Good Reason

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

Category: religion (page 19 of 36)

Here be weasels

8 February 2010 / / 12 Comments

If you take it upon yourself to argue with Christian creationists, you have to know the regular stuff: biology, the second law of thermodynamics, flood hydrology, DNA, optics, embryology.

But if you decide to take on Mormon apologists, you have to have a passing knowledge of all of the above, plus archaeology, linguistics, and Meso-American metallurgy. There’s just no telling what they’ll throw into the mix.

I’ve just discovered Mormon Times writer Michael R. Ash. He makes money as an apologist for FAIR, a Mormon confabulation factory. His job is to disguise the lack of evidence for Mormon doctrines until the church can safely write them out of the canon. They call it ‘Mormon scholarship’, but ‘Mormon scholarship’ is scholarship like ‘Christian rock’ is rock. In his latest article, he complains about the lack of respect.

Shorter Michael Ash
Countering subversive attacks on Mormon scholarship

It’s so unfair that anti-Mormon scientists ‘poison the well’ by dismissing our arguments out of hand. But their claims are invalid because they haven’t read the Book of Mormon cover to cover.

It makes you wonder why he’s addressing the need for science at all, though, when he also claims that questions of the Book of Mormon’s truthfulness

can only be answered on a spiritual level — through faith, humility and personal study and prayer.

And only by carefully defining words like ‘true’, ‘correct’, and ‘historicity’ so as not to include anything that normal people mean when they use those words.

I’m looking forward to many cobbled-together bad-faith arguments in future.

My exit letter from the LDS Church

8 February 2010 / / 28 Comments

Even when I’d decided that the claims of the LDS Church were not grounded in reality, it took a while for me to resign formally. It was a big deal, so I didn’t want to rush it. But after about a year of not believing, I decided that it was time to write my Exit Letter.

You see, in the LDS Church, even if you no longer attend, or no longer even consider yourself a Mormon, you are still being counted in the church’s records. (Which are thus a bit inflated.) To no longer be counted, you need to resign formally.

A member of the Stake Presidency (who is also a good friend) was very helpful in the process. He explained that if I wanted to, I could submit a letter of resignation to the bishop of my ward, the bishop would write back asking if I was sure, I could write back and say ‘yes’, and then the matter would go to Salt Lake. There are ways around the rigamarole, but that was direct enough for my purposes.

What follows is the text of my exit letter. I don’t recommend using my letter as a model. Richard Packham has a page with information that you can adapt for your own purposes. An exit letter only has to be a one-sentence deal. But I’m a bit more verbose than that, so I wanted my letter to be a manifesto of sorts. You only get to write one of these, after all! In the end, it was exactly what I wanted to say.

Here’s the letter:

Dear (first name of bishop),

This letter is to notify you that I resign my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, effective immediately. I’d like to ask you to carry out the necessary paperwork to remove my name from the records of the Church. I recognise that according to Church doctrine this cancels all ordinances I have engaged in, and I have made my choice with that consideration in mind.

This is not a decision that I have made lightly. ‘Being Mormon’ has been a part of my identity throughout my life, and I have made many sacrifices in service of the Church because I thought it was right. The process of ‘deconversion’ has at times been difficult. However, I have also found it to be immensely worthwhile. I have gained the ability to reason without worrying about the presumed opinions of hypothetical beings, and I am better able to enjoy and value every day of this life with the people I love, while still being the moral agent I have always been.

In my youth, the LDS Church instilled in me the highest regard for truth. That was what made it better than other churches — it had the truth, or so I thought. Ironically, it was this regard for truth that led me away from religion in general, and Mormonism in particular. As I became more aware of the scientific method, with its reliance on empirical, real-world evidence, it became clear to me that the Church was promoting an essentially false method for finding truth. Latter-day Saints try to evaluate the truth of an idea by how that idea makes them feel. They try to maintain their belief by having faith-promoting experiences and by bearing testimony to each other. But feelings, experiences, and testimony are not reliable sources of evidence because they are coloured by our tendency to see what we want to see. By contrast, the scientific method requires evidence to establish the truthfulness of claims, and it offers a set of tools that control for our human biases and our tendency for wishful thinking.

Science and religion are opposite and irreconcilable ways of understanding the world. Science does a better job. It offers testable ideas, and makes predictions that are confirmed by experimentation and observation. Religion fails miserably at this, but believers are expected to ‘have faith’ and continue believing anyway. I’m pleased to say that I no longer believe in supernatural beings — gods, angels, spirits, or devils — because there is simply no empirical evidence for the existence of such beings, and there are better explanations for the experiences people claim as evidence. I will be very interested should any good evidence appear in the future, though I find it rather unlikely. In the meantime, I do not wish to be a member of an organisation that promotes a superstitious and magical worldview, of which the LDS Church is only one example.

That said, I’d like to add that my experience with the Church — both inside and outside — has been a largely positive one where I have learned much. I have recently had occasion to speak to someone who was going through the deconversion process in his faith, and I observed that our experiences were very similar, with one exception: his church ostracises its unbelievers. The threat of losing his family and social contacts at a time of great change has caused him an added dimension of grief. I am glad that Mormons do not engage in this tactic, and that my LDS friends are still my friends, though I no longer share their worldview.

Thank you for your timely handling of this matter. I would appreciate if you could confirm when my request has been processed.

Best regards,
Daniel Midgley

In the weeks after posting my letter, I had several enjoyable chats with church leaders, in which I asked if they had any evidence for various Mormon doctrines yet, and they tried to explain why I shouldn’t need any. Sadly, their enthusiasm for these chats waned long before mine did. And then some months later, I received my very own letter from one Mr Greg Dodge in Salt Lake City, informing me I was officially No Longer Mormon. I’m having it framed.

My exit letter reflected my experience in the LDS Church. Yours will no doubt be different. But whatever your circumstances, if you no longer believe in the church, there are some good reasons for making an official resignation. Otherwise, you’re still being counted in their statistics, and as long as you’re on their rolls, the things they do are done with your tacit approval. I found a psychological benefit to having that sense of closure. My status on the outside matched my status on the inside, and that’s a great feeling.

To date, my resignation from the LDS Church is the intellectual accomplishment I’m proudest of. I was able to overcome a lifetime of religious conditioning, centuries of socio-cultural tradition, and millions of years of human perceptual weirdness, with only my mind.

Religion in the 2011 Australian Census

4 February 2010 / / 7 Comments

Australia’s having a census next year, and you know what that means: Statistical religion hijinx! Australia will no doubt continue its proud tradition of pumping up some joke religion to wreak havoc on the census statisticians. The exercise also serves to nurture a vain hope of forcing the government to elevate the ‘religion’ to official status.

So what’s the new Jedi? Possibly heavy metal, if this Facebook page is any indication. (Its UK counterpart is doing rather better.)

It’s all a bit of fun, and everyone loves to take the piss, but I’d like to encourage all atheists and agnostics to put down ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’ (whichever you are). That way, we’ll boost the ‘none’ category (we’re still not sure if ‘Jedi’ did), and there will be more specific evidence for the rise of a*ism, if anyone breaks the results down.

I’m kind of excited to see what comes out of this. We know that the ‘nones’ have been growing steadily for several decades (that’s the blue part in the chart at right), and it’ll be fun to see the pattern continue as the stats come in.

More encouraging is the announcement that people in same-sex relationships will be able to tick the ‘husband or wife’ box for their partner, and it will be counted the same as a hetero marriage.

Paul Lowe, Head of the ABS Population Census Branch, announced in an email to Australian Marriage Equality (AME) that “the count of people in same-sex relationships who tick the ‘husband or wife of person 1’ box at question 5 will be made available as a part of the standard output from the 2011 Census”.

Australian Marriage Equality (AME) national convener, Peter Furness, welcomed the decision, which will count the number of married same-sex couples living together even though such marriages are denied recognition under Australian law following amendments to the Marriage Act in 2004.

“As government agencies like the ABS begin to recognise the reality that some same-sex partners are married, the Rudd Government’s opposition to recognising same-sex marriage looks increasingly outdated”, said Mr Furness.

“The Rudd Government may choose to bury its head in the sand and pretend same-sex marriages don’t exist, but clearly the ABS will not.”

One more step to full acceptance for our gay and lesbian friends, and to equality for all.

Religious vultures in Haiti: Worse than even I’d thought

2 February 2010 / / 1 Comment

I complained in an earlier post about religious groups in Haiti jockeying for position so as to mix aid with proselyting (and in some cases, victim blaming).

I didn’t expect them to be carrying off children.

Ten American Baptists sit in a Haitian jail on Monday, accused of child trafficking for what they say was a hastily conceived attempt to rescue orphans by quickly removing them from Haiti — before getting official permission or even checking to determine that the children really were orphans. In Haiti and on the Web, the arrests have led to fresh accusations that some religious groups may be guilty of a kind of spiritual trafficking, by mixing the help they offer to victims of last month’s earthquake with proselytizing.

The Baptists were open about the fact that they felt driven by their Christian faith. Speaking to reporters after the group’s arrest, Laura Silsby, who led the Baptist team to Haiti, described the children as “deeply in need most of all of God’s love and his compassion.” In a description of the mission posted online, the group wrote, “God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now.”

Meanwhile in Idaho, where several of the Baptists are from, Rev. Clint Henry, a pastor involved in the effort, denounced what he called “the accusations of Satan,” made against “our team,” The Associated Press reported.

In other words, anything they do is right, and any efforts to oppose them are from the devil.

Even I wouldn’t have suspected religiously-motivated aid workers of something so self-righteous, misguided, and wrong. But when you’re high on faith, and think a god is directing you, it means there’s no possibility of accountability or negotiation.

But only 33 children? Amateurs!

Religious vultures in Haiti: Not helping.

27 January 2010 / / 7 Comments

As if the people of Haiti didn’t have it bad enough. After the earthquake, the residents now find themselves beset by a plague of opportunistic religionists, eager to tell Haitians that they themselves are the reason for their suffering.

These days, preachers are wandering through public squares, carrying Bibles and delivering sermons to the homeless residents of makeshift tents pieced together after the earthquake.

Mio Janvier is among the estimated one million who became homeless on Jan. 12.

The middle-aged woman spends her days sitting in front of her new home made of bedsheets, in the shadow of the smashed remnants of Haiti’s presidential palace.

She says she hasn’t been going to church; the preachers are coming to her.

And the messages she’s been hearing haven’t been all that stern.

“No,” she says. “They just tell us, ‘Jesus is coming back’.”

One of her tent-city neighbours disagrees.

He says that, yes, there have been plenty of preachers promising the imminent return of Jesus, but they’ve also had harsh words for their fellow Haitians.

He says the tent-dwellers are being told that the end is nigh, and that they’d better change their ways in time for Judgment Day.

Nickerson Gay says they’re being told they might wind up suffering the same calamitous fate periodically visited upon the infamous sinners of the Old Testament.

“They’ve been talking a lot about that,” said Nickerson Gay, a high-school teacher.

“They’re talking about Sodom and Gomorrah. They’re even talking about the floods in Noah’s time.”

“They’re saying God hit Haiti because there’s a lot of evil and sin going on in the country, which is why God hit us this way.“

Absolutely infuriating, and completely in line with Christian doctrine. Richard Dawkins‘ has already blasted the hypocrisy of Christian doctrine with far more erudition than I could muster, but let me just say this.

If you take the Christian view, you must accept that your god caused or allowed the disaster to happen. And why wouldn’t he? It’s the same god that drowned everything on earth except Noah and his family, leveled Sodom and Gomorrah, and killed millions more because they were insufficiently faithful to him, or because he didn’t like what people were doing with their private bits. In which case, any Christian should recognise the hand of justice when they see it, and any thinking person should recognise a fishy story when they hear it.

Everyone tries to understand why bad things happen (in Haiti or anywhere else), and it’s human nature to accept a superstitious answer when things are out of your control. But it’s horribly ironic that people who have the least consistent explanation are having so much influence on an understandably jittery population. And they’ll keep loading these worried people into their churches, and pass the plate.

These people are still reeling from the tragedy that’s befallen them. Either help them to feel better, or leave them the fuck alone.

UPDATE: Just one more quote from the article.

Gracia Ganer Lemercier, also rendered homeless by the quake, is wandering in front of the shattered cathedral.

He’s active in his church and has had a decent career in the federal public service. Even though he now wears a scraggly beard and frayed clothing, he’s feeling grateful.

“The great Lord, who is the architect of the universe, I thank him for having saved my life – and for having saved the life of many of my brothers and sisters,” Lemercier says.

“I ask him to continue blessing us.”

But what is he hearing from religious leaders? Why would such a terrible string of tragedies befall Haiti?

“These are our sins,” he replies. “They are the sins of each Haitian on this Earth, which God has given us as our heritage.”

Tell me this doesn’t fit the profile of battered-spouse syndrome.

In lay terms, this is a reference to any person who, because of constant and severe domestic violence usually involving physical abuse by a partner, becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.

Religious logic: Baseball edition

20 January 2010 / / 2 Comments

When you ask for evidence, do you get it? Or do you get a lot of tap-dancing to explain why you shouldn’t need evidence?

If the latter, then this cartoon is for you.

But that’s only one ending. There are lots of others.

  • Thinking that he has a baseball gives him a sense of peace. Who are you to upset his equalibrium?
  • What if you think he doesn’t have a baseball, and you’re wrong? Eternal consequences, that’s what!
  • It’s not meant to be taken literally. It’s a metaphorical baseball.
  • He has an amazing perfect baseball, so perfect that it doesn’t manifest itself in this physical plane. But it’s real, all right. Also, it transcends science.
  • All your family thinks he has a baseball, and what will they think of you if you don’t believe in it?
  • I knows that he has a baseball. I don’t just believes it; I knows it. With every fiber of my beings.
  • He really does has a baseball, so give him ten percent of all your money.

Thanks to snowqueen.

LDS lessons: now even less content

15 January 2010 / / 8 Comments

I suspect that if I were still a believing Mormon in church classes, I’d have to go insane just as a coping mechanism. The lesson manual they’re now using for Priesthood and Relief Society is ‘Gospel Principles‘, a manual originally intended for new converts. As I remember, the chapters were, shall we say, spartan. How are long-time members coping with this? Will they go mad from repetition? Then again, don’t underestimate the Mormon capacity for boredom absorption.

Now how would I have approached teaching this kind of a lesson as a Priesthood teacher? I might have thought, sure it’s a little sparse, but nothing we can’t fix by bringing in some interesting outside sources. But even there I’d have been stymied; you’re not supposed to use them. Let’s peek in at a fictional Relief Society teacher, and see what the Brethren have in mind for its flock.

A woman sat at her dining room table, buried in dozens of books and magazines. She looked discouraged. Her daughter asked if she could help.

The woman said she was preparing a Relief Society lesson. She told her daughter she didn’t know how she could possibly “boil down all the information” she had collected for the lesson. The process, the woman acknowledged, was both time consuming and frustrating.

The daughter looked surprised.

“Why,” she asked, “are you trying to boil down information? An inspired Church-writing committee has already done that for you.“
…
[L]eaders and teachers in the Church do themselves and the people they serve a disservice when they turn to unofficial — not correlated — materials in the planning of lessons and activities.

Oh, dear. Seems people have been using the Internet to get information, and finding out things that the folks in Salt Lake don’t want you to know. Those who want to control minds need foremost to control information, and this is part of an attempt to do exactly that.

The tone of this article needs to be read to be believed, but the last paragraph is a good indicator.

The Church — through its inspired correlation program — has given us official sources of information to help us prepare lessons and plan activities. Instead of turning to unofficial books and Web sites, let’s use those sources.

Something I realised after teaching Sunday School for many years was that the whole process was essentially stagnant. It was frustrating: I believed in eternal progression, but it was not to be found in church meetings. When I was younger, I thought that eventually I could graduate to — what? moving mountains? At uni, I could delve more deeply into topics of interest and there was always more to study. But at church? Delving into early Mormon history was just asking for apostasy, and who cared enough to delve into the Old Testament? Eventually I realised that there was no higher level. The quest for spiritual knowledge had plateaued, as far as earth goes, and it seemed to me the fault of the religious system. There was just no ‘there’ there.

In hindsight, it makes sense that going over the same books over and over would leave one with that cyclical feeling. The religion couldn’t really offer any answers past ‘goddidit’, and that doesn’t take long to explain. This was a source of profound disappointment for me at the time, but now I’m glad to have escaped that useless hole that I kept digging myself into.

Surely he could have thought of even one.

7 January 2010 / / Comments Off on Surely he could have thought of even one.

Things that make atheists go ‘hmm’.

2 January 2010 / / 1 Comment

Two recent stories.

An alleged Muslim tries to kill a Danish cartoonist for depicting Mohammed.

The Irish government enacts a blasphemy law. Why? Because religious beliefs need protection.

Loony v loony

26 December 2009 / / Comments Off on Loony v loony

I was disappointed in the video of the Pope Attack, but only because I got it wrong: I thought the Pope had attacked someone. You must admit, it would be worth watching. When Popes Attack. Instead, a crazed loony jumped him like a LOLcat on a tree ornament, and he only got his pointy hat knocked to the ground.

That’s okay, but it’s even better when you apply the Benny Hill soundtrack to it. Now that’s comedy gold!

Jokes aside, I can’t condone an attack on an elderly virgin, even from a fellow loon. I want the Pope to disappear as much as anyone, but this kind of thing won’t help. Just as Jason and Freddy will only die when audiences refuse to watch their movies, the Pope will only cease to exist when people stop believing in him. Sorta like Tinkerbell. And I don’t mean the outfit.

Older posts Newer posts

Meta

© 2024 Good Reason

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑