We human beings have an innate tendency to empathize with one another. We like to share in the joys our friends experience, and we feel their sorrows when things go wrong. As any teacher will tell you, it fills a person with warm fuzzies when they see another person begin to understand something previously alien to them.
My wife and I are experiencing that right now.
A friend of ours, a devout Mormon back in Utah, has just recently begun to actually question her religion. This is no mean feat, let me tell you. The LDS church is quite adept at brainwashing its followers. This should be clear to anyone who's ever taken more than a cursory glance at Mormonism. Its tenets are ludicrously unbelievable, and yet it's a rapidly growing faith, and some claim it as the fastest growing religion in the world.
It has always struck me as odd that our friend continued in the Mormon church. She is, after all, an intelligent girl, and very headstrong. She doesn't take crap from anyone. Unfortunately, she's never before truly applied her intelligence to the area of her faith (as most people don't). Whenever someone would say something negative about religion in general, let alone Mormonism specifically, her headstrong attitude would cause her to brush it aside with a comment of "Let's not go there."
But recently, some things have happened to cause her to do otherwise. Some of the things currently going though her head:
If ours is the one true faith, why do we need this funny underwear for "protection"?
If I'm to "bear my testimony" at the end of each of these lessons I'm teaching, why do I have to repeat verbatim the "testimony" printed in my textbook?
Why will no one in the church give me straight answers to my questions? Do they really think things like "Perhaps you need to strengthen your testimony," or "Read the scriptures," really cut it? And when your bishop responds with, "I'm not sure," how can your faith not be rattled a little?
So many, many people know exactly what she's going through. They, too, feel that they went through the temple, taking out their endowments, largely for the sake of others, not themselves. They, too, wonder how weird it is that sixteen year old boys are called "elders" in the church.
Many of these people went on to utterly reject the LDS faith for the sham that it is. If I can make a prediction, I think our friend will become one of them, in time. As I said, she's headstrong, and I think once she begins this questioning, she won't give it up easily.
Does that mean she'll be a regular visitor to these pages soon, emailing me to say, "Thanks for enlightening me," the way so many have done?
Not likely.
Oh, it would be nice, but I think it'll take more than realizing the Mormon church is bogus to shake her belief in a god. Still, she's going through the first step right now. She's realized that her faith is not beyond questioning. And that first step, as they say, is a doozie.
