’m interested in how many Mormons actually do “shop” for their wards within the Mormon community.

It happens all the time, but indirectly. Here’s my experience with this in North Texas (where there are dozens of stakes that one could live in and work almost anywhere in the area).

1. People focus first on where they work. They define an acceptable commute radius. This is a driving state; there are some mass transit options if you work in Dallas, but where you can live is restricted to a degree.

2. People then focus on the schools within that radius. Given the typical commute radius to either downtown Dallas or downtown FW, people here can pretty live in any school district in the area, so it’s easy to pick out 8-10 acceptable school districts.

3. People focus on the housing prices and local taxes and general stability of the city.

4. People focus on the wards. Once you’ve gone through 1-3, you can still find a bunch of wards that cover where you want to buy a house.

Example: bbell and I live in the same school district. There are, I believe, 9 wards in two stakes covering our school district. Depending on your ward preference and financial flexibility, you have *quite* a variety to choose from, from the very wealthy to the less wealthy, from the orthodox to the pragmatic.

This scenario repeats itself for virtually every school district in North Texas.

Thanks for this.

BEMG,
I apologize if I gave you the impression that I believe you have to be a member of an organized religion to experience the divine (or learn its counsel). I do not believe that. I think that it is possible to do in and out of organized religion. I also think that our religious status when we experience the divine is important, as regards our spiritual journey, and that it should not be casually disregarded.

As an atheist, I’ll sidestep some of the critical words and try to go things from a slightly different way.

Firstly, I ultimately agree that faith is something that picks a person, rather than a person picking that faith (and to the commenter who raised questions about the calvinistic undertones of that, I kinda agree — that’s why I named my blog the way I did.) So, I think a problem with some believers is that they feel you can just force some spiritual experience…when I don’t think this is so.

However, from there, I diverge a bit. I don’t think faith ever becomes chosen. Rather, I think that someone who has the inclination towards spiritual experiences has that…that is “faith” and that is unchosen. If one chooses to ignore/rationalize it away, that does not mean he lacks faith, but rather he is going against his own inclination to faith.

So, I guess I have to put a spin on this “consumer model of religion” and make my case for it. I believe that everyone has their own inclinations, to certain faiths or not. So, they cannot fit into just *any* belief system without running into brick walls, pain and misery. People *should* leave belief systems they do not mesh with and they need to stay with belief systems that do mesh with.

HOWEVER, I will qualify this by saying that you don’t determine mesh based on a nut or bolt. It is based on your inclination. So, I disagree with the commenters who believed the diarist should have dropped the church because of unorthodoxy. I would only think someone should drop the church when they realize they do not have faith and do not believe in it. So, I reject the idea that the consumer model of religion is just, “Justify the way you currently live and don’t grow at all.” Rather, you have to discover your true inclination and then grow within that. There is infinite opportunity for growth…we shouldn’t all be trying to do it in the same way, is all I think.

sorry for the long and scatterbrained comment; I’ll probably have to dedicate a post to this on my blog in the next few days.

Bob,
If you believe that the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Israelites operated in relation to their gods only out of fear, I am afraid that your opinion is too reductionist. There are always benefits to membership in a religious movement.

Dan Weston,
I don’t much care for Occam’s Razor as a predictor or an inherent explanation for most things. It is too subjective. Setting that aside, science is good at hows, lousy at whys. Rationality only gets you so far in explaining human behavior; we are, at heart, crazy little beasties. An expectation of logical behavior or motivation will only get you so far.

Katie,
I suppose I am more concerned with the choice to believe at all than with the choice of a particular religion. I think that we have ties to the movements wherein we found God that are hard to break (for good reason). Atheists who encourage us to start shopping at a new religious wholesaler simply don’t understand the stakes involved.

I’ve heard this argument before and as a convert it used to make me feel a little smug. I had chosen the hard, true religion, while other people had shopped for a church that flattered their preexisting lifestyles and choices.

But then I realized that I had essentially done the very same thing. We all applaud when a convert like myself talks about how other churches never made sense to them, and how they had always believed X, and when they found this church that teaches X, they knew it was true. I always thought that God wouldn’t send good people to Hell and that people could receive personal revelations and that the Bible wasn’t perfect. And I was always a brown noser and an upright person that believed in working hard and being self-disciplined. And so I guess I “shopped” for churches until I found one that aligned with what I already believed.

Obviously that wasn’t enough to make me join, it was my experience with the ineffable that really did it. But I fail to see how my experience is any different than someone who always believed that you should have a intensely personal relationship with Jesus, and that Jesus doesn’t care how you dress for church, and that modern music is a great way to worship God. Just because our church is harder than others doesn’t mean that there aren’t people shopping for a church that’s going to make the gospel hard.

Part of the problem is the atheistic tendency (or human tendency) to substitute predictive for explanatory power.

That is because rational beings have respect for the scientific method.

There is no scientifically valid method of distinguishing two explanations until they give different predictions for the same input data. Occam’s Razor suggests that until some such input data can be found to choose among them, the “simpler” explanation is more likely to be true.

Since historically very many things once explained only by supernatural means have later been found to be completely explained by a natural model, supernaturality is no longer considered a “simpler” explanation.

It does not require atheism to accept science, but it is the “simplest” explanation I have found.

I don’t really object to the use of ‘ineffable’ in your context.

The reason I dislike the word, in general, is that it suggests the the experience of God is mystical. I know that there are ‘groanings that cannot be uttered’, and that every experience with God (we would say the Spirit, as we do not experience the Father or Son directly, most of us) does not communicate something clear. But personal revelation does often, even usually, bring words and clarity. It isn’t ineffable but clearly speakable – even if the exact experience may be difficult to describe. ~