Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Category: Mormonism (page 6 of 12)

Annoyed, not offended.

26 April 2011 / / Comments Off on Annoyed, not offended.

The fourteenth Mormon Article of Faith is, as we all know: Ex-Mormons Are Offended. It’s never anything as complicated as a protracted moral struggle in which one tries to reconcile slippery doctrine with tangible reality and realises it can’t be done. Nope. Someone offends us, and we’re out the door.

But really, how can we help being offended when people define the term so broadly? Just recently, Boyd ‘Li’l Factory’ Packer gave this advice:

Around us we see members of the Church who have become offended. Some take offense at incidents in the history of the Church or its leaders and suffer their whole lives, unable to get past the mistakes of others. They do not leave it alone. They fall into inactivity.

See? It’s not that you can’t believe all the bizarro stuff in church history. It’s that you’re ‘offended’ by it. You’re supposed to let it go. Aaand pay tithing.

Wait — am I being offended by sloppy definitions? No. Just annoyed. But there are other things to get annoyed at.

An interesting story out of New Zealand. It seems the owner of a grocery store didn’t program the automatic door to stay closed for Good Friday. At 8:00, as usual, the doors opened with no staff inside. It took shoppers a while to realise the place was unmanned. What would they do?

About half paid for their groceries using the self-scan service, but that stopped working when someone scanned alcohol, which requires a staff member to check a customer’s age before the system is unlocked.

So a lot of people paid, even when no one was watching. We’re fair-minded beings. Some people didn’t. We’re self-seeking beings, too.

But one religious studies professor jumps to the conclusion that you need a god to be moral. How so? Because obviously all the true Christians were in church of Good Friday! Therefore all the cheaters were grubby secularists.

“The Christian Right have tended to think [that] without the Ten Commandments and God’s divining hand we would never have been able to develop a plausible and sustainable morality.

“This [Pak ‘n Save incident] is like some mad experiment, because you’ve sent off to church the religious and it’s the secular who have gone shopping on Good Friday … and you’ve put them to the test.

Given the proportion of Christians in prisons (though c.f.), I’ll wager there were a few in that store.

Also annoying is this column in which Ross Douthat mounts a defense of hell, which for some inexplicable reason appears in the opinion pages of the New York Fucking Times.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

I don’t know why he’d imagine that eternal torture for some is what it takes to make life meaningful. I have noticed, though, that people who defend the doctrine of hell never think that they’re going there. Or maybe they know that fear does wonders in keeping believers in line. To hell with that.

What I wish Mike Ash understood

2 April 2011 / / 3 Comments

Michael R. Ash is continuing his discussion of testimony over at the Mormon Times with a column titled “What critics don’t understand about testimony“.

Don’t understand testimony? What’s not to understand? I’ve had one and recovered. One thing I wish Mike Ash understood is that testimonial evidence is not good evidence, and relying on it is asking to be fooled.

He’s making an assumption here is that critics of the church don’t understand the church. (It’s a bit like the soggy drunk in a bar, saying “My wife doesn’t understand me.”) Many of us used to be LDS. Some of us served in the church for years, had a testimony, and remember the feelings that kept us believing with more certainty than was warranted by real evidence. So another thing I wish Mike Ash understood is that we do understand the church. We’re critical of the church because we understand it.

While a testimony must be grounded on a spiritual confirmation, the mind is an integral part of gaining our testimony. We are expected to use our minds to study the scriptures and learn what God wants.

Whoops, presupposition. Whether a god exists is one of the items still under consideration for the testimony-hunter. So the next thing that I wish Mike Ash understood is that if you start from your conclusion, and then try to amass facts to support it, you’re doing it wrong.

It’s not just creationists.

When Oliver Cowdery made his failed attempt at translating the plates the Lord told him: “Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.”

It’s true that Mormon writings encourage you to think about things that you’re praying about. But encouragement to think does no good unless you learn how to think well — another thing Ash doesn’t seem to understand. That’s not an insult to any Latter-day Saints. Thinking well is a skill. No one’s automatically good at it, and everyone is bad at it when cherished beliefs are on the line. Including me — I’m not nearly as critical of ideas I agree with as I ought to be. But by learning only a few things about how to spot a fallacy and how we fool ourselves, the poor reasoning at church becomes easy to spot.

Here’s a good example:

In 2007, the church published a statement about LDS doctrine which read in part:

“The church exhorts all people to approach the gospel not only intellectually but with the intellect and the spirit, a process in which reason and faith work together.”

It’s no surprise that the church tells people that faith and reason work together. Magical thinkers have been borrowing the credibility of science for years. It’s just a way of muting concerns: Gee, if the leaders say that reason is good, then this testimony thing must be scientifically valid after all. But while reason is concerned with logic and evidence, faith encourages belief without evidence. You can’t use both at once. Faith and reason are opposite and incompatible methods. And that’s another thing I wish Mike Ash understood.

A chat with Dallin H. Oaks

27 March 2011 / / 34 Comments

I was talking to Mormon apostle Dallin H. Oaks just the other day, and for some reason, we started talking about gay marriage. He was able to clear up a few things for me.

Dallin H. Oaks has elaborated on these ideas from time to time.

Proof is not in the eye of the beholder if they won’t show it to you.

22 March 2011 / / 9 Comments

I’m not a masochist, but I do check the Mormon Times occasionally. And Michael R. Ash’s latest column is a corker: Proof is in the eye of the beholder.

The next several installments will deal with evidence, proof, faith and Book of Mormon archaeology.

Evidence for the Book of Mormon? At last! Unfortunately, he then spends the entire column making excuses for why we shouldn’t expect evidence. That’s always a bad sign. If he had the evidence, he would rely on it. Instead, there’s tap dancing.

I should note two important points regarding the nature of evidence and the necessity of faith. First, I’m unconvinced that any critic would “convert” because of some alleged “proof” because I doubt that any “proof” could ever satisfy those who have truly hardened their hearts against Joseph Smith.

This is not quite right. When I deconverted, it was not because I had ‘hardened my heart’. In fact, I spent years making excuses for the church and trying to shoehorn the facts into my narrow religious belief. Only when I realised that it had no evidentiary basis did I abandon the religion I’d invested so much in.

Now, as someone who’s doing science, I will change my mind if the facts require. I can think of a few things that would make me reconsider the Book of Mormon. One would be evidence of Hebrew or Egyptian writing in Mesoamerica. Another would be if a Native American language showed good linguistic evidence of Hebrew or Egyptian loanwords — solid patterns of correspondence, not piecemeal lists of ‘similarities’. If Ash has this evidence, let him say so.

I might say that Ash’s presumption may be based on his own attitude. I wonder what evidence he’d accept that his beliefs are in error. I hope he shows up in comments, because I’d really like to ask him that one question.

Here’s his other point.

Secondly, the Lord doesn’t work via secular proofs because that would confound the primary principle of agency. While there are evidences that support religious convictions, there are no intellectually decisive proofs, and there will always be evidences that conflict with our beliefs
…
Non-LDS philosophers have argued that in order for us to have spiritual freedom — freedom to make choices — God cannot allow us to know — by secular proof alone — that he exists.
…
If humans had incontrovertible secular evidence for the existence of God, they would be unable to freely choose whether or not to accept God.

So God exists, but he’s not going to give any evidence. And then when I don’t believe in him, he’s going to punish me for not believing in him despite the lack of evidence. If that’s the case, then he values ignorance over knowledge, which is not the kind of being I’d want to worship.

There’s something odd about Ash’s post. Take another look at his two reasons for not giving evidence.

Point 1: If you gave someone evidence, they could still just reject it.
Point 2: If you gave someone evidence, it would destroy their agency because they’d be unable to reject it.

So which is it? Can someone reject evidence, or can’t they? He’s rested his case on two points that contradict each other.

Is this really the best the Mormon Times can do?

I’m in the Trib.

20 March 2011 / / 3 Comments

Well, hot dog. Good Reason has been noticed by the Salt Lake Tribune, with a snippet of the ‘Flame-Retardant Tabernacle Jesus‘ post appearing within its august pages.

Not everyone was so impressed. Former Utahn Daniel Midgley, an ex-Mormon atheist who writes the blog Good Reason — goodreasonblog.blogspot.com — argued that those who find anything miraculous in the fire are “cherry-picking” the facts.

“One might wonder why the Mormon god would allow a church building to be destroyed by fire as he watches, pitiless and indifferent to human affairs,” Midgley wrote. “One might even wonder what message he intends to send. Perhaps an Old Testament-style message of anger and vengeance! The fire and destruction symbolic of the wrath to come. … But wait! It’s a Christmas miracle!”

In Midgley’s view, those who saw God’s hand in the scarred painting of Christ were using the same sort of broken logic that would allow some to see a “miracle” in a plane crash in which hundreds die and one person survives. Believers are quick to make such connections, Midgley wrote, “because in the face of disaster, there are only two possible outcomes — either your faith is boosted or your faith is boosted more. You have to admire their optimism, at least.”

I like the sound of ‘Former Utahn’, but does it count if you were only going to BYU? Will my LDS relatives notice my name and discover I’m an ex-Mormon atheist? Of course not. They all read the Deseret News.

Anyway, a big hello to all Tribune readers! I hope you either chortle with unholy mirth, or are offended. Either way, have a look around and comment if you wish.

Why is BYU so important to the LDS Church?

18 March 2011 / / 4 Comments

Some interesting documents are coming out of Canada these days. Because it’s registered as a charity, the LDS Church is required to report statistics about its spending. (Love the transparency. America, you could work on this.)

This caught my attention:

3) In 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Canada gave $40,000,000 to BYU Provo. In other words, 57.9% of the money received from the wards that year.

Wow. Forty mil per year going to BYU, and that’s just from Canada. I wonder how much it’s netting in total.

One might wonder why the Mormon Church sees fit to pour that kind of money into a university. You could argue it’s to promote the fiction that faith and science are somehow compatible. I know that sounds like a strange principle to spend so much money on, but the Templeton Foundation spends big money just to promote that view. But in BYU’s case, I don’t think that’s the reason.

I think it’s about ‘Bubble creation’.


This is a good intro to bubbles.

Beliefs don’t last long in isolation, especially false ones. They need constant propping up. Communities of belief typically use some form of communal reinforcement — they constantly affirm the group’s beliefs, telling each other how true they are, and to some extent controlling the information available to members of the group.

I call this “the Bubble”. Inside the Mormon Bubble, it’s comfortable and non-challenging. Criticisms from the outside are muted, and affirmations amplified. The Bubble is absolutely vital to maintaining religious faith, especially for uni students, who are just being exposed to new ideas and (le gasp) scientific inquiry.

So BYU functions as a Mormon Bubble for uni students who have just left their parents’ home (which is often a Bubble itself) or transitioning to or from the mission field (another Bubble). You also find yourself in a largely Mormon dating pool, from which you may select a mate and create another Bubble in the form of an LDS home. That kind of Bubble can last for the rest of your life, and serves to propagate LDS memes as more people are raised in Mormon Bubbles.

Without a Bubble Factory like BYU to take young Mormons through that transitional period in their lives, I don’t know if the Mormon Church would survive. Certainly its leaders see it as vital enough to pour millions into it, and I don’t think it’s all for the benefit of science.

What I tell my children about sex

5 March 2011 / / 6 Comments

Sometimes you want to talk about sex, and sometimes it is thrust upon you. Like this week, when a BYU basketball player was nixed off the team for an ‘honor code violation’, which turned out to be consensual sex with his girlfriend.

Some people are congratulating the BYU for standing up for old-fashioned values like sexual repression. It ties in neatly with a recent article by K-Lo of the National Review about her longing for a new sexual revolution, except without the sex. Others are congratulating BYU for upholding their ‘honor code‘ at great cost to themselves. Of course, the BYU ‘honor code’ has as much to do with honor as an ‘honor killing‘ does — in both cases, it’s about social control.

And that’s the real thrust of this issue: The Mormon Church (and to varying degrees, the rest of Christianity along with many other religions) claims the right to control the sexual behaviour of other adults, and for some reason these adults allow them to have that right. The church claims this right in the name of moral purity or social order, but I think it’s really because sex competes with the church. Sex makes you feel good, and this is a challenge to a church that wants to be the only source of good feelings — indeed, a church which enshrines good feelings as the highest form of evidence. So they try to take over sex by controlling the conditions under which it occurs.

Sex is normal. Critters have been bonking each other since there was bonking. But if you do something perfectly normal that the church has prohibited, and you admit that what you did was wrong, then they’ve got you. You owe them now. They hold the keys to your forgiveness, your imaginary salvation, and your entry into Fictional Heaven. But only if you hand them the right to control that most personal part of yourself.

(Especially to young Mormons: Your bishop has no right to take you behind closed doors and question you about your sexual or masturbatory habits. This is creepy behaviour. Tell him it’s private.)

I endured a Mormon upbringing, which meant that I was loaded with messages about sexual guilt from since I was about yay-high. The messages were also strangely vague. When I asked my mom about sex, she threw me a book about animal reproduction, which was confusing. Was I supposed to have sex, or amplexus? My dad’s advice was gruff, but simple: “Don’t do the Marriage Thing.” He said sex was a priesthood ordinance. (I asked him if that meant that if you got the words wrong, you had to start again? He smiled at this, despite himself.)

My advice to my boys has been different. I hope that they get all the love they could ever wish for, both in body and heart. But the pursuit of love must be conducted with responsibility.

The responsibility I’m talking about takes four forms:

Take care of your body, and those of others.
Take care of your heart, and those of others.

The first two are related:

Take care of your body, and those of others.

This means if you’re sexually active, don’t have unprotected sex. Condoms are available at my place, and the boys know where they are. They know this because recently I was looking for something in a bathroom drawer, and hollered, “I can’t find anything in this drawer for all the condoms in here! I wouldn’t mind if they disappeared!” Clumsy, but effective.

Care for your body also means that if you are sexually active, you occasionally get tested for HIV, chlamydia, and all the other nasties that are out there. Don’t be Patient X.

Take care of your heart…

Taking care of your heart could mean a lot of things. I think of it as not getting involved with people who are bad for you, either because they’re using you at your expense, they’re mean or careless with your feelings, or they’re physically or verbally abusive. Value yourself enough to not have a sexual relationship with people who are wrong for you. The cost is too high.

…and those of others.

Look out for the feelings of other people. The philosopher Martin Buber described two kinds of relationships: ‘It’ and ‘You’. This applies to sex. You can have sex because you like the person (a ‘You’ relationship), or you can have sex because you like the sex (the ‘It’). I think either’s fine, but your goals have to match those of your sex partner.

That means taking the time to DTR. Define the Relationship before having sex, and make sure you both want the same thing. If she’s having a ‘You’ experience, and you just want ‘It’, then there’s a mismatch. Best to let it go. There are lots of people that you can find ‘it’ with. Otherwise, you’re just screwing someone over, and that’s not taking care of other people’s hearts. I’m pleased to say that I’m on good terms with people in my past because I took the time to DTR.

I think this advice is much more helpful than the ‘Never Never’ advice I got as a young man. Talking about sexual responsibility instead of sexual avoidance allows that young people are likely to engage in sexual behaviour, and reduces the likelihood of negative consequences.

So my message is: When you’re ready to have a sex life, have a good one. But do so responsibly. I’m here to help, but if you don’t want to talk to me, talk to someone you trust. And I hope you have some great experiences.

O-Day Hijinx: Part 4 – Faith or death

3 March 2011 / / 5 Comments

When I was trolling teh Mormonz, one of them said something terribly sad and abhorrent.

This is what I really hate about religion. These guys have been carefully taught that their life is meaningless if they lose their faith. They now believe that their own reason for living isn’t good enough, and they’ve replaced it with the Church’s reason for living. This is sick dependency — it’s not the way to build self-reliance. Do not let this happen to you.

It also doesn’t seem to help you to think your way through an argument.

O-Day Hijinx: Part 1

25 February 2011 / / 2 Comments

I talked to a lot of interesting people at UWA’s Orientation Day. It’s a day when university clubs have their big membership drives. Religions, eager to counter the effects of learning, have their booths as well, and — oh joy — one was a contingent of Mormon missionaries. So I took some time off helping the UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society to have a chat.

They’re fun to talk to, but I can never get used to how uniform their thinking is. You could get the same line of patter from any of them. I suppose atheists say the same things, too.

Here’s the first in a multi-part series: Trolling teh Mormons.

The cost of religious faith: Relationships

19 February 2011 / / 8 Comments

This rant from Matt Dillahunty is getting a lot of exposure this week, and justly so. He hits on a lot of great points, and I only wish I could say so much in one coherent stream. I had to hit ‘pause’ several times and let things sink in. It’s that good.

It’s all worth watching, but I’ve highlighted this part near the end. Jeff and Matt talk about the cost that Christianity (in particular) imposes on non-believers and ex-believers in the form of broken relationships.

Jeff: But there is, this is my personal hobby horse today; there is a cost in deciding that you’re going to take (in particular) Christianity on faith and that is that when you run into folks like us who don’t believe it, you are compelled because you’ve decided to believe in Christianity; you are compelled to think all kinds of horrific things about us. And tell us, or come at us with these threats of eternal torment which just draws an insurmountable line between us. And we cannot be friends because of what you have decided to take on faith. That’s the cost.

Matt: Yeah and I’ll tell you, that divisive cost plays out not only in the previous caller who had to give up his job because of “good intentioned Christians”, but I have a fiancée sitting in the room who is essentially estranged from a good portion of her family who consider me to be the devil. Now, I may not be a perfect person, far from it, but I’m generally a good person and a caring person, and I do the best I can to live the best life I can.

I certainly am not – well, I guess if I was the devil, this is exactly what he would say, so who knows? – but the absurdity of the divisive nature of Christianity in particular (and by the way, I am an atheist in regard to all gods, but since you’re kind of representing Christianity), it breaks my heart. People who actually understand what love is; people who actually understand what morality is; people who actually understand reality; it is almost unbearable to watch the people that you love be so absolutely duped into a divisive, hateful religion that they think is not divisive; they think it’s inclusive, and they think it’s positive.

It kills me, and it’s one of the reasons that I do this. Because I, for 25+ years, believed this stuff. I am so happy – so happy – that I no longer think that my former roommate is destined for hell. I am so happy that despite the fact that my relationship with my parents, the nature of it is changed, I don’t have to worry about them. The division is entirely one-sided. I didn’t end relationships when I became an atheist. Christians ended those relationships, and it was because their particular religion cannot tolerate – I have letters from people who said ‘We can no longer associate with you. You are of the devil.’

This is true for me, too, and I think it’s true for anyone who’s deconverted. The ostracism, the disownings, the mysterious unfriendings — we’ve all paid a cost in the form of broken relationships, and it’s not us that is doing the breaking. It’s not us that can’t tolerate other points of view. It’s the folks in the fragile bubble. Bubbles don’t last long without complete and unconditional unanimity, and we just don’t offer it, nor should we.

I’m still on good terms with many of my family, but certain other members have told me that by (for example) having this blog and writing against religion and Mormonism as I do, there would be “consequences” to our relationships. And I don’t hear from them now. Other ‘best friends’ from my younger and more churchy years have disappeared or rejected me entirely.

It’s a cost I’m prepared to pay, by the way. The loss of friends and family members is insignificant when compared to what I gain — the ability to tell the truth. (I realise that makes me sound like them, but I’m not the one making it an either/or issue.)

I don’t always say everything I think; I’m pretty good about choosing when and where to put my opinion in, and it’s just about always right here or elsewhere on the net. But even that’s apparently too much for them — I shouldn’t be saying or writing anything. The way they phrase it, I’m attacking them. I’m not; I’m attacking a religion, and if they think I’m attacking them, then that tells me that they’ve mistaken their own identity and their own goals for those of the religion. (A distinction that the religion is not keen to draw, for obvious reasons.)

I’m putting this out there because I seem to be running into a lot of people lately who think that religion is somehow this benign thing that doesn’t harm anyone. “What’s wrong with people having faith in their religion?” they say. “It gives people hope and a sense of community.” Blah blah blah. It’s not benign. It’s poisonous, and it ruins relationships. Ask any deconvert about the treatment they’ve had at the hands of believers who couldn’t let the presence of an unbelieving friend or family member sully their fantasy world.

Older posts Newer posts

Meta

© 2024 Good Reason

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑