Earl Wunderli

I frankly don't know why I became a humanist. By this I mean that I have three younger brothers, and of the four boys, the middle two are active in the LDS church, while the youngest one and I have left it. I don't know whether skepticism is genetic and only two of us inherited the gene, or something happened to two of us that did not happen to the other two. There are some particulars that are unique to me later in my life, but they are not essential for the journey to humanism. These particulars have confirmed to me that I took the right fork in the road, but from all outward appearances in my youth, I should have grown up to be a faithful Mormon.

I was born in Salt Lake and grew up on the avenues. I had a stable home and a happy childhood. My two older sisters and three younger brothers and I all went to Longfellow Elementary School and the 21st ward, to Bryant Junior High School, and to East High School. Perhaps my earliest memory of anything bearing on my journey to humanism was learning in church that science was not to be trusted, which created a bias in me against science that I was years in overcoming.

Together with most kids in my high school graduating class, I went to the U. I worked stuffing the Sunday Tribune to pay my tuition of $25.00 per quarter and my fraternity dues. As a freshman I dated a girl whose father was up there somewhere in the church hierarchy. I must have been asking impious questions at that time because he talked to me at length one evening and lent me a book entitled After Its Kind, which argued against biological evolution. I was willing to go on a mission after my sophomore year except that my parents sent me to a hotel school in Switzerland instead. I thought I aspired to follow in my father's footsteps as a hotel manager. My father had emigrated from Switzerland to Salt Lake after the first world war to join the rest of his family in Zion. Here he met my mother, whose grandmother was a polygamous wife and whose father served on three missions, including the presidency of the British and Eastern States missions. I had helped my father at the Beau Brummel Cafe during the second world war when help was hard to get. And so my parents scraped together enough money to send me to Lausanne, Switzerland, where, because of their sacrifice, I finally became a dedicated student.

I spent over a year in Lausanne where I was active in the LDS branch, knew the missionaries, and participated in a chain letter with a number of fraternity brothers on missions. The hotel school required that students serve apprenticeships, and so a friend from school got me a job as a cook at a hotel in Bermuda. While in Bermuda I didn't look for a branch of the church but I did buy a Bible. I also remember consciously trying to think through some problems for the first time. After two years in college and more than a year away from home, I was just learning to think.

After Bermuda, I spent two years in the navy during the Korean war, where I was active in the LDS ward or branch in Norfolk, Virginia. It was then that I read the Book of Mormon for the first time.

I returned to the U, being four years older but uncertain about what I believed so I majored in philosophy to find out. Sterling McMurrin, O.C. Tanner, and Waldemer P. Read were among my great professors.

I went on to Law School at the U for want of anything better to do with a philosophy degree, during which time I managed to qualify for marriage in the temple. After our marriage, we lived in Apostle Mark E. Peterson's basement apartment and had Sunday dinner upstairs every week. Apostle Peterson's wife, Emma Marr, would leave a roast in the oven during church for our dinner together. I taught Sunday School to some 12-year-olds. They were particularly unruly because I taught the class on the Book of Mormon like a law professor.

I practiced law with Fabian and Clendenin in the old Continental Bank Building for three years, during which time we bought our first house and I became almost inactive in our new ward. I was then in my late twenties.

It is still unclear to me why I had wavered for ten years and my LDS friends had not, or, if they had, why they kept on the straight and narrow and I wandered away into uncharted territory. It is true that although I was raised LDS, I did not go to primary or seminary or on a mission, but so far as I know, neither did my younger brothers who are active in the church, although one of them did go on a mission.

In any case, after three years of private practice, I joined IBM's law department and moved east, where we spent 31 years until I retired nearly three years ago and returned to Salt Lake. When we moved to Connecticut, we stayed with an aunt and uncle for a few days until we found a place to rent, which I mention only to explain why I attended church. I was not prepared to confront our kind hosts on the issue. I even substituted as the gospel doctrine teacher for a friend two or three times. My aunt had shown me a study by a member in which the doctrine of salvation had been constructed from something like 69 different passages from the four standard works. As the substitute teacher, I remember upsetting the class by asking whether it disturbed anyone that the doctrine of salvation had to be pieced together like that, my point being that God should be able to communicate more clearly. The last time I ever attended church, except for funerals, farewells, weddings, and such, was when the class discussed the creation. The class had little use for Darwin or evolution, and I'd had enough.

Still, I did not want to be just another apostate. I wanted solid reasons for my position. Shortly after moving east, my wife and I spent a number of evenings comparing the first and current editions of the Book of Mormon, since we had heard there were changes but didn't know what they were or what to make of them. We did the same with the Doctrine and Covenants. It was so satisfying to have solid facts that I began an internal analysis of the Book of Mormon to find out whether there was any objective evidence of different ancient writers. Thus began the particulars unique to me.

My job gave me enough free time to do what I wished someone else had done and saved me the trouble. The internal analysis of the Book of Mormon took me 14 years. If I were beginning today, I would be able to use a computer and save many years in time. In any case, my conclusion was that not only could Joseph Smith have written the Book of Mormon but much of the internal evidence indicates that he did.

In 1976, I sent three large loose-leaf volumes containing my research to Sterling McMurrin for his review. He was, I proudly report, "absolutely overwhelmed by the extent and thoroughness" of the work. He suggested drastically reducing the size of the work for publication, and thought that for publication I would have to "show [my] hand more clearly" than I did in my chapter summaries. He thought I was "a little too cautious." He told me about a manuscript on the Book of Mormon by B.H. Roberts that confirmed my findings.

During the last twenty years since 1976, I have written many papers and have given four of them at Sunstone Symposia in Salt Lake and Washington, DC. I also completely rewrote the book but decided it was not right. I later rewrote the first four chapters but could generate no interest among publishers. I have now just about completed rewriting the book in my fourth attempt and this time I think I've got it right. I was recently encouraged by something I read in the last issue of Dialogue. In an article by Karl Sandberg (not the poet) entitled "Thinking about the Word of God in the Twenty-first Century," Sandberg wrote that "for the first time serious efforts of wide-scale textual criticism of Mormon scriptures have begun among Mormon scholars." I'm encouraged that there may be some interest in my work out there.

For much of the time that I was researching, I felt negative even though the evidence kept mounting against the Book of Mormon and I consciously withheld judgment until my work was finished. I had to overcome the feeling that skepticism was somehow destructive. I felt the need to articulate what I was for in contrast to what I was against. This was easy, since I was for truth and against falsehood. But there was another issue: even if the book was not true, wasn't the church nevertheless good? I eventually concluded that religion, which preaches faith over reason, does more harm than good. On this point there is too much to say to say just a little. I will only note two local examples of what disturbs me that many in our community would take no exception to: a Bountiful woman was quoted in last Sunday's Tribune that if she counted the cost, she might not have children, but she "just figured the Lord would provide," and in the name of God we prohibit high school clubs where gay students can find mutual support against our intolerance of them.

I concluded that we needed better options. I heard the best option yet at, ironically, a Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City some ten years ago or so. A humanist spoke at a plenary session. I don't remember who it was or what he said, but I went back to my office in New York, got a directory of organizations, found the American Humanist Association, and joined.

Humanism is the rational, ethical, positive philosophy that I discovered little by little. My faith is that, unless we destroy ourselves first, it will prevail in the future because it is rational, science-based, and open-minded. My faith may be misplaced, given the slow pace at which rationality progresses among humankind. But reason ultimately seems to prevail. Virtually everyone now accepts that the earth is round and revolves around the sun. Although many still do not accept biblical higher criticism or the theory of evolution, in time they may make today's religious superstitions seem as untenable as the Gods on Mt. Olympus. Meanwhile, the American Humanist Association and Humanists of Utah serve important purposes. They would have helped me earlier in my life and I believe may help many others who just have to learn of them. And as human beings gradually let go of mythology, the humanist philosophy the AHA and Humanists of Utah espouse will be there to catch them.