I'd be more interested in discussing what part of my point of view you are not sure is defensible...the "apologia" near the end or the "all spirituality has two base components and if these two aren't reliable then all spiritual systems are not reliable either". Any chance of discussing that?

I left Mormonism because I felt dissatisfied with it, the more I looked at other religions the more I saw the same patterns. The idea that all spirituality has two base components and that these are unreliable came relatively quickly...there's nothing new to that notion, it just doesn't get a lot of attention in my experience. The idea of god simply began to make less sense and there was less of a need for it. I am not a-Mormon, or a-Christian, I am an a-theist. Are you an LDS?

No, I rejected it. I dug deeply enough to find a lot of contradictions in their 'inspired' writings... If there is one thing that God must be, it is consistent. It seems that LDS doctrine changes with each new edition of the Deseret News. They also miserably failed the archaeology test. If the story of the great battle of the Lamanites and the ?????manites were true, then NY state would be knee deep in artifacts. There is also the problem of horses being mentioned in that battle, about a thousand years before they were brought to this country from overseas. Joseph Smith had a great imagination, but was not scholarly enough to cover all the holes in the story.

You postulate that all spirituality has 2 base components...so what? What matters is not how many or what they are, but can we know that they are or not true and reliable?

I tried to find the basis of all spiritual systems to see if spirituality generically makes sense...if it does, then some spiritual system might make sense and it might make sense to explore spirituality to find the correct version. But why practice any religion if the things that can be said of all religions don't make sense. If there is no reason to believe that spirits are in individuals then why worry about your karma, reincarnating, going to hell, heaven, Abraham's bosom, or purgatory? If the things gods do don't need a god to be accomplished: creating, sustaining, and destroying the universe for example, then why worry about god?

These things gods are supposed to do and the things individual's spirits are supposed to do aren't true and reliable, so I don't worry about Jesus being the Messiah, Mohammed a Prophet, Guatamma a Buddha, or Hubbard the revealer of the secrets of Scientology.

You mention that you think you address the historicity argument. I don't think you do. If you take a book like the bible, that writes about people and events thousands of years past, and then modern archaeology continues to dig up artifacts that have confirmed it over and over...how do you discount historicity? Our history, the worlds history, your history, simply 'is'....it happened. The bible and its characters and cities are the same way. Why deny that?

There is no evidence that the Israelites trekked through the desert, modern Egyptology reveals Egypt as a multi-ethnic state with few slaves and modern research by the Jesus Seminar casts informed doubt on the New Testament "history". Even Dr. John McRay interviewed in Strobel's Case for Christ can do no better than "Archaeology has not produced anything that is unequivocally a contradiction to the Bible"(p.134). In context, the paragraph before the one quoted, he is referring to the New Testament not the Old...not to the whole Bible.