I’m not an ex-Mormon specifically, but this shelf analogy resonates with my experience as someone who was raised in an evangelical Protestant church. Eventually you stack up too many inconsistencies and the cognitive dissonance is too much.
It’s just how much bs a belief can hold before it all falls apart.
I personally got compounding items on my shelf. Because I would ask “hey what happened to the metal swords the book of Mormon talks a lot about?”
Instead of a reasonable answer, I was more or less told not to ask those questions. So “it’s bad to ask questions” gets added to the shelf. I imagine it was the same for a most people leaving religion.
Yeah it’s wild how many ways humans can express “don’t question the dogma,” both explicitly and implicitly with deflection, body language, etc. I’m a child of clergy, so I very much grew up “in” a church. Consequently, I don’t even have any specific memories of asking questions and being told not to doubt or what have you. I’d never not been immersed in the fundamentalist milieu, so I subconsciously learned to police my own thoughts and actions without realizing it. It’s taken years to recontextualize some of my childhood behavior. Most of it is sad stuff, like realizing “oh I ghosted that friend because I was trying to avoid becoming aware of the homosexual crush I was developing”. Anyway, I guess my point is that we can be good at preventing ourselves from questioning dogma, too. Until the shelf collapses.
I’m not an ex-Mormon specifically, but this shelf analogy resonates with my experience as someone who was raised in an evangelical Protestant church. Eventually you stack up too many inconsistencies and the cognitive dissonance is too much.
Yeah it feels right for a lot of situations!
It’s just how much bs a belief can hold before it all falls apart.
I personally got compounding items on my shelf. Because I would ask “hey what happened to the metal swords the book of Mormon talks a lot about?”
Instead of a reasonable answer, I was more or less told not to ask those questions. So “it’s bad to ask questions” gets added to the shelf. I imagine it was the same for a most people leaving religion.
Yeah it’s wild how many ways humans can express “don’t question the dogma,” both explicitly and implicitly with deflection, body language, etc. I’m a child of clergy, so I very much grew up “in” a church. Consequently, I don’t even have any specific memories of asking questions and being told not to doubt or what have you. I’d never not been immersed in the fundamentalist milieu, so I subconsciously learned to police my own thoughts and actions without realizing it. It’s taken years to recontextualize some of my childhood behavior. Most of it is sad stuff, like realizing “oh I ghosted that friend because I was trying to avoid becoming aware of the homosexual crush I was developing”. Anyway, I guess my point is that we can be good at preventing ourselves from questioning dogma, too. Until the shelf collapses.