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Category: Mormonism (page 5 of 12)

Atheism and agnosticism in LDS General Conference talks

25 September 2011 / / 2 Comments

Here’s a great tool that you can use to plow through General Conference talks.

I looked for references to words relating to atheism and agnosticism. I used the wild card, so my search terms were atheis* and agnosti*.

And here is the data, converted into a handy chart. (This chart is additive, so the data for atheis* is stacked on top of agnosti*.)

Click to enlarge.

Wow! Look at that spike in the 1960s! Most of this bump is due to talks by Ezra Taft Benson and Mark E. Petersen, who both liked to warn people against ‘godless communism’. Petersen even invoked what he thought was Lincoln’s prophetic warning against atheism:

Masquerading under the cloak of anthropology with great emphasis upon evolution, atheism is weakening the religious faith of the nation, and thus it also becomes an ally of the adversary. Is it any wonder that Lincoln, almost prophetically, looked into our future and foretold the perils that would confront us?

without realising that Lincoln was basically an atheist himself. Oops.

I suppose part of the 1960s bump could also be because more young Latter-day Saints were attending universities at that time, becoming acquainted with secular education, and horrifying their parents on visits home.

I don’t know why, but I’m rather surprised that Orson and Parley Pratt mentioned atheism, back in the 1850s.

As for recent times, notice the lull in a*ism from the 1980s onward. I guess atheism wasn’t on the radar until, say, The God Delusion came out. (All the mentions from the 2000s are post-2006.) That’s quite a drop-off. And it’s not coming up this decade. So far in the 2010s, nothing. (There’s one reference to ‘atheist’, in a footnote.)

So why the tail-off for a*ism in recent years? Here are some possibilities.

It’s not a concern. The numbers might have to climb a bit more before the alarm bells go off.

They dare not speak its name. Perhaps they’re keeping it positive and avoiding the mention of competitors by name. The term ‘catholi*’ has undergone a similar drop-off.

Give it time. The decade is young. If someone decides to make atheism the focus of a GC talk, it may include eight or nine mentions — a whole 80s worth in one go. Double that if it gets two speakers in the next decade, which seems likely.

I find this last scenario to be the most probable.

Monson fondly remembers 9/11

9 September 2011 / / 2 Comments

Religions are in the business of providing emotional comfort (among other things), and after 11/9/1, Americans’ sense of stability was rocked. I think this played out in a predictable way for Mormons.

I visited my US home ward in late 2001, and it was the strangest thing: I’d never heard so many references to Satan before. Naturally, when people feel like events are out of their hands (what’s known as an ‘external locus of control’), they develop superstitions, and here it was unseen malevolent agents. I saw something else on that visit that I’d never seen before: In Priesthood Meeting, they’d developed the habit of reciting their ‘group values’ in unison, chanting a sort of ‘we believe’ mantra. Even as a believer, it struck me that here was a group of people too frightened to think.

From a look at this WaPo column, Mormon president Thomas Monson sure misses that time.

There was, as many have noted, a remarkable surge of faith following the tragedy. People across the United States rediscovered the need for God and turned to Him for solace and understanding. Comfortable times were shattered. We felt the great unsteadiness of life and reached for the great steadiness of our Father in Heaven. And, as ever, we found it. Americans of all faiths came together in a remarkable way.

And the bottom line couldn’t have been better.

Side note: what’s with the capital H on ‘Him’? I haven’t seen that in Church publications since the 1920s.

Sadly, it seems that much of that renewal of faith has waned in the years that have followed. Healing has come with time, but so has indifference.

Isn’t it too bad that we don’t have more horrible tragedies to turn our hearts to god? Darned if Monson doesn’t feel some nostalgia for that time of national agony. What a ghoul.

Whether it is the best of times or the worst, He is with us. He has promised us that this will never change.

But we are less faithful than He is. By nature we are vain, frail, and foolish. We sometimes neglect God.

Then we’re even, because God was more than a little neglectful on that day. He failed to save the lives of 3,000 people, but left instead a steel cross. You know, just to let us know he’s there, thinking about us.

If you object to this, saying that ‘super-hero’ isn’t part of god’s job description, consider: What would you have done if you’d had the knowledge of what was about to happen that day, and the ability to do anything? Well, god had all that, and still failed to do what you — a normal human, with all your goods and bads — would have done. Why do people say that god is good?

Mormons talk interminably about what they call the ‘pride cycle’: People get prosperous and prideful, they forget god, then god (that sicko) burns them up in fires, buries their cities in earthquakes, or sinks them into the sea (and that was gentle Jesus, BTW). Then the people remember to grovel sufficiently before him, and he prospers them. Because it’s all about him.

One could rewrite the narrative thus: Tragedies happen, and the feeling of vulnerability drives people into authoritarian religions. But life goes on, and people stop feeling frightened, at which point they abandon superstition, becoming secular or at least joining liberal churches. Until the next tragedy. Rinse, repeat.

Small wonder, then, that Monson is banging the drum for a more godly society. The vacuum cleaner salesman wants everyone to buy vacuum cleaners, and the god salesman… you get the picture. It’s just business.

Two by two

7 September 2011 / / 2 Comments

Wow — I didn’t know you could get these.

What’s that Elder on the left doing? Ah, he’s expounding.

I think the other one is dusting off his feet. Watch out — that’s like a level 3 Harm spell when they do that. I think you can only recover from that if you’re a Mage.

Without a trace

5 September 2011 / / 1 Comment

I recently learned of L’Anse aux Meadows. It’s a place in Newfoundland, Canada where Vikings settled about 1,000 years ago. It’s the oldest European settlement in the Americas. The Vikings didn’t live there very long — only about 10 years — and it seems that there weren’t that many of them. It’s only a small site — no stables, no burials.

Yet for that small a group in so short a time, they left enough artifacts to fill a small museum.

Long-time readers will see where I’m going with this. The Book of Mormon claims to be the history of a group of people who lived in the Americas for about a thousand years, numbering in the millions. The book discusses their metalwork, their swords, their coins, their money, and much more — no evidence of which occurs in the archaeological record. And they didn’t dwindle down slowly — they were supposedly killed off quickly in wars of extinction. You’d think that something would have survived, but no.

Maybe the Nephites and Lamanites just didn’t build stuff as well as the Vikings. Or else fictional people don’t leave archaeological traces.

Purity, but without the balls.

30 July 2011 / / 1 Comment

I am so sick of sex-negative religious bullshit. And it’s not just because they fill children up with guilt and shame about their bodies and their desires. It’s also because they hector other grownups about how they should conduct their sexuality.

Take this video from the Mormon Church, for instance, which focuses on the meaning of ‘pure’. (h/t profxm)

Wow, feel the waves of pent-up energy.

George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, is big on the idea that metaphors are instrumental in guiding our thinking. And it seems to me that the metaphor of ‘SEXUAL ABSTINENCE IS PURITY’ is being used as a giant Trojan Horse to smuggle in a very sex-negative view.

I’m going to put on my cognitive linguist hat, and try to unpack what’s going on with this metaphor.

1. Who would disagree with ‘purity’? If purity is an unquestionable good, then going up against it makes you automatically bad. This is an underhanded tactic commonly used when ideas aren’t strong enough to be accepted when stated clearly. Run ‘abstinence’ up the flagpole, and who salutes? Sexually repressed ninnies and religious folk (lots of overlap there, though). Call it ‘purity’ instead, and it’s a lot more palatable.

2. A thing becomes impure by having something else put into it. A pure vial of water becomes impure with the addition of some other liquid. A hypothetical Miss X, before intercourse, was just herself, presumably with no liquids added. She was, if you will, a pure vessel, unadulterated. (Ah, le mot juste. It nicely preserves the etymological link to ‘adultery’.) But after sex with Mr Y, she is impure, coated with someone else’s sticky remnants inside her.

3. Mr Y, on the other hand, doesn’t have very much put into him during (typical) sex. Which is kind of a shame, because it can be nice if done well. Sex doesn’t impurify men. They’re still 100% themselves (minus a few teaspoons).

4. So, taking this metaphor to a logical conclusion, the consequences of impurity should therefore be more serious for women than for men, since according to this metaphor the Anti-Sex Brigade is handing us, they have more to lose in the purity game.

We could therefore make a prediction that the bulk of efforts toward maintaining ‘purity’ would focus on women. And indeed, they do. Is it surprising that the young women in the video says the emotional consequences of having sex are serious, “especially for girls”? The Book of Mormon even says that the Lord delights in the chastity of women. And so the Church obsesses over female ‘purity’, while ignoring the fact that Joseph Smith got as much ass as any sex guru in the modern era (with the possible exception of Brigham Young).

As a linguist, I’m not a fan of language engineering; language is such a big thing that it’s hard for any one person or group of people to move it. But this is one instance where the use has taken hold among the religious community, and now they’re trying to export it to the rest of us. This is kind of a thing for Christians, who have taken a lot of good words for good things, and crammed them into their own sex-hating definitions.

It’s not just the word ‘purity’. It’s also the word ‘morality’. As a Mormon living within the Mormon speech community, I came to think of morality in terms of sexual morality, not in terms of what it took to be a moral person. For many Christians, Bush was a ‘moral’ leader even though he lied about Iraq, but Clinton was ‘immoral’ because he got a blow job. This is a perverted standard of morality.

‘Virtue‘ is another. It comes from Latin vir meaning ‘man’ and it once meant something like ‘excellence’ and ‘valor’. But that’s not the prevailing sense among Latter-day Saints, where it just means ‘sexual abstinence’.

This use of language debases these concepts among its users, and elevates a standard of behaviour that is easy to measure, but which does nothing to promote actual morality, virtue, or purity.

Lectures on Doubt: What faith is

28 July 2011 / / 5 Comments

I once described faith as “the willingness to suspend critical reasoning facilities in the service of a belief for which there is no adequate evidence”. Not everyone likes this definition (strangely), so I thought I’d return to the topic of faith and refine it a bit.

You might think it’s strange for an atheist to talk about faith in the first place. Perhaps you’d say I couldn’t give it a fair treatment, since I don’t have any. Which is a typical faith-y thing to say: you don’t really understand faith (or you’re not qualified to speak about it) unless you’ve fallen for it completely. You have to take the leap, and then you’ll get it. However, if ‘faith’ means ‘fooling yourself’, then a person of faith would be the worst person to ask about it. Anyway, humour me. Treat me as a somewhat objective observer. Have a little faith.

On the other hand, you may take exception to my claim that I don’t have any faith. Of course I do, you might say. It takes faith to do anything! It takes faith to be an atheist, I’ve been told. My Uncle Richard used to say that it takes faith to believe that the floor will be there when you get out of bed in the morning. It takes faith for scientists to study a cure for cancer, since they don’t know that they’ll be successful. It takes faith to believe in, say, evolution. So I’ve been told.

I don’t believe it. When people use this reasoning, they’re stretching the definition of faith to encompass everything, which intrudes on other concepts that we already have words for. Defining ‘faith’ this way makes the word meaningless.

The key insight to what faith is hinges on an understanding of its relationship to evidence, and it’s this: If you have evidence for something, you do not need faith in that thing. You just need to open your eyes. For this reason, I describe faith as belief without evidence.

The Book of Mormon agrees fairly well with this assessment. (It’s not a source I think much of, but some people do.) It says that once you know something, your faith becomes dormant.

32:17 Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe.

32:18 Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.

Faith is only necessary in the absence of knowledge, according to this author. I’d agree. Insofar as evidence brings you knowledge of a thing, there is no need for faith in that thing where there is evidence for it.

So with that in mind, let’s go back to those who think that everything requires faith. Does it require faith to put your feet on the floor, believing it will be there? No. I have a lot of evidence that the floor has been there on previous mornings, and I can infer with some degree of certainty that this morning will be like other mornings. There’s a very high probability that the floor will be there, based on the evidence. (If tomorrow morning I turn out to be wrong and fall through the floor, I’ll update accordingly.) I may have a ‘belief’ that the floor will be there, but ‘belief’ is not the same as ‘faith’. I have a ‘belief’ that I am sitting at a computer writing this, but since this belief is well in evidence, I don’t need to exercise any faith in it.

Does a scientist need faith to work on a cure for cancer? No. A scientist may have a reasonable expectation of success, based on (again) evidence, but this is not the same as ‘faith’. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe this situation as ordinary ‘reasoning under uncertainty’, the kind we engage in every day. Or perhaps ‘hope’.

Do we need to have faith in scientific theories, like evolution? Not at all. You can ask a scientist what evidence led them to that conclusion, and they can tell you. Even better, you can replicate those results yourself, given time, equipment, and expertise. Of course, I haven’t actually replicated many scientific results myself. Do I therefore have faith in the scientists? No. It’s true that scientists typically function in what could be called a climate of ‘trust’, but this is optional. People in science can review each others’ results — no faith required.

What happens in faith is something like this: You don’t have evidence for something, but you wish it were true, so your faith makes up the difference and allows you to keep believing. It’s not knowing something, but believing it anyway. In other words, it’s wishful thinking.

Things that you have faith in may not always turn out to be wrong, but they’re likely to be, since it’s kind of hard to get things right. To get something right, you have to observe, generate ideas about what’s happening, control the natural tendency to see what we want to see, and figure out what it would take to prove your idea wrong. Even after you’ve gotten it mostly right, your idea might need to be refined, or overturned entirely if the evidence demands. That’s the cost of making reality your guide. But if you have faith, and you are unmoored from reality, you just keep believing whatever you want! Isn’t that easy?

Well, no. Having faith is not easy, especially when contrary evidence is staring you in the face. That’s when it takes a lot of tenacity to hold on to faith by sheer force of will. I can see why people would consider it a virtue, since it does take a lot of effort. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people speak of ‘exercising’ faith.

But rather than exercise faith in things for which we lack adequate evidence, how much better it would be to find out the facts, and when facts are scarce, to keep an open mind. Faith needs to be thrown out, and where possible, to be replaced with knowledge.

I give it one star

17 July 2011 / / 6 Comments

You’ve got to give the the LDS Church credit for working the Internet. One of their latest suggestions for members eager to share that gospel message is here (h/t Chino):

Google Reviews for LDS Chapels

This task involves submitting a review of your local meetinghouse to Google. Doing so will help make our local meetinghouses more visible in Google searches for people who are looking for a church to attend.

People can submit Google reviews for churches? Sounds like fun!

You may find a visit here to be pleasant enough. If you decide to investigate the church more in-depth, you will be presented with an escalating series of commitments. At first, it’s going to 3-hour church meetings and reading the Book of Mormon. Eventually, you’ll have promised to give the church 10% of your income and even more of your time. They offer no evidence for their many outlandish claims, including God living near a star named Kolob, or ancient Hebrews building boats and sailing to America. You’re meant to accept all this based on feelings, which are no subsitute for evidence. Mormons are generally nice people, but you probably have better things to do.

Try writing one for your local meetinghouse. It’s hard to be concise, but the real trick is to sound sensible and well-reasoned. If you start raving about underwear, then you sound like the crazy one. It’s so unfair.

If you attack the Church, you are attacking me.

6 July 2011 / / 8 Comments

Many times, when I make criticisms of religion (or a religion), various practitioners take it personally and say that I’m attacking them.

My answer is: No, I’m not attacking you; I’m attacking your church. If you can’t tell the difference between your church and yourself, then you have made a serious mistake. What that means is that you are identifying too closely with the organisation. You have conflated your goals, your future, and your identity with those of the group. You need to fix this. It’s not healthy to confuse your own identity with other things that are not you. (It is understandable that high-commitment religions are slow to correct this tendency. It works overwhelmingly to their advantage.)

Many religious folks are able to differentiate, and I quite enjoy talking to them. Many thanks if you’re one of these. I have a harder time with the internalisers. I’ve just had an multi-day online discussion where I started with this notion:

Churches are (among other things) safe places for weak ideas. They’re like shelters for ideas that can’t defend themselves.

I thought this was an interesting idea. I’d always considered that ideas keep religions going, but this was the opposite — the idea that churches exist as social life-support systems for their ideas — and it hinted at a commensal relationship. I was hoping for a bit of discussion on the topic. Oh, that it were possible.

It didn’t take long before a believer insisted that I was just ‘having a go’ at religion and that I was implying that all religious people were ‘weak-minded fools’. I don’t think this, but if someone wanted evidence to the contrary, it was not to be found from his comments. He insisted (without evidence) that angels and demons were real, that science ‘didn’t know everything’, and that his ‘feelings of the Spirit’ were different from ordinary feelings, and ought to be evidence enough for anyone. Moreover, he was unwilling to consider that his subjective feelings might be in error. All of this was couched in the most tormented reasoning; over the course of 200 comments, he committed the bandwagon fallacy, special pleading, and terminal logorrhea. Well, that’s not a fallacy, but ad hominem attacks are; he surmised that I must be a terrible partner if I needed evidence for everything. Not to mention the argument from ignorance — what proof did I have that God didn’t exist? In short, all the devices, defense mechanisms, and poor reasoning that has kept him (and will keep him forever) anchored to his faith. And he managed all this while misreading my initial premise. If he wanted to demonstrate that religious believers were not weak-minded fools, he could have done a better job than he did.

I am not, by nature, a poker of hives. I dissect poor ideas unsparingly, but I try to go easy on actual people (previous paragraph excepted). I don’t expect believers to like it. But there needs to be a way to say “I think you’ve got this wrong”.

So if I criticise a religion, what reaction would I expect its members to have? That depends.

  • If I’m right, accept it, and move on with a determination to do better.
  • If I’m wrong, please tell me. But in the process, don’t make me right.

Hardly getting over it

8 May 2011 / / 3 Comments

I saw an LDS friend from long ago, and had an enjoyable catching-up session, talking about work and kids.

“What else are you doing?” she asked.

“Well, still blogging,” I said.

“Oh, what do you blog about?”

“Actually,” I said, “being an ex-Mormon! Among other things.”

She wasn’t put off at all — she asked a few questions about it, and then said, “So, that’s something you’re still interested in?”

My answer is still an enthusiastic yes! I don’t know why. Some people never want to talk about their deconversion at all. And other people initially do, but then they find that they run dry, they’ve said it all, and they ‘get over it’. They ‘move on’. I think there’s even some kind of expectation that ex-Mormons (maybe even ex-whatevers) will eventually ‘get over it’. If you don’t, then you’re stuck in some phase of your development. There you will stay, not progressing, until you no longer feel the need to discuss ‘it’ anymore.

Not me. It’s been over five years, and I’m still here, but I don’t see my development as arrested. It’s become another one of my interests. I still find Mormonism and issues relating to faith and un-faith fascinating. What is it that makes people believe things just because of ‘faith’? How could I have devoted years of my life to something that had no evidentiary basis? Why do we, as humans, have cognitive blind spots that keep us from examining our beliefs critically? Can we be certain that gods don’t exist? This is a fascinating area that involves psychology, philosophy, and the sciences. How could I not be interested? There’s enough here to play around with forever.

There’s another aspect. As a skeptical rationalist and as an educator, I’m against superstition and ignorance, and I intend to challenge it wherever it may appear. That includes religions. They’re still out there indoctrinating children, filling people up with sexual guilt, worming falsehoods into the educational system, and taking a hefty chunk of people’s money for the pleasure. In some cases, their members advocate violence and try to control the choices of people who don’t believe. As long as religions are operating, I want to be hoisting the banner of reason, as quixotic as that sounds.

I think I owe it to myself not to forget what I learned in my experience with religion. That means not putting it in a box and leaving it there. At this stage, I’m very pleased to not be ‘getting over it’, and I hope I never do.

The Mormon ‘Plan of Happiness’

6 May 2011 / / 6 Comments

Hey, who remembers this from church? I think I got all the details right.

Really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Of course, it might make more sense if you’ve seen the real chart, or had a missionary draw it for you.

UPDATE: I wrote this as a comment on r/exmormon, and decided to paste it here:

If I had to name the most odious and evil LDS doctrine, I wouldn’t hesitate to say ‘eternal families’.

That may seem like a strange answer, but that’s the thing that allows all the emotional hijacking, even more than heaven and hell. If you don’t keep in line, your family will be broken up and you’ll be in isolation for eternity.

It uses the natural feelings of love we have for our family, and subverts them for its own ends.

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