The Mormon church reinforces adherence to its doctrines, many of which are quite strange, by encouraging its members to take the personal experience of intense emotional response as confirmation of religious belief The author, who previously justified his Mormon beliefs based on his experience of “a spiritual witness,” explains how a conversation with an evangelical Christian friend inadvertently exposed to him the shortcomings of this emotion- based approach. This led him from an emotional to an evidence-based epistemology and away from Mormonism and religion in general.