This, from mormon.org (via Facebook):
This, from Gallup:
This was how Utah voted in the 2004 elections.
I don’t know which is more unaccountable — why the LDS Church would try to make this claim, or why they thought anyone would believe them.
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I was in a debate with Ben Rae of the UWA Christian Union this week, and the topic was “Is Life Meaningless?”
I’ll have a bit to say about this, and I think there may even be video (though I hope not — I have a condition that makes me curl into a ball of pain when seeing myself on film). But I wanted to post an idea that occurred to me as I was passing the staircase.
The way the event went down, there was a lot of Ben saying that life was meaningless without Jesus, and a lot of me saying that, no, life had meaning, atheists have the ability to create meaning in life, and that even Christians have to construct it.
But why would a Christian want to assert that life is meaningless without a god? In a word: marketing. You have to sell the problem before you can sell the solution, and what we saw was Ben selling a lot of problem. There’s really nothing that a religion can offer someone who’s happy and well-adjusted. They do awfully well with miserable people, though.
It would make sense, then, for religions to try to increase human misery in an effort to sell their system, which in fact, they do. It could be considered their chief enterprise.
This happened when my son was so hungry he could eat a three-day-old corpse, and I don’t just mean ritually.
I’ve had lots of talks with people about ‘spirituality’, and the one thing I’ve learned is that it’s important to figure out what they mean by that.
If by ‘spirituality’, they mean
- ‘a feeling of wonder and awe at the universe’, or
- ‘a sense of being interconnected with all things’, or even
- ‘a focus on worthwhile but non-material things, like relationships’
then they’ll get very little argument with me, because I like those things too.
If, however, by ‘spirituality’, they mean ‘a belief that our material reality is overlaid with an invisible realm of spirits and incorporeal beings’, then that’s just crap. Nobody has any evidence for that.
Well, Sam Harris is making an argument that we should be reclaiming the word ‘spiritual’ to refer to my first bracket of concepts above.
We must reclaim good words and put them to good use—and this is what I intend to do with “spiritual.” I have no quarrel with Hitch’s general use of it to mean something like “beauty or significance that provokes awe,” but I believe that we can also use it in a narrower and, indeed, more transcendent sense.
Of course, “spiritual” and its cognates have some unfortunate associations unrelated to their etymology—and I will do my best to cut those ties as well. But there seems to be no other term (apart from the even more problematic “mystical” or the more restrictive “contemplative”) with which to discuss the deliberate efforts some people make to overcome their feeling of separateness—through meditation, psychedelics, or other means of inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness. And I find neologisms pretentious and annoying. Hence, I appear to have no choice: “Spiritual” it is.
Neologisms (new words) may indeed be pretentious and annoying, but the reality is that they’re also very difficult to implement. It took a good 30 years for Richard Dawkins’ meme to catch on, and even then it’s likely to refer to a picture of a cat. Curse you, semantic shift!
What Harris doesn’t allow for is that reclaiming a word is very difficult as well. It only seems to work with taboo labels for people (queer and nigger come to mind), and only then to be used among people it was formerly applied to. It takes a lot of people to make this kind of change happen, and I just don’t see the impetus for it. If the word is moving at all, it’s moving toward that group of people who describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’, meaning that they believe in a god, but not a church. And they’re much more numerous than us pantheistic-leaning Sagan fans.
I just don’t think ‘spirituality’ is a good choice to refer to the transcendent and ineffable. It’s so fuzzy and imprecise — it could mean anything. And that means that when you use it, you’re leaving yourself open to misinterpretation. Why use a word that you have to explain every time you use it?
Not only that, it’s going to be very difficult to uncouple the word from a set of associations people have about it; memories of being in a church, an implication that religion is positive. These are implications I don’t intend and don’t want to reinforce.
And of course, the link between the word ‘spirituality’ and supernaturalism is well-nigh insurmountable. It has ‘spirit’ at its root. How is someone not supposed to think of spirits whenever you use it?
Instead of trying to redeem the word ‘spiritual’ out of the muck of supernaturalism and religious tradition, why not use another word: transcendent. Or transcendence, if you need a noun to replace ‘spirituality’. These convey the transportive sense of wonder and awe most adequately.
Back in 1981, a newspaper article arrested my adolescent attention. It was so striking that I clipped and saved it, and here it is all these years later.
Believer predicts ‘liftoff’
By CHARLES HILLINGER
Los Angeles TimesTUCSON, Ariz. — The “liftoff” is just a trumpet call and a day away, Bill Maupin says.
Tomorrow, June 28, a trumpet heard around the world will sound in the heavens and “all of us on Earth who have accepted the Lord will slowly rise from the ground in our bodies and drift into the clouds,” he says“Millions of people will ascend into the heaven toward evening on June 28. It is prophesized in the Bible.”
Maupin, 51, founder and president of the 50-member Lighthouse Gospel Tract Foundation here, has been predicting this day of “rapture” since 1976. Now, he and the other group members believe they are spending their final days on Earth.
“We know we are going to ascend into heaven June 28.”
Holmer Pappageorge, 53, former owner of a restaurant, says the Lord led him to Maupin’s door. “I’m saying my goodbyes to my friends,” Pappageorge says.
“Television news crews and newspaper photographers all over the world will be filming us going up,” Scott Braun, 28, predicts.
“I was a merchant seaman sailing on a ship in the Far East when the Lord told me one night to go to Tucson. I had no idea why he wanted me in Tucson. He led me to this house.”
Joe Wade, 20, a busboy at a local restaurant, says his mother told him God is coming back. “He will meet us in the clouds and take us with him to heaven.”
“It’s going to happen soon. I‘ve got goose bumps all over.” Wade displayed his arms, which were indeed covered with goose bumps.Maupin, his wife, Elizabeth, and their five children live on an estate in northeast Tucson on an acre of land. Their living room is the size of a chapel and is filled with folding chairs, a podium, a piano and musical instruments and religious tracts.
The Maupin bedroom is a greenhouse crowded with scores of trees and plants. A spiral staircase leads from the foot of their bed to the ceiling.Maupin says Satan will take over the world for seven years after the massive ascension on the last Sunday of this month. “Satan and his cohorts will chop off the heads of a billion people still on Earth who turn to the Lord during a 50-day period begnning Dec. 2, 1984,” Maupin says.
“It’s all in the Bible. On May 14, 1988, one day before the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel, Christ will come back to Earth. bringing along all of us who went to heaven June 28.
“When he returns to Earth he will reign for 1,000 years.”
Maupin says the prophecies all are in the Bible but it takes years of study to determine the dates on which the prophecies will be fulfilled.
What if the prophecies do not come true? Maupin was asked.
“There is no question in my mind. I’m absolutely conviced without a doubt.”
“Trust in the Lord,” chanted his assembled followers.
“Every human being since Adam who has been saved will rise from their graves and join the living in the liftoff,” Maupin says.
Now once you’ve lived a while, and you’ve seen rapture movements come and go, you see how silly it all is. But despite growing up in a Millennial church, this was the first time I’d seen someone predict the End of the Times so unambiguously, and I’ll be honest — I was a little freaked out. Of course, the guy wasn’t a Mormon, so what did he know? But despite the semi-sarcastic tone of the article, a part of my brain said, “What if he’s right?”
The day came and went, and then on June 29, a follow-up article appeared in the paper. How would Maupin explain the failed prediction? He made a move that failed rapture predictors typically make the first time around: reschedule.
This time he’s absolutely sure of rapture date
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — The mass, bodily ascension into heaven erroneously forecast by a fundamentalist sect for June 28 will occur instead on Aug. 7, the group’s leader says.
“This time, I’m absolutely positive,” said Bill Maupin, spiritual leader of the Lighthouse Gospel Tract Foundation. It’s Aug. 7.”
Maupin, 51, and the approximately 50 members of the church-like foundation received nationwide publicity last month after predicting the ascension, or rapture, based on an interpretation of dates and “signs” related in the Bible.
Maupin said “a slight miscalculation” caused the incorrect date.
“There was a period of time there (in the Bible) that I just didn’t see,” he said. “It had to do with Noah and the flood and the 40 days and 40 nights. I got out my Bible on the 30th of June, and the Lord showed it to me.”
And after August 7 passed uneventfully? Maupin declined to set another date, but instead claimed that the rapture was no big deal really, and that ‘the important thing’ was that they were making people aware of Jesus or some crap like that.
‘Rapture’ put off again
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Fundamentalist leader Bill Maupin has once again postponed the day on which his followers are to ascend to heaven, saying the auguries that were to precede the event have not occurred.
Maupin declined to set another date for the “rapture,” or ascension, “It sure isn’t very far away,” he said Saturday.
Maupin, who heads a group of about 50 followers of the Lighthouse Gospel Tract Foundation here, first predicted that the faithful would experience rapture on June 28.
When that deadline passed, Maupin said there had been a “slight miscalculation” and said the ascension should occur by noon Saturday.This time, however, he hedged his bets, saying that it would first necessary for Israel to capture Damascus, Syria and Lebanon and for someone from the United States to intervene in that holy war.
“The rapture is not main thing I expected to occur,” Maupin said. “When we started, it was not so much the date of the rapture. It was making the people of the world aware of the events that precede the rapture. The events have not occurred.”
Maupin still believes a Mideast war is imminent. He said he expects Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government to attempt to regain Israel’s biblical borders.
Maupin said he does not know if his followers are disappointed to find themselves in Tucson instead of in heaven, but he said he believes they remain strong in their faith.
There have been a lot of raptures since then, and whenever they’ve come along, I’ve thought of ol’ Bill Maupin and these clippings. In a way, the non-event helped me become a skeptic and helped me understand how ridiculous religious people can be and how shifty their advocates are when they’re proven wrong.
I only just found these clippings, or else I would have posted them just after the failed Harold Camping prediction as a way of showing how eerily similar their rationalisations were. But never mind, there will always be more, whether in 2012 or beyond. That’s another thing I learned from rapture predictors.
Data for the 2011 Australian census is out. I mentioned in a previous post that if ‘no religion’ went higher than 20%, I’d be ecstatic. Well, ecstatic I am, because we’re at 22.3 percent, up from 18.7.
Here’s the graph. Notice the red line, which is the trendline for the data for 1971–2006. The data for 2011 is way above this projection.
This places the “no religion” category in second place among religions (if it were one). It’s the only major group to post gains as a percentage of the population.
As to numbers:
2006: 3,706,553 people answered “No religion”, or 18.7%.
2011: 4,796,787 people answered “No religion”, or 22.3%.
For perspective, this means we have more people than the Uniting Church, Presbyterians, Eastern Orthodox, Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Buddhism, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews combined.
That’s over 1 million people who either dumped their religion since the last census, or came out as ‘No religion’ for the first time. So if it seems like small potatoes that we only got a 3.6% gain over the whole population, just remember that we’ve had a 29% increase in our numbers. We gained more than the entire population of the Uniting Church, in just the last five years.
The ‘No religion’ group does not include people who did not answer the religion question. This latter group has shrunk since 2006, so we’re likely pulling some people from there. I’ll bet the AFA’s “No Religion” campaign had some influence on this.
What does this mean for us atheists? Well, we have to be careful about these numbers — people who put down ‘no religion’ may not be atheists. There may be a sizeable proportion of ‘spiritual but not religious’ people in that figure. We don’t have (or I couldn’t find) specific breakdowns for ‘Atheist’ or ‘Agnostic’ categories. I’ll be looking forward to those (as well as smaller Christian categories like ‘Mormon’ or ‘Jehovah’s Witness’).
But this does mean that one in five of us has no religion, and it’s getting close to one in four. Doubtless some of those are newly deconverted, and they’re going to need support. If you’re one of the ‘old guard’ who’s been an atheist for a while now, get involved and get with a group or start your own, whether online or IRL.
It’s taken a while to get here, and it’s going to take a while longer to reduce religion to a minority, but the social trends are moving in our direction. This is great news! Now is the time to celebrate, but also time to keep up the pressure on religion by staying visible.
The next challenge will be to encourage critical thinking among the populace. We all know people who have deconverted from a religion, but who maybe haven’t made the move to skeptical rationalism. This means they’re still vulnerable to proto-religions like New Age woo, or other delusions like altMed. Critical thinking doesn’t happen automatically, and it’s something even atheists aren’t always good at. I’d like to encourage everyone to get informed, and get skeptical.
Data for the 2011 Australian census is coming out on Thursday, and I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve. I can’t wait to see what percentage of people listed themselves as ‘No Religion’.
Why do I care? Am I insecure in my atheism, and I need backup to feel validated? Not really; it’s just that we’re on the brink of a moment in history here. More and more of us are coming out as ‘not religious’, and it’s cool to see it grow. Sure, Thursday’s data dump gives us more numbers to crunch, but the numbers represent the stories of people who have walked away from religion (and in some cases but not all, gods and supernaturalism). This weakens the hold of religion in our society, and provides an ever-larger pool of people that could be turned on to skepticism, humanism, and other positive values.
So what should we expect the numbers to do for 2011? I grabbed the “no religion” numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, and did some plotting.
The Numbers application will give you trendlines, but it doesn’t let you extrapolate beyond the data. (Boo.) So I took the linear trendline, and laid a longer red line over it. That’s kind of bodgy; sorry about that.
Anyway, if you enlarge, you’ll find that the line crosses the 2011 axis just over 20 percent. So that’s my prediction — a little over 20%; anything more is gravy. Maybe the AFA’s “No Religion” campaign did its work, and we’ll see 22 or 23. I’d be ecstatic with 23, but I think that’s a bit high.
Place your bets in comments. More on Thursday.
So there’s this gay guy, right? And he’s Mormon, and married to a woman. Sadly, not as uncommon as you’d think.
But the story of Mr and Mrs Weed is a bit different because they both knew going into the relationship. He’s come out of the closet to tell their story.
I guess the premise of this post is to share that not only am I homosexual, but I’m also a devout and believing Mormon. And that I’m very happily married to a woman, and have been for ten years now.
And for the first time, we’re talking about it publicly.
So he’s gay. She knew about it. But they’re in love, have three kids, and a working relationship in which they both seem very happy, including a functioning sex life.
This story has garnered a lot of love among Mormon women on Facebook. Friends of mine are saying
- I loved this xx
- Very very very cool.
- I think he is a hero.
I can see why they’d think that because his story is tremendously affirming for the beliefs of Mormon women, two core beliefs in particular:
- Gay people ought to abstain from gay sex for the entirety of their lives, and this is proof that it can work!
- Sex isn’t very important to a relationship. Why should men get to have the kind of sex they want, and why won’t my husband quit bugging me about it?!
So you can imagine the Facebook fury when I tell them that this is a terrible idea, and I give the whole thing ten years.
Am I a hater? No, I just realise that sex is important, and while you may be able to bury yourself in the kind of lifestyle you think you should want, a lifetime is a long time not to be getting the kind of sex you really really want. It’s a setup for cheating, and then he’d be the bad guy for a) having gay sex, and b) cheating.
Sure, it can be pulled off, and I hope they do. But how does it sound to you? Let’s just say there was a church that only allowed gay people, and you really believe in it, although you’re straight. If you really really tried, could you find a nice person of your own gender that you liked and respected, and maybe even have sex, even though you know you don’t find that kind of sex appealing? You probably could, especially if you regarded it as a sacrifice of faith. (And if you believed that God would fix everything in the life beyond.) But acting contrary to your orientation is just that — acting.
The Mormon angle is bugging me, too. They’re making this decision because, yes, they love each other and want a family. But they also believe the Mormon Church is the One True Church, and it’s telling him that gaysex is wrong, and that he should abstain. I’m a big believer in informed consent, but it needs to work all the way around; they know what’s going on with each other, but they’re not aware that the church is — frankly — a mess of men’s opinions, built on lies. If this man came to realise that, the anguish might be considerable. Or not, if he felt lucky to have been with his wife, which he well might. But you need to know, you know?
He writes movingly about God’s love for gay people:
I want you to know that God loves you, and that even though you are attracted to people of the same gender, you are a completely legitimate individual, worthy of God’s love, your family’s love, and the love of your friends. You are no more broken than any other person you meet. You are not evil. You are a beautiful child of God.
This would be news to the God of the Bible, who couldn’t stand gay people, won’t let them into his kingdom, and has commanded that they be killed. But I guess since Mr Weed has come this far, he’ll believe in whatever kind of god he needs to. Theism is so often projection and wish-fulfillment.
Another sad thing: despite the author’s best intentions, this will be used as a stick to beat gay people. “Hey, this guy can do it. Why can’t you?” Mixed-orientation LDS marriage is one of the tragedies of the Mormon experience, and this may tip a few people to try it. (It should be noted though that the author doesn’t recommend this lifestyle for everyone.)
Maybe they can manage it. I really hope they do — we don’t need more unhappy relationships. At this stage, he’s a data point. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. My hope is that they can keep it together, or at least work together and remain friends, when he moves on to his real sexual orientation in his early-to-mid forties.
UPDATE
Another thing: Notice how he talks about ‘authenticity’, and claims that by having an LDS lifestyle, he’s being authentic to himself.
No, you’re being authentic to the Mormon Church. I’ve written before about how Mormonism is so all-consuming that Mormons often conflate their own goals, desires, and even their identities with that of their religion, so much so that when I insult the church, they think I’m insulting them. This is another manifestation of that.
Uh-oh! Looks like little Caleb has brought home some competing fiction! Mom knows that her Bible fiction won’t survive against it — it’s far more interesting — so it’s time for a guilt trip at the family table! (Fast forward to 2:58 for the video.)
Maybe AC Grayling was wrong — he suggested substituting ‘God’ with ‘Fred’ or some other name, just to show how silly the whole thing is. But ‘Jehovah’ sounds pretty silly to me, and they’re still buying it.
I imagine this is intended to help JW parents remove unwanted elements like ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘critical thinking’. It’s really terrible parenting, but it’s disguised as good parenting. Notice that Mom doesn’t yell or scream, or throw the toy in the trash. What she does is much more sinister: she manipulates the boy into caring for the feelings of an invisible bronze-age Hebrew deity, and acting accordingly. Check him out; he’s absolutely gutted.
Do you want Jehovah to be sad?
How stupid! Jehovah’s a big guy; he can look after his own feelings. Or is that a not-so-subtle threat? You don’t want Jehovah to be ‘sad’ with you, do you? Remember how we read about the Midianites? Jehovah was ‘sad’ with them, too.
What if you disobey Jehovah, and play with toys he doesn’t like?
I’ll turn horrible and old like those poor fuckers Adam and Eve!
Even creepier is how the kid is encouraged to be Jehovah’s ‘friend’. People sometimes talk about having a ‘relationship’ with their favourite deity, but what they don’t realise is that it’s hard to make a relationship work when there’s a significant power imbalance. When the other person in the relationship has all the power in the universe, knows everything you do and think, imposes arbitrary moral demands on you, and will ultimately decide your eternal future, that’s not a relationship. It even goes beyond ‘abusive relationship’; it’s a hostage situation. How is this a model for successful relationships?
You made Mommy very happy!
Hmm. Something about her seems familiar.
Nah.
Afterwards, they sang “I Am a Slave of God”.
UPDATE: Hey, look what the Internet made! A Sparlock t-shirt!
Best of all, Café Press will give you a 25% discount if you use the order code 3XNEYLRKATMK. Apparently.
Celebrate this, the best of all possible worlds!
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