daviddstoker

be true to yourself, any successful relationship will include the freedom to express yourself honestly and following one's heart.

I understand the descriptions of solemn and reverent but I also think LDS people have a very high toleration for boredom in their meetings. I think a lot of it comes from the New Englander/British cultural heritage that came down through the pioneers as far as the style of our meetings. I also agree with a previous comment that when you have a lay clergy and the speakers are just pulled from the congregation you are going to get people who are not great public speakers, people who are not great teachers, and even questionable doctrine. And agree that at some point you go to meetings not because you expect to have an exhilarating experience but out of loyalty and as a physical 'vote' with your body and time that you will support the church and other members, even with all it's warts and imperfections. The solution is not to abandon the company of the Saints but to promote better habits and a little more flare in your circle of influence. The American culture of the Church will never go so far as to jumping up and down with high energy but there is a lot of room to add energy and shape the future culture of the Church.

I've think you've been fed a lot of food for thought. I approached this issue with a slightly different spin and previously blogged about why, out of all the ways to design this earth-life experience, would God put such a strong emphasis on faith. What’s on the test? | Thoughts of a Seeker

1. How can every other religion be wrong and your belief is right? Mormons don't see it as right and wrong but on a kind of continuum of light. Mormons also have a dispensation worldview in that they believe at different points in history the fullness God's religion was established and subsequently in all dispensations, excluding this last and final dispensation, the people gradually fell away in righteousness. So a mormon is more likely to look at a present-day form of religion and see certain elements that have the ring of truth but ultimately acknowledge that many ideas of men had been intertwined with whatever the original form looked like. 2. What makes your god real and other gods not real? God is real because he is both some place and some time. No matter how any human describes Him or worships him, it does not change the reality of his character as he really is. Many gods of various religions are, by definition, not 'real' in that they are immaterial ideas or thoughts. Is an idea real? It is real to the person but the idea itself does not have any essence. Mormons got themselves out of the typical argument when Joseph Smith declared God the Father and Jesus Christ have bodies of a refined and pure but still physically tangible. 3. If somebody believes in a different god because its in their culture, do you think they will go to hell or not be "saved"? Mormons don't view it as an all-or-nothing Heaven or Hell. Again, more akin to a continuum of light each individual being 'rewarded' according that which they are willing to receive by choice. Mormons have missionary work continuing in the millennium, baptisms for the dead, and phrases such as "as it has been explained to you" that makes it impossible to judge, hence the tendency to defer to God as the Judge of eternal destiny. 4. What is the benefit from being religious? Can this be accomplished without religion? For mormons salvation is not an individual experience, we talked about couples, families, communities of zion being saved, the house of Israel. Also the highest levels of religiousity in Mormonism cannot be conducted in isolation, the covenants involve how we treat each other and function together. There is also the belief in authority, a needed official stamp, and that stamp being priesthood and ordinances which occur within the Church. 5. How do you know, without a doubt that god is real? Im looking for tangable evidence. Mormons are perhaps unique in that their tangible evidence is recent enough that it has a large amount of first hand accounts surrounding its roots. I refer specifically to the Book of Mormon, it is as tangible as you can get, it either came from God or is a fabrication. We have journals and witnesses from the time it came about, we have an incredible amount of information to sort through. For many other present-day religions, Islam and the Koran, Buddhism, Biblical scholarship, people who want tangible evidence must make conclusions from an incredibly small amount of archeological data or historical records. The fact that there are historians who have dedicated their entire lives to studying the early roots of Mormonism and do not all come to the same conclusion implies ultimately there will have to be some other kind of knowing. And I think God, and it is incredibly brilliant in my mind, has allowed just enough blurriness and question marks in the story so that an individual will eventually have to take a leap of faith in proclaiming their loyalties to him in word and deed. If life is a test of our loyalty and our ultimate desires for the entrusting of sacred privilege and responsibility I could not imagine a more well-crafted test.