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Detailed response to CES Letter, Testimony and Spiritual Witness: Difference between revisions
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*Dr. Wendy Ulrich, a licensed psychologist with over 25 years of experience, addresses this issue: | |||
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'''How do we decide what to believe in religious matters?''' | |||
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People from many religious traditions have “spiritual” experiences–feelings, insights, premonitions, and encounters which they are left to their own conclusions to decipher. It is not unusual for people to conclude from such experiences that God is their God, that He is nearby, or that something associated with that experience is God’s will. Often in the Church we encourage people to look for such feelings and experiences as evidence of God’s hand, or of the truthfulness of the Church’s message. Yet people from many religious backgrounds can have such experiences. How do the goosebumps and tearfulness I experience when someone speaks in a testimony meeting differ from the goosebumps and tearfulness I experience when the 4:00 parade begins at Disneyland? Critics may conclude that there is no real difference, that feelings are not trustworthy or related to the spirit, and that Church members are being misled by missionaries who teach them that such experiences are the Holy Ghost testifying to them of truth. I have seen this argument used to discredit “spiritual” experiences as nothing more than subjectively produced emotions with no supernatural significance. In many cases I might agree. Because I feel certain emotions in response to a film–even a Church film–may say more about the credibility of the actors’ performance or the director’s talent than the presence of God or the historical accuracy of the message, for example. | |||
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Fortunately, we are not left with emotion alone to discern God’s hand in our lives. Reason, experience, counsel from others, and other forms of revelation may all assist us. In fact, I notice that emotion plays into only some of my spiritual experiences, and often only in a secondary way. More often the spiritual promptings and confirmations I receive come very quietly as something simply occurs to me with a kind of rightness that has no real emotion attached to it at all. Other times my emotions have been running high, but the clear voice of the Spirit is utterly calm and outside of the range of my thoughts or experience. Some of my clearest spiritual experiences have come as a question or statement in my mind that completely surprised me, or that took me a moment to take in and understand. Others have come as a pure love beyond my previous capacity to imagine. I have received impressions to do something that, when acted on, produced an amazing but utterly unpredictable result that was a clear answer to a prayer. And at least a few times God has simply told me something which was later confirmed but that I had no way of knowing by any other means. I expect that people from many religious backgrounds may have such experiences, and I am comfortable imagining God in many of them, but they are not easily explained away as a self-produced warm feeling. I am comfortable with being tentative about what I conclude from such experiences beyond the experience itself. | |||
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What is also striking is how often I do NOT get any spiritual feelings or impressions even when it would be most convenient to my faith and comfort if I could. What I’d really like to know is not so much why I have faith-promoting experiences at predictable times as why I don’t have faith-promoting experiences at times when it would really help if I did. I might explain away a warm feeling as wishful thinking rather than the Spirit if it generally comes around at will. But why did I go for years without any reduction in my substantial feelings of betrayal and doubt about a particular aspect of Church history even though I was desperately pleading with God for answers? And why, when I had long since decided no answer that would satisfy me was forthcoming did I receive an answer that not only completely satisfied, but humbled, awed, and instructed me in four simple words spoken through the Spirit to my heart? I would agree that we must be careful about the conclusions we jump to when we feel something sweet or good, but how do I explain the remark of a young Chinese investigator who asked the missionaries teaching her, “Why do I feel cold every time I read the Book of Mormon? Every time I even touch this book, I feel cold, and I don’t understand that.” I promise you that no missionary had taught this girl to expect a cold feeling in association with the Book of Mormon. This is not part of our language of the Spirit at all. It was only with patient listening that they could discern that this cold feeling she was struggling to describe in English was not negative in any way for her, but rather the feeling we might describe as goosebumps, a concept they had never discussed and for which they had no mutual vocabulary. So how do we decide what to believe? No simple formula exists that easily applies to all situations, but there is a language of the Spirit that we learn through experience, practice, and attention, and that uses both feelings and reason to communicate. | |||
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—Wendy Ulrich, Ph.D., "'Believest thou…?': Faith, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Psychology of Religious Experience," 2005 FAIR Conference. {{link|url=http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2005-fair-conference/2005-believest-thou-faith-cognitive-dissonance-and-the-psychology-of-religious-experience}} | |||
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Revision as of 02:34, 11 July 2013
| [[../Kinderhook Plates and Translator & Seer Claims Concerns & Questions|Kinderhook Plates and Translator/Seer Claims Concerns & Questions]] | A FAIR Analysis of:
[[../|Letter to a CES Director]] |
[[../Priesthood Restoration Concerns & Questions|Priesthood Restoration Concerns & Questions]] |
A FAIR Analysis of the online document Letter to a CES Director section "Testimony & Spiritual Witness Concerns & Questions"
And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? (Luke 24꞉32)
My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue. (Psalms 39꞉3)
What does a “burning in the bosom” mean? Does it need to be a feeling of caloric heat, like the burning produced by combustion? If that is the meaning, I have never had a burning in the bosom. Surely, the word “burning” in this scripture signifies a feeling of comfort and serenity. That is the witness many receive. That is the way revelation works.
—Dallin H. Oaks, "Teaching and Learning by the Spirit," Ensign (March 1997): 14.
—Dallin H. Oaks, "Teaching and Learning by the Spirit," Ensign (March 1997): 14.
- Response to section: "Every major religion has members who claim the same thing: God or God’s spirit bore witness to them" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "it would likewise be arrogant of a Latter-day Saint to deny their spiritual experiences and testimonies of the truthfulness of their own religion" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "If God’s method to revealing truth is through feelings, it’s a pretty ineffective method" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "Joseph Smith received a revelation, through the peep stone in his hat, to send Hiram Page and Oliver Cowdery to Toronto, Canada for the sole purpose of selling the copyright of the Book of Mormon" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "I discovered that the gap between what the Church teaches about its origins versus what the primary historical documents actually show happened" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: Paul H. Dunn [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "a testimony is to be found in the bearing of it" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "how can they be sure of the reliability of this same exact process in telling them that Mormonism is true?" [Work in Progress]
- Response to section: "Why did I feel the Spirit as I listened to the stories of apostates sharing how they discovered for themselves that Mormonism is not true?" [Work in Progress]
Response Section
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