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Chat with JW’s: Why the atonement is incoherent.

21 December 2015 / / 43 Comments

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before: I always engage with street evangelists. If they’re putting their ideas out there in public, those ideas are fair game for discussion and ruthless examination.

Here’s a discussion I had with a Witness of Jehovah. It went pretty much exactly like this. Feel free to use and adapt.

There are loads of problems here. Human evolution and human civilisation go back way farther than 6,000 years. But it’s a mistake to get bogged down here. Keep it moving.

Sin is a problem of God’s own making. He decided that he couldn’t stand some things. Then, having created the problem of sin, he decided to blame humans for the problem that he created.

Another problem: Jesus came back to life. You don’t get the ransom back! How is that a sacrifice?

Yet another problem: If God wanted a sacrifice, then he got one; he should be satisfied, and the process should be over. But it’s not; God expects us to believe in him. When someone pays a ransom, the kidnapper doesn’t then require the parents to ‘believe’ in him.

This is problem of its own; isn’t justice simply what God says is just? in which case he could do anything, and then declare his actions just by fiat. On the other hand, if there’s some external principle of justice that even God has to obey, then he must be subordinate to some principle. Then why worship God at all? Why not skip the middleman, and worship the principle instead, since it’s higher than God is?

This is a dodge to terminate the thought process. You could say any wild thing, and then refuse to defend it on the grounds that humans can’t understand it.

And again, why did God decide to make a solution that makes no sense? If humans need to believe this to be saved, then it needs to make sense to humans.

I think we can understand it. God is a bloodthirsty maniac whose ultimate idea of compassion is a human sacrifice. And he’s that way because he was imagined up by bloodthirsty people. That’s not hard to understand.

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Thanks for stopping by! If you like this cartoon, I got more.

Daniel font rundown, November 2015

25 November 2015 / / 1 Comment

I love getting to show examples of my fonts. There are so many great creative people using it.

Wow — it seems my handwriting is the font for French soul singer Vitaa. Check out her YouTube channel. Thanks to Jordane Poilvilain for the props!

And not only that: the Daniel font is being used for Silver Lining coffee in Korea. Patrick shares their story:

A friend of mine in Korea recently had to move a coffee shop she has owned for several years because the neighborhood is getting too ‘hip’ and the landlord doubled her rent. She and her husband aren’t in to making profit, the enjoy helping people, roasting good coffee, and making a comfortable space to enjoy community.  They didn’t feel good raising the price of her coffee to compensate, so they left and opened a new shop in a less ‘hip’ neighborhood, and called it Silver Lining in honor of the situation.

Give them a look, if you’re over in that area.

I got a note from Joe Boyle of Joe Boyle Photography. He says:

I just wanted to thank you for allowing people to use your fonts! I’m super thankful! I wanted to send you a link of what I created with your font – it’s just a phone case for iPhones and Droids. I’m selling it from society 6….

Here is the link for the phone case: http://society6.com/product/rocks-in-the-stream_iphone-case#9=195&52=377

This one’s from Claudia Hall Christian.

I just saw your note at DaFont about letting you know what it’s used for.
I found Daniel when I was wrapping up the production for the Alex the Fey thrillers. Since then, I’ve used it to depict her handwriting. It’s also in the banner – Alex the Fey.
Thank you for creating the font. I picked it because the “A” looks like a greek delta which is the symbol for heat or change. This character changes lives — in the books and of readers.

Andrea Landauer has used the Daniel font in a sci-fi relationship sim game, “Our Personal Space“, and Kitty has used it in her game, “Sabotage“.

Meanwhile, Manuela Pinho is using it in the logo for her line of accessories. Give her a look and see what it’s about.

There sure are a lot of creative people out there! If you’re one, and you want me to feature your Daniel-font-related stuff, send me an email! (Link is up top.) And of course, you can always download all my fonts from the Page of Fontery. Thanks, everyone.

For all my Mormon Facebook friends

13 November 2015 / / 3 Comments

This hasn’t happened yet, but I’m so confident it will that I’m writing about it in the past tense. You too can have the spirit of prophecy — no Holy Ghost required!

Well, it’s been quite a week for Mormon-watchers! Ever since the church’s shockingly cruel policy for LGBT families was leaked from the not-for-regular-members handbook, there’s been talk. And you and I — former mission companions, fellow ward members — we’ve been mixing it up and arguing about it on Facebook.

Now I’ve been pretty harsh about this policy because I think it’s going to hurt people. “But, Daniel!” you’ve said. “Who’s it going to hurt? Those gay people aren’t going to want to be in the church anyway, so their kids aren’t missing out on anything. And you’re just a big old apostate anyway, so what do you care if kids — or anyone — don’t get baptised?”

Well, I do like it when people don’t join the church, that’s true. But you may be surprised to find that more people have become caught up in this thing than you might think. Some gay parents, formerly part of a mixed-orientation marriage, are happy for their kids to be in the church — maybe to keep the peace, maybe in the mistaken belief that religion teaches good wholesome values — and they’re now surprised to find that their kids aren’t welcome (unless they denounce their parents), and will be relegated to second-class status over this. Sorry — third-class. Women have second-class status. Hard to keep up.

Now I have a confession. I don’t actually think the Q15 actually intended this. There’s a saying known as Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Well, I think the Brethren — fine legal minds notwithstanding — simply intended to retrofit the polygamy policy to another group that they wanted to take a hard line with. They didn’t mean for it to become well-known or publicised, and were surprised when it all blew up on them. (There’s one bit of anecdotal hearsay that bears this out.) Then they were in a bit of a corner, wondering what to do. They rolled out one of their elders (who has a gay brother) to make a video statement, but that didn’t help.

Now here’s the most shocking and disappointing thing about all of this. In the week since the story broke, during our discussions on social media, you never doubted anything after maybe the first few hours. You never showed (to me at least) any sentiment like, “Gee, that’s a bit harsh.” Nothing like that. You wanted to believe that your leaders were inspired, and so when an explanation was handed to you, you clung to it. And so your defence of your leaders was full-throated and vociferous.

And the defence you offered was: It’s not a cruel policy! It’s a kind policy. The church has decided not to cause tensions between gay parents and straight kids. (Besides the eventual denunciation, that is.) By not letting kids get baptised, the church is really preventing setting families against each other. It was a silly rationale — the church doesn’t have a problem creating tension in part-member families, in which kids can get baptised. And we debated that.

But, again, your belief that your leaders couldn’t be wrong — when they clearly were — was shocking. It told me that you had outsourced your conscience. Is there anything they could do that you wouldn’t sign off on? Probably not. And that tells me that your moral compass is broken, in a way that wouldn’t be so without the church.

So now, on a drowsy news Friday, President Newsroom has released a statement walking back some of the policy, and relaxing the ban. They had to do it. There really wasn’t a choice, if they wanted to control the damage.

But in so doing, they’ve sold you out. There you were, defending them and their “kind policy”. Now that even they’ve had to admit that the policy wasn’t so kind, they’ve sort of pulled out the rug from under you, haven’t they? You were defending something that even they couldn’t defend. Not to mention what this says about their supposed revelatory capacity; they really didn’t see this coming! So much for ‘discernment’.

Most of all, I wonder how you feel now. I wonder if this will trigger any reflection, or if you’ll just go back to obedience and moral slumber. I hope not. I hope you’ll think about this for a good long while.

Response to a Facebook friend, re: exclusion of LDS kids in gay families

7 November 2015 / / Comments Off on Response to a Facebook friend, re: exclusion of LDS kids in gay families

Here’s an old mission companion, on a thread about this:

Mormon Church to exclude children of same-sex couples from getting blessed and baptized until they are 18

Children living in a same-sex household may not be blessed as babies or baptized until they are 18, the Mormon Church declared in a new policy. Once they reach 18, children may disavow the practice of same-sex cohabitation or marriage and stop living within the household and request to join the church.

The policy changes, which also state that those in a same-sex marriage are to be considered apostates, set off confusion and turmoil among many Mormons after the policy was leaked online. The changes in the handbook for local church leaders for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were confirmed Thursday by church spokesman Eric Hawkins.

My former companion says:

>I received a witness of he Church as a young 19 year old as I pounded the streets of Perth with many of you.

Thank goodness when we knocked on doors, we didn’t have to say, “Hi! We’re missionaries from the Church of… er… your parents aren’t gay, are they? Good, we’ll continue.”

I’m wondering how missionaries today will keep from inadvertently teaching someone who isn’t eligible.

>I believe in God and I believe the LDS church is his church. If this is what God has decided then it’s not for me to argue.

I would say that this cruel and unfair policy is convincing evidence that either

  • LDS leaders are operating from a source other than a just and fair god — be it their own prejudices, or their own principles, or
  • the god that Mormons worship has an inordinate concern with the sexual behaviour of humans, but is unconcerned with justice. And, in my view, is not worth worshipping.

Or perhaps both.

>Maybe I’m too simple in my views but what I fought for as a 19 year old when I laboured with you all then has not changed now.

Our views should change as we get older. As Paul said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” I think homophobia is a childish thing, and worse, it harms people. In my life, I’ve made gay, lesbian, bi, and trans friends, and some co-workers. I’ve learned that there was a commonality to our life experiences, and that any prejudice I might have felt toward them was my own problem. And I’ve sorted it out. I’ve learned that every member of a society has the right to equal treatment.

Sadly, the LDS Church hasn’t learned this — speaking of the church collectively and not individually, of course. It has formed harmful and cruel policies, and now it has doubled down on them. Well, as an exMo, it would be easy to say, “What do I care — I’m no longer in the church.” But the climate of homophobia fostered by the LDS Church is having a harmful effect on LGBT people, especially the ones in the church. It is setting children against parents — a potential convert will have to leave the supportive environment offered by gay parents, turn their backs on them and denounce their relationships. Wow. That’s cold.

Kids (even straight kids) in blended families won’t be able to participate in the church they’ve grown up in, because one set of parents is in a gay relationship. Suddenly ineligible. And this is contrary to AoF2; the kids will be responsible for the actions of their parents.

Does all of this seem right to you?

Fortunately, most people in “the world” are starting to operate from a position of kindness. They are showing more compassion and love than the LDS leadership is currently capable of.

You may be too far into the LDS community to see how regular people regard this. When I tell my neverMo friends about this, or who they see it in the news — yes, it is hitting the news — they’re horrified. And it confirms to them that the church is a homophobic organisation. It is — as we call other groups when they exist to promote bigotry — a hate group.

The leadership will eventually change on this issue, just like they did with race and the priesthood. They’ll walk it back with an anonymous essay on the website, if we still have websites then. Until then, they (and you) are on the wrong side of history. They’ve chosen exclusion and bigotry.

What will you choose? Understanding and compassion? Or obedience?

About that rock…

8 August 2015 / / Comments Off on About that rock…

Last week, the LDS Church released photos of a small brown rock belonging to Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Here it is, on a tasteful mat.

The LDS Church, most notably through its artwork, has promoted the idea that founder Joseph Smith translated the book from gold plates, but the story now is that words would appear on the stone in English, and Smith would dictate these to a scribe. Apparently, he didn’t need to use the gold plates in the translation process at all — and Moroni and Nephi are not happy about this.

So what’s going on here? Why is the church promoting this strange artefact, essentially admitting that a small brown rock was instrumental to the Restoration? And what effect will this have on Latter-day Saints?

First, let me lay down a theoretical framework that helped me. It’s from a post by redditor ShemL.

The church contains not one gospel, but two. There’s Gospel A and Gospel B. Gospel A is the one missionaries teach. It’s lovely, inspiring, and uncomplicated. It’s the one where Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus in the Sacred Grove, he translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates, and only had one wife.

Then you find inconsistencies in the story, and unsavoury things about church history, and you transition to Gospel B. Gospel B is difficult and tangled, and there’s so much to explain away! It involves a lot of mental gymnastics. Nobody feels the Spirit from Gospel B. If you’re here, you might say that you have a “complex faith”.

The weird thing is that when you go to church, you have to pretend that Gospel A is the real one. There’s no acknowledgement of the complexity.

Now back to this rock. The rock is part of Gospel B. It’s a weird thing, the rock is. People are loath to believe that you can translate a document using a magic rock in a hat, and for good reason. It just screams fraud.

So why is the church publicising this? My answer: it has problems that are even worse than I thought.

It used to be easy for the church to keep everyone in Gospel A. Information about the church was reasonably scarce, except from the church itself — that was plentiful, but wrong. Anything that would divert people into Gospel B was dismissed as an anti-Mormon lie. Some people were in Gospel B because they knew about the rock and Joseph’s sex partners and so forth, but they had to find their own ways of dealing with that. In church, it was all Gospel A.

Then, with more information, people learned the information that the church was trying to control. It moved some people into Gospel B, but it moved a lot of people out of the church entirely. The church noticed this, and they figured that at least having people in Gospel B (and paying tithing) is better than having them leave. As a response, the church tried opening up a little by releasing unannounced (and uncredited) essays onto their website in the dead of night.

The secretive strategy didn’t work, and people found out about the weirdness anyway. So now it seems that the church is trying to roll out all the weird stuff at once, and I think they’re hoping that if they can just get it all out there, and weather the resulting exodus of members for a couple of weeks, whoever else is still in the church will be in for good. No more unpleasant discoveries for anyone, or if there are, it won’t be the church’s fault; they’ve disclosed.

Is it going to work? I doubt it.

First of all, if they’re hoping that they can dig down to bedrock lunacy and hope everyone copes from there, they’re going to be disappointed. It’s all lunacy. The nonsense goes down to the core. Reveal all the weird stuff? It’s all weird stuff! And fabrications.

Second, by opening up about its history, the church has effectively transitioned everyone into Gospel B! How is that supposed to work? How is the Gospel-A illusion supposed to work in church, when everyone is aware of Gospel B?

As for the apologists, they’re working overtime. Right now, they’re doing two things:

  • Trying to boost plausibility by describing the magic rock as anything but a magic rock. Some people are trying to explain that having a physical object around to channel spiritual powers is not weird — it’s like technology! It’s like an iPad!

(If someone really thinks this rock is like an iPad, I don’t know how I can help them. A rock is not an iPad. iPads work reliably and predictably for more than just one person. A rock is a rock.)

  • Some apologists are going for gas-lighting, blaming members for not knowing about this stuff when the information was supposedly out there — perhaps in a locked filing cabinet in a room with a sign that said “Beware of the leopard.” Consider this article, entitled “It’s Not the Church’s Job to Teach Me Church History”. Oh, really? This is disingenuous; if person could have a lifetime of church attendance, four years of Seminary, and years of Institute without running across any of this stuff, then how forward could the church have been about teaching it?

So what will happen? My seer stone is a little rusty (it’s iron pyrite), but I think the church is in uncharted waters here. Owning up to its magical past in the scientific age is going to highlight the implausibility for many members. Some people will stay in no matter what, but with the Gospel-A narrative tarnished, more members are going to wonder: why am I cleaning the chapel toilets again? What is this all for? Some people say, “Even if the church weren’t true, I’d stay in because it’s a good way of life.” But how good is it looking, now that its absurdities and obfuscations are manifest? This is a major discontinuity in the church narrative, and it will make the church story really different for those who remain. If people are freaking out, I don’t blame them.

One member explained his acceptance of the weirdness to me with the phrase “Faith is a choice”. That’s true. But now Mormons have many choices. They can stick with Gospel A, but this will be increasingly difficult in the information age. They can go with Gospel B, as the church is pushing them into, but Gospel B is often a last step before ditching the church altogether. And that, I think, is the best choice of all.

Jesus on the park bench, revised

20 May 2015 / / Comments Off on Jesus on the park bench, revised
The first part of this graphic has been going around the web, so I made a second part.

A god could have prevented all these things. So why didn’t he?

Actually, one believer told me that earthquakes were our fault. When I asked him why, he said it was because we destroyed paradise. Now I can be a little careless sometimes, but I don’t recall doing any such thing.

Ethics with a god v without

30 April 2015 / / Comments Off on Ethics with a god v without

Why do skeptics have an image problem?

5 April 2015 / / 2 Comments

So I was just on a panel with author John Scalzi at Swancon. Great fun, good panel, good questions from the audience.

The panel was about skepticism and sci-fi, and one of the questions was, “Why do skeptics have such a bad reputation?” Why are they known as contentious, awful people?

John’s answer was essentially: Because they are unpleasant people. Paraphrasing: If debunking really Does It for you, then you’re probably a Stomper of Dreams.

As an unpleasant person, I have to kind of agree, but my answer went like this: There’s really no nice way to say, “Um, actually, that psychic isn’t really speaking to your dead relatives.” Saying it at all makes you the Dreamkiller, and that’s that. Either that, or you say nothing, in which case no one knows you’re a skeptic at all. Result: all skeptics are mean and unpleasant.

But I think there’s a third answer here: Popular entertainment has spent decades portraying skeptics as soulless or incomplete. Just check TV Tropes. Skeptics are Straw Vulcans — hyper-rational beings who are nonetheless incomplete and dead inside. Then they ‘come to their senses’ and become a Skeptic No Longer. Only when their character arc sees them learning to embrace at least a little unprovable bullshit do they become good and fully human. I think it’s a minor factor, but not an insignificant one.

Daniel font rundown

9 January 2015 / / Comments Off on Daniel font rundown

Loads of creative people are using my typefaces, and I love to give shout-outs. So here’s the latest.

• First up, Mark has a great blog and YouTube channel about language, called “The Endless Knot”. He breaks down the origins of English words in a way that’s fascinating and easy to watch. And what’s he using? Why, it’s Du Bellay, the weathered and antique font with the renaissance feel.

Looks great; makes you smarter. What’s not to love?

• Next, it’s Jenifer Brady, the author of Camp Spirit Fiction. She’s used the Daniel font on her website and books, and it gives it a campsite feel. Sit up close and smell the smores!

• There’s a new game that makes extensive use of the Daniel font. It’s called Pigments, and it gives you a chance to play with colour mixing. I love the papery feel. And look at that logo!

• Sirade is working on some manga. The blog is here. Keep going, Sirade!

• And finally, James has used the Daniel font in the logo for his website ‘Mind‘, and it’s looking quite sharp.

Thanks to everyone for using my work! It’s very encouraging. You can download these fonts for free on the Page of Fontery. If you make something cool, send me a link.

Saying “That’s not Islam” doesn’t help

18 December 2014 / / 1 Comment

I’ve just read that a Muslim cleric — the aptly-named Kamal Mousselmani — has denounced “fake sheiks” in the wake of the Sydney siege. He thinks it’s too easy to call oneself a religious authority. Fancy that. He comments on the Sydney hostage-taker who claimed to be a religious authority, and says, essentially, “He wasn’t a proper one.”

More and more, I’ve been hearing moderate Muslims say that fundamentalist Muslims or extremist Muslims are “un-Islamic”. Sometimes they go full Scotsman: “That’s not real Islam.”

On one level, I’m glad to hear that Muslims are denouncing violence. That’s very positive. This needs to happen — not just in Western countries, but everywhere — for human survival on Earth to continue. And I stand with Muslims who are my friends, co-workers, and students, even as I find their religion to be just as nonsensical as all other religions.

But for a Muslim to flatly disclaim other versions of Islam as “fake” or “not Islam” is disingenuous. What makes this imam so sure that his moderate reading of Islam is the right one, and fundamentalists have it wrong? The fundamentalists can quote scriptures in their defence, just as the moderates can; everyone picks their favourite cherries. This is religion we’re talking about, and one of the things about religion is that it doesn’t offer a good way of telling who’s doing it right and who’s doing it wrong.

See, with science, reality is the court of final appeal. But religion doesn’t get its data or practices from reality, so reality can’t be appealed to when there’s a schism. All the parties can do is excommunicate each other and move on. That’s what we’re seeing here with this disavowal. But moderates can’t just say “That’s not Islam” and then keep going as if the extremists don’t exist. The book that they think is so wonderful and peaceful is the same book that the encouraged the extremists to commit violence in the first place. The good guys? That’s Islam. The bad guys? That’s Islam, too.

This kind of denunciation is also self-serving. A religious leader denounced his competition as fake? Gee, never seen that before. In part, this imam is trying to make sure that the image problem generated from Islamic-motivated violence doesn’t affect him. I get why he’s doing it, but it’s ass-coverage all the same. It also prevents that pesky need for any self-analysis. You don’t have to grapple with the problematic part of your faith or history if you just wall it off and say it doesn’t apply to you. How much better it would be to say, “There are things in the Quran and the Hadith that do encourage violence, and we need to be aware of this to make sure we don’t go down that road.”

I don’t want to come down too hard on someone for not wording things exactly the right way when they’re saying the right thing. I’m encouraged that many Muslims are disavowing violence. (Welcome to the 19th century.) I hope they succeed in reining in the worst behaviours of the Muslims who are — whether they like it or not — their co-religionists. But by saying “That’s not Islam”, moderate Muslims are copping out, not stepping up.

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