Times come and times go, but religion provides an anchor of constancy (if an anchor’s what you need). So it’s good to see Mormon apostle Russell Nelson engaging in the time-honored religious tradition of slagging science.
Well, that’s not fair. If there’s science that they like, then it’s a gift from god. If they don’t like the science, then it’s either Satan’s deception, or some irrelevant wild guess that will get resolved in the fulness of time.
Here’s the clip (from 7:12).
“Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, ‘Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?’ The likelihood is most remote. But if so, it could never heal its own torn pages or reproduce its own newer editions.”
The printer’s shop analogy is extremely tired — evolution is not ‘by chance’! Mutation is, but natural selection is non-random. So yes, if books could reproduce and if only the fittest books survived to reproduce, then yes, we would see books that could heal torn pages and update themselves. Nelson is making a false analogy between a living being and an inanimate object, and the two have different qualities.
Analogy aside, what Elder Nelson has done must be very strange and uncomfortable for Mormons. He’s waded into science, and sneered at ideas from biology, physics, and cosmology that he doesn’t undertand, and that there’s real evidence for and no real reason to disbelieve.
To see why this is such weird territory he’s in, let’s take a look at mentions of ‘evolve’ or ‘evolution’ in General Conferences.
Predictably, the most mentions came when evolution was a new theory, and religious people were scrambling to figure out what to do about it. It popped up again as more young people started attending universities, and horrifying their religious parents with the science they were learning. Since then, things were calming down to background levels. The two words ‘evolution’ and ‘evolve’ weren’t even mentioned in all the 1990s! The last time Darwinian evolution was mentioned in General Conference was in 1984, when Bruce McConkie and Boyd Packer both had a bash. That’s 28 years of letting it lay.
So the scene was set for the LDS Church to let the issue go, accommodate evolution, and claim that they were never really against it, which is how they seem to resolve all their old conflicts. Instead, Nelson has recycled his old material, and renewed the attack. That’s going to take some time to walk back.
And just for comparison, no GA has ever trashed the Big Bang — the phrase doesn’t appear in the entire GC corpus. Nelson is really in deep water here.
What must intelligent Mormons be thinking?
a. Oh, Grandpa!
b. Um, are we not supposed to believe in the Big Bang now?
c. He spake as a man.
d. Let’s go shopping!
e. We just heard how not everything from the pulpit is doctrine, so no problem!
f. Holy fuck. This guy is a leader of my church, supposedly getting revelation from god, and he’s completely and unambiguously wrong. What else is he wrong about?
Because he is wrong. He’s proudly ignorant, making a joke out of something he doesn’t understand, and expecting the audience to laugh along. (Which of course they did, nervously.) He’s coming off as really dumb, and he’s considered one of the smart ones! (He was a doctor, doncha know.)
The takeaway: A major LDS leader just put himself (and the church) up against science. Are Mormons creationists now? Or is it possible to ignore an apostle?
Will this shake some educated Mormons up? The likelihood is most remote! But I think it should be a really big deal, and I’d like to hear from some smarter Mormons to see how they’re coping with this.
I got to interview linguist Dan Everett last week for an episode of the ‘Talk the Talk‘ podcast.
He’s well-known for his work with the Pirahã people, and we talked about the implications of their language for linguistic theory. But the Pirahã people also served as a catalyst for his deconversion from Christianity, as he has discussed in this video from Fora TV.
So after all the talk about language, I got to ask him about atheism.
– – – – – – – – – – Daniel Midgley: I’m just curious about atheism. As an atheist myself, I liked reading about your deconversion, but I think that must have been a really difficult time for you.
Dan Everett: Yeah, it was a very difficult time for me. I mean, I was raised with a complete apathy towards religion, and would have considered myself an atheist until I was about 17, when I had a dramatic conversion experience in San Diego in the 60s. And that was very useful; it got me off drugs and other things I was doing that I shouldn’t have been doing. And I met a family who had been missionaries in the Amazon for many years. That got me interested in the Amazon. And when you become a missionary, not only is your faith a personal thing, but it becomes a very public thing. You are being supported financially to do something based on what you say you believe. You’ve raised your family a certain way. So now suddenly to say, “Oh, wait, I don’t believe this stuff anymore,” it causes friends who’ve been giving money to you to help you do this work, and your family — it produces all sorts of trauma. Even when you would rather that it not do that, but at some point you have to say, “I don’t believe this stuff anymore for a number of reasons, and I can’t be dishonest and pretend that I do. I have to just say that I don’t, and take the consequences.
DM: It’s really hard to come out. I had not quite the same experience, but I used to be a Mormon, and I did the whole two year mission that they do. And there’s something about when you feel like you have to say that you believe something, it becomes very difficult — when you’re very much invested, it becomes very difficult to deconvert, I think.
DE: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And so you would know from your Mormon background almost exactly what it was to go through this huge social pressure, and a lot of people that you like very much.
The other really interesting thing is there is no… I’ve never found a social equivalent to church for atheists. I mean, we don’t get together on a regular basis and sing songs and take care of each others’ children and have potlucks, because atheists don’t share beliefs. They just don’t believe something. And so we don’t have the same positive unifying force as people who share beliefs. And so once you do make that decision, you lose a certain social network that you had before, that, whatever it was based on, was psychologcally supportive. So there are a number of pressures that don’t involve threats that keep people believing, even when their inner brains tell them, “This doesn’t make any sense.”
DM: Do you think humanism could fill in the gaps somewhere?
DE: I’d like to think that it could, but I think that many of us who are atheists are pretty independent-minded anyway. So it’s difficult. I belong to a couple of humanistic societies, and I get their newsletters, and I’m encouraged by what they do, but they don’t have any particular events that look like a lot of fun that I’d like to go to. But I do enjoy the symphony and I enjoy going to concerts and things like that, so those things have to become church to me.
DM: Do you identify with the New Atheism crowd, Dawkins and Myers and skeptics like that?
DE: My view of Dawkins’ book in particular is that … somebody wrote me one time and said “I suspected that Dawkins was an atheist, but I just didn’t realise that he was an amateur atheist!” And my view is that… I respect what they’re doing. I think that, you know, my favourite writer in this regard is Christopher Hitchens. But at the same time, I don’t think that people have done a very good job of trying to understand the cultural meaning that people find in the social attraction in religion, and why really really intelligent people can be religious. I think that just to say that this is all stupid, and anybody who believes this stuff is an idiot… you know, I can see the appeal in saying something like that, but it doesn’t really give a satisfying explanation to me. So while I think there need to be writings trying to lay out the case against theism and why it can be a very negative force, I think we have to do it with understanding and compassion in a way that I haven’t really seen in much of the New Atheism writing.
DM: I think one of the approaches that a lot of people take is that we need a multiplicity of approaches — we have people that, you know, mock and ridicule because that fires up the base and it can shake some people, but then we also have the ‘nice atheists’ who understand what it was like to be maybe a fundamentalist and can approach things a little more gently.
DE: Yeah, as I say, even having said what I just said about the need for more compassion I still find Christopher Hitchens’ work to be absolutely hilarious and wonderful to read and he just brings so much wit to the process. But still, it’s got to be aggravating and I don’t know who it would convince if they believe fervently the other way. So I agree. There needs to be a multiplicity of approaches, and among other atheists, I don’t need to hold back my opinion of theism, but when I’m with… you know, I have people that I love and respect very much who are strong believers, and I don’t hold back — I tell them what I think — but at the same time it would never occur to me to insult them because they believe differently than me.
DM: I tend to say: I respect people but I don’t respect ideas.
DE: Yeah, I agree with that. I completely agree with that. It’s just that sometimes people that we respect hold ideas that we hate. And so we have to speak to those ideas. And there are some times when there’s just no way to be diplomatic about it. So if I say, you know, “I don’t believe in God, and Jesus is not my saviour,” well, that’s what I believe and there are some people who are going to be offended by that no matter how nice I try to say it, but that is the bottom line.
DM: Sometimes you have to say, “I’m not going to sugar-coat this for you. That’s how it is.”
DE: I agree with that, too. Yeah, there are times you just have to say it. My grandkids come up to me, and they say, “Are you afraid of going to hell?” And I said, “No, I’m not.” But I said, “You don’t need to be afraid about it either, because even if there is a hell, you didn’t send me there. I make my own decisions, and I’ll have to deal with it when I die. But I don’t believe I’m going to such a place.”
DM: How do the other family members feel about that?
DE: They’ve become pretty understanding of me nowadays. I mean, it was hard initially for a number of reasons because I made the announcement of my atheism, and that was a very strong contributing factor to my divorce, and the divorce in itself was traumatic, so there’s a lot of stuff going on. But right now they’re all quite understanding of me, and they tolerate me. More than tolerate; they love me as their father, but you know, I don’t bring these things up all the time. Sometimes sitting around at one of my daughters’ homes, their sons will ask me or daughters, you know, what do you think about this? And I don’t lie and I don’t hold back.
DM: I found that my linguistics kind of informed my atheism in a way. Like I used to be a literal Tower-of-Babel believer on some level, even if I never thought about it very much, because I was kind of a literalist, like a lot of Mormons, I think.
DE: Uh-huh.
DM: Did your linguistics factor in?
DE: In a different way. My linguistics factored in for two reasons. One, it was teaching me how to think scientifically. And two, it brought me into contact with other people who were thinking scientifically. It gave me a different social crowd. And I realised that I admired this crowd more — that people who reasoned, however imperfectly, in a scientific way, seemed to be more interesting people than people who did not reason in a scientific way, the people who simply based everything on what they interpreted a book written a couple of thousand years ago said. So it was very appealing, and also I didn’t like all the rules and regulation of religion, to tell you the truth. I was very happy to be able to think for myself about what I thought morality should be, and what I can and can’t do.
There’s an amazingly clueless blog post on the Millennial Star about Mormon proxy baptism, in which author Geoff B. helpfully instructs people on
How to respond when a church says it is baptizing your dead
His response is: What’s the harm? If we think that it’s just a silly ceremony, then no harm done. Why, we should be glad that they took the time to do something nice for our ancestors. What a thoughtful gesture! We should send flowers and a nice note.
The whole post (and subsequent comments) show the signs of having been written by someone who thinks their church is wonderful, that eveything they do in the service of their church is an unalloyed good, and that they are therefore incapable of overreach.
Let’s back up a bit. What’s the deal with Mormon proxy ordinances? If you haven’t heard about it from Bill Maher or Stephen Colbert, read on.
There’s a tough problem in Christianity: Everybody who has ever lived needs to accept Jeebus through baptism, but what about people who lived before him? Do they go to hell? Does god give them a pass if they were nice? Or what? Mormons have resolved this problem in a very creative and time-consuming way: they collect names from genealogical records, dunk each other while thinking of a person’s name, and then pretend that the person gets to choose to accept the ordinance in the afterlife. I think this is a terribly creative solution to a knotty problem in Christianity, and the fact that it’s such an elaborate work-around to a problem that god should have really thought of before is a testament to
a) the theological difficulty of the problem
b) the creative genius of Joseph Smith, and
c) the lengths people will go to in the service of their silly religions.
Mormons think this work is incredibly important, even quoting Malachi:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
Ponder for a second. The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, serving as the habitat for trillions of creatures who have lived and died on it. And Mormons think that if they don’t sit in the dark and extract names from squeaky microfilm readers and then necrodunk each other, it’s all for naught, and Jeebus will smite us all with a curse. What a horrible lack of perspective.
One nice effect of proxy work (from the point of view of head office in Salt Lake City) is that it keeps Mormons coming back to the temples (and paying tithing) as often as possible. Perhaps this is why there doesn’t seem to be much attention paid to dunking everyone only once. Anne Frank, for instance, has been baptised at least nine times.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned enough in connection with all of this is that it isn’t just baptism. Mormons perform the full range of church ordinances on the deceased, including the ‘washing and anointing’, temple sealings, and something called the ‘endowment’, in which Mormons wear clothes that look like this:
All right, so what’s the harm in all this? As mundane as this sounds, I think it’s a boundary issue. Yes, Mormons make the audacious claim that everyone needs to be a Mormon, and yes, it’s annoying, but if people want to make the choice to be Mormons themselves, so be it. But to many people, monkeying around with someone else’s religious status post mortem seems just a mite invasive.
Some people like their faith tradition. They’ve had it for years. They might identify as X even though they never do anything X. These things seem to matter. So for a non-believer, the idea that unrelated peopole could hijack your ancestors, and aid them in becoming a part of some completely different faith tradition (and there’s not a thing you can do about it) is deeply unsettling. It rubs people the wrong way, and because it involves performing a symbolic act upon a deceased member of someone else’s family, it’s a particularly egregious way to rub someone the wrong way. That Mormons don’t seem to comprehend why anyone would object to this is indictive of their insularity and cluelessness, and perhaps they would benefit from pondering how they’d feel if someone tried to make their deceased relatives gay or something.
Back to Anne Frank. Mormons have copped flak for baptising Jews killed in the Holocaust. For Jews, there’s an extra layer of ouchiness. See, Mormons think that Israel is a chosen people, and by believing in Jesus (as they think the Jews should have done), they become a part of Israel — the Israel that god always intended. They take Paul at his word when he said that they would become “grafted in” to the olive tree. To show how seriously they take this, Mormons even assign themselves to one of the tribes of Israel. In a ritual called a “patriarchal blessing”, an older Mormon gentleman lays his hands on your head, does some free associating and cold reading, and makes predictions about the rest of your life. Mormons think it’s personal scripture, straight from god. And during the blessing, the partriarch names which specific tribe of Israel you’re from. I was from Ephraim, like every white guy, but I’ve known people allegedly from Dan, Manasseh, and even Levi. It’s all BS, but it shows just how much Mormons want to co-opt the whole Israelite thing, and claim it for their own. And therein lies the ouchiness. Mormons think they’re Israel in ways that Jews are not, not fully. And the only way Jews can be Israel-for-reals is to go through the Mormon Church. So converting Jews to make them Mormons — Israel in the latter days — seems like, if not ethnic cleansing, ethnic supplanting.
So if Mormons reading this could get one thing out of it, it would be that symbolism matters, and the posthumous Mormonising could be seen not as a nice gesture, but as a gesture of hostility and of religious and cultural imperialism. Does it do anything metaphysical? No. Is it an antagonising gesture? Yes.
UPDATE: Seriously, check out the unapologetic comments on the post. The commenters are unapologetic about carrying out what is, after all, one of the main aims of the church. To do otherwise would be disobedient to their god. It shows how people under the influence of religion don’t play well with others. And it explains why the Mormon Church can’t be honest when it gets caught at this kind of thing, and “promises” to knock it off.
While reading a post on Wheat and Tares, I tripped over this term: “inspired fiction”. I decided I’ve been ignoring it long enough.
If you want to be a Mormon, but you don’t think that the Book of Mormon is literally true, you could call it “inspired fiction”. This means that instead of thinking Joseph Smith made up a bunch of stories that aren’t true, God told Joseph Smith to make up a bunch of stories that aren’t true. (What’s the difference? Well, if God does it, it’s all right, you see.)
When I see someone taking this tack, it’s like they’re saying, “Oh, of course the Emperor has no socks, but the rest of his couture is exquisite!” It’s a partial credit situation; points for realising it’s not true, but demerits for going along with it anyway. Call me crazy, but it matters to me if my beliefs are true. If it’s not true, I don’t have time for it.
What about the idea that, although not true, the stories in the Book of Mormon are good moral stories that can help you to live a better life? That’s where it all comes down. The Book of Mormon’s a terrible guide for moral living! Here’s what you’ll find:
Are there no other fictional books that people could use as a guide for life? Of course there are, but it doesn’t really matter to these people — I suspect the reason they’ve mistaken this awful book for a guide is that either they’re tied to it by their social group, or maybe they enjoyed reading it and believing in it once, and they can’t bear to relinquish it completely. Which is kind of sad. I can understand if someone thinks these stories are a literal true account of the dealings of a cruel god that they have no choice but to obey — who can say how they’d act in a hostage situation? But imagine not thinking this stuff is true, and digging on it anyway. Somehow I think that’s worse.
I couldn’t believe it. There I was watching the NYE festivities, waiting for the ball to drop, and Cee-Lo Green is doing a version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Hm, thought I, a secular song. Wonder if he’ll tamper with it. And, sure enough, instead of “and no religion too”, he decides to slide in “and all religion’s true”.
How does that work? “Imagine there’s no heaven… And all religion’s true.” All religion can’t be true! They teach mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting things.
Couldn’t we just have one atheist song performed in public this holiday season? You know, all Xmas long, I sang songs about Jebus, and I wasn’t that happy about it, especially because Xtianity is not the whole point of Xmas. But I sang them anyway, words intact. And fuckers in the USA can’t even play an atheistic song straight. Seriously, fuck you, Cee-Lo Green, even though I don’t know who you are. You’re a horrible singer.
That does it. Now I’m going to give Xtians the War on Xmas they always thought they were getting. Tooth and nail. Anybody says anything remotely religious around me, I’m going to tell them they’re a deluded fool. It’s war.
Another thing. Someone asks me if I want to go to church on Xmas, I’m going to tell them they are wasting their time in that place. I went this year, and I was nice about it. No more. What’s the two things that apologists always say in defense of religion? They have great music, and they have great architecture. Well, I went to church, and the music was excruciating, and it was being done to me in a horrible featureless suburban church building. Fuck you, Mormon church.
In a year, all the religious people will thank me for speaking out and helping them see how they were wrong. If not, fuck them anyway. Fuck cultural deism, fuck Xmas carols, and fuck default Xtianity.
Dear Daniel: In other churches, people go to church on Christmas. There’s a Christmas Eve service at midnight, another in the morning, and maybe even again that night! It’s all they do! But Mormons seem to do it differently. They don’t go to church at all on Christmas if it’s not on a Sunday, and if it is, they actually reduce the length of the meetings. Why do Latter-day Saints do it this way?
Dear Nobody:
It’s because Mormons secretly loathe and detest their church meetings, and look for any way to avoid them if they have anything better to do. And who can blame them? Between the well-meaning but excruciating ward choir numbers, amateurish talks, infantile lesson manuals, and other people’s screechy children, many Mormons are under the (probably correct) impression that their meetings are the worst part of being in the church.
The Mormon method of worship has a lot to do with this. At their meetings, Mormons try to ‘feel the Spirit’. This essentially involves boring themselves into a quasi-meditative state in which any sensation they feel is assumed to be the Holy Ghost. No wonder they gratefully escape when there’s an opportunity to do something fun with family.
As for other churches, they ramp up their Christmas services because they secretly loathe and detest themselves.
Even though I’m no longer a Mormon, I still act like one in some ways. I still haven’t drunk alcohol (ever). Never smoked or tried illegal drugs. I guess arbitrary religious rules can exert quite a hold on one, especially rules pertaining to food and drink. Or maybe I was just never curious. Either way, breaking the Mormon “Word of Wisdom” still seems terribly transgressive. Sex before marriage? Yes, please. Deny the holy ghost? Why not? But trying coffee? Whoa, that’s really out there. Totally badass, yo.
Miss Perfect, my girlfriend/partner/fiancée, does drink coffee, and at a café once I timidly ventured a slurp of her demon drink. I say “demon drink” because it tasted like it came out of the ass of one of the legions of hell. No, wait — you know how you burn an entire pot of beans, and then you have to labouriously scrape it out to clean it? It tasted like the water at the bottom of the pot.
“That wasn’t very good coffee,” said she.
I thought it was probably a flawed concept from the beginning. Sure, you could make it taste okay if you added enough sugar and milk. But as Sandra Boynton said of carob, the same argument could be convincingly advanced in favour of dirt. I thought I’d stick to chocolate as my bean derivative of choice.
But I kept taking the occasional slurp (and making the occasional face). Some people say you can push past it. It got better.
And so when we found ourselves in Seattle, we sat down with a Starbucks latté and a Cinnabon, and I found myself sampling more than usual of the brew. The aroma reminded me of supermarket trips when I would eye the forbidden coffee beans (lined up in plexiglas containers, singing their tiny sirens’ song) with trepidation and fascination. And this time the taste, bitter by design, was just right for cutting the extreme sweetness of the sticky buttery bun. Complementary.
I had an online discussion (or perhaps a “run-in”) with a Mormon guy who I disagreed with on some issue. The issue isn’t important (gay people). What was interesting was his way of dealing with the disagreement. His response was essentially: I don’t expect you to agree with me. I’m a Mormon. You’re an ex-Mormon atheist. Our worldviews are too different.
Now I think this is a cop-out. I’m very open to hearing other views, and if they’re based on sound evidence and logic, I’ll even change my mind. But his “different worldview” view allowed him to miscast my reasons for not accepting his argument. It wasn’t that his reasons or his argument weren’t good ones; no, no. It was that I wasn’t open to change, or that our views just weren’t reconcilable.
I think this is projection on his part. While reason and evidence would change my mind, I seriously doubt that it would change his. He’s the one who is immune to reasoned argument because reason isn’t how he arrived at his religious opinion. And if he tries to use secular arguments, they’ll be hollow because they’re not his real reasons. He’s just using them to justify his religious reasons. He hauls out the secular reasons when he’s talking to secular people, but if those arguments are faulty, it won’t affect him at all. He’ll just shrug and keep believing.
I mentioned the discussion to an ex-Mormon friend who knows him, and to my surprise she said essentially the same thing: What did you expect? He’s a Mormon. He lives in Provo, for crying out loud.
I find this baffling. Here I am on the blog, and a lot of readers probably agree with things I write because, after all, we can’t read everything, and we like to pick things to read that make us feel good about our worldview. (Or I do.) But I’m also happy to engage with readers who disagree, and in fact I hope I get a lot of them. I learn a lot more that way, and it’s more interesting. But I feel like I’m standing on a chasm, shouting to ideological opposites.
Is there any point to discussing things? (Have I done any good on the blog today?) Or are we doomed to be divided into two camps that can never understand each other because of our different worldviews? I don’t think so. I think there’s a point to engaging in the Great Debates for two reasons.
First, people do change their views. I have, quite a lot, and I’ll do it again. Engaging with others is my way of saying that maybe no one’s beyond hope. Okay, maybe an online discussion won’t change the committed, in which case I’ll still keep arguing and discussing because I’m not trying to convince the committed — I’m trying to convince uncommitted bystanders.
The other reason I engage is that if I’m wrong about something, I want to know about it. How is it that I can say so confidently that there’s no evidence for the Book of Mormon? that that arguments for gods are uniformly awful? Because I’m here on the blog, and anyone who wants to can tell me something I don’t know, and I’ll consider it and change my mind if necessary. It’s not just meme propagation. It’s my continuing education.
Religious movements of the 1800s just couldn’t wait for Jesus to come back, and Mormonism was very much a product of its time. Did Joseph Smith make a firm prediction about it, or did he not? I guess when the name of your church includes “Latter-day Saints”, you’re expecting it to be pretty soon.
Accordingly, every single youth leader I ever had was utterly convinced that our generation was going to usher in Christ’s return. There were breathless reports of patriarchal blessings that said, “Yep, you’ll be alive for the whole wrapping up.”
The end is not near, senior LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer said Saturday.
Today’s youths can look forward to “getting married, having a family, seeing your children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren,” Packer told more than 20,000 Mormons gathered in the giant LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City.
I always wondered if perhaps one of the cast members of the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon might be an ex-LDS-missionary in real life. And one is. Ain’t it funny how life works out? You must admit, it would give an actor a special kind of qualification for the part.
Enter me (from stage right): an ex-missionary, now ex-Mormon and a gay to boot (A triple threat?). But for me, being a Latter-Day Saint meant a lot more than donning a white shirt, dark pants, a tie, and a slick black name tag bearing the title of Elder—it was my life. My entire life.
He describes his mission experience as quite positive — good for him — but he loses me at the end.
But beyond being a preparatory experience, my mission and my time as a Mormon overall were very rich and special to me. I used to think that this was because of the system of beliefs themselves: that without the church I would feel sad, lost and broken. Since leaving the church I have realized that what was so beneficial and sacred about the religion in my life was not what I had faith in specifically, but rather the having of the faith.
As The Book of Mormon’s Elder Cunningham accidentally discovers, it doesn’t matter what people believe in if what they believe has the ability to unite them and inspire them to serve one another and love each other freely. Their beliefs can be silly—absurd, even—but that doesn’t matter. It’s the believing that counts.
This is, perhaps not coincidentally, the central conceit of The Book of Mormon; that belief in something, even if it’s entirely made-up, can still be good because of its power to create social unity. The problem here is that, while religion does a lot to build unity within the group, it builds walls and creates intractable conflict between people of different faiths. I bet anyone could think of about 4 or 5 examples without trying too hard.
There’s the epistemological side, too: Believing in something (which is likely to be wrong) is worse than believing in nothing. When you believe in nothing, you may at least be open to learning something. But when you believe in something wrong, you think you’re right, and it’s very difficult to shift. Bad information is worse than no information. Faith actually blocks understanding.
I still love the show. Well, I haven’t actually seen the show, so I’m basing this only on the soundtrack and things I’ve read. I’d like to return to this idea when I manage to get to the USA and actually see it, which I am currently planning to do.
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