QUOTE: “So before you make that spiritually perilous choice to leave, I encourage you to stop and think carefully before giving up whatever it was that brought you to your testimony of the restored Church of Jesus Christ in the first place. Stop and think about what you have felt here and why you felt it. Think about the times when the Holy Ghost has borne witness to you of eternal truth.” –M. Russell Ballard, in General Conference, October 2016. [source]
COMMENTARY: When the vast majority of your members were born in the church and learned to believe that the church was true because they were constantly subjected to that message in their formative years, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to tell them to cling to the thing that most influenced them to believe in the church. Well, I take that back. Such a plea is probably effective. It’s just not intellectually honest. But what do I know? I’m just another apostate.
