I agree that there are many things which are not seen which are indeed true. I’ve never seen Australia, for example, but I believe that it exists. I’ve never seen an atom, but I believe that they exist as well. I haven’t seen God, but I don’t believe that He exists. Why the difference?

My difficulty arises when I try to discern which unseen things are true. Let me borrow a page from Betrand Russell. If I came to you and claimed that there was a teapot orbiting the sun beyond the vision of the most powerful telescope, what would you do? I imagine that you, a reasonable person, would demand evidence of some sort before believing me. We can go visit Australia. We can detect atoms through experimentation. We couldn’t easily find this teapot, and I could always claim that the teapot was somewhere we hadn’t searched yet.

I haven’t received any evidence for God which can’t be explained some other, more verifiable way. I haven’t received a personal revelation of God either despite years of trying, so it seems that I’m left out of the game.

Speaking of games, there was a time when I played the same wager as you describe here. Hey, I’m from Vegas. Why not, right?! I figured living a good life wasn’t such a high price to pay for the infinite treasures of heaven. This is known as Pascal’s Wager.

There are a number of assumptions behind this theological bet. The first is that God would reward such scheming faith. An omniscient God would see through the façade. Would He mercifully reward someone for going through the motions? Or would He require real belief?

The second assumption is that {insert your religion here} is the only game in town. Actually there are many religions which would claim our devotion: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Shintoism, etc. Though they differ on the details (pork or beef, which one is forbidden?) they all help their adherents lead good lives. Which should I choose? Why should I choose Mormonism, for example, over all these others? If I pick the wrong one, will I receive a reward anyway? Where should I place my faith?

The third assumption is that there are no real costs associated with placing your bet. I don’t think you make this assumption, by the way, since you clearly indicate that all your money is on the table. I did make this assumption, however. If I stayed with Mormonism despite my lack of belief and put my chips on the table, to name just two costs, I would have 1) spent less time with my family (We believe in meetings, all that have been scheduled, all that are now scheduled, and we believe that there will yet be many great and important meetings scheduled…), and 2) been perpetrating a fraud on everyone around me, including my daughters.

There are other problems with Pascal’s Wager, but I’ll stop here.

Regarding those who struggle with their faith, I hope that they find happiness. I hope that they don’t give up their struggle to find it wherever they may. My heart goes out to those who walk in confusion.

I am a believer in the power of the truth. The more we speak about the truth, the more we seek after it, the better off we will all be. I refer the Hugh B. Brown’s quote in my recent post The Truth. Our beliefs must be shaped and tested in the “marketplace of thought” where truth will emerge from the confusion of superstition and fear. If what I believe is false, then the truth will overcome it. As Joseph Smith said, “truth will cut its own way”.

Please know that this change in my life is not a surrender. I am not giving up. I am more invigorated to do good. I am standing up publicly for what I believe. I am living more honestly and with greater purpose.

I am giving my posterity the only gift I can: me as I am, in honesty. May they do the best that they can with what little I give them.

Thank you again for your thoughts.

When I taught Gospel Principles class, I assured the class that without the church, my life would be hopeless, empty, and pathetic. I tried to motivate the students to stay close to the Church by pointing to the sad state of affairs outside the Church. I assumed that, without the influence of the Church and its members, I would personally be addicted to drugs, sex, gambling, or something else. I had been taught to see the world in a deepening crisis preceding the Second Coming of Christ. I was afraid that leaving the Church would mean losing all hope and being at the mercy of Satan’s influence in this time of turmoil.

What I have come to realize is that the difference between me and those around me who lead those hopeless lives that I feared wasn’t Mormonism or any other religion. There are many people who lead happy lives without being particularly religious. The world is not in a period of deepening crisis. The exact opposite is true. The world has never been better. Improving science, technology, and ethics are bettering the lives of humanity. We are, on average, better fed, better educated, and healthier. War is relatively rare. Indeed the world is experiencing a Golden Age. Our time is cause for hope, not fear.

I acknowledge that we in the U.S. are experiencing a coarsening of our culture. The irony of that is that we are more deeply religious than most other industrialized nations. Religion isn’t preventing the spread of divorce, pornography, unwed pregnancy, consumerism, and other evils of our culture. These are problems for those within the Church as well as those outside. Membership in the Church doesn’t seem to be a shield against those influences. If temple marriages, for example, last longer on average than other marriages, it is only by a small margin and the statistics are tracking the trends of the larger population just a few years behind.

Yes, my life would be different if I hadn’t been a member of the Church. I probably wouldn’t have married Lacey and had my beautiful daughters. If you knew me before my marriage, then I won’t blame you for thinking that it was a miracle. For that reason, I wouldn’t change any part of my past.

If I must play the what-if game, I would hope that I would have met another sweet, capable, loving wife with whom to share my life. I wouldn’t trade Lacey for the world, but my life without her (and the Church) wouldn’t necessarily have been completely hopeless. I may have been completely happy, if only because I was ignorant of what I was missing in Lacey.

I’ll write more on this later in my story.

Regarding claiming that the Mormon church is the one wholly true church, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. As a missionary, I met some Catholic priests who invited us to dinner. We discussed religion, obviously, but they were reluctant to claim that the Roman Catholic church was God’s true church. That seemed a little odd to me. Later, we knowingly knocked on the door of a retired Monseigneur of that same parish. I was curious what he would say. My missionary companion basically said “He’s all yours.” When I started my spiel, he interrupted me and told us that we were going to hell and chased us off his doorstep. I respected Monseigneur LaGreene much more than the other priests who hedged about their church’s claims.

My problem is in evaluating all of these claims to the truth. If I’m going to make Pascal’s Wager, I need to find out which one is actually true from among all those who merely claim to be. This wager is not as simple as choosing to act as though I believed in God. Whose God?

Actually, since I can’t be certain that God doesn’t exist, I’m making a different kind of wager. I hope that a benevolent God will have a better reward for me for being honest about my disbelief than the reward I would gain by making everyone falsely think that I believe.

Regarding the teapot, I’m actually trying to show that you, as a reasonable person, wouldn’t believe my claim about the teapot without some corroborating evidence. You would be even more suspicious about my claim if you had no reasonable hope of ever finding the teapot. For me, God is like that teapot.

I’ve never had a profound experience of the Holy Ghost leading me to a belief in God. I was satisfied with feelings of peace and warmth that I felt from time to time in connection with the teachings of the Church. Those feelings reassured me that what I was doing was good. The strange part of it, the part that makes me a little leery of trusting those feelings, is that I have recently had similar feelings regarding atheism. Indeed, atheism has enlarged my soul, enlightened my understanding, and begun to be delicious to me. (Alma 32:28) It seems like those feelings have said contradictory things at different times in my life.

I don’t want to address what you say about the Book of Mormon right now, beyond saying that it is unfair to characterize it as having “silenced scholars the world around”. I might take up this issue later in the blog, after I’ve told my story.

I thank you for your concern for my happiness. If I am wrong, I hope that I will find out quickly so that I can return to following the truth. I’ll even invite you to give me a well deserved “I told you so”.

I agree that the world’s situation is not so rosy as I made it seem. There are grave challenges which threaten humanity’s continued existence. Many wonderful new technologies come with a dark side (e.g. nuclear weapons’ Mr. Hyde to nuclear medicine’s Doctor Jekyll) There are many people who live much like their ancestors did. We may be headed toward climatic disaster. Traditional family structures are breaking down. Global access and demand for pornography is increasing. There is much work to be done to make the world a more equitable place to live.

Even so, the world is not descending into a chaos of immorality and decadence preceding the end of the world, as some would have us believe. Teen pregnancy is down, even globally. Abortion is down. Serious crime is down. Warfare is down, especially since the end of the Cold War. Poverty is down.

To find these studies, I did an unscientific Google search for neutral terms like “teen pregnancy global trend” and looked for the first likely search result. In no case did I fail to cite a study that contradicted my view that things are getting better in these areas. There is a lot of reason to hope for the future, despite the other things that may worry us.

I suppose that I just went too far in trying to counteract the apocalyptic view of the world in my previous comment. I agree that humanity’s lot is a mixed bag and that how we perceive the world depends a lot on how we want to see it. It is not clear that the world is headed for calamity.