My Personal Progress Report

I love the contradiction in still belonging to the LDS web ring and being on the exmormon glog roll. I get a hit from the LDS web ring maybe twice a year and the exmormon blog roll brings at least 10 new visitors a day. I think I secretly hope that someone from the LDS web ring will happen upon my blog and something they read will cause them to think question their beliefs.

I'm still unsure about where exactly my own personal beliefs are. For example, I don't know where I stand with Christ right now or even the Bible for that matter. I believe that it is true historically, but there are many things in the Old Testimant that I seriously doubt happened. I don't want to cut and paste the parts that I like and make a collage from it. I want to either be able to accept it as it is or toss it all out.

Can one thing be true for one person and not for another person? In some ways, I think YES. In my period of searching, I read many people's near death experiences. They could more aptly be named tastes of death. In any case, I read from the experiences of a man who hadn't actually tasted death himself but he has had many out of body experiences and he travels to other places in time and space while his spirit is out of it's body. I read about a time that he visited person's personal Hell. I am including his full version of it. I realize it's lengthy, but I couldn't decide what to cut.

It began when I woke up to see that I was in some huge city, and there was some poor lost soul wandering the streets, utterly clueless about anything at all. No car, no possessions, as if he just materialized there out of the air! in a way, I see, he DID just that, in a sense as the scenery, as this dream unfolds, appears to be not of any city on this earthplane!!

I could tell that by the "magical" way that machines operate, the "fluidness" of how the scenery changes.... "cartoonlike"! but this was no cartoon! A
"real world". Full of people too, and the streets stretched off to the horizon, endlessly. I followed this guy as he stumbled from one "reality neighborhood" to another, areas of the city that
seemed to have a specialty.

There was a section of square miles that looked like a "ghetto" and everyone there, all 10,000+ people, where doing drugs. in fact every single shop sells
drugs of one kind or another, out in the open as if everything were utterly legal!

Between the shops were many many bars and and pubs and
dance places. The streets were packed with people all high on something. then there was the Zone where there were hundreds and hundreds of rug shops and stalls
where only oriental rugs were sold. All of the people there looked "middle eastern". then there was a area of blocks and blocks of nothing but bookstores and open bookstalls as if there never ever was rain there. Packed with people of course.

the Industrial zone was next, miles and miles of foundries and pipes. Somehow he got with a band of
motorcyclists who got him out into a kind of countryside, a countryside that seemed not to obey the
rules of nature and of the earth! Funny skies and roads to nowhere and to everywheres!

[poor guy. He must have died and he must have been one
of the residents of my, or another, senior resident place. Maybe 80 years old and very very conservative,
stuck in the 1950s in mindset and then 'against"
everything of the modern age. Not a Christian of course, no soul life at all.

Perhaps a retired engineer or maybe a business person.
Now he died and went to a Low Place in the afterlife,
and the Guides will let him COOK in this astral hell
for a bit of time! There might not have been a bit of
any kind of "preparation" for the afterlife, and he
might have "gone down hard" at the end of his life, a bitter old man, seeing how the 2000s are nothing but bad..Angry and obstinate!]

so here is now is, near the end of this dream. Standing next to yet *another* neiborhood of thousands and thousands of people who share a mindset. Lost. Bewildered. Not even knowing the name of the place that he stands in and no one to help him, to be the Authority for His Choices, like when he was alive!

[in WW II, one Obeyed authority, you could die in 10) seconds on the battlefield if you thought for yourself! In the 1944 civilian life, you placed your family, your town, your country first and you came utterly last!

So as this generation grows older, they would like a leader-figure to make all of the choices in life for them, let others do the thinkings for them.]

lost, utterly lost, no way to find a leader here. Everything that he denies in life seems to be all that
there is, here, with a cast of 200,000!

well....He finds out soon enough what *this* neiborhood is all about!

Homo men! Hundreds of shops and hundreds of partybars
and Clubs. The streets are packed body to body with
thousands of homo men and mostly naked. Suddenly, a whole block or two or three, of the gay residents, see him standing just outside of this area! They rush
up to him. As this dream ends, I see that he is mobbed by thousands of homo men, his hetrosexuality will very very soon be gone, against his will, as 3000 gay men de-flower him and make him one of their own, probably for years and years....A never-ending ORGY!

I'm not sure where I was going with this post except to say that I do not claim to know all the answers and that that is ok. I think there is great comfort to being a member of the church because it gives a sense of security that the church has all the answers for us to the age old questions of; Who are we? What are we doing here? Where are we going? What is the purpose of life? etc.

I have been told by a few people who have experienced the contrast of being active in the church and being inactive. They have shared how their lives were empty and meaningless when they were inactive and now that they are going to church again, they have purpose in life and goals and they feel peace in their lives.

I believe they were unhappy while inactive because they either filled their void with the wrong kinds of influences or all of those Primary lessons, and scriptures or temple movies have affected their subconcious so that they still believe that they cannot be happy unless they are living the way the church suggests.

Not only that, but like the example of the man in his personal hell, it is so much easier to let some one else do the thinking for us. If it does go all awry, we have someone else to blame besides ourselves.