Chapter 1 — The Experiment I Had Never Tried

There was one claim from my childhood that I realized I had never honestly tested.

I grew up in Utah in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I stopped believing when I was sixteen. My departure was not the result of a single dramatic revelation. I did not uncover one fact that caused the whole structure to collapse. I simply found that the world described by the church no longer seemed like the world I inhabited.

I have spent most of my adult life outside the faith. I learned to think in other vocabularies: software, organizations, history, psychology, systems, evidence. I became comfortable describing myself as someone who did not believe.

Yet one familiar claim continued to bother me.

Members of the church often say that a person who wants to know whether the Book of Mormon is true should read it sincerely, reflect on it, and pray. A passage near the end of the book makes a version of this promise. If you ask God with real intent, it says, the truth can be made known to you.¹

I had heard the promise many times. I had also heard many explanations for why it might fail. Perhaps the reader had not been sincere enough. Perhaps they had not prayed with sufficient humility. Perhaps they wanted an answer but were unwilling to follow it.

These conditions make the claim difficult to evaluate. A successful result confirms the promise. An unsuccessful result can be interpreted as evidence that the experiment was performed incorrectly.

That is not how a clean scientific test works.

Still, I could not quite dismiss it.

The claim was not merely that a proposition was true. It included a method. Read. Reflect. Pray. Approach the question sincerely. See what happens.

I had read portions of the scriptures when I was young, but I had never undertaken the experiment as an adult who understood why he was doing it. I had rejected the conclusion, but I had not fully repeated the procedure.

This may have been an unreasonable standard to impose on myself. We cannot personally test every spiritual claim, political ideology, medical theory, or philosophy of life before deciding how seriously to take it. A human lifetime is too short. We rely on the experiences of others because we have no alternative.

But this claim belonged to my own inheritance. It had shaped my parents, my grandparents, my neighbors, and the culture in which I learned to become a person. It was not an obscure ritual practiced on another continent. It was part of the language of my childhood.

Early one year, I decided to try. I did not enjoy it.

Scripture has rarely held my attention. The prose often feels distant. Genealogies, sermons, wars, prophecies, and repeated moral warnings blur together. I can read several pages and realize that my eyes have continued moving while my mind has gone elsewhere.

Meditation has sometimes worked for me because it does not ask me to pretend that my mind is more focused than it is. Distraction becomes part of the observation. Prayer felt different. It seemed to require a posture I did not naturally possess: speaking toward someone whose presence I did not assume.

There was also an epistemic problem I could not ignore.

If I prayed while hoping to feel something, would the hope create the feeling? If I entered the practice expecting confirmation, could I distinguish revelation from suggestion? Humans are extraordinarily capable of finding patterns that fit what they want to believe. Religious experience is not the only place this happens. We do it in politics, relationships, medicine, business, and science. We notice confirming evidence and overlook the rest.

I worried that prayer might make me more susceptible to precisely the kind of motivated interpretation I was trying to examine.

The opposite problem also existed. If I entered the experiment convinced that nothing would happen, my disbelief might become its own filter. I could tune out every response before it reached me.

The experiment depended on sincerity, but sincerity was the very condition I could not manufacture.

I could not make myself believe on command. I could only become willing to discover something I had not expected.

So I asked a reading companion for help—not a pastor or study group, but a language model I could query at odd hours.² That choice may sound strange in a story about spirituality, although perhaps it is no stranger than asking a teacher, pastor, friend, or study guide where to begin. I explained that long stretches of scripture caused me to lose interest. I wanted passages that might be worth reading even if I did not accept their supernatural claims. I wanted something short enough to approach honestly and substantial enough to give the practice a chance.

The companion suggested passages, explained historical context, and helped me notice themes I might have missed on my own. I did not mistake it for a spiritual authority. It was organizing and recombining what people have written. But it helped me remain with texts that I would otherwise have abandoned.

I could not yet see where that arrangement would lead. What changes when one of the newest forms of intelligence becomes a companion for reading an ancient spiritual text? The question stayed open. I was not looking for an answer in Chapter 1.

The experiment did not produce the result I had been taught to expect.

I did not receive a witness that the church was true. I did not feel a supernatural certainty descend upon me. I did not discover that sixteen-year-old me had made an enormous mistake.

What happened was quieter.

Some passages still bored me. Others made me uncomfortable. Some appeared to reflect assumptions about authority, obedience, gender, or divine intervention that I could not share.

But some were not bad.

That surprised me more than it should have.

The scriptures contained language about pride, grief, mercy, responsibility, community, sacrifice, resentment, and the human tendency to wander away from what we claim to value. I did not need to accept every theological premise to recognize the people being described.

More importantly, the texts helped me understand my parents.

Phrases I had heard throughout childhood began to sound different when I encountered their scriptural echoes. Ways of speaking about trials, agency, service, obedience, family, and endurance had not simply been invented by my mother or father. They belonged to a moral world they had inherited.

My parents had learned what to notice through these stories.

They had also learned what not to notice.

The realization was not an indictment. It was a form of recognition.

All families pass down scripts. Some are stated directly: work hard, tell the truth, do not embarrass the family, respect your elders. Others are absorbed through repetition. We learn which emotions are safe to express, which disagreements are worth having, who is allowed to speak with authority, and what kinds of suffering should be endured quietly.

Most of these scripts become invisible precisely because we learned them before we had language for questioning them.

Reading scripture as an adult did not restore my belief. It helped me see some of the material from which my early self had been assembled.

I began to recognize why conflict could feel dangerous even when nothing terrible was likely to happen. I understood more clearly why respect for authority carried moral weight in the culture around me. I saw how endurance could become both a virtue and a trap: a capacity that helped people survive hardship but also encouraged them to remain silent when something needed to change.

These were not simply personal habits. They were cultural sediment—practices and norms that had helped a community survive hardship and later became difficult to see as anything other than morality.³

A community that experiences persecution, displacement, and the demands of frontier survival may develop strong norms of unity and deference. Under those conditions, cohesion is not irrational. Conflict avoidance is not cowardice. Respect for authority may be part of the machinery that keeps a community alive.

But culture remembers solutions more easily than it remembers the conditions that produced them. The crisis ends. The practice remains. A norm that once protected a vulnerable community may later make it harder to challenge leaders, expose harm, or adapt to new evidence. What began as survival becomes identity. What becomes identity is eventually defended as morality.

I had written about this pattern in organizations before I recognized it in my own life. A company experiences a serious outage, so it introduces a review process. The process prevents another failure. Years later, no one remembers the outage, but everyone continues completing the forms. The control designed to reduce one kind of risk creates another: no one can act quickly enough to respond to the environment. The policy becomes sediment.

Religious and cultural traditions preserve sediment on a much larger timescale. The question is not whether inherited practices should survive. It is whether we can learn to see what they are doing—which problems they addressed, what they cultivate, and what they teach us to ignore. That investigation belongs to a later chapter. Here, the recognition was enough: my parents had inherited more than opinions. They had inherited a way of deciding what counted as virtue.

My scripture experiment had begun as a narrow test of a religious proposition. I wanted to know whether I had unfairly dismissed a method I had never sincerely tried.

The result was not a clean answer.

Instead, I encountered several different kinds of truth that did not fit neatly together.

There was metaphysical truth: whether God exists, whether revelation occurs, whether the Book of Mormon describes divine events.

There was historical truth: how a tradition emerged, how its texts were produced, and how its institutions changed.

There was psychological truth: what prayer, study, meditation, confession, or ritual might do within a person.

There was cultural truth: how stories shape communities and transmit values across generations.

And there was personal truth: what I could learn about my own life by returning to material that helped form me.

These kinds of truth are related, but they are not interchangeable.

A practice can produce psychological benefits without proving its theology. A story can reveal something important about human nature without being historically literal. A tradition can preserve wisdom while also preserving assumptions that deserve to be questioned.

This is where conversations about spirituality often become unnecessarily narrow.

Believers may feel required to defend the entire structure because conceding any uncertainty appears to threaten the value of the practice. Skeptics may feel required to dismiss the practice because acknowledging value appears to concede the metaphysical claim.

Both sides inherit an all-or-nothing question:

Is it true?

It is an important question. But it is not the only one.

We can also ask what a tradition has observed about human beings.

We can ask why prayer, meditation, fasting, confession, pilgrimage, Sabbath, communal meals, sacred stories, and repeated rituals have appeared in so many cultures.

We should not assume that practices are equivalent merely because they resemble one another. Christian prayer is not Buddhist meditation. Repentance is not scientific peer review. A congregation is not a research community. These practices emerge from different accounts of reality and pursue different ends.

But different traditions can encounter similar human problems—distraction, self-deception, overconfidence, the confusions of belonging and memory, the search for meaning in suffering. Across centuries, people have developed practices intended to help with these conditions. Some turn attention inward. Others turn it toward God, nature, community, evidence, or moral responsibility. Some ask us to empty the mind. Others ask us to fill it with particular words and stories.

The practices are not the same. The problems sometimes are.

That possibility changed the question I wanted to ask.

I was no longer trying to determine whether science and spirituality could be reconciled into a single system. I did not want to claim that all religions secretly taught the same thing or that modern psychology had finally proven ancient theology correct.

I began wondering what each tradition had learned to see.

Scientific practice teaches people to distrust the first explanation that fits the evidence. Philosophy teaches us to notice hidden assumptions within our concepts. History makes visible the contingency of arrangements that now appear inevitable. Art trains perception by lingering where ordinary attention moves on. Spiritual traditions often ask practitioners to observe pride, attachment, resentment, gratitude, suffering, obligation, and awe.

Each discipline illuminates something.

Each also casts a shadow.

The point of integration is not to combine them into one undifferentiated worldview. Integration begins when distinct perspectives are permitted to remain distinct long enough to challenge and inform one another.

My experiment did not bring me back to the church.

It brought me back to a question.

How do human beings learn to see beyond the limits of the selves and cultures that formed them?

That question belongs to epistemology, but it also belongs to spirituality. It belongs to science, philosophy, history, art, education, and every tradition that has tried to cultivate wisdom rather than merely transmit information.

We do not encounter reality with untrained eyes.

We inherit ways of seeing. We practice them until they become natural. We pass them to other people, often without recognizing what we are doing.

Sometimes we must unlearn them.

Sometimes we discover that an old practice has been carrying wisdom we were not yet prepared to recognize.

And sometimes, when we return to a familiar text expecting to settle an old argument, it quietly shows us something else: not a proof of what we should believe, but a glimpse of how we became the people who are doing the believing.

That is where this book begins.

Not with the claim that every tradition is true.

Not with the hope that their differences can be dissolved.

It begins with the possibility that humanity has spent thousands of years developing practices for seeing more clearly—and that those practices may still have something to teach one another.

Footnotes

1. Moroni 10:4–5 (Book of Mormon): "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost." ↩

2. The author used OpenAI's ChatGPT (conversational interface) as a reading companion for the scripture exploration described here and revisited in Chapter 13—querying for passage suggestions, historical context, and interpretive questions, without treating the model as a spiritual authority. Model capabilities and limits as of draft composition (2025–2026). ↩

3. On persecution, migration, and communal coordination in early Mormon history, see Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). On authority, cooperation, and internal strain in Mormon social life, see Thomas F. O'Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). On contemporary Latter-day Saint tendencies to avoid or misread conflict, see Patrick Q. Mason and J. David Pulsipher, Proclaim Peace: The Restoration's Answer to an Age of Conflict (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2021). The link between those historical conditions and present cultural norms is offered here as a working hypothesis—not a settled causal account. See Chapter 10. ↩