There are two simple questions you can ask yourself to determine if you're good at critical thinking or not. Here they are. Welcome to Mormon to Muse. I'm Kristen Martineau, certified life coach, artist, and former Mormon. This podcast is for post Mormon women ready to heal, reconnect with their inner wisdom, and create a life that feels fully their own.
Each week, we'll explore life after faith crisis through therapeutic art, life coaching tools, and creative reflection. If you're ready to deconstruct the past and create something beautiful in its place, you're in the right spot. Welcome to episode five. Today, we're talking about critical thinking. Do you remember being a kid in school and your teacher telling you to use your critical thinking skills on an assignment, but then never explained how to do that.
I just tried my best to think really hard. Today, I'm gonna teach you one framework for how to approach critical thinking so that you can be better equipped to determine what is really true. This is an important skill to develop because when you grow up in a high demand religion like Mormonism, you're not really taught how to think critically. You're taught how to obey. You're given answers instead of questions, rules instead of reasoning, authority instead of autonomy.
So when you leave, it's normal to feel disoriented. Who do you trust now? How do you know what's right for you? There are several ways to approach critical thinking, and I'm sure I'll address other critical frameworks in future podcasts. But for today, we're going to learn an approach that originates from Aristotle's writings on rhetoric and civil discourse.
I have to give credit to Randy Bell, who I heard talk about this on a Mormon Stories podcast episode. I can't remember for sure which one it was, but he mentioned this framework. So I decided to take a deeper dive into it, and I found the concept really useful. Here's the four part framework in a nutshell. The first three are Aristotle's original ideas, but we are going to add a fourth.
Logos, which means logical reasoning using evidence and data. Pathos, meaning the emotions that are being evoked and what our emotions are telling us. Ethos, is this ethical, and can I trust the credibility of the source of information? And then we're gonna add duos, meaning what is the other side of the argument, and do I have the capacity to hold two contradicting truths at once? And, of course, we're gonna talk about how this framework can be applied to your creative practice.
Before we dive in, let's take a second to evaluate your critical thinking skills. Before we dive in, let's take a second to evaluate your current critical thinking skills. There are two simple questions you can ask yourself, but I want you to take just a second and think about this and answer these honestly. Number one, do I think I'm right about everything? Number two, are my opinions basically the same as they were five years ago?
If the answer to either of these is yes, you need to work on your critical thinking skills. But don't worry. You are in good company. I think most of us think we're right. We don't hold opinions that we think we are wrong about, and it's difficult to understand the world outside our limited perspective.
If we don't intentionally expand that perspective, then we aren't capable of critical thinking. Critical thinking is a humbling experience. You have to be willing to be wrong. Remember, we default to ourselves as the reference for everything else. If these people agree with me, they are right.
If they disagree with me, they are wrong. Have you ever noticed how when you're driving on the freeway, no matter what speed you happen to be going at that moment, everyone who's going faster than you is crazy, and everyone going slower than you is stupid. So we're using our own speed as the reference point even if we're going slower or faster than we usually do. So I try to think of my perspectives as theories. This is my perspective with the information I currently have.
In science, a theory is not a proven fact. While theories can become very well established and widely accepted, they are not considered absolute truths and can be modified or replaced if new evidence emerges. Just because a lot of people agree with you doesn't mean what you believe is a fact. The plural of anecdote is not evidence. I'm gonna say that again.
The plural of anecdote is not evidence. So in order to be a good critical thinker, you have to be willing to update your current working My whole life growing up in Mormonism, the message I was given about queer people is that it was wrong. Even though scientific information shows that being queer is a trait you're born with, not a choice, The implicit message from the church was that the person or their parents had done something that caused it. It was okay to be a queer person, but not to act on it. Acting on it is a sin and meant you would not be in the celestial kingdom with your family.
I knew one or two queer people in my friend group in high school, but I didn't know anyone very close to me that was queer. When my oldest came out, I suddenly had new information that was at odds with the old information. My choice was to further retrench in my current belief system or be humble enough to update my opinion based on the new information. I wish I could say that I did that easily, but it definitely wasn't easy, especially considering this significant lifetime investment I had made in my current belief system thus far. So I get it.
It's hard to admit that you were wrong about something or that your beliefs hurt someone else. But if we are going to make any progress as a society, we are going to have to stop retrenching ourselves in our own belief systems and be open to receiving more information and change accordingly. I have a bachelor's degree in radiation therapy. As part of my training, we learned how to look at and evaluate the validity of scientific information. Some of the things we learned to look for were understand what source the information is coming from.
Is it information from a peer reviewed journal or, say, a blog? What kind of study was done? Meta analysis and randomized controlled trials are stronger than case studies or anecdotes. Are the results of the study reproducible by other people? Is the information current?
Are there conflicts of interest? Is a pharmaceutical company doing their own study on their own methods on their own drug? There could be a conflict of interest there. Are the methods and the data available to be reviewed? Some of the red flags to look for are claims of sweeping conclusions based on limited evidence, use of emotional language instead of data, relying heavily on anecdotes, claim a scientific conspiracy or dismiss peer review, and overhyping miracle results without nuance.
It's crazy to me that I was able to do this in every other area of my life, but the church was an exception. I had this idea that knowing spiritual truths were an exception to the above rules, which is a red flag in itself. Right? But when you're so invested in something being true, you have to ignore the red flags in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance. So the first part in the four part framework is logos.
This is logic. This is the part that focuses on clarity, coherence, rational thought. You're encouraged to look for data, patterns, and critical analysis. It helps us challenge emotionally manipulative or authority based arguments, meaning I'm the boss, so you have to believe me. And logic helps us in spotting cognitive distortions, circular reasoning, or other logical fallacies that are common in high demand groups.
Here's an example of an idea I wasn't able to evaluate critically while I was still in the church. You're told that if you pray with real intent, the Holy Ghost will confirm the truth of the church. When you feel something emotional or peaceful, it's interpreted as confirmation. That confirmation is used as proof that the church is true. But the authority that told you how to interpret that feeling is the church itself.
That's a good example of circular reasoning. It also includes an authority based argument and emotional manipulation. We are taught that being critical of the church is wrong, but criticism and checks and balances are essential for any healthy organization. If they don't allow it, that's a red flag. So we have to be able to look critically at the systems we're a part of without special pleading.
Special pleading is another logical fallacy, meaning when someone applies a principle or standard to others, but makes an exception for themselves or their group without valid justification. For example, Warren Jeffs is a huge creep and belongs in jail because he's a sexual predator, obviously. But somehow, we're supposed to justify that Joseph Smith did it because god told him to. Well, guess what? God told Warren Jeffs to also.
Another example of special pleading is you can't trust spiritual experiences from other religions because they're deceived, but ours prove the church is true because they come from the Holy Ghost. This is special pleading because it dismisses other people's spiritual confirmations as false or emotional, but it treats Mormon spiritual experiences as uniquely valid without a consistent standard. So when you are evaluating information with logic, here are some of the questions to ask. What assumptions is this idea built on? Are they true?
Does this make logical sense? What are the facts? What are the evidence? So let's ask these questions about the idea that the Holy Ghost will tell you if the church is true. What are the assumptions in this idea?
The assumptions are that emotional or spiritual feelings can confirm objective truth, that the feeling itself comes from the Holy Ghost, and that the Holy Ghost only confirms the truthfulness of the LDS Church. Are these assumptions true? No. They're not. Emotional or spiritual feelings can come from many sources, music, community, expectation, memory, hormones, etcetera.
People of every religion report similar emotional confirmations, Muslims, evangelicals, Buddhists, etcetera, Which raises the question, are they all true? Or are they all experiencing emotion tied to belief and conditioning? Also, there's no objective evidence that feelings originate from a divine being rather than from the human brain. Is this logical? Not really.
If a person says I felt the spirit so Mormonism is true. And another person says I felt the spirit so Islam is true. And another person says, I felt the spirit, so Jehovah Witnesses are true. They can't all be objectively true in the exclusive way each religion claims. The logic fails because it uses a subjective emotional experience to justify an exclusive objective claim.
What are the facts? What are the evidence? The facts are emotional and spiritual experiences are real. Humans have had these throughout the ages, but they're not exclusive to Mormonism. Studies in neuroscience and psychology show that religious feelings are often the result of social and emotional priming, not divine intervention.
And the LDS Church teaches people what to expect before they pray, a warm feeling, burning in the bosom, peace, which creates confirmation bias. Is there evidence? Anecdotal personal experiences are not reliable evidence of objective truth. No external verifiable tests exist for determining whether a spiritual feeling comes from God, emotion, or culture. This belief is built on unquestioned assumptions.
It lacks logical consistency and is supportive and is supported by subjective rather than objective experience. It may feel meaningful, but it doesn't hold up under critical scrutiny. So let's apply logos to art. In art, it shows up in the form of composition, proportion, technique, and planning. Even in abstract works, there is a logical planning and composition.
For example, if you take a look at Jackson Pollock's work, it might seem that there's no logic to it. It's easy to look at it and say, well, I could do that or a little kid could do that. But if you find yourself thinking that, I dare you to go home and try. It's harder than it looks, and I dare say that abstract work is much harder to do well than representational work. Pollock's technique, pouring, dripping, flinging paint, wasn't random.
He developed a repeatable, intuitive process based on body movement, rhythm, and material flow. His choices about canvas placement, paint thickness, speed, and direction all showed intentionality within the chaos. Whilst paintings may appear chaotic, they often have a balanced density across the canvas, controlled layering of color and line, and an underlying unity and energy that pulls the eye across the surface. So in art making, when you're applying logos, you can ask, does this color balance the others? Is this shape working?
Logos brings intentionality and structure to your piece, just like it brings logic to your thoughts. The next part of the framework is pathos. Pathos refers to emotion, specifically the emotional appeal and communication or persuasion. When it comes to critical thinking, pathos is a double edged sword. Emotions are not the enemy of clear thinking.
They're essential signals. In fact, emotional awareness can enhance critical thinking by pointing to values that matter to you. Pathos encourages empathy, which broadens your perspective and insight, and it helps you identify when something feels off even before you can articulate why. That definitely happened to me. I felt a lot of anger while I was still participating in the church, and I didn't know why.
Now looking back, I can see that it was my body telling me that something was off. As it turns out, blindly following the cookie cutter path that someone had prescribed to me was negatively influencing my mental health because I was suppressing my autonomy instead of tapping into my own authority on what is good and healthy for me. Pathos can become a problem, though, when emotions are used to bypass logic or ethics. In high demand systems like Mormonism, emotional appeals often discourage questioning by stirring fear, guilt, or shame, evoking sentimentality, or using emotional authority to silence doubt. This can lead to emotional reasoning, where someone assumes that because they feel something strongly, it must be true even if the evidence says otherwise.
Here's an example of emotional manipulation in the church. In Jeff Holland's October 2013 general conference talk, he says, if you leave the church, where will you go? What will you do? I remember this talk having a strong emotional effect on me, but this quote does not offer doctrinal reasoning, historical evidence, or logical justification for staying. Instead, it uses fear, guilt, and emotional dependency and identity loss.
It evokes the feeling that there is no safe or meaningful life outside the church without actually proving that claim. It discourages critical thinking. It bypasses the real reasons people leave, including historical issues, abuse, harm, doctrinal inconsistency. It suggests leaving equals drifting, darkness, or despair, without considering that leaving might lead to growth, healing, and truth, which has been my experience. And it subtly frames departure from the church as a failure or betrayal.
So how can you trust your feelings again after religious conditioning? Because our feelings have been so manipulated. As part of healing, it's important to reclaim pathos as a valid part of your inner compass. Not the only guide, but one voice in the conversation. Healthy critical thinking invites questions like, what emotion is coming up for me here and why?
Am I being emotionally manipulated, or is this a genuine inner signal? Can I hold my feelings with compassion while staying curious and grounded? Critical thinking doesn't mean shutting down your feelings. It means learning to listen to them without letting them run the show. Feelings are an important part of critical thinking, but they can't be relied on as the only way to know truth.
Pathos, of course, is everywhere in art. It's the emotion in the colors you choose, the pressure of the pencil, the subject matter you're drawn to. You're asking, what do I feel right now and how can I express it? In high demand religion, emotions were often invalidated or weaponized. In art, you reclaim your right to feel deeply and use that fuel for expression.
The painting Guernica is a good example of pathos in art. It's a large black and white mural that was painted by Pablo Picasso in response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. If you haven't seen it, look it up. It's disturbing and emotional, and it gets the message across. There's distorted figures that evoke deep grief, fear, horror.
It's black and white, and the lack of color heightens the bleak emotional tone. The idea that there's no escape, no beauty, just devastation. There's a mother screaming over the lifeless body of her child, which is awful. And it shows chaos and fragmentation in the composition, which mirror the emotional state of the trauma and powerlessness. And there's emotional chaos and fragmentation in the composition.
Picasso didn't explain or rationalize the painting. He let the emotional truth speak louder than any political argument or logical explanation. Guernica isn't meant to convince through facts or data. It moves you. It feels like war.
It bypasses reason to awaken moral and emotional urgency. This is pure pathos in visual form. It's a direct appeal to the viewer's compassion, outrage, and humanity. The next part of this four part framework is ethos. The question here is, is it ethical, and what are the motives of the person who's presenting the information?
When it's used well, ethos can help us consider the background, experience, and motives of a source. It helps us evaluate whether a person or institution has a track record of honesty or harm. It asks whether someone's character and consistency support their claims, and it holds people in power accountable to the trust that we place in them. In high demand systems, ethos is often abused to demand loyalty without accountability. Instead of earning trust, leaders are assumed to be trustworthy because of their position.
For example, the prophet speaks for God, so we should follow him even if we don't understand. This appeal to authority without transparency or evidence shuts down critical thinking. It assumes that someone's position equals their telling the truth, that questioning is rebellion, and loyalty is righteousness. When ethos is treated as automatic rather than earned, it becomes a tool for control. So ask yourself, is this source of information trustworthy?
What are their motives? Frida Kahlo's paintings are a good example of ethos in art, especially her self portraits. They're deeply personal, raw, and often filled with physical and emotional pain. Her authority as an artist didn't come from traditional academic training or institutional validation. It comes from her lived experience and her willingness to show it unfiltered.
In other words, she earned trust by her authenticity. She painted while she endured lifelong chronic pain. She exposed taboo topics like miscarriage, infidelity, identity conflict, cultural belonging in a time when women were expected to stay silent. Her paintings are not objective or decorative, but they are authentic records of her truth. People connect to Frida's work because they trust her voice.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't perform. Her ethos is built on radical honestly. You believe Frida when she paints herself pierced with nails because she lived with that kind of pain. You trust her perspective because she doesn't try to make herself more likable, less messy.
Her integrity is part of the message. She earned her voice through suffering, survival, and unflinching expression. In art, ethos is all about authenticity. Are you expressing your voice or copying work that you think other people will approve of? You can ask yourself, am I being true to myself?
Does this feel honest? Ethos and art making helps you rebuild a sense of self trust. I can make choices that reflect who I am now, not who I was told to be. And the last one in this four step framework is duos. Duos is the capacity to hold two seemingly opposite ideas or feelings at the same time without rushing to resolve the tension, which I think a lot of us have been taught to do.
Just put your doubts on the shelf. Don't think about it. Duos is about paradox, nuance, complexity. It's the kind of thinking that doesn't fit neatly into a binary system, black or white, right or wrong. It's about being able to look at and understand the opposing point of view.
In systems like Mormonism, you're often taught that there is one right answer. That certainty is righteousness and doubt is danger. Duos challenges this by inviting you to think in shades of gray, to grow your tolerance for ambiguity and trust your ability to live in the in between. It's a higher order critical thinking skill and a deeply human one. The other aspect to duos is, am I looking at the argument of the other side?
If I'm looking to buy a Ford truck, am I talking to people who drive the truck and have loved it and have stayed with Ford for a long time? And am I also talking to people who decided to switch to another brand? Why did they switch? What was their experience? If Ford is telling you, you can only ask the people who currently drive a Ford, that's a red flag.
Right? So we have to be able to hold these two opposing beliefs. For example, I love my family, and I disagree with their beliefs. I miss the community, and I'm relieved to be free. You don't have to resolve this tension.
You can live in it. This is one of the greatest gifts for me. Faith transition is being okay with not knowing the duality. Letting go of black and white thinking has been so freeing for me. Do us let you hold people and experiences in full complexity rather than casting them all as good or all bad.
I think a lot of ex Mormons tend to leave the church and but are still stuck in this black and white thinking that I'm right now and the church is wrong. But the truth is we're both right and we're both wrong. There's good and evil in most institutions and in most people. In order to be able to do that, you have to be able to emotionally regulate. You have to have cognitive flexibility and you have to have patience for not rushing for a resolution or certainty, which is exactly why high demand religions tend to discourage it because complexity threatens control.
So ask yourself, what's the other side of this story? Can both of these things be true at once? Is the discomfort I feel a sign that I'm growing? What if I don't need a clear answer right now? So we're talking about curiosity over conclusion and integration over absolutes.
So for me, this looks like the church was beneficial to me in many ways, and I can also see how it hurt me. The church harms people and teaches love and kindness. In art, Duo shows up in holding contradictions to create meaning. Art isn't about perfect answers or clean logic. It's about a truthful complexity and the most compelling art often lives in the space where two things are true at once, Light and shadow.
Beauty and discomfort. Chaos and control. Emotion and structure. Order and spontaneity. Past and present.
What you meant to say and what accidentally showed up. Do us reflects real life. Right? Life is never simple. Art that captures the tension of being human, of loving and leaving, of becoming and unraveling resonates deeply.
It creates emotional truth. When people view your work and feel something, it's often because you've allowed two emotional forces to coexist on the canvas. It liberates you from perfectionism. You don't have to figure it out. You just have to show up and hold the tension.
A good example of duos in art is Rothko's color field paintings. Mark Rothko's large scale color field paintings were these soft, like, luminous rectangles of layered color that seem really simple at first glance. But when you stand in front of one, especially in person, you feel a deep emotional and psychological tension. His paintings hold multiple opposing qualities at once. There's stillness and intensity.
There's a simplicity, but also complexity, light and darkness. For example, if you look at black on maroon or number 14, it's the name of the painting. You're looking at floating forms that are both serene and ominous. They don't tell you what to feel. They invite you into a space where both and is possible.
He wasn't trying to resolve the tension. He was creating a space to feel it. The viewer might feel comforted and disturbed at the same time. His work lives in emotional contradiction, and that's what makes it so human. In his own words, Rothko said, I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
He wasn't offering answers. He was making space for coexistence. Duosan art is about truth, not resolution. It's what happens when we stop trying to fix the contradiction and start letting it speak. So there we are.
That's the four part framework for critical thinking. But where do you start improving your critical thinking? Where do you even know where you might be lacking in that area? And there's a couple of questions that I think are really useful for this. Ask yourself, what groups of people, political issues, or ideas do I avoid?
What makes me uncomfortable? Who or what do I fear or hate the most? That's where your work is. And are you open to being wrong about your current theory? You don't have to agree with the other side, but if you refuse to endure a little discomfort in order to actually gather more information and understand the perspectives of people who disagree with you, then you are contributing to the pain and suffering of other people.
We all are. Right? We all ignorantly hold beliefs that hurt other people. And if we're not willing to look at the information, look at why this other group feels differently than us, then we're causing harm. Right?
Not only to other people, but to ourselves. When we refuse to be open to other ideas, to the possibility that we might be wrong. We hurt other people, but we also stifle our own growth. If you're an artist and you paint the same thing over and over and over again for twenty years and refuse to look at any other techniques or ideas or philosophies on art, you're stifling your own growth. So I hope that this was helpful for you in giving you a framework of how to look at information and evaluate it.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Remember, if you're not signed up for Sunday Muse, click on the link in the show notes to get signed up. Every week, you'll get a therapeutic art prompt that goes along with the podcast. So if you want to take this work a little deeper, if you want a easy way to start engaging in creativity, I will deliver it to your inbox once a week. So make sure you sign up.
Thanks again. Thank you so much for joining me today on Mormon to Muse. I hope this episode helped you feel seen, supported, and inspired to explore your healing through creativity. Before we go, I want to remind you that while I'm a certified life coach, I'm not a licensed therapist. The tools and conversations I offer here are for personal growth and creative healing, but they're not a substitute for professional mental health support.
If you're struggling with trauma, depression, or thoughts about hurting yourself or someone else, please reach out to a qualified therapist. Until next time, take care of yourself and keep creating.
