Gadianton wrote:[W]hat I'm saying is that [Mormon testimony is] a straight-up fabrication, not a real event that was misunderstood, and most of them know it, and testimony insecurity is yet another huge problems most TBMs have.
And yet:
I believe .. that most TBMs, especially lifers, really have it stuck in their mind that the Church is true. ... [T]here is a sincere commitment to truth operating here. ... [T]he typical TBM really believes it's "true" and when the member dares look into the box, and their web of false information is assailed from every angle, the obvious choice is that one must leave the Church (or mentally leave it and stay for family), and that's what usually happens.
I'm not accusing you of self-contradiction, just trying to emphasize that the scenario you present is paradoxical.
Convinced Mormons often emphasize that evidence and reason are only secondary grounds for their faith, which is primarily based on personal spiritual experience. You seem to be saying that this is only what Mormons know they are supposed to say, and that in fact few if any really have any such spiritual experience. Instead of one naked emperor, Mormonism is a whole naked empire in which everyone thinks that everyone else has magnificent clothes.
I can't see inside anyone else's head but I'd be surprised if most Mormons were really conscious of having no personal spiritual witness at all. What I rather expect is that most can recall some kind of experience which maybe could have been the Holy Ghost doing something, perhaps. Under peer pressure and from desire to believe, they decide that this actually rather underwhelming experience must have been their witness. They blame themselves for its inadequacy and try to make up retroactively by thinking about it as a life-changing event: a humble shrine faithfully tended because it's all that they have.
If that scenario is true very often then I'd have to say that I can understand individual Mormons trying to bolster their inadequate testimonies however they can, but getting everyone to accept lukewarm experiences as transcendence is like making everyone marry their high-school sweethearts. The advice to "find a testimony in the bearing of it" may come as a relief to Mormons who long for a reliable way of finally landing that elusive testimony but to me it's really creepy.
Your theory then seems to be that most Mormons are in fact basing their beliefs in the ordinary human way on a web of argument and evidence. It's a big web with a fair amount of redundancy but it can crumble and if it does, the witness of the Holy Ghost is like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.