The Critical Necessity of Reading Articles Critical of Your Current Beliefs

One fundamental lesson I learned as I discovered the fraud of Mormonism that I cannot stress enough is the critical necessity to read information critical of whatever current beliefs you have. The only thing that kept me believing in the Church as long as I did was that I did not read good quality anti like "By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus" by Charles Larson. I was so certain the Church was true and I "knew" lots of evidence that "confirmed" it from institute manuals and other pro-LDS books. After finding out that I was wrong when I had been so sure that I was right, I knew that I needed to not fall into the trap of unjustified certainty again. It is not enough to build a strong case for an idea, one must be aware of the evidence against the idea as well.

After reading several posts here, I fear that many of us are again becoming convinced of the correctness of our new views when we have not fully investigated the literature opposing our new views. I believe that one cannot be a fully informed orthodox True Believing Mormon. Most TBM's aren't fully informed of the evidence against Mormonism. There are many other Mormons (i.e., New Order Mormons, Sunstone, Middle Way, etc) that are very informed and continue to attend, but are no longer orthodox TBM's. Then, there are apologists, some are TBM, but not fully informed, others are very informed but are not orthodox. They do not look at Mormonism the way regular chapel Mormons do. They buy into theories such as Blake Ostler's Expansion Thesis or the pious fraud theory. In any case, one seems unable to be a fully informed orthodox TBM while being true to the evidence.

Similarly, I believe it is impossible to be a fully informed, orthodox true believing Christian. I find that there are very few Christians who have read both the critical and apologetic info about the Bible and Christianity. In my opinion, the evidence is just too strong against a literal take on Christianity. I do believe that it is possible to be a fully informed, liberal Christian. Where there are unknowns, there is room for faith and to believe as one wishes. But, there are several knowns and a resonsible belief system must integrate the realities of those knowns, in my opinion. One is not likely to learn of those challenging pieces of evidence if one sticks to only reading pro-Christian literature.

Now, to practice what I preach, I am open to hearing the evidence for an opposing view point than the one I expressed. One thing to watch for though is a mistake I made while in Mormonism: I thought I knew all the evidence against Mormonism way before I actually did. I did not know what I did not know.