Well, thanks for taking the time to read my posts. I wrote a longer post, but you already read a bunch of my stuff so I'll condense.
As to why people change their minds in general, one comment that might help is that I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people's actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results. Only after that did I come to believe that it was true.
Another way of saying that, and perhaps an anwer to your second question, As to the second question, is that the non-spiritual experiences -- veracity of texts, ability to teach me something useful or have positive effects on me, established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current state.
I'm going to reply to your later stuff. I think there's a basic epistemological difference in that I lend more credence to experience here.
I would disagree that I didn't "trace out the implications" of issues that I discovered. To me, the main implication was that everything wasn't neat, tidy and perfect the way most church members thought it was. But truth claims depend on the Book of Mormon. Seer stones, divining rods and polygamy are all true but irrelevant to this question; I wasn't convinced by the View of the Hebrews/ Solomon Spaulding/ anachronisms arguments. (This is the short version of a long story as I'm sure you realize)
Badger, possibly you're right in that everyone else's hopes were too high. If you're looking for a general theory of "why all religious people are wrong," hopefully the first two paragraphs are useful to you. But the last stuff is more "my judgment of a very particular set of evidence."
I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people's actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results.
This seems tangential. I agree that living a non-hypocritical, coherent narrative leads to overall better mental health. But there are many ways to live coherently, most of which don't match the truth.
...non-spiritual experiences ... established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current s
Hello fellow Less Wrongians!
Given your comments on my organizing communities series, I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:
I'm happy to hold discussions about any of these questions or related ones. However, I haven't responded to many comments on the main series of posts because:
I wanted to created this thread as a center for questions you might have about my faith. This is not an attempt to preach -- I would be perfectly happy not having a discussion purely about religion at all. But since there seem to be many comments, well, fire away.
Some basic facts: I am a student at Stanford. I am 22. I converted to Mormonism when I was 19. I used to be atheist/agnostic. I am very much a believer, not just in it for the social perks.
Well, as it is written, AMA (= Ask Me Anything)
(Thanks Kevin for the suggestion.)
Edit: Wow, there are a lot of comments. This has been a helpful chance to clarify my thinking. I hope you have learned something useful -- perhaps using the question is 'Is there anything surprising here that he said?'.
Edit 2: Here are some answers to repeated questions. Again, this really helped me distill and clarify myself and I've enjoyed the discussion.
Why do you believe? It's a combination of
I would estimate that before this all happened, my odds ratio was about 2000:1, and now it's about 1:10. I would ballpark the odds ratios of each of the above 3 events as ~12.5:1, ~25:1, and ~62.5:1. (I was considering likelihood but didn't think in that precise of terms at the time, so any concretization is open to charges of ex post facto. And these are still ballparks.)
There are lots of arguments against Mormonism on factual and historical grounds; there are also counterarguments which I feel pretty much balance them out. (The feeling of balancing each other out was contemporaneous.)
What things could make you consider leaving the faith?
Why do you think your conversion story is disappointing to many of us?
Several possible reasons:
[1] Specifically: