It also has given me a bit of perspective on “the alternatives” – again, enough to realize that I just don’t want them. They won’t give me any more joy in the here and now than I already have, and they don’t give me the hope for a continuation eternally of what brings me joy in the here and now. I feel what I believe is true; I want it to be true; I don’t want any other “truth”; so I accept the difficulties inherent in the history as a natural result of mortality and pursue the joy I want and for which I hope.

To me, that’s a conscious choice – as others have said, not necessarily as to what I hear or read or feel but as to what I do with it. Even if I am wrong in that (even if I don’t choose nearly as much as I think I do), my belief in the nature of the Atonement covers that potential wrongness, so I just don’t spend much emotional capital worrying about it.

Again, I’m sorry I misread your post. I’ve read it over four or five times now and there’s no reason I should have misread it. I’m sorry.

Anyway, there is lot more to it than waking up one morning and saying ‘I choose to have faith’ or ‘I choose to no longer have faith.’

I recognize that I both chose to leave the church, then chose to come back. In fact, even though there were many factors, my varying choices being factors, many moments of varying color that lead to both, there were in fact decisive moments in each ‘choice’ that were definitive. I could describe both moments. Neither was in and of itself a matter of choosing whether to have faith or not. Rather, I chose to act based on where I beleived I’d find happiness and freedom. I never really lost my faith in the church – for some reason the things that seem to trouble people about the church have never troubled me. But I did lose faith in the ability of the gospel to make me happy and free. I thought I’d find freedom in chooisng an identity: in creating myself, or, in a kind of Nietzchean way, being myself. And then, over time and after a LOT of difficulty and soul searching, and making myself and other people miserable, and close observation of myself and the people around me, and contrasting it to those few Mormons I knew understood and lived their religion – I began to find my faith again.

What I do think is that we can choose, day to day, even moment to moment, to think and, more importantly, act in ways that will strengthen or loosen our faith. Certain things we do bring the Spirit into our lives. At some point we may have to choose those things over things we temporarily love better. And that is very very difficult. It may be more difficult for some than for others -right, some have ten talents, some five, some one – we do not begin on equal footing. But consistant prayer, honest, searching and humble scripture study, a willingness to sacrifice, especially the willingness to sacrifice one’s worldly identity (the honors of men), in short living the gospel, which can very nearly be _defined_ as a mode of searching, will lead any person to the same _ultimate_ conclusions. We will grow from grace to grace.

Well, if we love better the voice of our totem jaguar spirit, or whatehaveyou, that will lead us to a different place. Those who find their lives lose it – those who lose thier lives, for Christ’s sake, will find it. I found that the most hateful scripture. Right along with the scripture that says that no man seeks for the Lord or His righteousness, but walks in his own way, after the image of his own god, which is in the image of the world. I personally wanted to be Lord Byron. Some other person might want something less dramatic – to be a success in some profession, or in the eyes of some people. Or when Pres Benson said that unless the roots of our faith go deep into the gospel as it is taught in the BoM in the heat of the day it will wither and die. I really hated all that stuff. It turned to be so, all the same.

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