I was raised without any particular religion or faith, but was instilled with a strong sense of right and wrong. My parents served as examples of morality and character, and encouraged me to seek out matters of religion on my own. Some of my earliest memories are of my father teaching me the importance of standing up for what I believed was right, and my mother teaching by example what true, pure selflessness meant. In retrospect, I see I was brought up very differently than many other children. I was rarely told what to believe or what was right, but was taught that I must independently find the truth and stand up for it without question. My parents had this laissez-faire mentality to both religion and politics. I have a memory of being taught in elementary school about the presidential election that was happening that year. The teacher asked us a few questions, like who our parents were voting for and who we would vote for if we could. I distinctly remember being confidently different, even at that time, for several reasons. The first was that I wasn’t sure who my parents were voting for while everyone else was. The second was that I seemed to be the only one who thought it didn’t matter who my family voted for and I didn’t have to think the same way. All the other kids said they would vote for the same person as their parents – I thought that didn’t make any sense. The last thing that was different was that I was the only one who said I’d vote for Ross Perot. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know anything about his policies, but I think I liked the idea that he was independent – the guy that didn’t play by the same rules as everyone else, the guy that thought he could do things differently. I don’t know if that memory is entirely accurate, memories have the tendency to evolve with our personality, but the impression the experience left on me says a lot about how I came to be who I am. The lesson here isn’t that I think Ross Perot would have been a good President, but that as long as I can remember I’ve liked the idea of using independent thought to come to my own conclusions. My writing on The Road Well Traveled is meant to display that mentality in the political arena, and I have the same convictions on matters of spirituality. Had that elementary school discussion been about religion I probably would have been one of the few who thought my faith was something independent of my parents. (Had that discussion really been about religion, the poor teacher would probably have been fired – but that’s a discussion for later.)
Though my desire for independence has kept me aloof from political affiliation, religious affiliation is a different story. I was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was a sophomore in high school, served as a missionary for the church in Taiwan for two years, and am still an active member of the faith. You might wonder how someone on a crusade of independent thought could find himself a member of a highly organized, structured religion. The answer is simply that I believe, as stated above, that we should independently seek for that which we know to be true, and live according to it. That quest and desire led me to become a Mormon. If you’re curious about that process, please read my first blog, What I Believe, for the whole story. But don’t worry, even with committed faith there’s still plenty of room for independent thought. While there are certain things I hold as absolute truth, my faith in no way precludes the search for greater understanding – in fact it promotes it. I hope to pursue that search in this blog.
