About Me

About Me August 29, 2015

Tarik photo
Photo courtesy of Tarik LaCour’s Facebook page

Before I start writing for Patheos, especially for Peculiar People, I thought that it would be appropriate to introduce my readers to myself; especially who I am and why I do what I do.

I was born on June 16th 1991 in Washington D.C. My parents were in the military, so we moved quite a bit, but settled in Riverside, California in 1995. I spent most of my life in Riverside, and will always consider it home, regardless of where I currently happen to live at the time.

I was raised as a protestant Christian, in a tradition that was very myopic considering that most in my church were African-Americans (a term I despise), and also a tradition that did not think about religion from an empirical and rational perspective. The argument went: 1. The Bible is the Word of God 2. We know how to interpret it correctly 3. Listen to the pastor and you will prosper, which is truly not an argument at all. I was also concerned from a young age that most of the focus seemed to be on prosperity rather than on the fundamentals of orthodox Christianity ie the nature of God, the nature of the church, our relationship to God, etc.

While I was raised in the protestant tradition, I have never truthfully been an orthodox Christian (I use the term orthodox to mean the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions). One memory I often reflect on was when I was 5 years old that story of Adam and Eve was told in our bible study class and it was presented in a way that made it seem that Adam and Eve had committed a grave sin in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I often thought it was rather odd that God would basically tempt people who were not sophisticated enough to know what god and evil truly were.

While I continued in the Christian tradition for all of my adolescent years, I was very much a skeptic. I did not believe int the idea of the trinity, the inerrancy of the Bible, the traditional idea of hell, and the idea that marriage was for life only. I was not a skeptic so much in that I doubted that God exists; like Aquinas I believed that to be self-evident. However the idea of Christianity was becoming more and more absurd as I got older.

From a young age I was interested in science also, especially in Darwinian evolution and cosmology. I often looked into the doctrine of ex nihilo creation (creation out of nothing), and found it very unconvincing. It seemed that if there were a God, then he/she would have to have come into being since the evidence pointed to the fact that the cosmos was eternal rather than coming into being.

When I was 16 I ran into a Mormon in my choir class. I had read about Mormonism in an encyclopedia, but had never personally known any Mormons. I read the Book of Mormon as well as many of Joseph Smith’s teachings, and found it to be what I had been searching for. I was baptized on August 30, 2009 and confirmed September 6th, 2009.

I served a mission to Alabama from November 2010 to November 2012. I did my general studies at LDS Business College from 2013 to 2015, and I am currently a philosophy major at Utah Valley University. After graduation I plan to receive both a Juris Doctorate and a PhD in Philosophy, hopefully at either NYU, Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, Michigan, or Stanford.

You can follow me on Twitter @HumeDisciple, and I also blog privately a here

I look forward to blogging here as a continued part of my journey, and if I am of help to others along the way, so much the better.


Browse Our Archives

Follow Us!