A brief account of my conversion to “half-Protestantism”

I plan to post more on this but this is a brief response to Ray, who asked about my conversion from atheism to what I call “half-Protestantism” Another way of putting it is this, while I was a Mormon, I felt that the Spirit was representative of God. I lost faith in a personal creator of the universe when I determined that all we know about God is myth, not fact. I recognized the Spirit as a special kind of intuition, but not necessary the source of “truth” only more myth. In this philosophical move, I lost all faith in Mormonism. I think you could call me an atheist because I denied the existence of God, mainly because I did not think that whatever  caused the world was sufficiently definable to be called a “thing”.  In other words, I did not think I believe in God made any sense without a sensible definition of God, and I did not believe that any definition of God I had heard made sense.

In November I accepted that there is a fact that is also the deepest mystery that yielded the world, I accepted this fact as God. I sought to sort out what that meant, including trying to determine if it made sense to call God a “person” or a “father” i.e. whether those sorts of myths meant anything at all in light of science and philosophy. I started thinking about what could be behind the myth of the love of God. I posted this about Mormonism and the love of God and the Mormon approach to theology.

While in this process of coming to terms with how I could sensibly talk about God it dawned on me how unique orthodox Christianity was in concept with regard to virtue, sin, and redemption,and the world. I began to think that if the love of God means anything at all it is a means of escape from the torments we face in the world that came from God. I recognized that it was unquestionably that there were experiences of reconciliation where justified guilt turns to joy in the human mind without rationalization.  When I accepted this as a fact, the same experience happened to me, I felt joy.  At root the joy did not come from a spiritual experience, it was from the real recognition that the guilt that hung over my life was, in reality, somehow redeemed.

In my past religious life, I have experienced such joy in the context of spiritual experiences, but I recognized that the joy I now felt was not a spiritual feeling brought on by prayer, but a simple fact of reality that I had failed to see before.  It was similar to when I first grasped calculus, but in this case it seemed to allow a solution for any problem of the soul.

I consider myself a “half-Protestant” because I accept what the New Testament was talking about as reality, i.e. the fact of Christ. I also believe the New Testament reliably points the mind to this fact.  I am only “half” Protestant because although I am clear on the redemption of the soul, I am still unsure on the other half of the Gospel, i.e. the redemption of the world.

Whatever new light or insight I now have is similar to what I had as an LDS, but I think contemporary LDS teaching does not make the fact of Christ clear to most of its members in a way that they can readily explain it or talk about it.  In this sense I think LDS are just bad Protestants, i.e. they do not clearly repeat the proclamation of the New Testament even though they proclaim it as the Word of God.

Joseph Smith’s bedrock message about the Light of Christ

In LDS teaching there is often a minor mistake often made in explaining the Light of Christ, but this mistake can have dramatic consequences in the minds of LDS children.

The light of Christ often defined by LDS Missionaries as the conscience, enabling people to judge good from evil. But according to doctrine, the conscience is only a manifestation of the Light of Christ. But if you judge by the Book of Mormon, the Light of Christ must also be the thing that allows you to see salvation from the conscience.  A critical doctrine in the LDS Faith is that Adam and Eve were sent from the garden with a specific sort of enlightenment: (1) the knowledge of good and evil, and (2) a knowledge of their inevitable salvation from good and evil.  The Books of Abraham and Moses establish that Adam and Eve knew about Christ from the time they left the Garden. Symbolically, the temple ceremony must mean that (1) all humans have a conscience, and (2) they have the capacity to understand their ultimate salvation, even before Jesus taught about it.  This understanding is assumed, before any priesthood, and any of the covenants.  This must be the Light of Christ. 

The temple ceremony also must mean that parents have the responsibility, before anything else, to teach their children to distinguish good from evil and to choose the right, and the inevitable salvation from their wrong choices in Christ.  Children must be taught that their salvation is inevitable in Christ, just as it is inevitable that they will fail to do good in nearly every choice they make.  To not teach the full light of Christ, is to fail to teach the first principle of the Gospel.  Without being enlightened in the mind somehow by the light of Christ it is not possible to have faith in Jesus Christ.

Interfaith dialogue: Knowing God Exists

I was reading Summa Theologica the other day and couldn’t get his imagery out of my head. So I dreamt up this dialogue: 

Kathy:  I think you can know that God exists.

Carl:  What does it mean to say that God exists anyway? Whether God “exists” necessarily depends on your definition of God.  If there is only one God, can there be more than one correct definition, and if you don’t or can’t define God, how can you know he exists?  But, if you alone decide the definition of God, then “knowing God exists” is simply affirming a personal belief in a certain definition. Right?

Kathy: St. Thomas Aquinas tells us:

To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him.

This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching; for many there are who imagine that man’s perfect good which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.

Norman:  In terms of that example, I know God exists because I have met Him in my personal experience. I can positively recognize Him every time as the same Spirit.  I define God by the doctrines and teachings that are spoken through the Spirit.

Chris: I have felt God as well, I know God as Christ, a historical person.  I have a lot of beliefs about God but I really only trust what comes from the Bible.  If you don’t believe the Bible, you can’t really know that God exists, because you won’t know who or what God is.

Kathy: But wait, in order to identify God you must be able to identify God’s interaction with humanity,   If you can’t identify God’s church—you can’t really know assuredly God exists, because whatever you call God will either be your interpretation of your experience, or your personal interpretation of the text.   And these subjective interpretations will always result in a morass of different definitions.  The Church provides the tangible basis for the existence of God and is the only reliable basis to define and identify God.

Carl: So does the entire question come down to whether your church is also part of God’s church?

What do you all think?