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Monday, April 25, 2011

How does an apostate view faith promoting experiences?

Faith promoting experiences. Mormons love faith promoting experiences. They show up in General Conference, Sacrament meeting, Sunday School, Relief Society, Priesthood, and in virtually every other place that Mormons gather. They are given as evidence of all sorts of things, and they can be very versatile. There are some famous ones and some infamous ones. I imagine that every Mormon has a few that they hold dear.
I have had a few myself. I have had experiences that I viewed as evidence of a loving God or even evidence that The Church was true.
One particular summer, when I was a teenager, we were headed on a vacation to Oregon. We had just left my Dad's house in Provo when I started to feel very, very motion sick. It should be noted that motion sickness is not at all unusual for me. I am the type that gets motion sick playing video games. As I have grown up this tendency has lessened a little bit but it still catches me off guard sometimes. This particular time being motion sick was pretty bad though, so much so that I didn't feel I could stay in the car. We had only been on the road for an hour or so and just happened to be near my Grandparent's house. So my Dad decided to stop there and let me rest for a while.
As soon as we stopped the car and got out we saw a huge bubble on the sidewall of one of our front tires. My dad quickly went to get it fixed and by the time he was done I felt better and we were on our way again. I used to see this as God's way of keeping us safe by making sure that my Dad saw the problem before it turned into a dangerous blowout while traveling at freeway speeds.
Now? I view it as a simple coincidence. If you are thinking to yourself, "How could that be just a coincidence?" My answer would be, which is more likely, that God purposely made me sick so that I would get my Dad to stop the car so that he would see the problem, or that it was a lucky break? Wouldn't it have been easier to just stop the tire from developing a problem? Coincidences happen all the time. In fact there are so many things happening all over this world at any one time that it would be strange if there weren't weird coincidences.
Here is another example.
When I was 8 years old my mother accidentally put a gardening fork through my hand. We were weeding and she thought I was done and just casually threw the fork down, into my left hand. It entered about a half inch below the ring and little fingers. It went right between the two bones and missed all major nerves. Other than a cool scar I have no negative effects from this incident. This was always put out as a miracle. That God saved my hand from major damage by making the fork go right where it needed to go. If you are still with me this far you will know that I don't view this incident as miraculous at all. I view it as lucky.
If God wanted to impress me he could have easily stopped the fork in mid flight before it hit me. Or how about a simple prompting to my Mother to not throw the fork in the first place? The reason I still have full use of my hand today isn't thanks to God. It's thanks to good doctors, medical science, and luck.
Here is a good summary of why coincidences should not only not be surprising, they should be expected.


3 comments:

  1. I remember every one of those 'coincidences'.

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  2. When coincidences happen to our benefit, we are blessed, or its a miracle. When coincidences happen to cause us misfortune, they are written off as tests of our faith.

    Also, how often have we all seen faith promoting stories, where we know the real story, embellished right before our eyes, and then justified for the greater good?

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  3. I also find it a little weird that people promote things as faith-promoting that are really horrible. Like when a little child survives and earthquake and is pulled out of the rubble alive. That s supposed to be a miracle, but nobody ever asks why the hell we had to have the earthquake in the first place.

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