t ask the investigator what he or she learned from prayer. They are asked howhe or she feels.
And since feelings change, it is taken for granted that the testimony can be weakened, strengthened and even lost - according to the changes in emotion. This is why it is so important to play the role the Church wants for its members. They need to keep attending Church to have those feelings reinforced, whether it is watching a tear-jerking sacrament meeting or seeing children sing “I am a Child of God.” The whole idea is to keep people emotionally vested in the social group, and of course, the monthly testimony meeting is just another measure to reinforce the delusion that you actually “know” the Church is true.
The problem is that people can delude themselves.
I agree. The problem is that people delude themselves into thinking a testimony is about actually “knowing” something concrete.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
so, I've been just thinking about this recently again. What is a testimony? What is it based on? How does one acquire it? Simply, it is prayed about, and received through feelings (the heart) as opposed to intellectual/academic pursuits. One can gain a testimony (in the LDS sense) without years of study, a college degree, scientific (empirical) evidence, or concrete proofs. It comes from good feelings about the Church and the Gospel (which are synonymous in the sense that I'm using it here--and as it is used within LDS culture). But what if, after years of experience with the Church (as God's organization), bad feelings replace good ones as that experience amounts to a larger amount of bad experience over the good. Then it would be only sense here that the Church provides both good and bad feelings, but if the bad outweighs the good, it is calculated that it is more bad. And bad feelings are contrary to truth and acquiring of knowledge (according to LDS understanding), and the Gospel therefore contradicts itself.
From thousands of years of western thought, knowledge has been a justified belief in that which is true (a justified true belief, or JTB). Of course for one to "know" something, they must believe it....and it must be true. For most, the controversy and dialogue about knowing something has been concerning the justification. After all, you may believe that your mother is coming to your house at 5 o'clock, and she may coincidentally show up then, but you need to be justified in what you believe to know something--you can't just believe it because you want to. So, what counts as justification? Perhaps you saw your mother in your toast that morning, but how is that justification, if your toast shows all types of patterns each morning? Your justification has to be realistic, and caused by the truth. A better justification would be that your mother called and told you that she would be there at 5, or if she comes every week at that time, etc. This has been the largest question in the study of knowledge (epistemology). I could ask endless questions here if Joseph Smith saying he saw God in the grove, your good feelings at church, or the Book of Mormon count as justification (and there would be endless controversy amongst LDS/non-LDS on this matter). Instead, I would like to focus on the "true" part of the requirement of knowledge. How can religious propositions be "know" if it is not true--it can't. On the other hand, if said propositions are true, you can know....but because there is no way to empirically prove religious propositions (if we could, there would be very few non-LDS, and they would probably be insane people anyway), how could we ever measure if we could know that we know religious propositions. And if you can't know if you know or not, how could it be said that we really do know. In other words, people may say they know the Church to be true, but until we can stand back at the end of time and prove (assuming that by that time we will all have seen God, if He exists) that people who said they "knew" were correct in what they said, or if they were just deluded. "Knowledge" of religious propositions is incoherent--they are beliefs (after all, isn't that really what religion is? synonymous with beliefs?)
Livingstone22 wrote:so, I've been just thinking about this recently again. What is a testimony? What is it based on? How does one acquire it? Simply, it is prayed about, and received through feelings (the heart) as opposed to intellectual/academic pursuits. One can gain a testimony (in the LDS sense) without years of study, a college degree, scientific (empirical) evidence, or concrete proofs. It comes from good feelings about the Church and the Gospel (which are synonymous in the sense that I'm using it here--and as it is used within LDS culture). But what if, after years of experience with the Church (as God's organization), bad feelings replace good ones as that experience amounts to a larger amount of bad experience over the good. Then it would be only sense here that the Church provides both good and bad feelings, but if the bad outweighs the good, it is calculated that it is more bad. And bad feelings are contrary to truth and acquiring of knowledge (according to LDS understanding), and the Gospel therefore contradicts itself.
From thousands of years of western thought, knowledge has been a justified belief in that which is true (a justified true belief, or JTB). Of course for one to "know" something, they must believe it....and it must be true. For most, the controversy and dialogue about knowing something has been concerning the justification. After all, you may believe that your mother is coming to your house at 5 o'clock, and she may coincidentally show up then, but you need to be justified in what you believe to know something--you can't just believe it because you want to. So, what counts as justification? Perhaps you saw your mother in your toast that morning, but how is that justification, if your toast shows all types of patterns each morning? Your justification has to be realistic, and caused by the truth. A better justification would be that your mother called and told you that she would be there at 5, or if she comes every week at that time, etc. This has been the largest question in the study of knowledge (epistemology). I could ask endless questions here if Joseph Smith saying he saw God in the grove, your good feelings at church, or the Book of Mormon count as justification (and there would be endless controversy amongst LDS/non-LDS on this matter). Instead, I would like to focus on the "true" part of the requirement of knowledge. How can religious propositions be "know" if it is not true--it can't. On the other hand, if said propositions are true, you can know....but because there is no way to empirically prove religious propositions (if we could, there would be very few non-LDS, and they would probably be insane people anyway), how could we ever measure if we could know that we know religious propositions. And if you can't know if you know or not, how could it be said that we really do know. In other words, people may say they know the Church to be true, but until we can stand back at the end of time and prove (assuming that by that time we will all have seen God, if He exists) that people who said they "knew" were correct in what they said, or if they were just deluded. "Knowledge" of religious propositions is incoherent--they are beliefs (after all, isn't that really what religion is? synonymous with beliefs?)