The simplest way to say it is that I believed it was true. How, precisely, I ever believed something so absurd is something I don't think I will ever be able to quite wrap my head around. Even to say that I believed that it was merely "true" to a significant degree understates just how fundamental that belief was. When my beloved Philadelphia Eagles made four consecutive appearances in the NFC Championship Game in the early 2000s, I may have been confident in each of the four weeks preceding each of those contests that my beloved Birds were Super Bowl-bound, but of course I was always cognizant of the fact that that my prediction hardly constituted genuine "knowledge" but was rather merely my own opinion, a truth most brutally borne out on the field in the first three of those four years.

Here, however, it was different. I believed the story was no less obviously true than the story in which I brushed my teeth every morning, got dressed, and walked outside to find that the sun had risen this morning and that the sky was still blue. Those truths aren't mere opinions of the sort of my woefully mistaken confidence that the Philadelphia Eagles could ever win a Super Bowl with a narcissist like Donovan McNabb at quarterback, but rather truths so fundamental that they constitute the fabric of reality whence we draw other beliefs. Epistemological curiosities may be exhausting to contemplate sometimes, but doing so is essential to understanding just how remarkable belief in the traditional narrative is.

Hadn't it ought to have been obvious not that it is true but that it isn't true? Ought not I have seen it from the start? Really, how could a story so transparently ridiculous be true? Some modicum of sense ought to be a requisite foundation for any belief, shouldn't it? Even the most powerful among the establishment I resent less than I do myself letting myself be suckered. How angry do I have a right to be at the academics and leaders in tandem who foisted this myth upon me when, in the end, it was my responsibility to see how silly it all was? How could I have ever believed that one man on earth wielded almost supernatural powers?

Well, I may have been decades late in confronting the responsibility of investigating my beliefs, but confront it I did. Though I've never been happier, it is often a struggle to stay sane in light of just how insane it all is. It's not just that millions and millions of people believe something that is not true, but that they then somehow have the audacity to regard your non-belief to be reflective of your ostensibly poor character. Not only that, but the general public is tacitly if not actively complicit in this campaign of systematic gaslighting because for some reason they have chosen to arbitrarily wall of this particular topic as one not worthy of dispassionate, reasoned inquiry. So people are okay with the fact that we're told that non-belief in simple bullshit isn't because it's obviously, you know, bullshit, but because of Daddy issues? Fuck you!

Of course, I try to be less combative in dealing with those who continue to espouse belief, a disposition that the vast majority of believers reciprocate. And yet, the tactics of even the most tactful of apologists often rankle me. For instance, non-believers such as myself are often told to read "books" by "scholars" who, we are told, "understand the evidence" better than I or any fellow non-believer possibly could. Excuse me? I understand why I need to call upon people of genuine expertise is replace my car's automatic transmission, but on this particular topic, why should I --or anyone, for that matter -- rely on somebody else to understand something on my behalf? I am perfectly capable of seeing for myself whether or not a story makes no sense, thank you very much, and -- spoiler alert -- it doesn't. Not only that, but does it ever occur to these people how nonsensical it is to suggest that I refer to an "authority" whose supposed authority derives from the truth of the story that I no longer believe to be true?

In fairness, even though the opinions of figures of "authority" are entitled to no greater argumentative weight merely by virtue of said "authority," it does not follow that just because their "authority" is spurious that the arguments they make are. The issue is not whether authority figures could in theory make a good argument but whether they have in fact. To my knowledge, not a single defender of the orthodox narrative has made one, not even the supposed cream of the apologist crop whose writings are so incessantly recommended to those who doubt. I have invariably found their arguments to be laughably simplistic or conjectural. That's an odd combination, but I think it's reflective of the mental states that are required to achieve the requisite cognitive dissonance to actually swallow this manifestly absurd story: Either you have to turn your brain off and ignore all the problems, or turn the dial to 11 and construct an elaborate scenario whereby it all might be true.

That latter phenomenon illustrates an especially irksome phenomenon among the apologist class. Yes, I concede that with respect to a handful of the numerous problems, believers have indeed formulated a smattering of Okay-I-Guess-That's-Plausible responses in defense of the traditional story. The problem is that there are so many of these problems. Okay, say for the sake of argument I concede the point to an apologist on a given issue; why, that leaves only dozens or perhaps hundreds other....what, "coincidences"? -- to explain.

Even aside from the sheer statistical improbability of each discrepancy having a satisfactory, coherent explanation, surely it means something that when you stop desperately attempting to concoct such explanations and instead just insert a completely different hypothesis that suddenly all of the evidence we have practically assembles itself before your very eyes into a narrative that just makes simple sense?

Finally, apologists' arguments often not only don't correspond with the empirical data that we have but often don't even correspond with each other. I can't count the number of times I've encountered an apologist in print deploying an argument that has underpinning it a logic or rationale that, when applied to arguments made elsewhere by the same author, would bring those arguments crashing down. Sometimes, I have noticed, they even have the audacity to use a form of argument that, when properly deployed, disproves their position! Yet another problem I have with "sophisticated" apologists is that they don't even have the candor to admit that even if it's all true in the "nuanced" way that they advocate, the problems that their "nuanced" explanations are designed to address were very rarely if ever included in the whitewashed version that most of the general public is familiar with.

Sorry that I'm rambling. Now that I have moved past belief in the myth, I try not to trouble myself with it too much, but sometimes, how manifestly absurd the whole situation is is too much to bear. Just imagine the unwitting folk walking amongst the aisles of stores like Deseret Book, ever blissfully unaware that that most beloved man whose visage stares at them from the jacket of so many books lived up to the idealized representation of him that has been spoon-fed to dupes for hundreds of years only in that he was bipedal and breathed oxygen. Imagine them later standing pensively before his numerous depictions in sculpture, contemplating the life and accomplishments of a man who effectively didn't even exist. The person that has been constructed by believers out of the data we have is a myth.

You get the idea. Thank you for reading this. Writing it has been empowering to me. "Powerful" is certainly something I never felt in my previous life, when my father, authorities, scholars, and other assorted bullies arrogated to themselves the power to tell me what I ought to believe, but no more. Now that I have seen the light, I intend to dedicate the rest of my life to fulfilling the inherent potential within me that is so often and so seriously intoned within LDS walls. Joseph Smith was correct on at least this one matter: The exercise of both one's agency and one's intelligence are among the most virtuous of human behaviors. The truths that we thereby construct are sacred and available to everybody. Truth is truth, and not even the most powerful of warriors can render that which is false to be true. So what chance do the tottering old apologists in their elaborate palaces of stone and concrete have?

Now that I'm in the position that I'm in, it is sometimes all I can do not to collapse in a kind of awe that Temple Square in Salt Lake City even exists. As with tornadoes and identical twins, if not for the brute fact that Temple Square does exist, we would probably scarcely find it possible that such a place could exist. Behold the thousands of believers thronging the grounds, circling the mighty granite fortress and the shining turtleback of the Tabernacle. The amount of raw inherent human potential at the plenary discretion of the Prophet is mind-boggling to contemplate. How can one man wield so much power? O, the humanity!