deacon blues wrote: ↑Mon Mar 31, 2025 4:19 pm
We are all are biased, but it's hard to get people to see it. I read a Catholic testimony online today. It was almost exactly like a Mormon testimony except the guy said "The Catholic Church is the only true Church."
i thought if I ask a TBM how many LDS testimonies they've listened too they're going to say 'probably hundreds, thousands,' etc. If I then ask them how many Catholic testimonies, or Presbyterian testimonies they've listened to I might get crickets, or more likely a rationalization.
But at least, if they're honest, they may begin to see why they are biased, and see that they are trying to be biased.
This was a realization I came to while serving a mission (in a state where there is a greater representation of Catholics, incidentally, though the insight would come from any honest consideration of any other faith, I think): namely, that there was no basis for thinking that my particular 'spiritual experience' that I may have had while contemplating Mormonism was qualitatively better or likely any different from the 'spiritual experience' that a Catholic had while contemplating Catholicism, or a Muslim had while contemplating Islam, etc.
Apologetics around this point, a la "all religions have some truth and they are just realizing within Catholicism those elements of truth that Catholicism has in common with Mormonism," break down fairly quickly as well--particularly when the strength of some of these 'spiritual experiences' turn on particular beliefs about the Virgin Mary or whatever that Mormonism just doesn't share. Frequently within Mormonism, practitioners who have not had a truly revelatory personal experience are just counseled to stick with it, and keep studying and contemplating over the course of decades, until they finally get that experience. But how many of those people spend any real amount of time honestly considering the truth claims of any other religion? Do they go to mass and contemplate the Catechism for decades before they become convinced that the Catholics have it right? Of course not--which is why the epistemology of Mormonism, in the end, reduces to something akin to "You can find out for yourself if it is true, by which we mean keep praying and studying for as long as it takes you to come up with the answer we told you to accept in the first instance."
I realized through this, that I largely believed in Mormonism because it was what I was raised in and felt the most comfortable with, but that the "real" answer must be something more akin to universalism--i.e., God must have its own reasons for having people in all the different religions, and who was I to tell someone that God wanted them in my religion. Of course, over time I shifted from universalism to deism then agnosticism/atheism, but I recall your original point as being one of the things that started me down the path.
Oh, and by the way, hi all! It's been a while since I've posted.
"The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling." -- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
