# The elephant in the room, AMA

Hello fellow Less Wrongians!

Given your comments on [my](/lw/5lm/how_to_build_rationalist_communities/) [organizing](/lw/5ln/building_rationalist_communities_a_series_overview/) [communities](/lw/5mv/holy_books_or_rationalist_sequences_dont/) [series](/lw/5o1/designing_rationalist_projects/), I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:

*   a returned Mormon missionary would even come to Less Wrong in the first place.
*   why I find religion plausible at all
*   why I would identify with Mormonism in particular (several people have used the word 'cult')

I'm happy to hold discussions about any of these questions or related ones. However, I haven't responded to many comments on the main series of posts because:

*   they could eat up each thread
*   the threads aren't supposed to be about Mormonism. They're supposed to be about about making a movement work effectively. But being a missionary is where I got my experience.

I wanted to created this thread as a center for questions you might have about my faith. **This is not an attempt to preach** \-\- I would be perfectly happy not having a discussion purely about religion at all. But since there seem to be many comments, well, fire away.

_Some basic facts:_ I am a student at Stanford. I am 22. I converted to Mormonism when I was 19. I used to be atheist/agnostic. I am very much a believer, not just in it for the social perks.

Well, as it is written, AMA (= Ask Me Anything)

(Thanks [Kevin](/user/Kevin/) for the suggestion.)

_Edit: Wow, there are a lot of comments. This has been a helpful chance to clarify my thinking. I hope you have learned something useful -- perhaps using the question is 'Is there anything surprising here that he said?'._  

_Edit 2: Here are some answers to repeated questions. Again, this really helped me distill and clarify myself and I've enjoyed the discussion.  
_

_**Why do you believe?**_ It's a combination of

*   "wow_,_ this seems to be a really functional community in producing good people." 
*   "wow, these doctrines are really amazing."[\[1\]](#_ftn1)

*   personal spiritual experiences (experiences-which-I-interpret as spiritual if you prefer) and other positive experiences from doing church things, like emotional growth from going on a mission.

I would estimate that before this all happened, my odds ratio was about 2000:1, and now it's about 1:10. I would ballpark the odds ratios of each of the above 3 events as ~12.5:1, ~25:1, and ~62.5:1. (I was considering likelihood but didn't think in that precise of terms at the time, so any concretization is open to charges of _ex post facto_. And these are still ballparks.)

There are lots of arguments against Mormonism on factual and historical grounds; there are also counterarguments which I feel pretty much balance them out. (The feeling of balancing each other out was contemporaneous.)

**What things could make you consider leaving the faith?**

*   Undermining any of the above: negative experiences from doing church things, better arguments against Mormonism, the church repudiating the doctrines I love, experiencing it as much less functional, etc.  

**Why do you think your conversion story is disappointing to many of us?**

Several possible reasons:

*   You might have been looking for a more rationalist narrative. 
*   Your priors are like (say) 100,000:1 on this. So maybe something I say sounds plausible (1:2). But you're still at 50,000:1 and extremely skeptical.
*   It took a lot of experiences and arguments to persuade me; this is just the tip of the iceberg.
*   A lot of my conversion was experiential. An analogy would be that I ate a certain fruit which others haven't. We are discussing descriptions of the fruit; the only way to be truly convinced (or unconvinced) would be to taste it.  [\[2\]](#_ftn1)

* * *

[\[1\]](#_ftnref1) Specifically:

*   I felt the doctrines were coherent both with my experience of the world -- for example, how faith is introduced as an experiment and described empirically.
*   I felt they offered solutions to central human problems like the feeling of aloneness; the sometimes-destructive yet still necessary nature of guilt.
*   Finally, certain doctrines, like the "weeping God of Mormonism" or deification, struck me with a reaction which I can only describe as "it tasted good." I felt something like, "if there is a God, it just makes sense he would be this.

[\[2\]](#_ftnref1) Difficulty of adequately conveying strong emotional experiences to someone who hasn't had them is general, right? For a parent, try to imagine explaining the feelings you had from holding your infant in your arms the first time. Or someone else, try explaining the strength of arousal feelings to a pre-pubescent who is like "ew, gross." Just because it's really difficult to describe it doesn't mean it didn't happen.