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Daniel Shirley was long a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or simply the Mormon Church. At age 34, he left after a long inner struggle. This is his story.

Read an Interview: You left your church in October of 2009. Why?

Daniel Shirley: When I left, I wrote up a little essay explaining my story. The short version, though, is that I left because trying to reconcile what I’d been taught about the nature of God and the Universe was causing me some profound distress, and it got to the point where I could no longer make it work in my head.

RAI: What didn’t work?

DS: The fact that I had experiences that happened in direct contradiction to what I thought, at the time, had been divine answers to my prayers.

RAI: I assume leaving was something you considered for a long time. What process did you go through before making up your mind?

DS: I struggled with my faith for nearly a decade. I had been very committed to it, and I tried desperately to cling to anything I could find to keep my faith alive. For many of us, our loss of faith is a profound tragedy, and we grieve in the same way you would grieve the loss of a loved one. We feel betrayed by the people we trusted to tell us the truth. And anger is a very real part of that grieving process. But so is despair.

Question everything. Value truth. Have faith in yourself. Trust your instincts.

My process also involved a lot of attempts at prayer. Trying to communicate with a God or father figure who appeared to have made himself as absent in my life as possible. When I wasn’t getting the answers I needed from prayer and scripture reading, I turned to other things. I started studying psychology and neurology, trying to learn why we think the way we think, discovering all the myriad ways we fool ourselves with logical fallacies or make logical errors because of cognitive biases or other faulty thought processes.

One profound experience I had was listening to a Radiolab episode in which they interviewed an Air Force pilot who had an out-of-body experience while his plane was diving. He found himself sitting on the wing of the airplane and looking in at his body in the cockpit. After that experience, they started experimenting, and discovered that under the right conditions – in a centrifuge – these “mystical” experiences could be reliably reproduced. In other words, the entire experience could be attributed to errors in cognition that the brain makes when it’s under stress and deprived of oxygen.

It was a huge moment for me – recognizing that we can’t completely trust our mystical experiences 100% because the brain can produce some very strange experiences.

RAI: So scientifically, religious experiences are pure imagination?

DS: I wouldn’t say that. What I would say is that, scientifically, mystical experiences are very personal and invariably fall into the category of “anecdotal evidence”. Scientifically, there is very little, if any, objective evidence that such experiences are real. And finally, scientifically, we are learning how to create mystical experiences by manipulating the brain in various ways.

For me, personally, that points to a conclusion that mystical experiences are a by-product of unusual but very natural brain activity in sometimes stressful circumstances.

Were any of my “spiritual” experiences real? Or were they simply a product of interesting coincidences and endorphins? – Daniel Shirley in the essay “My exit story”.

Before I got this far in my thinking, though, I thought I owed it to my wife and family to be able to say I’d tried everything I possibly could. In Mormon scripture there is a specific promise made that if you read the Book of Mormon and pray about its truthfulness, you will have a spiritual experience that confirms its truth. This is the centerpiece of the LDS missionary efforts. People who do this and have a positive feeling about it often get baptized. People who do it and don’t have a positive experience generally don’t.

And so I explained some of my doubts to my wife and promised her that I would read the Book of Mormon and pray about it, invoking this promise. I figured that if the Mormon God were real, and if he genuinely wanted me to stay in the church, he’d keep his promise and give me some kind of answer that I could use. When he didn’t, I quit.

RAI: How did you feel afterwards? How’s life been?

DS: It’s been a long road. For the most part, things have been profoundly better, at least in the sense that I feel like I have a framework for my experiences that makes some sense to me. I’m a less dogmatic person now. I’m more at peace with change. I have given up all belief in the supernatural – a term that I consider an oxymoron: if something exists at all, it must be natural. And I have come to rely on certain parts of Buddhist philosophy regarding the source of suffering and the nature of attachment.

At the same time, when I left my faith, I had a lot of emotional baggage that I’d been carrying around for decades, and my new perspective has forced me to confront some of those things that I had buried deeply for a very long time.

I had something of a nervous breakdown in the summer of 2012. My marriage of 12 years ended in part over the church issues and in part over the emotional and psychological issues I was dealing with.

RAI: What were the things you had buried?

DS: My mother died when I was 11 years old. For a variety of reasons, I never really had an opportunity to grieve her death properly. People at church often said things like “She’s in a better place” and “God needed her in heaven more than here”. All of those ideas about what it means when someone you depend on dies came from my religious beliefs – and they all worked together to make me believe that I was selfish and “wrong” to want my mother to be alive.

And since it was clearly God’s will that she be dead, I also had no right to be angry. So grief – normal, healthy grief – was wrapped up with guilt, and the grief was buried in order to assuage the guilt I felt for missing my mom.

RAI: You mentioned Buddhist philosophy. What do you identify yourself as today?

DS: When it’s emotionally safe to do so, I identify as an agnostic atheist. I don’t believe in a god, but it’s important to me that I’m not as dogmatically committed to that position as I used to be committed to Mormonism. If at some point some objective evidence for the existence of a god were to arise, I would like to think that I’d be open to considering that evidence and altering my beliefs.

When it’s not emotionally safe to identify as atheist, I tell people I’m non-religious or a secular humanist or even a casual Buddhist that doesn’t believe in reincarnation.

To lust after a woman is to commit adultery in your heart. What teenage boy doesn’t feel lust?

RAI: You divorced your wife. How did your friends and other family react to your change of faith?

DS: I never really had close friends in the church. My family has mainly reacted by not talking about it at all. That’s a pretty common reaction, but it’s also very difficult when it becomes the single biggest, most important thing in your life.

When I left, I felt completely and totally isolated. Fortunately I was able to discover some support groups online, and I have since made very dear friends who have gone through very similar experiences leaving the church. In many ways they are my family now.

RAI: Do you speak with your dad?

DS: Not much. My relationship with my father is strained. We have superficial interactions from time to time, but nothing very substantive. Many people feel shunned when they leave the church, but I don’t really think that happened in my case. Our distance has much more to do with other things than it has to do with the fact that I’m an apostate.

RAI: In your experience, are there any misconceptions by religious friends and family about the reasons anyone leaves the church?

DS: Yes, there are some very specific things we are taught about why people leave the church: they want to sin, they are deceived by Satan, they were lazy and “took the easy way”, they must have committed some sin and are ashamed, or they never really believed in the first place.

I suppose that if number two were true, I wouldn’t really know since I’d be deceived, but I can assert that the rest are factually incorrect.

RAI: Did you sin while you were still believing?

DS: Absolutely! But only in the sense that there are so many little rules it’s impossible not to. Many things that are normal human behavior, like Jesus’s advice that to “lust after a woman is to commit adultery in your heart”. What teenage boy doesn’t feel lust?

But I never did anything serious that someone could point to as the “cause” of my downfall. Especially when I was in the midst of my crisis, I tried to do everything as right as I could so that I would be worthy of the understanding I sought.

RAI: Your life today… what have you been able to do now that you weren’t able to do before?

DS: Well, I can drink coffee and alcohol. I can make my own decisions about the kinds of relationships, sexual or otherwise, I engage in. My concept of sin is vastly different now. I consider it morally wrong to purposely hurt another person, but aside from that, the rules are vague and very subjective in the sense that context matters a lot when you’re considering the rightness or wrongness of a certain behavior. Most importantly, though, it’s internally driven – there are no directives from some long-dead prophet dictating what I can and can’t eat or the types of movies I’m allowed to watch, or whatever.

I’m on the upswing again, and I feel like I’m on the cusp of experiencing life that I very much want to engage with.

RAI: If you could go back in time, would you have done anything differently?

DS: If I could go back knowing what I know now, I’d have left the church as a teenager and done pretty much everything differently.

RAI: What are your thoughts about Thomas S. Monson?

DS: He’s a very old man who may or may not actually believe he’s a prophet of God. Overall, he seems to be a fairly benign prophet figure, in that he likes to tell stories and tends to encourage people to be nice to each other when he’s speaking to the members. I believe that he shares many of the prejudices, preconceptions, and superstitions of his generation.

RAI: Like what?

DS: He was an Apostle when church worked actively to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have given women a Constitutional guarantee of equality. He leads a church that still speaks out actively against homosexuality and against gay marriage, a church that still denies women the right to hold the priesthood and hold leadership positions over men in the church.

I can drink coffee and alcohol. I can make my own decisions about the kinds of relationships, sexual or otherwise, I engage in.

RAI: Do you have any final advice for anyone struggling with their belief?

DS: Yes. First, a crisis of faith can be very isolating. Most religions vilify apostates sometimes even to the extent that you feel guilty for even having questions. Find support. Find people who are asking the same questions you are. I can guarantee they are out there.

I would also advise you to act carefully so as to not upset those relationships that are important to you, but to also act with integrity. Don’t lie to preserve relationships, because you end up hating yourself for it and resenting the people you’re lying to. Learn about cognition – how we think and how we make mistakes in our thinking. Study rhetoric so you can spot when people are trying to convince you of something using faulty logic.

Finally, I would recommend that you have the courage to reject answers to any question if you don’t find the answer satisfying, and to even examine critically the answers you do find satisfying.

Question everything. Value truth. Have faith in yourself. Trust your instincts, but confirm them with objective fact whenever possible.

RAI: As a final question, if you were to give this interview a title, would it be “Leaving Church” or “Losing Faith”?

DS: I would choose “Losing Faith”. Because that was what happened to me. Leaving the church was simply the natural consequence of the experience.



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