u/Bodhisatwat92

I recently converted to the Church and so far my experience has been pleasant and nobody seems to be judging me, even though I’ve been transparent about my past when I was more of a heathen. I see a lot of horror stories online of people being treated horribly in the church, and especially in the Utah area. I have a friend from high school who was born in Utah but moved later, and she told me she briefly met several Mormons there that refused to be friends with any non Mormons. It really seems like there is 2 different churches because there seems to be two kinds of drastically different experiences that are being talked about. The church has been healing for me.

I don’t agree with everything about the church, and maybe that’s a factor in my experience, since I never really went into it expecting myself to fully agree with everything.

I’ve been researching religion for nearly 15 years, and I’ve mainly kept my searching in the major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the Dharmic faiths from India. I never really considered the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) as an option worth studying and had pretty much kept them in the file of Cults like Jim Jones or Scientology. (Sorry) LDS.

This isn’t a post to try to claim Joseph Smith in particular and the events surrounding the Book of Mormon are valid. That’s a whole different discussion from the one I’m intending to have in this particular post, because my post isn’t about proving the Latter- Day Church to be literally true. I have yet to find evidence that could persuade me that kind of proof would be possible to find, and ultimately the Church itself would agree that you wouldn’t come to belief in their church without an encounter with the Holy Ghost.

My post is intended to demonstrate that the LDS Church should be taken just as seriously or not seriously as any other Church with two main examples.

1. Their theology doesn’t fall into the same pitfalls as other Abrahamic traditions.

Usually the theist purposes to the skeptic that there is a God, and this God is omnipotent. This claim of omnipotence has always thrown theists into logical fallacies that the skeptic is quick to point out. It’s the origin of the problem of evil in philosophy, because if God is unlimited in power and also love, why all the horrific problems in the world? Free will? Why can’t God create a world in which everything is perfect and free will exists?
My personal favorite question to the theist, is if God can create a stone too heavy for him to throw?

Omnipotence is a self defeating concept.
The thing with Latter Day Saints is they don’t believe in this kind of God, they believe he’s as powerful as a being can possibly get, but they don’t believe he’s powerful without limits.
Im not saying this proves that this super powerful being exists, but it moves us away from the endless cycle of trying to wrap our heads around the logical fallacy of omnipotence.

Another logical fallacy the Latter-Day saints don’t have to deal with is the trinity. The belief in one hypostasis and 3 separate persons. I’m not interested in getting into a debate about whether the trinity is illogical or not, nor am I interested in debating if omnipotence is a self defeating concept. This is a post for atheists, agnostics or other theists who have already moved past these concepts and agree these beliefs are logically unjustifiable.

The Latter-Day Saints believe in the Godhead. 3 Separate beings that are one in purpose, not hypostasis.
This belief is actually very accurate to the world described in the earliest biblical texts. The ancient Israelites seemed to have more of a Henotheistic model of divinity rather than our current conception of monotheism. God was the highest God in the council of Gods. He was the only God to be worshipped, but he wasn’t the only God.

2. Consistency in believing in continuous divine revelation.

The Catholic Church isn’t as susceptible to this critique because of the papacy and its believed capabilities, but they fall into the other major criticisms I just wrote.

I find Protestant Christians to be incredibly inconsistent with their easy dismissal of a continuous line of prophets or the idea of new scripture being revealed. God spoke to prophets thousands of years ago and had them perform supernatural miracles to the high degree of raising people from the dead and parting the Red Sea, but the idea that he would show himself to a prophet 200 years ago and reveal a new scripture? That’s bullocks!!

Protestants have no way of criticizing the idea of more scripture being added to the canon with their belief in sola scriptura, because the Bible doesn’t have an official list of books in it declaring what the canon is. This is where Protestants start to act like skeptics. There is no consistent logic for them to knee jerk reject Joseph smith’s claims to prophet hood. Especially since Joseph Smith provided another testament of Christ, that said he was the son of God who died on the cross for the sins of the world and rose from the dead. They logically reject Muhammad as a prophet because he denied these things about Jesus, but Joseph Smith did not, his message was the polar opposite of Muhammad’s.

Why would the devil be responsible for providing more possible evidence for the divinity of Christ and his death and resurrection?

I’ve been researching so many religions and philosophies for years and I never even considered Joseph Smith. I started looking into Latter Day Saints as a fun joke, but I don’t know how Joseph did it. I haven’t seen this much evidence for any religious claim in my life.

I don’t know how to think, there’s reasons to doubt but Joseph Smith’s story is extraordinary.

Someone who is a serious believing Christian has no justification for hating Muslims. They have no justification for assuming most Muslims are terrorists. Islamophobia is a real thing, but the term is getting murkier when no one is allowed to criticize Islam as an ideology without being attacked by a parade of assumptions.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to expect Christians to never preach against Islam. If anyone knows anything about the core tenets of Islamic theology then you would know whether you’re a Christian or not that you couldn’t possibly expect them not to. Islam doesn’t only deny the divinity of Christ. It teaches that believing Jesus is the son of God is the sin of shirk that’s guaranteed to send someone to hell fire forever. Nobody in their right mind who has studied both religions would expect Christian’s to just pretend they can reconcile Islamic belief in God with theirs.

Not everyone who criticizes a religion is a bigot or a racist. Yes some are, but it’s not an automatic, and it shouldn’t be assumed that way when someone is criticizing Islam from the viewpoint of Christian theology.

I’m officially done even remotely considering either of you as a possible true religion. I’ll consider Judaism or even Mormonism before I consider traditional Christianity or Islam. You’re both just awful.

One side tells me I’m going to hell for not worshipping Jesus. The other side tells me I’m going to Hell if I do worship Jesus. How is anyone supposed to make an informed decision whatsoever between the barrel of two guns? Likely most people probably decide between the two of your religions based on who they think has the biggest gun and who they fear the most. You’re both toxic.

Just wanted to say as someone with a lot of religious trauma from being raised in a hellfire and brimstone church, that I really appreciate the LDS doctrines about the afterlife and how it seems to be mostly universalist. It’s a breath of fresh air because I still have a lot of fear of going to a place of eternal hell fire because I got the wrong religion. Just got done studying Islam and that didn’t help my trauma at all. I look forward to visiting an LDS church this Sunday and learning more about your faith. I’m wishing I was raised Mormon whether the faith is true or not.

I was raised Pentecostal and I have severe religious trauma from it. I was taught that most of humanity is going to hell for eternity in a literal burning fire. I recently finished studying Islam for 4 and a half years, and even studying that religion was traumatizing.

I don’t want to downplay the real damage that can be caused in any religion, religion always cuts deep because it deals with the most impactful questions of life. Anytime abuse of any kind is mixed with religion, it’s traumatic to every core of one’s being. I’m also bisexual and I’ve seen what LGBT Mormons have gone through and I certainly don’t want to downplay that.

Overall I have to say though, I envy most of the complaints of ex Mormons. I can see why people who don’t even believe anymore are still active in the church. There’s a good emphasis on community that my Protestant church didn’t have and the talk about hell is practically non existent compared to what I went through and compared to what Muslims go through. Even the little talk of a place called Hell doesn’t really cut the same weight. Very few will end up there and it’s not a literal fire. I can’t begin to explain to you the amount of mental damage I’ve had being terrified of hell and being told it’s incredibly easy to end up in hell. I didn’t even want to have children because I was so terrified of bringing a soul into the world that would likely end up in hell.

I envy you guys, and most of you whether raised or converted Mormon seem like very kind people. Even ex Mormons I’ve met have been some of the best human beings I’ve ran across, and I think this lack of a hellfire doctrine might have a lot to do with it.

I’m not a Mormon, but I’m interested in the faith. I think it makes sense to believe God would never stop sending Prophets and the Latter Day Saints seem to be the only serious religion holding to that belief, but what I don’t understand is why God would allow a great apostasy and a time without prophets to last so long.

I’m aware that there are some Quran alone Muslims that don’t believe there is a Qibla/direction of prayer we’re supposed to pray towards, that the Kaaba in Mecca is an idol.

I’m a Muslim who only follows the Quran and I think the religion of Islam and the religion of Sunnism are two different things. I don’t believe in 5 obligatory daily prayers, I don’t believe in any of the Hadith corpus or accept any of it as authority, but I’m still uncertain about this subject. I suppose I don’t see anything wrong with Muslims praying towards a certain direction, but I’m opened to have my mind changed.

I’m 34 years old, and I have been studying world religions and philosophy since I was 17. From the age of 17 to 29 I searched and searched everything I could find to try to find the answers I was looking for except Islam. Islam was absolutely the last thing I even considered because of all the propaganda I’d heard about it from the west, Sunnism may be corrupt, but it’s not near as horrible as western media portrays it, that I know now.

For my 29th birthday I took a small vacation to Florida. I remember lying on the beach and looking at the sky and the vastness of the ocean feeling a sense of awe and disappointment. I knew in my gut that all of this beauty and function of nature couldn’t be a mere accident, but why hadn’t I found my path to God yet? I was still relatively young and I knew a lot of people hadn’t found God, their religion or spiritual path till much later ages than mine, but I had sought out for this answer so thoroughly for so long. I wasn’t this uncaring type of young person that just wanted to party through life and get nothing meaningful done. I genuinely wanted truth and I desperately had been searching for it only to find nothing but holes in everything.

When I got home from my vacation I still had an extra day off work and didn’t have much to do. I decided to go to the bookstore and try to find a good sci-fi or horror novel for the first time in a long time. I was attempting to let go of my search for knowledge and accept a permanent agnosticism, but of course when I got to the bookstore I passed by the religion section by habit.

The first book I saw was a English translation of the Quran by Maulana Muhammad Ali, it was a beautiful cover and almost reminded me of the Bible in the way it was designed as a hard copy. I remembered while looking at this Quran that I hadn’t even read one chapter of this book. I had read the Gita, upanishads, the Bible, countless occult and philosophy books, but I’d never given this book a chance. I decided to buy it before I even skimmed through it, why not at this point I thought.

I read the whole Quran in about a week and a half, and I was impressed, extremely impressed.

The style of this book was like no other book I had read. It wasn’t a story about God and mankind. It was written as if God is speaking to man kind more directly than id ever imagined. It corrected absurdities and contradictions from the biblical stories, and its theology about the nature of God was the most straightforward, sensible and logically coherent I’d ever read. I knew as soon as I was done with it I was going to read it several more times whether I ended up believing it or not.

Then I made a mistake, I visited my local mosque, a Sunni mosque.

To say I was confused after I spoke to Muslims at this place of worship and learned their habits is an understatement. I was perplexed. This place didn’t feel like it had anything to do with the religion I had just read in the Quran. The Quran was simple, easy, clarifying. The Sunnis and the teachings they were telling me only brought nothing but confusion and more questions. What were Hadiths that are the sunnah of the prophet? Why was there any need for another message from the prophet Muhammad after he had already delivered the perfect book for all mankind? Why couldn’t I pray in my own language? Why was it a sin to pray during certain hours of the morning? None of it made sense.

For the next several years I tried my best to accept Sunni Islam, who was I to question how Muslims before me had practiced for generations? I had to be missing something, I’m just an ignorant white guy from the Midwest United States that knew nothing about this culture and picked up their favorite book one day. I didn’t want to be arrogant, so I tried, but then I started to get angry. I was confused, again.

It took me a long time of sifting through the mud till I finally accepted Islam, true Islam on the Quran’s terms. I finally understood the verse that says if you follow the majority of mankind you will be led astray. The Quran is a message for all mankind and the messenger’s only duty was to deliver the message. If you truly want to be a Muslim and submit to the will of almighty God, you must Obey him and obey the messenger.

Muslims who follow the Quran and only the Quran are not disobeying the messenger, the sectarians are. The Quran says those who break the religion into sects are not associated with the Prophet. The Sunnis are not the owners of the Quran and neither are the Shias. They are the gate keepers baring people from the way of Allah.

The Quran never tells the reader to be a Sunni or a Shia. The Quran calls us to be Muslims.

Sunnis and Shias invoke the name of the prophet during their prayers and the justification they provide for this is no different than the illogical justification certain Christians make when they pray to saints.

The verse from the Quran they use to justify this practice is Surah Al-Ahzab 33:56. Telling believers who are alive at the time to invoke blessings on the prophet. Notice this verse is mentioning nothing about doing this while they’re praying to Allah. This verse is talking in a context of which the prophet is still alive. There’s a verse in the Quran that instructs believers to be respectful of the prophet while entering his home and not to overstay your welcome, so clearly we all understand their are certain commands regarding the prophet that can only involve the prophet while he’s still alive.

If you still think this Sunni and Shia practice is acceptable I want you to ask yourself one question. Would you invoke the prophet Jesus during your prayer in this same manner, or would you avoid doing that to avoid mimicking what the Christians do?

Edit: For clarification, I am specifically talking about the Sunni prayer “peace and blessings be upon YOU O PROPHET”. I am not talking about anything else. This very phrase of speaking to a dead man while you’re supposed to be praying to Allah is spiritually dangerous.

I’m a revert, but I came to Islam from reading the Quran. There was actually quite a long time where I didn’t even know that Hadiths that were attributed to the blessed prophet existed.

I have visited the mosque near me a few times over my years of studying Islam, but now as a full believer and submitter to the lord of the worlds, I only feel disturbed when I visit the mosque. They talk about rulings in the Hadith more often than Quran. The Prophet seems to be more emphasized than Allah in conversation. I keep finding myself more and more disturbed when they address the prophet during the regular Sunni Isha prayer.

I’m beginning to wonder if most of these people in the mosque are even Muslims according to the Quran and if I should even be praying with them, but that makes me feel disheartened because who would I have a spiritual community with if I didn’t pray at the masjid, and aren’t we supposed to pray with other believers? I don’t know what the right action is I should take or not take.

Edit: I am not saying I think every single person who identifies as a Sunni or Shia is ipso facto not Muslim. I’m saying I think that these sects have deviated so far from the Quran that I feel spiritually safer praying by myself at home than in a Sunni or Shia mosque.

Im not really interested in arguments for why I have to believe hell is eternal to be a Muslim cause I’ve heard them all. No matter how many arguments I hear in favor of eternal conscious torment, I just can’t bring myself to believe Allah would do that to people. Everything else about Islam makes perfect sense to me except this. Is it still possible for me to be a Muslim if I can’t bring myself to believe hell lasts forever without end?

My wife and I have both been the agnostic/deist type for awhile, raised Christian and we were both always confused by it, but neither of us could ever fully accept atheism because it seemed just as illogical to us as the illogical beliefs about God in concepts like the trinity and the contradicting images and mixed messages of Hinduism.

For the past few years I’ve been researching religions and her and I have been having conversations about them. I trust her judgment because she’s the most rational person I know and we are both skilled at putting aside our personal dislikes to be able to make objective decisions based entirely on logic.

When it comes to Islam we both keep coming to the same conclusion, we don’t personally like it, as we feel it’s very strict and hinders a lot of our personal desires and cultural norms, but we can’t logically say anything wrong about it’s theology. We can’t complain that it’s confusing, it actually seems very clear and straightforward to us.

We ended up discussing this last night in a lot more depth than usual and my wife ended up admitting that she feels like she already believes Islam and has always felt this way about God. Islam appeals to her intuitive senses, almost as if its theology is the most common sense she’s ever heard. I told her I felt the same way and keep coming to a similar conclusion but I don’t like it. She said she doesn’t like it either, and I pointed out that the fact that we don’t like it but still keep struggling to deny it is objectively even more of a reason to suspect it’s true. She completely agreed to this and said I guess we’re Muslims now, but is it more dangerous to be a bad Muslim than to not be a Muslim at all?

It does seem like we’re both convinced Islam is true wether we like it or not, but we know ourselves and our limitations, so our serious question is if we would make God more angry by knowingly being bad Muslims?

When I was younger I never wanted to have children because I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist home. I actually believed the claims my parents and the church were telling me about this God who would send people to hell for eternity for rejecting him.

I think people who believe in this hell are either pretending to believe in it or they’re horrible parents who would even consider bringing a child into the possibility of such a fate as worth the risk. Everyone knows the pastor’s kid is always the one who ends up being the most rebellious so why would your kid be any different? If you seriously believe in the possibility of eternal torment for sentient life then you would do everything in your power to make sure you didn’t bring anyone else into this hostage situation. You would even see abortion as a mercy, unless you’re an old school Catholic and believe unbaptized infants go to limbo.

Paul said it’s better not to marry, hence even he recognizes it’s better not to start a family in some sense, so it’s certainly not a sin to abstain from children. If you’re a Christian that believes in eternal conscious torment then you’re a truly immoral person if you purposely bring children into the world. There’s no excuse.

Either admit you’re a horrible person or admit you don’t believe in this asinine belief as much as you claim you do.

Including the virgin birth in the Quran was possibly the worst theological mistake Muhammad made. The earliest writings of Jesus attributed to Paul never mention his virgin birth. This story was later produced by the author of Matthew to make Jesus seem more divine, because in the Greco Roman world, sons of gods were born from virgins.

The Quran is trying to make Jesus out to be a prophet and not the son of God, yet still includes the very myth that was forged from a mistranslation and a desire to boost the divinity of Jesus in later writings about him.

I’ve increasingly ran into Quran alone Muslims in the past few years and I’m curious to hear from Muslims, ex Muslims and those knowledgeable about Islam on this topic. I don’t think this movement of Quranists will gain much traction. It seems to me like this is just one of the last stops before someone leaves Islam. The Quran has too many plot holes and you really need outside sources to understand much of what is happening. Even if you didn’t have intimate details of Muhammad’s life mentioned in the Quran with more of the context of the stories in the Hadith corpus, you would still need the Bible to understand everything else the Quran is talking about.

I mean I get it, patriarchy and all, but I was also raised under the same patriarchy. I converted to Shakta Sanatana Dharma from Christianity for many reasons, but the biggest reason of all was that I never understood why God was a man. Women create life, women birth life. Looking at creation objectively it’s always the feminine side of nature that creates and nourishes. Honestly as a man myself, I also don’t understand why so many heterosexual men devoutly worship a male god. It’s just never come natural for me to seek that spiritual ecstasy from the divine masculine. I’m not saying the divine masculine isn’t a valid path, but why do so many men gravitate towards it? Some men even see the fact that I worship the divine feminine as “unmanly” of me, as if it’s “gay” to be devoted to the feminine as a man.

Edit: I’m aware it would be limiting to only see the divine as feminine. I’m a devotee to Kali and Shiva. I’m also bisexual and have well understood feminine and masculine traits in myself. The point of my post is to talk about the obvious observation, that globally speaking the divine feminine is severely underrepresented.

Edit: I didn’t expect “Everyone” to be taken so literally. Where I live, all I have to do is pick a random group of people to have a conversation with about God, and everyone in the conversation is calling God “He”. Obviously not every single person and religion in the world, as my own religion doesn’t do this.