Confessions of an Anonymous Coward

A Change of Focus

2010-01-02T20:53:00.000-08:00

So... with the new year and all (and the year and a half of silence), I think it's about time to... refocus this blog a little. When it started out, it was mostly about atheism. I'm likely to still have something to say about that subject, of course, but there are other things I want to write about too. A year after the blog launched, I admitted I was gay. And... well, that's another thing I'm likely to want to write about some.

But I think maybe the main thing I'm going to want to focus this blog on is skepticism and critical thinking. Because really, that's the root of everything else. It's critical thinking that leads to recognizing the lack of foundation of religion. It would certainly be silly to say it was critical thinking that made me gay... but critical thinking does lead to more acceptance of that and other traits, by, again, helping to recognize the baselessness of discrimination. Ultimately, I think critical thinking is one of the most important things to try to foster.

Anyway, we'll see how the blog develops over this next year. There are a few things I want to do fairly soon, though. I'm going to make a few changes to that blogroll on the right... there are a few other blogs I ought to add, and at least one of the blogs that is listed there is no longer updating, and should maybe be removed. (Well, several of them haven't updated in a while, but one of them has officially declared itself inactive.) But also, I should make a new introductory post. I already have an introductory post—it was the first post on this blog—but a lot has changed since then, and it's pretty badly out of date.

And then, yeah, I'll get to making some more substantive posts. Never did get around to finishing that series on the Seven Deadly Sins... But in the meantime... yeah, I've got a lot on my plate...

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T23:52:00.001-08:00

Well, it's a new year... and it's a year and a half since my last post. In which I said it had been "way too long" since my last post before that, and said I'd post more later. Which, I guess, I now technically have, even if it's more than a year and a half later...

Yeah, okay, a big part of my reason for not posting has, obviously, been the fact that I've been busy. First with my teaching job, and then (I wasn't rehired for this academic year)... well, with other things. Such as acting. Yeah, I'm not making enough as an actor to make a living at it yet, but I've been doing pretty well; I've got an IMDb page now with a number of credits. (Which, of course, I'm not going to link to, since that would kind of go against the whole anonymity thing.) In fact, it's to the point now where I'm called by my stage name more often than by my real name; even my current roommate is someone who I met through acting and who calls me by my stage name. (He does know my real name; he's just not used to using it.)

So, yeah, I guess while I'm anonymous here, I'm otherwise polyonymous. But anyway...

So, anyway, I've been busy, and that's part of the problem. But another part is that as I fell behind, the comments piled up on past posts, and responding to all those comments seemed an increasingly daunting task. And made me somewhat unwilling to resume this blog and face them.

Oh, I'm not referring to friendly comments offering support, or even those that respectfully disagree or ask honest questions; those don't bother me. I can deal with them. It's the comments of people who seem intent on starting a debate, or on just plain attacking. That's not what I started this blog for. I don't like debating. I don't think I'm bad at it; I just don't enjoy it. I don't want to debate. Seriously. I have things I want to say, but I'm really not interested in arguing about them.

Yeah, I know; I don't have to respond. But the problem was... well, I guess the main problem was, I didn't want it to look like I didn't have a response. In fact, in many cases (maybe even most cases), I'd already addressed the matters brought up in the comment in another post the commenter evidently hadn't read, or even in the same post the comment was in reply to, the commenter apparently having only glanced at the subject of the post and made assumptions about its contents without actually reading it. So it's not like responding would have been difficult. But with so many posts to respond to... and the inevitability, based on past experience, that some of the commenters would have returned with objections that must be responded to, or tried to play word games to twist what I said, or... ugh.

But you know what? Ultimately, I guess, this is all a matter of pride. It's all just because I don't want these people to think I can't answer their arguments. Why should I care? Especially given that this blog is anonymous, so they don't even know who I am? Why should it matter if they think they've out-argued me? Especially since even if I do reply, they're likely to dismiss my reply and go on thinking they've won anyway?

So you know I've decided? The heck with past comments. I may respond to some if I feel like it, but I won't feel obligated. And that goes with future comments too. I'm going to try not to worry about responding to them. I might respond to some comments if I feel like it (particularly if they're not argumentative), but I'm not going to feel obligated to respond to them all. I'm not going to actually delete comments unless they're clearly spam or obscene, but I may decide to ignore them. If people want to think the reason I'm not responding is because they've stumped me with their brilliant arguments, eh, let them think that. I don't have time to deal with it.

In fact, I'm not even going to look at any comments on past posts tonight. Maybe later, to see if there's anything interesting I missed. But for now, I'll just make this post, and go to bed. (Well, maybe check out a few other blogs I haven't checked out in a while first.)

Anyway, though, I'll try to be a little more active on this blog this year than I was last year. Which shouldn't be hard, given that last year I made a grand total of zero posts. But seriously, I do still have some things I want to say, and maybe this year I'll find time to say them. And if anyone reading this wants to get into an argument about them... please, find someone else to argue with. Thanks.

On the Way Back

2008-03-31T23:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's been way too long since my last post; like I said, I've been in some financial straits, and haven't even had internet access at home. But I've got my internet access restored now, and I should be able to start posting much more often again.

Though not tonight; I've got a lot of other things to catch up on. So...for right now, all I wanted to say was that I'm back. I'll post more later.

Schoolwork

2008-01-31T22:38:00.000-08:00

Gah, well, it's been a long time since my last post (again), so I figured it was about time I ought to post something so I wouldn't leave January completely without posts, and so any readers that may still be keeping an eye on this blog will know I haven't completely abandoned it. Life's just been very busy (more specifically, the teaching job has kept me very busy, between writing and grading finals and students wanting tutoring)--that, and I still don't have an internet connection at home (I don't really feel comfortable spending money on things like that till I have all my past-due bills paid up--and while I'm getting there, I'm not quite there yet), which makes it hard to find an opportunity to make a blog post. There's been plenty I've been wanting to post about, though, and more frequent posts should resume...uh, some time in the future.

For now, I'm going to make this post relatively brief, because I have to be getting home and getting to bed so I can get up in the morning in time to get to the school early. But I do have something to tell about my teaching job that relates to the subject of this blog.

I may have mentioned (I'm kind of writing this post in a hurry, so I don't want to take the time to glance through prior posts right now to check) that I got this job because I'd applied for a job back in October at the same school as a science teacher. I didn't get the job then, but the head of the science department liked me enough to ask me to tutor a student he was working with--and, when a math teacher quit unexpectedly in December and an immediate replacement was needed, to recommend me for the position. Well, during my first interview back in December, he had remarked that he noticed that I had mentioned on my résumé that I spoke Spanish. Yes, I said, that's true.

"Why?" he asked.

Kind of an odd question, but I had an answer; I had lived for two years in Spain. But then he asked why I had done that, and I answered that, well, I was raised in the Mormon church, and I'd gone on a mission for the church when I was younger.

Then he asked whether I still was a believing Mormon.

I hesitated a little before answering. Private schools are often run or funded by religious organizations--as far as I knew, this one wasn't, but I wasn't sure. Besides, even if the school wasn't religious, he might be, and I didn't want to offend him. Was it a good idea to let him know I was an atheist? Still, the alternative was lying--or evading the question, but that wasn't much better--and while, admittedly, I still haven't told my family and the people at my church that I don't believe anymore, I didn't really want to spread that subterfuge any farther than it already was. So I told him that no, I'd been brought up in the church, but I no longer believed in it.

Somewhat to my relief, he expressed approval at this, saying that he thought religion was a bunch of nonsense himself.

(Which, I later discovered, may not be entirely true; he does still raise his family in a Christian church--though I don't gather he really believes in its doctrines.)

Anyway, he did occasionally thereafter talk to me about the LDS church, and tease me about it a little (he'd sometimes tell people I was from Utah--which I'm not; my brother lives in Utah, and my father grew up there, but the most time I've spent in Utah myself is two months in the Missionary Training Center before my mission). And apparently he mentioned to the English and history teacher in the room across from mine that I had family members who went to BYU. (Or possibly he'd erroneously told her that I myself had went to BYU--I don't recall correctly.)

I found this out one day when I went to lunch with said teacher and the science teacher next door (the person who, apparently, had gotten the job I'd originally applied for, though she didn't realize that). The English/history teacher brought up the subject, and I said that yes, my brother and sister had gone to BYU. So then she asked the inevitable follow-up question: Was I Mormon?

Again, I hesitated a little before answering, not sure how she would react, but decided to go with the honest answer. Well, I answered, I was brought up Mormon, and as far as most of my family knows I still am. I do still go to church, but just for social reasons; I don't believe in it anymore.

"Well," she said, "at least you still go to church."

Her reaction wasn't quite as positive as the department chair's; it turned out that she is Mormon (and is apparently doing her best to try to convert the science teacher; I overheard her inviting her to accompany her to church). Still, she remains friendly toward me, and doesn't seem offended by the fact that I've left the church (in spirit, if not in body, so to speak). But she hasn't talked to me at all about the church since then--though that may be not because she's avoiding the subject, but just because it hasn't come up.

The English/history teacher in question has a daughter in my class--one of the top students in the class, too, although she apparently didn't used to be; she was doing very badly in the class before, I've been told, but the science teacher has been tutoring her, and between that and the fact that she prefers my teaching methods to those of my predecessor she's shown a drastic improvement. Anyway, it was just yesterday, I think, that her daughter saw me drinking something before class, and said "Is that coffee, Mr. [insert my last name here]? Shame on you!" At the time, I thought it was a little odd she would find that shameful; did she think teachers shouldn't be drinking coffee for some reason? It didn't register with me until later that her mother must have told her I had been Mormon, and she was disapproving of my drinking coffee because it went against Mormon commandments.

As it happened, what I was drinking that morning wasn't coffee; it was, as I told her, an horchata-flavored smoothie. But--although I didn't tell her this--I have started drinking coffee now. Not every day, and not regularly, and the reason I started at all...can be laid largely at the feet of another teacher with a child in one of my classes. (Well, technically she's not a teacher; she's the academic admissions director, but a staff member, anyway.) But that's another story, and one that I suppose I'll tell in another entry another time.

So, anyway, I haven't been hiding my atheism at my new job (though obviously I haven't been going about trumpeting it either), and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything. One thing, though, I admit, I have avoided mentioning is...well, my sexual orientation. Not that there haven't been opportunities. The science department head has occasionally asked me questions about what kind of girls I find most attractive, and similar matters, and I've done my best to avoid them. My students have asked me if I'm married. And, well, I'm not positive, but I think the science teacher nextdoor may be flirting with me. But I just haven't felt comfortable mentioning that I'm gay. Now, the science department head does use "homosexual" as a random insult sometimes, but he uses various ethnicities as random insults, too, including his own (Armenian), so that's probably more because he enjoys being politically incorrect for his own amusement than because he really has anything against homosexuals; still, I admit it is a little off-putting. Even without that, though...I don't know. For some reason, even though I've known I was gay a lot longer than I've considered myself an atheist, and even though I know that lots of studies and surveys have shown that atheists are far more distrusted than homosexuals, it's still my homosexuality that I'm less comfortable admitting to or talking about.

Anyway, I said I'd make this post relatively brief, and arguably I've already failed to do so, but I really do have to get home and get to bed, so I should end it now. But anyway, I just figured it was well past time I ought to post something, and that I may as well post about my teaching job, and how my atheism has come up there. I'll try to post more often again in the future--I do have a lot more I want to post about--but...okay, you know, I'm struggling to think of a pithy way to end this post, but it's late enough I should just end it and go, even if it ends on a lame sentence like this one.

A Voice From the Dust

2007-12-25T22:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's been way, way too long since my last update. When last we left off, I was in a state of severe financial hardship and searching for a job. Which explains why it's been so long since my last update--not only because I've had to spend all my time job-hunting and scrambling for money, but also because my internet connection was disconnected due to lack of payment. But let's continue the story from where we left off.

So, as I was going longer and longer without a job, things were getting more and more desperate. I wasn't completely without any income--I had a few tutoring jobs. One of them I'd gotten through another job I'd applied in October, as a science teacher at a private school. I didn't get the job, but the science department chair liked me enough to arrange for me to tutor a student he was helping out independently. Another tutoring job I'd gotten through a tutoring company. Still, while the income from the tutoring jobs was certainly better than nothing, it wasn't enough to pay all my bills.

In particular, it wasn't even enough to pay my rent, and by the beginning of December my landlord had lost what patience he may have had. I'd already been very late with my November rent (and had managed to come up with it only by borrowing money), and he wasn't happy about having to wait for late payment in December too. He reluctantly agreed to give me until December 10 to pay--but if I didn't give him the money by then, I'd be evicted.

Now, it probably goes without saying that eviction would be an utter disaster for me. With no car, and no money to rent a truck or hire movers, I'd have no way of getting my stuff moved, and nowhere to move it to in any case. It might not be entirely true that I have nowhere to go--my mother has long been trying to convince me to move back in with my parents, and she'd no doubt be happy to have me. But--while that would beat homelessness--it would be a catastrophe as far as I was concerned. Aside from the fact that I don't want to live in Orange County, and that I have lots of things going on in Los Angeles I wouldn't be able to get to; and aside from, well, the opprobrium of a thirty-something living with his parents; there's the prospect of it being a dead end I couldn't escape from, or at least couldn't escape from without great difficulty. My mother kept talking about the money I'd save by not having to pay rent, and how with what I'm paying on rent at my current place I'd be able to afford a car--but this overlooks the difficulty I'd have making any money there at all. In Los Angeles, I can still work without a car (or could if I had a job); the public transportation system, while not top-of-the-line (the MTA has advertised that it won an award as the best municipal transportation system in the nation; I find this hard to credit), is at least serviceable; Orange County's vastly inferior and thoroughly inadequate bus system would make getting to a regular job impossible. Not to mention the fact that I would lose the tutoring jobs I already had, plus the job leads I was still pursuing, and would have to start a job hunt over from scratch. And there are many other ways that moving into my parents' house in Orange County would severely interfere with my plans for my future... Suffice to say that moving in with my parents was an extremely unpalatable contigency. But if I was evicted, I would have nowhere else to go--if I didn't have the money to pay my rent where I lived now, I certainly didn't have the money to put down for rent somewhere new (even if I could find another apartment I could afford). So eviction was something I wanted to avoid at virtually all costs.

Which is why I was so tempted by a possible way out that presented itself...

One friend I knew from church (who had loaned me some money)--for the purposes of this post, I'll call him "Tom", which isn't his real name but is close enough--had been urging me for some time to go to the bishop about my financial difficulties and get some money from the church. There was nothing to be ashamed of, he said; that's the reason we pay tithing and fast offerings; he knew of many people in the ward who had gotten money from the church to get through hard times who deserved it a lot less than I did. "Tom" pressed me to just give the bishop a call and explain the situation, and there shouldn't be any problem with just getting enough to get by--in fact, he recommended I ask for a little more than I needed just for rent, enough to get a bit of a cushion and avoid undue stress.

Obviously, I'd resisted doing this. Neither "Tom" nor the bishop, of course, knows about my atheism; as far as either of them knows, I'm still a faithful member of the church. ("Tom" had even mentioned at one point--I think half in jest, but not entirely--that his testimony depended to some degree on mine, that my own faithfulness was helping him through. I...really wasn't sure what to say about that.) I feel bad enough about that, about going through the motions of Mormonism for social reasons and hiding my deconversion from the ward members. But actually getting money from the church under false pretenses...well, it struck me that that would be a whole different and much bigger level of wrong. (And it would be under false pretenses; I'm pretty sure the bishop wouldn't consider giving me any money to get me through my financial straits if he knew how I really felt about the church.)

But by December 8, two days before my eviction deadline, when "Tom" pressed me again to see the bishop and ask for money...I gave in. I was desperate. I'd tried anything else. I'd tried getting loans, with no luck. Payday advances? No dice without a regular payday, and the tutoring jobs didn't count. I had gotten a job at Universal Studios--a sort of embarrassing, barely-over-minimum-wage job that I'd gotten because it was at least better than nothing, but that still didn't seem likely to be enough to cover all my bills--but the five-day training period for that had just started, and I wouldn't be an official employee until after the training was over (and wouldn't get paid until the following Thursday--and even then, of course, it wouldn't be nearly enough to cover my rent). I'd tried pretty much everything I could think of, and hadn't found a way to come up with the money. I was out of options.

So I told "Tom" that yeah, maybe he was right. I'd go to the bishop.

He called back later and said he'd talked to one of the bishop's counselors and explained my situation, and that all I needed to do was talk to the bishop and work out the details. I called him and explained the situation, and arranged to call him the next day after I got out of job training--because of the training, I wasn't going to be able to be at church that Sunday--and set up a meeting.

So. It looked like I was going to be able to avoid eviction after all. But...I didn't feel at all comfortable about what I'd had to do to do it.

I tried to rationalize it. After all, the amount I'd be getting was much less than I'd paid the church over the years in tithing and fast offerings, so I'd be just sort of getting back some of what the church had already taken from me. Okay, I hadn't been planning to pay tithing or fast offerings anymore, but after this, maybe I owed it to them to pay for one more year. In fact, once I was in a better financial spot, I could pay back what I'd gotten, with interest. There'd be no harm done. I wasn't hurting anyone.

I wasn't buying it. No matter how I tried to justify it, it just didn't sit well with me. The ends didn't justify the means. It was still wrong.

Desperate as I was to avoid eviction, I still couldn't go through with this; my conscience wouldn't allow it. It was too late that night to call the bishop back, but I called him the next morning and left a message, and called "Tom" too, to let him know that, while I appreciated his help and his friendship, I didn't feel comfortable taking money from the church.

I still didn't have any idea how I could come up with the money for rent, and eviction still looked possibly inescapable. But I did manage to talk the landlord into giving me till Thursday, though it wasn't easy and he made it very clear that he wouldn't give me any further extensions.

Then, on Monday, December 10, a math teacher at the private school where I'd applied for the science teacher job back in October quit very suddenly, without giving notice. The school needed a replacement teacher immediately. And the science department chair, whom I'd kept in touch with through the tutoring job, asked me if I wanted the job.

This didn't immediately solve the problem, of course--I had a job now, but I didn't get paid immediately. Still, knowing that I had a decent job now and a definite prospect of income made it easier to get some loans from friends, and I managed to get the money to the landlord by Thursday and avoid eviction...and from here on out, my financial prospects are looking much rosier. Oh, it'll be a while before I'm really caught up and financially comfortable, but at least I'm in no danger of eviction now and, while things will be tight for a while, I'll have enough to get by.

We've all heard the "inspirational" stories of people in dire situations resisting the temptation to get out of their trouble by immoral means and being rewarded by an unexpected boon that gets them better off than they would have been had they given into the temptation in the first place. The idea behind the stories is that the people were being tested by God, and that He rewarded their faithfulness. The story of my recent experiences has a similar flavor--I turned down the option of getting money from the church, even though I didn't see any other way to avoid disaster, and then a better option unexpectedly arose. But if the God of those inspirational stories did exist, it would seem out of character for him to reward what was essentially my staying true to my atheism, so I think He can be ruled out as the architect of my financial deliverance. Still, even if I can't thank some divine benefactor for my fortune, I'm certainly grateful for it, if one can be grateful to impersonal circumstance--and I'm glad I don't have to live with the guilt of having taken money from the church to get through my straits. I'm still ashamed that in my desperation I went so far as to call the bishop and start the process, but I can take some consolation in the fact that at least I didn't go through with it.

And anyway, now that I've got a job and am in a much better situation than I had been for the last few months, I'll try to update this blog much more regularly again...

A Month In Review

2007-10-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

Dang...it's been way too long since I last updated this. Over a month, in fact (though just barely). Yeah, sorry; things have been busy lately...mostly because I've been, well, busy trying to get enough money together to pay the bills. (The acting thing has actually been going fairly well...but not well enough to make me enough money to live on.)

I'm in a hurry right now, and don't have time for a long post, so, though (as usual) there are many things I want to post about (including but by no means limited to finally posting a wrap-up to the series about The God Delusion), for the moment I'll just give, well, a brief rundown of what's been going on for the last month. Or the last two months, really, because last time I posted I'd still been behind stating what was going on.

So, what's been going on lately. Um, okay, not much worth stating here, really. Still for the moment keeping up the faĉade of going to church, though fairly infrequently; things have come up often enough on Sundays lately that I haven't been going all that often. (Which is okay; I'm doing it pretty much just for appearances now--well, okay, that and to keep in touch with friends there--, and eventually I ought to come clean about my beliefs, or disbeliefs, anyway.) Went to a few more PFLAG meetings, but may not go to any more, particularly as I've since found out about a group meeting more nearby (at the Center for Inquiry) that seems likely to be more congenial--although unfortunately I may not be able to make the meeting this month (and it is unfortunate, because I'm curious what that group's like).

Hm...not much more to say right now, especially since I don't have time to go on at length right now. I am, however, possibly about to start a new job (I've interviewed for it; the interview went well; but I haven't heard back yet)--in fact, I'll just say that one way or another I am about to start a new job, because if I don't get this one I'll find another one; I really need the money right now, and acting, while it's been fun, hasn't been sufficient financially--and when that happens, I should be able to post more often. Being stressed out about not having money, and desperately seeking sources of same, has made it hard to keep up with things like, well, blog posting. But I'll post again--a more substantive post--soon. Definitely within much less than a month, at any rate...

The God Delusion: The Third 100 Pages

2007-09-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

Wow. It's been three weeks since I last posted here. That's way too long. Yeah, there are reasons for the delay--I've still been quite busy, and I was actually without internet access for a period of time (not worth going into details)--but anyway, uh, I guess I'm back. And though there are plenty of other things I've been wanting to post about, I think I'll start out by finally continuing my posts about my impression of The God Delusion

Anyway, I said in my second post that I probably wasn't going to do this--not that I wasn't going to continue this series, but that I wasn't going to post about the third 100 pages, specifically; I was likely to just make one more post wrapping everything up. I'm not doing that primarily because, uh, I still haven't finished the book. Not that I'm that slow a reader, of course; I finished the first 300 pages in a few days, after all. It's just that when I didn't finish the book by the book club meeting, I wasn't in a hurry to finish it thereafter, especially since I had so much else to do (like I said, I've been busy). But after this post I'm going to read the rest--aside from the fact that, well, it's about time that I finished it, it's, uh, overdue at the library... Anyway, I haven't looked at the book since that August book club meeting, so I guess before making this post I should at least skim those third 100 pages to refresh my memory...

Okay, back. Actually, I have little to say about this part of the book (which is good, because this post is late enough already, and I don't have much time to write it). Dawkins presents here arguments about why religion isn't necessary for morality (a well-worn subject, but one that too many theists still refuse to accept), and, significantly, why and how religion has been--and still is--an active force for harm, both societally and individually. (His discussion of the "moral Zeitgeist" in Chapter 7 has much in common with a post I made back in June). But I won't repeat his arguments in detail; you can (and probably should, if you haven't) read the book yourself for that. Again, my purpose here is to state my impression of the book--and in particular, my criticisms of it, since I haven't seen any really critical reviews not from a religious standpoint. (I repeat, however, as I've said in earlier posts, that my focus on criticism here shouldn't be taken to imply overall that I disliked the book--only that it's the details I found fault with that I think are most worth discussing here, since plenty of other people have already gone on about its virtues.)

Actually, after reading this part of the book, I think I want to mitigate--though not entirely retract--some of my prior criticisms. I mentioned that the second part of the book seemed somewhat less gratingly insulting and potentially offensive toward the religious than the first; the trend continues in the third. At first, I thought perhaps this was an odd strategy, to concentrate his venom near the beginning of the book and thus turn off potential religious readers, but on further thought perhaps that's not the case after all. Any theists willing to read the book in the first place are likely to expect some offense and stick through it, and if they get through the harshness at the beginning then by the time they've finished the book they may have forgotten it, or at least forgiven it. I still think it would likely have been more productive--from the standpoint of winning religious converts--to forbear from such insulting language altogether, but if he feels the need to put it in perhaps the beginning of the book is the place for it. (The possibility has not escaped me that perhaps its concentration at the beginning of the book is in fact illusory; that it only seems that there's less vituperation later on because I became inured to it. If that's the case, though, then that's likely to be just as true of religious readers, so again the situation is not as bad as it first appeared.)

And as for my criticism about his misunderstanding of the literalist mindset, in his apparent belief that no one really believes that God is a bearded man and that all the Bible stories are literally true--again, there's some validity to that criticism, but it's not as bad as I originally thought. It becomes clear later on that Dawkins is perfectly aware after all that there are people who believe in the literal truth of scripture, and so forth and so on--he just doesn't regard them as part of his target audience. They are, he opines (apparently, though of course he never explicitly says so), too far over the edge and beyond dissuasion; he will address himself to the more sophisticated liberal theists and give the literalists up for lost. I do think he misses the mark here--I think many literalists are more sophisticated and more open-minded than he gives them credit for (perhaps I'm a bit biased here because, after all, I was raised Mormon myself, and the Mormon religion is quite conservative and literalist and has much in common with fundamental Christianity despite the fundamentalists' abomination of it)--but thinking that literalists are all hidebound and unsophisticated is at least a less severe error than not realizing they exist at all.

So. I realize this hasn't been a very meaty post, but like I said it's been way too long, and I just wanted to get something up. Tomorrow I hope to make my final post about The God Delusion--and after that I really need to return it to the library...

One Foot Out of the Closet

2007-09-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't abandoned this blog; I've just been really busy lately. I had three different projects I was filming last week, including one three-day shoot in Ventura. (I don't want to make it sound like I'm having more success at my acting than I am, though...for one thing, I'm not usually this busy; it just happens that these three projects all happened to converge in one week. Also, these are student projects and low-budget movies, which means credits for my resume and footage for my reel but little or no actual money...)

Anyway, I've gotta go somewhere tonight, too, so this is going to be a short post, but there's something I've been meaning to post about...something that happened just the day after the Skeptics' Book Club meeting that factored into my previous post, in fact. (So...in other words, it happened three weeks ago. Yeah, I'm way behind on my posting.)

I went to a PFLAG meeting.

Someone had suggested that in a comment to the post I made where I admitted I was gay, and I decided I might as well try it. Maybe it would help me come to terms with things. I looked for a local chapter online, and after being unavailable to find a meeting time for the chapter that seemed it would be the easiest to get to from my apartment (PFLAG San Fernando Valley, which I later discovered was at least temporarily defunct), I ended up going to a meeting of PFLAG-LA.

Nothing earthshattering happened there; I didn't have any important revelations. But it does mark the first time I openly admitted to anyone (without hiding behind the mask of anonymity) that I'm gay. And I guess that may be an important step. For the record, it's not like I don't have any friends that I'm sure would have accepted me had I told them...but, you know, it's not exactly something that's easy to work into a conversation. "Hi, how you doin'? Yeah, well, I just called you up to tell you I'm gay..."

So. I'll probably go to this month's meeting, too. I don't know exactly what I expect to get out of it, but it can't hurt. And anyway, being able to openly talk about my homosexuality at least in one specific setting is, I think, bringing me one step closer to being ready to come out with all of this (my homosexuality and my atheism) completely...

Family Matters

2007-08-26T13:39:00.001-07:00

Okay, it's been almost two weeks since I said I'd have up my third post on Dawkins' The God Delusion. Uh...what can I say? I've been really busy. Busy enough, in fact, that...I didn't manage to finish the book before the book club meeting after all. Though this wasn't all that big a deal, since (a) generally many--perhaps most--book club members don't actually finish reading the book before the meeting anyway, and (b) usually the discussion during the book club is only tangentially about the actual book. Anyway, I did read most of it...

Well, though I hadn't finished the book, something did happen at the book club meeting that I've been meaning to post about. At one point, Wendy, one of the book club members, related her telling her mother (or maybe it was her mother-in-law, or some other quasimaternal relation; I don't remember for sure) about her atheism. And rather to her surprise, her mother(-in-law?) confessed that, well, secretly, she didn't really believe in God either.

I briefly thought that I wished there was someone in my own immediate family who might harbor such sentiments, but it seemed unlikely. (Even the gay uncle I've mentioned professes a belief in God, though he has little use for organized religion.) My mother is constantly talking about prayer and eternal togetherness and so on and so forth; certainly no closet atheist there. My brother moved to Utah--enough said. (Okay, that's not fair, and not really meant entirely seriously; certainly not everyone in Utah is a dyed-in-the-wool faithful Mormon. Still, my brother's shown no signs of doubt or of not fitting in with the Utahn norm.) My sister is maybe a little less definite, but there's enough evidence to conclude that she's pretty firmly entrenched in the church as well. And my father...

Hold on a minute...

It occurred to me then that I didn't recall having ever heard my father talk about religion outside of church meetings. It was always my mother who was suggesting prayer, who was urging him to give people blessings and otherwise "use his priesthood". Outside of attendance at church, my father never really engaged in any religious activity or talk on his own initiative. Could it be that maybe he didn't really believe, or at least didn't have strong beliefs, but just didn't want to admit it?

It's possible. My father's always been nonconfrontational, perhaps to a fault; it wouldn't be out of character for him to remain silent on such a matter. On the other hand, he's also just fairly taciturn, so it could also be that he does have strong religious beliefs, but just, well, doesn't talk about them. So I certainly don't regard the matter as proven that he doesn't really believe in the church. But I was surprised it had never occurred to me before that he never talked about it, and it's an interesting possibility...

Anyway, that was a post I'd been meaning to make since the book club meeting almost two weeks ago. And I would leave it there, except that something happened last Monday that's sufficiently related that I'll go ahead and include it in the same post as well.

My brother called me to wish me a happy birthday. In the course of the conversation, though, he eventually mentioned that he had found this blog... This was at the end of what had already been a fairly long conversation, however, so my cell phone battery gave out shortly after he mentioned that, so I didn't talk to him much about it until the next day.

How did he find it? Well, I've mentioned here before that I have a LiveJournal; as it happens, I mentioned in passing in a recent LiveJournal post that I had a blog "where I maintain anonymity and post about subjects I'm not yet ready to discuss more publicly". (I had a reason for mentioning it; it was relevant to the subject of that post; but of course I could have omitted the mention.) My brother had been concerned about certain matters and had tried to find said blog through Google, and apparently had hit on it fairly easily. (I don't know what exact search terms he used, but apparently this blog had come up second among the search results. Plugging in some of the terms he did mention using--"anonymous", "blog", "mormon", "brother" (I'm not sure why he'd try that one, but apparently he did)--brings it up fourth, so this isn't implausible.))

Now, you might say it was stupid of me to mention the existence of this blog in my LiveJournal. Well, certainly when I did mention it there, it did occur to me that this might lead readers of my LiveJournal--my mother or brother especially--to try to find this blog. I didn't really expect it to happen--I didn't think it would be that easy to find. (Then again, I was thinking mostly of my mother, who is more curious but less computer-savvy; I doubt she would have been able to find it. I didn't really consider that my brother might search for it.) But, on the other hand, I did realize it was a possibility.

Coincidentally, someone made a comment on a recent post mentioning that "while [I'm] still maintaining your anonymity in name, it[']s obvious that if someone who knew [me] (brother, friend, other relative) were to stumble on this and read your story they would easily recognize [me]." I replied as follows:

Oh, I've considered that; I know I've revealed enough information about myself in this blog that if someone who knew me well read it they'd be able to recognize me. But I'm not too worried about it. I'm pretty sure no one among my family and the people I know at church makes a habit of browsing atheist blogs, so the chances of their running across my blog--and reading enough of it to come across identifying information--is minimal. And anyway, even if, against all odds, it does happen--well, then, that just forces the issue of my coming out about my atheism, which is something I know I really should be doing anyway...

And really, that was more or less my attitude when I mentioned this blog in that LiveJournal post. Yeah, it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't do that, because it was possible that would lead to someone finding the blog. But, on the other hand...well, if they did, so what? I wasn't really comfortable keeping these secrets anyway, and if that forced the issue, well, maybe it would be for the best. I'm not even sure that at some level I may not have wanted it to be found...

But, anyway, so what did my brother think about what he read here? Well...obviously he wasn't happy about it. (Though the two posts he singled out as the ones that upset him the most--Something For Nothing and Behind the Zion Curtain--were probably the two I'd consider the most questionable myself, and that I probably would have written differently if for some reason I had to do it over again--I do still stand by the main points I was trying to make in both posts, but I don't think I expressed them at all well.) But, on the other hand, he said there was nothing here he found really shocking. And he took it all a lot better than I expected. In fact, he said some things that really surprised me. I can't repeat it here, because, well, it's personal, and while I may be willing to share personal information about me here it's not my business to share personal information about my brother that I don't think he'd want shared, but suffice to say that his religious attitude is somewhat different from what I thought it would be. Obviously, I disagree with him about religion, but perhaps not quite as much as I thought.

(For what it's worth, by the way, the bit about my brother in the third paragraph of this post was what I had planned to write before my brother called. I'd already more or less composed the post about my father in my head, including that bit (and including the parenthetical comment explaining that it wasn't meant entirely seriously). Rather than change what I'd intended to write after my brother called, I decided to go ahead and write that part of the post as I'd originally intended, and then add this disclaimer here...)

My brother thinks, though, that this is temporary and that I'll eventually be realizing my error and returning to the church. Uh...not a chance of that, I'm afraid. After finally escaping from a prison that's held me for thirty-plus years, I'm not about to go running back, particularly after recognizing all the harm the church does. But anyway...

He's said he won't tell the rest of the family about all this, and I appreciate that. While in a way it's good to have it out in the open with one family member...I don't think my mother, in particular, would take it was well as he did. Still...like I said, I don't like keeping these secrets, and I think the time is coming near when I'm going to be ready to make a clean breast of it and come out in the open about what I believe and what I am and let the chips fall where the may. I'm just...not quite ready yet.

I think it may be fairly soon, though. And in any case, at least that's one fewer person now I'm keeping the secrets from...

(Oh, and that third post about The God Delusion? It's still coming...eventually...)

Open Wide Your Mind

2007-08-14T23:41:00.001-07:00

All right, I still owe another post or two about The God Delusion, but I'm going to take a break for that for a moment to post about something else. I admit my main reason for wanting to make this post right now is to try to get it in in time for the next edition of the Skeptics' Circle, but this is a post I'd been meaning to make for a while. Anyway, the next post about The God Delusion should be up tomorrow morning--and for anyone who thinks I may have been too hard on Dawkins thus far, the next post should be more complimentary.

Anyway...

There's a saying which apparently originated with NASA engineer James Oberg but has since achieved wide popularity, particularly, it seems to me, among the skeptical community: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."

I absolutely loathe this saying, and not only because the wordplay makes no sense. How can your brains fall out of your mind? If the word was "open-headed" or "open-skulled", well, okay, sure, but it's not...

But there are deeper reasons for despising this saying. I think it utterly and dangerously misrepresents what it really means to keep an open mind in the first place. I don't think there's any such thing as having too open a mind, and I think the implication that there is could have some unfortunate consequences.

The purport of the saying, of course, is that those who hold some belief that the speaker considers eccentric have their minds too open. They're too receptive to fringe ideas, and need to close their minds a little (that follows if their minds are too open, right?) to become more rational.

I would argue just the opposite. Those who cling to unsupported beliefs in the face of the evidence don't have minds that are too open. They have minds that aren't open enough. And that needs to be emphasized if we're to point out what's really wrong with their thinking.

What does it mean to have an open mind? Well, to be willing to consider any idea, however much it may conflict with our preferences or preconceptions. If we truly have an open mind, we have to really be willing to entertain the idea that aliens could be abducting people, that God could speak to man, that chupacabras and the Loch Ness monster exist, that the moon is made of rubber cement. But, of course, we also have to really be willing to entertain the idea that all of this isn't true. Having a really open mind means being open to both sides of a proposition.

But having an open mind doesn't mean assuming that any idea has equal merit. It can't, in fact, because that's impossible. In our daily living, we are constantly, by necessity, making judgments between ideas, judging one as more likely than the other. We have to, or we couldn't do anything at all. If we considered it equally likely that we could sate our thirst by drinking paint thinner as by drinking water, we wouldn't last very long. Our every action is motivated by the judgment--whether conscious or not--that one course of action is more likely to lead to the fulfillment of a particular goal than another. (And admittedly often partly by instinct, yes, but that's beside the point.)

None of this is in conflict with being open-minded. A truly open-minded individual should be willing to consider any proposition, yes. But considering a proposition entails making a rough judgment about its probability. If confronted with the idea that the moon is made of rubber cement, an open-minded person won't reject the idea merely because it conflicts with what he's already been told. He will, however, reject the idea because of the evidence against it. For one thing, we have some understanding scientifically of how a giant sphere of rock could be where the moon is. We have no theory for how a giant ball of rubber cement could have gotten up there. For another thing, people have even been to the moon and brought back moon rocks. None of this completely rules out the idea that the moon is made of rubber cement--it's technically possible that a celestial lump of rubber cement formed by means currently unknown to us (or was placed there by playful members of an advanced civilization), and it's conceivable (though given the evidence it's immensely improbable) that all the claims of lunar visitation and moon rocks are part of a vast conspiracy--but it renders it extremely unlikely. For similar reasons, a truly open-minded person is perfectly justified in rejecting the idea that everyone has a giant green marshmallow implanted in his mid-thorax, or that there is a race of hyperintelligent living breaded shrimp living in the sewers under Pittsburgh. In fact, not only is he justified in rejecting these ideas, but he's pretty much obligated to, if he's really open-minded; any reasonable consideration should lead to the conclusion that the probability of either idea being true is pretty much negligible.

Of course, in one sense one could say that someone with a truly open mind never really rejects such a proposition at all--he may decide it's very improbable, but he doesn't rule it out entirely. When the probability is low enough, however--as it is in the above examples--, it amounts in practice to rejecting the proposition completely. Certainly if the probability is that negligible it's not worth acting on, and the individual is completely in the right to behave in most respects as if the proposition is known to be false.

So. Let's look at a typical example of where the "brains falling out" quote is likely to be used. Let's say somebody--let's call him Joe, an arbitrary choice with no offense intended to any readers of that name--holds some paranormal or pseudoscientific belief--it could be a belief in astrology, homeopathy, alien abductions, whatever; the details don't matter. Let's say, for the purposes of this discussion, that he believes in some mystical phenomenon called "kalatrasis" (a word I pretty much just made up on the spur of the moment), with evidential support comparable to the other examples named--which is to say, none. Despite the lack of evidence in kalatrasis, however--and perhaps despite experiments that actually seem to disprove its existence--Joe firmly insists that kalatrasis exists. Joe might be told to not be so open-minded his brains fall out. But is his problem really being too open-minded?

Again, a truly open-minded person should be open to all possibilities. Joe is open to the possibility that kalatrasis exists. Is he open to the possibility that it doesn't? If he were, and if he were honestly evaluating the evidence, would he have reached his conclusion? Insisting on something in spite of the evidence isn't being open-minded; it's being extremely closed-minded, because one is refusing to even consider the alternative possibility--that the evidence is right and the something isn't there. Insisting a priori on the truth of kalatrasis (where of course "kalatrasis" is a stand-in for astrology, homeopathy, alien abductions, or whatever similar unsupported belief you'd like to throw in there) is no more "open-minded" than insisting a priori on its falsehood. The truly open-minded way is to be willing to consider either possibility, and evaluating the evidence to see which one is more likely. And if there's no evidence for kalatrasis, and plenty of evidence against it, then that means that the open-minded person will reject it. In other words, the person who's really being more open-minded isn't the person who firmly believes in the unsupported idea--it's the skeptic.

Of course, there are a few caveats here. First of all, this doesn't mean that to be truly open-minded a person is required to go out of his way to hunt down all the evidence on a given subject. That's not reasonable, and an open-minded person can make a provisional judgment on limited evidence--though of course with the proviso that he's open to revising that judgment later if contrary evidence arises. This is especially true with regards to a particularly complicated proposition, or one that seems to contradict established theories. The burden of proof is then on the person making the proposition, and in the absence of evidence the open-minded person is perfectly justified in rejecting the proposition--at least until such a time as such evidence is presented.

Furthermore, I don't know that anyone really is perfectly open-minded. Open-mindedness is the ideal of the skeptic, of course, but I don't know that any skeptics really achieve it completely; skeptics are human too, and they do have prejudices and make mistakes. At least they do consciously strive for open-mindedness, and are in general more open-minded than other people, but in practice they're not perfect.

Anyway, though, why am I making such a big deal about this? Sure, the "brains fall out" injunction may be a little inaccurate or misleading, but why argue against it at such length? Well, mainly because if we (that is, skeptics) accuse the fringe believers of being too open-minded...then that opens us up to being accused of not being open-minded enough. Believers can--and do--accuse skeptics of being closed-minded when they don't accept their beliefs. This accusation is grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be open-minded in the first place...but it's a misunderstanding that we ourselves perpetuate when we attribute adherence to fringe beliefs to excessive open-mindedness.

So. Let's all try to be as open-minded as we possibly can. Our brains aren't going anywhere.

The God Delusion: The Second 100 Pages

2007-08-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Last night, I made a post about the first 100 pages of The God Delusion. I've read farther since then, and I suppose now is as good a time as any to post about my impression of the second 100 pages. (Incidentally, I do not expect to make another post about the third 100 pages; I'll probably wrap up the remainder of the book in a single post. I'll already have given my general impression of the book in these two posts, after all, unless there's something in the latter half to drastically change it, so I probably won't have as much to say about the rest of the book.)

Before beginning, though, I want to give a word of explanation about why I may come across as so critical of the book in these posts. It's not because I don't like it; I'm quite enjoying the read. But I do have my reservations about it, and if I focus in these posts more on the negatives than the positives it's for two reasons. First, because, well, there's simply not as much to say about the positives; I could just repeat approvingly Dawkins' arguments that I liked, but I don't see much point in that; you can read them in the book yourself. The second reason is simply because I haven't really seen much criticism of Dawkins' book from a non-religious perspective; there's plenty of praise of it, but I've seen little real analysis. So, to reiterate, I liked the book (or anyway, I like it so far). I'm not focusing on the negatives because they outnumber or overwhelm the positives, but simply because there's more to say about them, and less that's been said.

Okay, now, having said that...it does seem to me, at least, that the mocking tone I noted in the first 100 pages is much less prominent thereafter (or maybe I'd just grown inured to it, but I don't think so). Perhaps Dawkins got that out of his system in the book's beginning. As to the other matter I mentioned in the previous post, however, that of his alleged misunderstanding of religion...hm.

Let me get out of the way, first, a relatively minor objection, before I move on to something I feel is more significant. Dawkins makes another mention of Mormonism, a subject on which, having been raised Mormon myself and having until relatively recently considered myself a faithful Mormon, I feel perhaps somewhat qualified to comment upon. And...I think what he says about Mormonism is here somewhat misinformed, though it perhaps throws a little light on his then-mystifying suggestion earlier in the book that perhaps Mormonism should be counted as a fourth major Abrahamic religion.

(Technically, by the way, this mention appears on page 201, so I'm cheating a little with my stated focus on the "second 100 pages". But...well, close enough.)

Here's the relevant quotation: "Another candidate for a purely designed religion is Mormonism. Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English. Mormonism, however, has evolved since it was fabricated in the nineteenth century and has now become one of the respectable mainstream religions of America..."

First of all, there's good reason to believe that Joseph Smith did not, in fact, invent his "new bogus American history" from scratch--there had already existed a very popular book, View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith, that argued for the supposed descent of Native Americans from Israelite immigrants, and included many other ideas later to appear in the Book of Mormon. To what extent Joseph Smith was familiar with View of the Hebrews and copied material from it may be impossible to prove, but it seems quite likely he was familiar with it (the book's author had even visited his hometown), and there are some very suggestive similarities.

But that's really beside the point, and has no bearing on Mormonism's status as a "purely designed religion". Far more significant is the fact that Mormonism was already undergoing drastic change even in the beginning, under Joseph Smith's leadership. Dawkins seems to be implying that Joseph Smith laid out his religious precepts all in one go, and then only after his death did the doctrines start to evolve and change. (Granted, he doesn't directly say this, and maybe I'm reading too much into his words, but that's what it seems to me he's saying.) But that's not the case at all. In the church's early days, Mormon doctrine was constantly being revised and added to. The Book of Mormon itself sticks quite close to the traditional Protestant theology Joseph Smith was raised in; most of the more esoteric Mormon doctrines that most set the church apart from the mainstream are nowhere to be found in the Book of Mormon, and are pretty clearly later developments. The core Mormon doctrines were not set forth all at once by Joseph Smith; it's pretty clear he was making things up as he went along, fitting them to his situation, and constantly revising.

Granted, it's still arguably true that most of the core tenets of the church were originally the work of one man (Joseph Smith), even if he did change his mind over time and adapt them to circumstances, and even if some later church leaders did make their own lesser changes and revisions. But then, it could be argued about as cogently that most of the core tenets of Christianity were originally the work of Paul of Tarsus to a comparable degree, so if one could argue that Mormonism is a "purely designed religion" one could make a similar argument about Christianity. I get the impression Dawkins has some rather major misconceptions about Mormonism (which, again, may explain why he thinks it's somehow different or important enough to qualify as a fourth "'great' monotheistic religion"). And I admit this does give me some pause; if he's misinformed about the religion I'm most familiar with, perhaps he makes mistakes regarding other religions as well, that I don't recognize because I'm not sufficiently familiar with those religions myself.

But I honestly don't think this matter is important, because Dawkins' target isn't Mormonism or any other specific creed, but religion and supernaturalism in general, and he doesn't have to be closely familiar with the doctrines of individual religions for that. What's more important is that when Dawkins makes what he considers "a very serious argument against the existence of God", and he fails with this argument to convince any theologians, he doesn't seem to understand why. This suggests a definite failure on Dawkins' part to understand the religious mindset. And it wouldn't be such a big deal, perhaps, except that, well, this argument, by Dawkins' own statement, he considers part of "the central argument of [his] book".

The argument in question Dawkins calls "the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit", and goes as follows: The appearance of design in the universe--including, but not limited to, the existence and diversity of complex life forms--is enormously statistically improbable. This improbability can be explained by natural selection. However, if one posits instead a designer to explain it away, then the designer must be even more complex than what one is trying to explain in the first place, and therefore even more improbable. Therefore, as the chapter heading states, "there almost certainly is no God."

Dawkins tells of a conference at Cambridge in which he made this argument to a number of theologians. By Dawkins' account, the theologians were unable to counter this argument in any satisfactory way: "The strongest response I heard was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology. Theologians had always defined God as simple. Who was I, a scientist, to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex?"

I wonder, though, how much of the theologians' failure to answer Dawkins' argument was due to their refusal to seriously consider it, and how much, really, was rather due to Dawkins' refusal to seriously consider their responses. Because, honestly, Dawkins' argument strikes me as enormously unsatisfactory and unconvincing. I don't believe in God, but I don't believe in God because I don't see any good reason to believe in God, and in the absence of evidence disbelief is the default. I believe God almost certainly doesn't exist, for the same reason I believe Russell's teapot almost certainly doesn't exist--not because it's inherently impossible, but because there's no evidence of its existence and that it should happen to be there is quite unlikely. (And really, with the utter lack of evidence of God's existence, trying to find evidence of God's nonexistence seems almost superfluous.) But I don't think Dawkins' "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit" does anything to further establish God's nonexistence. In fact, I don't think Dawkins' "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit" makes much sense at all.

What's wrong with the argument? Well, that's kind of hard to address explicitly. I would say of Dawkins' argument the same thing that Dawkins quotes Bertrand Russell as having said about St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God: "It is easier to feel that [the argument] must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies." (In fact, the "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit" strikes me as so completely inane that I'm almost tempted to say what Dawkins quotes Jefferson as having said about the Trinity: "Ridicule is the only weapon that can be used against unintelligible propositions." But that's probably going a little too far...) Still, Dawkins did eventually go on to try to pick out the flaw in the ontological argument, whatever his initial impression of its vapidity, and I'll attempt the same for his Ultimate 747 gambit.

The main flaw, I think, lies in the fact that Dawkins is assuming that God must work the same way as known biological creatures. It is this that seems to lie behind his assertion that God must be more complex than his creations. I can conceive of alternatives--I don't believe them, but I can conceive of them. For instance: What if consciousness does have some special sort of nonphysical existence, some sort of being apart from matter and ability to influence its surroundings? Again, I'm not saying I believe that, and the evidence is certainly against it, but it is conceivable. And what if God is just a big mass of omnipotent consciousness (whatever that means), with no particular form or makeup? Even so, how would such an entity have come into existence? Well, it would certainly involve things beyond our understanding, but then again, there are things beyond our understanding. Maybe the real working of consciousness is one of those things, and some mass consciousness is not only possible, but actually simple, in the sense that it could have (in some currently not understood way) have arisen out of nothing--or, better yet, be inherent to the universe and have perforce always existed, a necessary consequence of natural principles that simply aren't yet understood. It's easy to dismiss all this as meaningless babble, but I don't think it's quite that cut and dry; I think such a dismissal really amounts to a refusal to admit to possibilities we don't yet understand--and, given the number of things in the sciences we don't yet understand, I think that's a dangerous attitude for a scientist.

Again, I want to emphasize that I don't actually believe the possibilities raised in the previous paragraph. I tend to agree with Dawkins that the existence or nonexistence of God is, in principle, a scientific question, and I think if God existed we'd have some evidence of it (which we do not). And we have a perfectly good alternate explanation, in the form of natural selection (and perhaps not yet understood analogues in the nonbiological sciences) for the existence of all that statistical improbability; appealing to a God, simple or not, is not necessary. (And such an appeal certainly has no real explanatory power, since it could be used to hand-wave away anything at all.) I don't think God really is a formless mass consciousness--or exists at all.

But it is conceivable that a God could exist who is "simple" in the sense that his existence could be explained by some way other than appealing to extreme improbabilities (even if it involves principles we don't currently understand). It isn't necessarily the case that a creator God must be more statistically improbable than the world he created, if we allow that that God may have come into existence (or may have been required to have always existed) by laws and processes we don't currently understand--and I'm certainly not willing to state categorically that there are no laws and principles we don't currently understand. In essence, it seems to me that Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit amounts ultimately to nothing more than an Argument from Personal Incredulity--which is somewhat ironic, since Dawkins coined that term.

Once again, I am certainly not arguing that God exists. I agree with Dawkins' conclusions--albeit for different reasons. I just have problems with this particular one of Dawkins' arguments. And really, this wouldn't be such a big deal--it's just one argument among many, after all--if Dawkins himself didn't make so much of this argument, and, again, hold it up as part of "the central argument of [his] book". If his central argument is that vacuous, that's a bit of a problem. And if it's really the case that Dawkins "ha[s] yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so", that seems to me to say more about Dawkins, and his apparent refusal to consider esoteric (but conceivable) possibilities, than about the theologians.

(As a side note--not really terribly relevant, perhaps, but possibly interesting--I'll mention that Mormon doctrine does purport to give an explanation of God's origin--albeit not a particularly productive one. It's one of the more arcane bits of Mormon theology that isn't generally explained to prospective converts (perhaps for fear of scaring them away with something so radical), but it's there. According to LDS doctrine, God was once a human, who went through a mortal life just as we're doing now, and remained faithful to the necessary principles so that he proved himself worthy of eventually being elevated to godhood--just as the humans of this world may, if they follow the necessary commandments, go through the necessary ordinances, and take upon themselves the necessary covenants. By implication, when God was a mortal, he had worshipped his own heavenly father, another God who, presumably, had also once been a mortal, spirit child of a previous God, and so on, and so forth. So, of course, this doesn't really explain anything--it's just turtles all the way down.)

Again, I feel like I'm probably coming across as terribly critical here, and I don't want to give the impression that I disliked the book. I didn't; I've enjoyed the book quite a bit. But, unfortunately, I do think it's flawed. I have been disappointed, but that's largely because of my high expectations; it's still well worth reading, even if it isn't perfect. (Then again, what is?)

Ah, well. On to the rest of the book...

The God Delusion: The First 100 Pages

2007-08-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

This month's selection for The Skeptics' Book Club is a book I'd long been thinking I ought to read (and have been told so), so I'm kind of glad to have this excuse to make the time to do so: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

I probably don't have to explain what the book is about, or who Dawkins is; I'm sure everyone reading this knows all that already. (And if somehow someone doesn't, well, you can click on the links in the previous paragraph.)

As the title of this post implies, I haven't finished the book yet (though I expect to do so before the book club meeting). However, I decided to go ahead and make a post about as much of it as I've read so far, for two reasons: first, because I'm sure I'll have more to say about the rest of the book--and better a few reasonably-sized posts than one really long one--and second, because, uh, it's been way too long since my last post anyway.

So. First of all, let me mention what I'd heard about the book before I read it--the same, I'd imagine, as everyone else had heard about it. In general, theists said that it was a venomous attack on religion, which Dawkins clearly didn't even really understand at all. The godless, on the other hand, said that the supposed venom was grossly exaggerated.

I really wish I could say that the theists were completely wrong here.

Okay, first of all, on the charge of Dawkins not understanding religion: eh, I dunno about that one. Granted, I'm only a hundred pages in, and maybe he makes some major mistakes later on, but so far there's only one thing I've run across I'd really classify as inaccurate or unfair. When discussing the inadequacy of scripture as proof of God's existence, Dawkins points out the contradictions in Biblical accounts, and then laments the ignorance of Biblical literalists who--he assumes--are unaware of them. "...[T]here are many unsophisticated Christians out there who...take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting their religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice these glaring contradictions?"

In my experience--and since Mormon doctrine does include a highly literal interpretation of the Bible, I do have experience with this--Biblical literalists aren't all that stupid, or that ignorant. Yes, they--not all of them, I'm sure, but many--do read the Bible, and they're aware of the contradictions. However, they are also aware of rationalizations that apologists have come up with to reconcile those contradictions (or are capable of coming up with such rationalizations on their own). As I remarked in a previous post, there almost always are ways to paper over an apparent contradiction, if you're creative enough, and maybe willing to bend words a little. Of course, the apologetic "explanations" may strike non-believers as ad hoc and rather desperate, but the fact remains that Biblical literalists aren't necessarily ignorant of the contradictions in the Bible--and nor are they necessarily any more "unsophisticated" than Christians who feel free to interpret the Bible more liberally.

(Actually, there is one other point in the book that puzzled me, and that I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention. At one point Dawkins refers to "the three 'great' monotheistic religions (four if you count Mormonism), all of which trace themselves back to the mythological patriarch Abraham". Guh? The three main religions Dawkins is referring to are, of course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam...but what possible reason would there be to count Mormonism separately? Sure, many Protestants don't consider Mormons true Christians--but many Protestants don't consider Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses true Christians either, and Dawkins doesn't propose counting them separately. Sure, Mormon doctrine does have some very significant and fundamental differences with the more mainstream Protestant doctrine--but again, the same is true of Catholicism and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and he doesn't propose counting them separately. Sure, LDS church leaders may like to repeat that Mormonism is the fastest-growing religion in the world--but there's little or no evidence that that's true, and many other religions make the same claim. [EDIT: It's been pointed out to me in a comment that it's not really the church leaders who make these claims--the claims are made, and are often repeated by church members in talks and lessons, but they originate from other sources, not from the church leadership.] Besides, if we're just going by raw numbers--well, to pick on the same two examples I've been using up until now, both the Catholics and the Jehovah's Witnesses outnumber the Mormons. So why single Mormonism out as a fourth "'great' monotheistic religion"? I am honestly baffled.

All right, and, for the sake of completeness, there is one other slight inaccuracy I could remark on. Dawkins dismisses a little too categorically belief in God as "an old man in the sky with a long white beard", implying, though not stating outright, that nobody really literally believes in that. In fact, though, some people do believe in God as literally a white-bearded man in the sky--Mormons at least arguably among them; they even have a name for God's home planet or star (Kolob). But this isn't at all important to Dawkins' points, so it isn't worth dwelling on.)

That aside, though, I didn't see--so far, at least--any signs that Dawkins really had any fundamental misunderstanding of religion. He may have gotten some details wrong, but nothing crucial to his arguments, and nothing that isn't forgivable in someone speaking outside his area of expertise. So on that charge, I'd say (at least, again, judging from the first hundred pages) he's mostly innocent.

But on the charge of his mocking and derisive tone: uh, yeah. Let's not kid ourselves. It's there.

"I shall not go out of my way to offend," Dawkins writes at the end of the first chapter, "but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else."

And then thus begins chapter 2: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

I daresay anyone who believed in the God of the Old Testament might find that sentence just a shade offensive.

This is by no means the only example of inflammatory language. He says that "[w]hat impresses [him] about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along." I've already reproduced above his rather insulting characterization of Biblical literalists. He calls St. Anselm's ontological argument "infantile" and casts it "in the language of the playground", with the argument's proponent, in his relation, resorting to the nonsensical taunt "Nur Nurny Nur Nur".

I am not accusing Dawkins of going against the sentence he ended his first chapter with. He did say he wasn't going to handle religion with kid gloves, and I am willing to believe that he is not going out of his way to offend. He has strong feelings about religion--and, I would say, justifiably so--and so if he's not intentionally restraining himself he tends to write about it in strong language and in jeering scorn. That's understandable.

And, to be fair, I should quote the sentence preceding that last sentence of the first chapter: "It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book." The "unparalleled presumption of respect for religion" is what he had just spent the last seven and a half pages explaining: the fact that religion gets a bye that other practices and belief systems don't enjoy, that society demands that broad allowances be made for religious belief that are not made for any other cause. Therefore, any attacks on religion are perceived as offensive far out of proportion to their real content or intent.

He has a point, and it is something I tried to keep in mind. How, I thought, would language comparable to what Dawkins writes here come across in another context, other than religion? Well, I suppose Dawkins speaks no more harshly about religion than typical pundits do about those of opposing political views. But except in extreme cases such pundits aren't generally attacked as being wildly offensive.

However, there's another factor that I think must be kept in mind here. Political pundits, when they write diatribes against the other side, aren't really trying to win over their opponents. In general, they're writing for people who already agree with them. They don't expect to make converts, and they're not really worried about offending people.

Dawkins, on the other hand, is trying to make converts--or "de-converts". He explicitly says as much in his preface: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down." He acknowledges, of course, that it may be hard to motivate believers to read his book in the first place: "Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this". What he doesn't seem to recognize is the possibility that a believer who does read his book may be so offended by his ridicule that he refuses to take in the message--or may even become more entrenched in his beliefs, as a reaction against Dawkins' mockery.

Again, I am not doubting that Dawkins was being genuine about his intentions in that last sentence of the first chapter. I believe him when he says that he didn't go out of his way to offend. I believe him that any offensiveness is simply because of his refusal to "don kid gloves".

But I think maybe he should have tried those gloves on for size.

I'm not saying Dawkins' outrage is unwarranted. I agree that religion does a lot of damage; I agree there's a lot there that's worthy of ridicule. But ridicule doesn't win converts--and by Dawkins' own admission, that's what he's set out to do. I don't think this is the way to do it. Like the political pundits, he's going to end up--or, since the book was published last year, perhaps I should say he probably already has ended up--just encouraging those who already agree with him. Or, to use a phrase that originated in a religious context...preaching to the choir.

I made a post a long while back on Mormon missionary methods. Now, I may not believe in Mormon doctrine--and I may have serious doubts that Mormonism is really the fastest-growing religion like ~~its leaders~~ some of its members claim--but there's no doubt that Mormonism has had a lot of success with its missionaries, and with a century and change to hone their methods they've had plenty of time to figure out what works. And one of the biggest things that is stressed to Mormon missionaries is to "build relationships of trust"--to win people over by expressing interest in their activities, but also by starting out with talk of common beliefs. Among themselves, Mormons do plenty of ridiculing of other churches' doctrines (and vice versa, of course). But the church knows better than to send its missionaries out to mock potential converts. If a Mormon missionary is engaging a Catholic in conversation, he's supposed to first discuss their commonalities--faith in God, belief in the Bible, and so forth--and when he does discuss what sets the Mormon church apart, he's supposed to do so in a way that still shows respect to his interlocutor's beliefs. Certainly a good Mormon missionary would never go up to a Catholic and tell him his religion was full of "tasteless kitsch" and that the priests were just "mak[ing] up the details as they go along". Any missionary who tried that would just get a door slammed in his face.

And I fear, from the backlash I've seen against Dawkins, that that, in a figurative sense, is just what happened to him. He went to the religious and told them how unsophisticated and silly they were, and they responded by refusing to listen to him and calling him rude. Now, again, I think Dawkins is right; religious beliefs are pretty silly, when you look at them without the lens of indoctrination in the way. But that's not the best approach to use to try to win people over.

Now, one might say--and many have said--that, well, someone has to be blunt and direct; someone has to tell it like it is. And yes, maybe someone does. But that someone shouldn't expect to win many believers to his side. And anyway, others are already doing that; from what I've heard, other major atheist writers--Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris--are even more abrasive than Dawkins. It can also be said that religion doesn't deserve respect; that--as Dawkins says in the prologue--it's already respected far more than it should be. Also true, but, again, if your goal is to win people over, you're not going to do it by insulting them.

I'm not saying I haven't been enjoying the book. Dawkins makes some good points, and some interesting arguments. And really, I wouldn't be having such a problem with it if it weren't intended--according to Dawkins--to turn believers into atheists. As a sermon to the choir, it's excellent. As a missionary tract, though, I have a hard time not seeing it as doomed to failure.

Ah, well. As I said, I'm still enjoying the book, and we'll see what I think of the other 274 pages...

Getting to the Premises

2007-08-04T23:58:00.000-07:00

I recall some years back a Mormon friend boasting of an encounter he'd had with a born-again Christian. He had taken issue with the born-again's claim that just accepting Christ into your heart was enough to be saved. LDS doctrine puts a lot of emphasis on "enduring to the end", on remaining faithful, and on the dangers of even those who had been firm in the church falling into error, so the idea that a one-time choice would be enough to guarantee salvation didn't ring true with him.

"But what if someone accepts Christ, and then later goes on a murdering spree?" the Mormon had challenged the born-again.

"If he really accepted Christ, he wouldn't do that," was the other's response.

"But what if he did?"

"It would never happen. He wouldn't do it."

"But what if he did?"

My Mormon friend recounted this exchange with obvious pride, clearly very satisfied with how he had handled himself. I kept my mouth shut, but what I was thinking was: Wow. You completely lost that debate, and you don't even realize it.

It's not that I disagreed with his position, of course. This was long before my deconversion, when I still (at least ostensibly) believed the Mormon church to be true. So I agreed with his point of view. But his method of argument struck me as pointless. He wasn't addressing his interlocutor's point at all. If the born-again truly believed that someone who had accepted Christ would never afterward commit serious sins, then asking "What if he did?" is meaningless. It is (according to his worldview) not just a counterfactual, but an impossibility. You might as well ask "What if 2 plus 2 was 5?" or "What if God created a rock so big he couldn't lift it?"

Of course, though I didn't really consider this at the time, another problem with his argument is that it could be turned around just as easily to try to attack Mormonism. Mormons believe that they know the church is true because they have received a testimony through the Holy Ghost; God Himself has told them it's true. So...what if the Holy Ghost tells them it's false? Well...that wouldn't happen; they've already received a testimony that it's true; God wouldn't contradict himself. But what if He did? Well, he wouldn't. But what if He did? And so forth, and so on. It would be essentially the same argument as my friend had with the born-again...and it would be just as unproductive.

Such an argument, in fact, could be attempted against any viewpoint whatsoever...and it would be equally useless. Asking what would happen if something were true that according to the premises of the person's beliefs could not possibly be true doesn't really accomplish anything. You are--according to that person's beliefs--asking a what if about an impossibility. The question isn't provocative; it isn't damaging to the person's belief system. It is, quite simply--within the context of his worldview--completely meaningless.

Which is why I thought--and still think--that my Mormon friend had badly lost his debate with the born-again without realizing it. The born-again had stated his point of view, and all the Mormon had done was repeat what was essentially a nonsense phrase. The born-again's statement had gone unanswered and uncontested in any meaningful way, and the Mormon had just ended up spouting gibberish (within the context of the born-again's premises).

Now, what could have been a valid argument against the born-again's statement? Well, rather than ask him to consider something that couldn't possibly happen given the premises of his belief, a better tactic would have been to call into question the premises themselves. Why wouldn't a person who had accepted Christ commit a sin? He'd likely have an answer to that (my guess as to his answer: because truly accepting Christ into his heart would remove the desire for sin), but that could lead to more questions. How does he know that would remove the desire for sin? For that matter, how could you know whether or not someone had truly accepted Christ in the first place?

But of course I think there's a good reason that line of argument didn't occur to my Mormon friend. Because this, too, could be turned against Mormonism itself--and with more validity than the former method. You know the church is true because the Holy Ghost told you? Well, how do you know that "witness" really came from the Holy Ghost? A faithful Mormon would have an answer to that--something, perhaps, about how the feelings of peace that the Holy Ghost gives cannot be counterfeited by anything else--but again, the same question could be asked, how does he know that? At some level, there are premises that can be questioned. And of course, this doesn't apply just to Mormonism; it applies to any faith-based belief system.

(Of course, science has its basic premises too--the existence of cause and effect, that the laws of physics work the same everywhere, and so on. Certainly those premises aren't immune to being questioned. But on the other hand, they have a very good track record; the scientific method has made a lot of successful predictions, and led to a lot of important discoveries. So if we're asked how we know that those premises are true, we have a good answer--not, of course, that we do know, or could ever know, with absolute, 100% accuracy, but given the success of the predictions those premises have so far led to, their validity seems to have been established with a very high level of probability. The premises of faith and religion don't have that distinction.)

This is a general principle that I think important to keep in mind when considering religious claims. It's easy to ask what-ifs that seem to challenge religious beliefs, but given the premises of those beliefs, the what-ifs are easy to answer--or to dismiss as meaningless. The important thing isn't to question the consequences of the premises, but to question the premises themselves.

The real question isn't "What if". It's "How do you know".

Unfortunately, it's a question that the faithful are all too seldom willing to seriously consider...

Unsuited

2007-07-31T17:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm back from the Comic-Con. Actually, I was back yesterday morning, and did intend to post then, but I ended up having too much to catch up on and being too tired to get to it. Truth be told, I still have a lot to catch up on, so I don't have much time today either, but I'll at least make time for a brief post.

I'm not going to say anything about the Comic-Con itself, because, well, that's not really relevant to this blog; that's something more appropriate for my LiveJournal. There is one thing I did over the weekend, though, that I don't really want to admit to in a non-anonymous context just yet. It's something I've long kinda wanted to do, but never did mostly because I knew the church would frown on it.

The Comic-Con ended around 5:00 on Sunday. I didn't want to drive back to L.A. during peak traffic hours, so I had decided to wait until later that night to head back. That left me with a few hours of down time Sunday evening to fill. And I'd found out about a nude beach near San Diego...

So, I figured, what the hey...

The most direct route to get there, apparently, involved following a spotty trail down a fairly steep cliff. When I got to the bottom, I was about to head north--I had read that the nude part of the beach was the northern half; the south part was city-owned and the wearing of clothing was enforced there--when I noticed that apparently that was unnecessary; this trail evidently led right to the nude beach itself, judging from the fact that, well, pretty much everyone around was naked.

True to stereotype, there was a volleyball game going on. I didn't join in; I only had an hour or two anyway before the parking lot at the top of the cliffs closed at sundown. I spent my time at the beach in the water, just swimming in the ocean and letting the waves wash over me.

I enjoyed it quite a bit, actually. I'm not sure why, but there was just something about being naked in the ocean, with nothing between me and the waters of the sea, that I really liked. Now, I don't go to San Diego often, and there aren't any nude beaches near L.A.--there is one, apparently, closer to L.A. than the one I went to, but still not all that close. So I don't know when I'm likely to visit a nude beach again. But I'm glad I went this time.

Still...this obviously isn't something I'm going to be telling my family, or the people I know at church, about...

Back In A Bit

2007-07-27T02:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, like I said, there are things I've been meaning to post about, and I'd hoped to make at least one post yesterday, but I was busy enough it didn't end up happening. Unfortunately, I can't post today either. I'm about to leave for the San Diego Comic-Con, and I'm not likely to have internet access there. So...I'll post again on Monday.

Hey, I know this won't be the first time I've gone several days without posting, but it's the first time I've explained in advance why I won't be posting for a while...

See you Monday.

The Temple Is Closed

2007-07-25T23:53:00.000-07:00

I said back at the beginning of June that my visit to the temple for the Los Angeles temple jubilee was likely to be my last. My temple recommend wasn't going to expire until August, but I had no particular desire to go to the temple again, and certainly no longer feel any obligation to.

Well, turns out that prediction was accurate; my temple recommend was supposed to have been good until August, but it seems they're redesigning all the temple recommends--they have bar codes now, I guess so they can be scanned in instead of, or in addition to, being looked over visually. Since I wasn't planning on going to the temple between now and August anyway, it doesn't particularly matter to me that my temple recommend is invalid a little sooner than I thought. It has, however, led to a few awkward moments, when someone suggested the bishop was free and that now would be a good time to get my new recommend, or when someone else asked me if I'd gotten my new recommend yet. (My response, essentially: Don't have time today; gotta go.) I expect the matter will blow over, though, and in a week or two everyone will just assume I've done it--except the bishop, of course, but it remains to be seen whether he will remember that I haven't gotten my new recommend (or check his records to see), and if so whether he'll try to do anything about it. If so...well, maybe my coming clean about my atheism will be forced a little sooner than I'd planned.

(I could, of course, just go through the interview and get the recommend. But, as I've said before, I already feel uncomfortable enough essentially lying by omission by not telling the people at church that I don't believe; getting a new recommend would involve lying directly (to the bishop and a member of the stake presidency during the interviews), and I certainly don't want to do that. If that means admitting to my deconversion--which it may, if they ever ask me directly why I'm not renewing my recommend--well, so be it, I guess. Hasn't happened yet, though.)

Now, one might wonder, of course, why the church would feel the need to redesign the temple recommends. The addition of the bar code suggests that a reason is to heighten security. Which certainly makes sense; the church has always been very protective about what goes on in the temple, and takes pains to try to avoid any details getting out. Not entirely successfully--there are, in fact, transcripts of all the major temple ceremonies available on the web, and I wouldn't be too surprised if the video from the temple endowment ceremony was available somewhere too (though almost certainly not on the web, because the church's legal department would quickly move to have it taken down due to copyright violation)--, but they've certainly made the effort. The standard church response to questions about why the temple ceremonies are such a big secret is that they're not secret, they're sacred--they're so holy that they should not be tainted by speaking about them in unhallowed contexts. But of course "secret" and "sacred" aren't mutually exclusive, and even if church members do consider the temple ceremonies sacred, they're certainly secret as well...so this standard response is really dodging the question.

During the priesthood meeting last Sunday, the question came up of why new converts to the church had to wait a year before they were allowed to enter the temple. The response a church authority had given to this question was that that time was necessary in order for the convert to be prepared for what he will go through in the temple. The temple ceremonies must be experienced with the proper spiritual mindset. I think it's pretty clear that the real reason, though, is to weed out people who would otherwise join the church just to see what happens in the temple, and then disseminate that information. If they've stayed faithful in the church for a year, it's a safe bet they're genuine about their devotion. It's yet another way the church is protecting its "sacreds".

Or, on second thought, maybe that's not entirely the real reason--though I strongly suspect it is a part of it. Maybe there is an aspect of preparation necessary before one can experience the temple ceremony the way the church leaders would like. Because, frankly, considering the temple ceremonies now...I think to someone who hadn't had some level of conditioning or--at the risk of using a perhaps too loaded word--brainwashing before experiencing those temple ceremonies would see them as absolutely ludicrous. By the time a member has been in the church for a year, its supposed absolute truth has been drilled into his head enough he'll be willing to accept what goes on in the temple regardless of its silliness; maybe someone who hadn't been so firmly entrenched in the church yet is much more likely to be sufficiently disturbed or baffled by the temple ceremonies to be driven away entirely. In fact, maybe that's the main reason the church has to keep the temple ceremonies such a secret in the first place--because if they got out to members who hadn't been sufficiently "prepared", or worse yet to potential converts, they'd lose interest in the church.

Ah, well. Regardless of the reasons for it, I'm content not to get the fancy new bar-coded temple recommend. I've seen the secrets of the temple, many times, and I don't need to see them again.

HS5

2007-07-23T17:44:00.001-07:00

Okay, so much, once again, for my attempt to post every day for another week. That never seems to work nowadays.

Ah, well. I do have more things that I want to post about, but I'm not likely to have time to get to them until tomorrow. In the meanwhile, though, The Humanist Symposium #5 is up at The Green Atheist. Go see, if you haven't already!

In the meanwhile, this is an open thread. Optional topic of discussion: What's your favorite transcendental number?

Family Friendly...ish

2007-07-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

As usual when I've been behind on updating my blog, I've also been behind on reading other blogs, and I just decided to take a glance at some of the other blogs I like to see what I've been missing. After seeing this post on Pooflingers Anonymous, I decided to run my own blog through the site and see what its rating came out as.

And here's what I got:

Apparently the only things keeping me from a G rating were two mentions of the word "death" and one of "dead". Hm.

So, there you go! I'm a (reasonably) family-friendly gay atheist! Hooray!

Of Monkeys and Men

2007-07-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

This month's selection for the Skeptics' Book Club was Our Inner Ape, by Frans de Waal. The book was about the behavior of animals related to humans--especially the human's closest relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo--and about the light this could throw on human behavior. (And regarding the title of this post, yes, I know that "ape" and "monkey" aren't synonymous. But "of apes and men" wouldn't have alliterated, and anyway the book did discuss monkeys too, a little. I claim artistic license.)

At one point during the discussion, the question was raised whether perhaps de Waal was going too far in anthropomorphizing the apes, and in imputing to them conscious motivations. Personally, I don't think so; I think he gives valid reasons for his conclusions, and that his arguments as to why certain actions the apes performed could only have been the result of conscious thought on their part are good ones. But then, I've always been less amazed by evidence for conscious thought in non-human animals as I am by the amazement this seems to evoke in others. Humans in general like to think of themselves as different from the animals, in some defining way. In fact, de Waal discusses that in the book, and enumerates how each defining characteristic that was supposed to set humans apart--tool use, language, and most recently empathy--was later discovered in animals after all, forcing those who still wanted to cling to an idea of humanity's uniqueness to come up with some new and narrower defining characteristic to last them until newer discoveries rendered it, too, obsolete. (I got a laugh at the book club meeting when I suggested that maybe humanity's real defining characteristic was its search for defining characterstics.)

That's not to say, of course, that humans aren't unique. But if we are, it's primarily quantitatively, not qualitatively. We may not be the only animals capable of rational thought, or even of self-awareness--there's good evidence for self-awareness in both apes and dolphins, and according to de Waal the jury is still out on elephants--but certainly we take these matters to greater extremes than any other animal. As is evidenced by de Waal's book itself, and other books about similar themes--what other animal could so closely question its own motivations and mental make-up?

There's a delightful circularity in all of this, in that of course in questioning how our minds work we're questioning the workings of the very processes that are doing the questioning in the first place. (It's not a vicious circle, of course--the fact that we can analyze how our thought processes came doesn't make those processes or their conclusions invalid.) The recursion involved in our using our minds to analyze our minds, in products of our biological and societal evolution studying those very processes that brought them about and by which they continue to be influenced.

And I think to fully appreciate this, we have to give up the superficially attractive idea of humans being qualitatively unique, of being forever apart from the rest of the universe. I think things become much more interesting and much more, well, fun, once we recognize that we're a part of it all, that we share much the same nature as the rest of nature. The idea that humans are different, that we occupy some special place in the center of creation, may have its appeal, but I think if you really consider it the idea that humans are as much a part of the material cosmos as anything else--as well as being more accurate--is much more profound in its implications and in a way much more uplifting. That we are animals, but animals with a(n apparently quantitatively unique, if not qualitatively) capacity for introspection and self-analysis, that we are products of and subject to the same physical laws that run the rest of the universe, but have the ability to understand those laws (not fully, perhaps, but more each day), and even to manipulate them--that's really marvelous. It seems almost magical that out of the processes of nature could come something with the capacity to study and comprehend the very processes that brought it about, and more still to study and comprehend--at least to a limited degree--itself. Science fiction frequently repeats the trope of a computer program developing intelligence and self-awareness; it's considered a weird and exotic idea. But, in a way, if we consider the universe, running according to physical laws, as being something like a computer (an imperfect analogy, certainly, but not altogether baseless), it's already happened, and the program is us.

We don't have to have some qualitative defining characteristic, something that sets us definitively apart from other animals and from the physical universe, to be special. Our capacity for thought, our consciousness, may differ from that of our relatives only in degree. But it's that difference in degree that lets us wonder about our differences in the first place, and lets us try to understand just what we are in the first place. We are, so far as we know, the only parts of the universe that wonder what we are. And that's wonderful.

Blessed Are The Geeks...

2007-07-16T23:25:00.001-07:00

I'm not as avid a webcomic reader as many, but there are a few webcomics I read regularly, and others I catch up on once in a while. As I think I've mentioned before, I even have a webcomic of my own, though I'm currently (and really pretty much chronically) behind on the updates. Naturally, I'm not going to link to or mention the name of my webcomic here, since that would kind of go against the whole anonymity thing...I do the webcomic under a pseudonym, but even so it wouldn't be at all hard to track down my real identity from it. I will mention, though, that somewhat ironically the main character of my webcomic is a god...

Anyway, most anyone who's familiar with webcomics has heard of Keenspot, one of the most prominent webcomic collectives, and as far as I know the oldest such collective still extant. And anyone who's checked out any Keenspot sites lately might have noticed some...unusual advertisements there.

This was the part where I was going to link to an image of one of the ads, except they don't seem to be running anymore. Should have made this post last week. In searching, though, I find references to the ads having turned up in other places, as well, though, including a site called "Gamers with Jobs" (where, however, the ad was eventually turned off) and another called gamedev.net. Still, the KeenSpot sites were the only place I'd actually seen them.

Even if I can't find the ads themselves anymore (though I'd guess they're still running out there somewhere), the current front page to mormon.org displays much the same thing in a different aspect ratio.

Yes, that's right; the ads were for the LDS church. They depicted, on a white background, people looking pensive while questions appeared next to them in gold letters. (All right, on the current mormon.org front page they're gray, but in the original ads they were gold.) Questions like, "What should I do with my life?" And then, after fading through a few of these images, it would settle into an image with the text "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" on the left and "TRUTH RESTORED" and the URL "mormon.org" on the right. (The main church website is lds.org, but mormon.org is also run by the church and is more focused on information for non-members (the idea being, of course, to get them interested in joining the church).)

That someone would see a church as supplying the answer to the question of what she should do with her life strikes me as, well, kind of pathetic. I mean, what, is the idea being that she's going to be devoting her life entirely to the church? Even Mormons (well, some of them, anyway) do have careers and goals and interests other than focusing on the church in every waking moment; that someone would be completely without any idea of what she wants to do with her life and then, on joining the church, would suddenly find the sense of purpose she was missing seems...well, sort of sad, actually. Then again, there is the fact that the endowment ceremony does require members to "consecrate [them]selves, [their] time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed [them], or with which he may bless [them], to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for the building up of the Kingdom of God on the earth and for the establishment of Zion." So I guess the idea of looking to the church as supplying your entire purpose in life does kind of go along with Mormon doctrine, as unattractive a prospect as it may be.

But that's not the main thing I wanted to write about here; no, the main thing is, well, how odd it was to see an ad for the LDS church come up on Keenspot in the first place. Keenspot...well...isn't exactly the sort of place you'd expect the kind of people who'd be likely converts to spend a lot of time. Oh, for what it's worth, there was a webcomic by a Mormon on Keenspot once upon a time, though it eventually jumped ship and later joined up with Blank Label Comics. But by and large, I don't think on average most of the comics on Keenspot are all that religion-friendly. One of the two founders of Keenspot that have their own comics there is quite openly "agnostic" ("agnostic" in quotes because, really, though he calls himself an agnostic, he actually seems to be more of an atheist). Then there's the comic where the two main characters are gay, the one where the main character is a demon, the one that seems to go out of its way to be offensive (especially toward religion)...you get the idea. Obviously, not every Keenspot cartoonist is anti-religion--at least one is a faithful Catholic--but all in all, Keenspot doesn't seem like the kind of site that's likely to attract a lot of people searching for answers in religion. It seems like an odd sort of site for the Mormon church to advertise on.

Not, of course, that that's the only place the church has advertised; like I mentioned above, there've been ads on other sites too. But, well, look at the nature of those other sites. One is a site for gamers, another is about game development. These weren't cherry-picked; those were the first two I found in my googling. It seems the LDS church is, for whatever reason, specifically courting a "geek" demographic, which seems like a very odd strategy. Well, either that or it's just that geeks talk online about the banner ads more, which is also certainly a possibility.

Either way, though, it seems...odd to see banners for the LDS church appear on such, um, worldly sites. I wonder if this might attract for the church at least as much negative attention--making it seem desperate, or associating it with spam or with some of the sites it's advertising on that have most "inappropriate" content--as it does positive. On the other hand, the church certainly has a lot of experience in marketing (a.k.a. proselyting); presumably it's done its research and knows what it's doing. But then back to the first hand, I'm apparently not the only one who sees the church's web advertising as having an odd flavor; I just ran across a blog post by a Mormon who saw one of the banner ads on Hotmail and was uncomfortable about it.

I dunno. Between web ads and Romney's candidacy--on top of the hosting of the Winter Olympics a while back--the LDS church is certainly getting an increasing amount of publicity. The problem is--well, the problem from the church's standpoint, anyway--that not all of it is good publicity. I'm not sure putting banner ads on gaming and webcomic sites is really going to help with that... Then again, if this does end up backfiring, well, that might be a disaster from the church's point of view, but from my viewpoint I can't really see it as a bad thing...

Transitions

2007-07-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, yeah, once again I've been kinda sparse on the updates, but I have a pretty good reason for not posting last week. My parents are spending two months in Utah, and I'm housesitting for them while they're away...which means much time this last week was spent helping them finish packing, and then settling in. So...not a lot of free time. Even less than usual, I mean. (Well, I actually did have quite a bit of free time on Friday and Saturday, I guess, but after all I was dealing with earlier in the week I...okay, I don't have a good excuse for not posting on Friday or Saturday.)

My parents have gone on and on about how much they appreciate my help, and how they don't know what they'd have done without me...and in a way, it's kind of awkward, because I can't help wondering whether they'd see things differently if they knew I was an atheist. Probably not, in the long run, but I'm sure it would be a shock. I'm not ready to tell them just yet, though.

Incidentally, my mother is increasingly often asking me direct questions about whether or not I ever intend to get married. Being unmarried at my age is, well, for a Mormon, very unusual, and she's clearly not happy about it. She's even said that if I'm not seen dating soon people might "start to wonder" about me. I don't have the heart to tell her just yet that what people would presumably be wondering is in fact precisely the case. (I'm pretty sure, though, that people are not, in fact, wondering--aside from my mother, who I suspect is on some level wondering, but is reluctant to admit that to herself.)

Speaking of, well, the thing I've been alluding to all through the previous paragraph without ever explicitly saying it, which is kind of pointless since I've already explicitly said it in a previous post...I'm really feeling like I ought to be telling people about that. Not everyone; certainly not my parents or the people I know at church. But at least some close friends, who I think I can trust to, well, support me. My friend David, with whom I spoke about my atheism, maybe...though I don't want to make him feel like I'm just using him as a sounding board for my catharses. And my current role-playing gaming group, or now former gaming group...I consider them all good friends, and I've mentioned my atheism to them, and I'm sure they'd be supportive about this too, especially considering that, well, one of them is bi.

(I say "now former" because, well, the group is splitting up; two of them are moving to Florida this week, and another (the bi one, FWIW) to San Francisco in a month. Today was our last meeting before the move. Though we're still going to be keeping in touch.)

It's just...yeah, I'd been keeping that secret for fifteen years, and I don't like living a lie that long. As I said, I'm not ready to tell everyone, but I feel like I ought to tell someone--and an anonymous confession to people whom I've never met and who don't know my real name or anything about me other than what I write here, while definitely a step in the right direction, doesn't completely fit the bill. (I had guessed that some people I knew from the Center For Inquiry whom I'd told about my blog might read that post--though I certainly hadn't written it with that intention--but as it turns out, I don't think they have. Both the people who had been reading my blog happened to be very busy with other matters at the time of that post, and I'm pretty sure they didn't read it--it seems likely they would have commented or said something if they had.)

Anyway. I've gotta go, and I guess there's not much of a coherent point to this post. Now that I'm settled in at my parents' house (well, more or less; I'll still be commuting to L.A. for school and acting and other things), I should have more time this next week, and I'm going to try again to make a post a day and maybe catch up on the backlog of posts I've been meaning to make but haven't. So, tomorrow, expect a post about webcomics. And Tuesday, a post about monkeys. (Well, really more about apes...but "monkeys" is just more fun to say for some reason.)

Carnival Time Again

2007-07-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

Well...so much for posting every day this week; I had a busy weekend. I've still got quite a few things I wanted to post about, but first, Carnival of the Godless #70 is up at Friendly Atheist.

I am tired, so the other things I wanted to post about will wait until (at least) tomorrow.

In the meantime, open thread. Optional topic of discussion: How in the word did "earwigs" get their name, anyway? (No fair cheating by looking in a dictionary...)

Life is Unfair

2007-07-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, my mother had to drop off a dinner for a woman in her ward who lives down the street and was sick and bedridden. My mother, however, isn't doing too well herself--she'd recently gotten out of the hospital for a hip surgery--and isn't supposed to walk long distances without a walker or a cane. (Actually, she's not supposed to walk short distances without a walker or a cane either, but she does anyway.) This made it impossible for her to carry a plate of food, so since I was there visiting for the holiday she had me take the plate over for her.

She then sat and visited with the ill woman for a while. I didn't participate in the conversation, but I was there and heard it; they discussed things such as the evils of the world and the problem of theodicy (though they didn't use that term), as well as more down-to-earth topics such as her son-in-law's struggle with cancer. At one point, though, the bedridden woman said something that struck me as frankly appalling. (I don't remember her words verbatim, of course, but this is the gist of what she said:)

"I remember those commercials I used to see--ten cents a day could feed a child. All that starvation and hardship going on there [in parts of Africa]. And I used to think, how could God be so angry at an entire country? But then [a certain senior couple from the ward] got back from their mission to Africa, and they talked about how evil the people there are. They just have no feelings at all."

Yeah. Her basic conclusion was that people are starving in Africa because they are evil. They deserve it. God is punishing them for their wrongdoings.

(Something that, unsurprisingly, didn't come up: if the sufferings of starving Africans were God's punishment for to their sins, what about her son-in-law with brain cancer that she had just been talking about? What had he been doing wrong? Incidentally, my mother, to her credit, after leaving the house talked to me how dismayed she was at what the woman had said, and how much she disagreed with her remarks.)

This isn't a new attitude, of course. It's mentioned in the Bible. In John 9:2, Christ's disciples ask him, "Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" Of course, it's mentioned in the context of Christ debunking their assumption, and assuring them that the man's blindness wasn't due to sin, but a lot of modern Christians apparently haven't taken this particular lesson to heart. (I'm sure it doesn't help, though, that the reason that is given for the man's blindness--"that the works of God should be made manifest in him"--isn't all that comforting and doesn't have a broad application, given that after all most blind people nowadays aren't miraculously healed.) So we get various stalwarts of the Christian Right blaming liberals, single mothers, and homosexuals for everything from the 9/11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina.

I don't usually say much in my blog about religions other than Christianity, mostly because I'm not as familiar with them, but in this case there's something I recently read about certain Eastern religions that goes right along with this theme. As research for one of the myriad projects I'm planning, I've been reading a book about everyday life in Early India. (In fact, as it happens, that's the book's title.) Now, the most prominent religions of Early India, which still survive today--Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, collectively (along with Sikhism) called the "Dharmic religions"--all have similar roots. And one of the concepts they have in common, and perhaps the one best known to outsiders, is that of karma. What you do in one life will affect the next. Live well, and you'll be reincarnated in a higher form. Live badly, and you'll come back in a lower. The karma concept has been appropriated by many people who don't belong to the Dharmic religions, but usually in a slightly altered form, that your good and bad deeds will bring good or bad repercussions on your head later in this life. No doubt we've all heard people talk of building "good karma", or of risking "bad karma", with their actions.

Karma may seem superficially like a warm and fuzzy, positive idea. After all, it should motivate people to do good, right? But the concept has its dark side, that I'd never really thought of before reading the aforementioned book (well, not that I'd ever given much thought to karma to begin with). Many people in early India felt justified in holding contempt for the poor and the afflicted (as presumably many members of the Dharmic religions still do today) because, after all, they earned their poverty and afflictions. If they were suffering so much in this life, it must be because they had committed terrible misdeeds in previous lives. They therefore didn't really deserve pity or compassion--or at least, not as much as would be merited by a righteous man. They were only reaping what they had sowed. Their suffering was fair.

Of course, it wasn't. Life very often isn't fair. But that's not a comforting thought. So religions--Abrahamic, Dharmic, and no doubt others--have established doctrines to restore fairness and justice to existence. The problem with this is that if you assume life is fair, that everyone does get what they deserve...well, that must mean that those who are worse off must deserve it. Ultimately, these doctrines, taken to their logical conclusion, lead to hard-heartedness and antipathy toward the poor and the suffering.

Life isn't fair. And it's especially unfair to the less fortunate to pretend otherwise.

Church and State

2007-07-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a post I've been meaning to make for a week or two, but I guess in a way it's kind of appropriate that it's going up today, being that it touches on America and patriotism, and today is the day of a holiday that's all about that. It's the Fourth of July, Independence Day, when we celebrate the birth of the U.S.A.--or, more accurately, when we watch fireworks and have barbecues and maybe occasionally spare a fleeting thought to what the holiday is supposedly about.

Not that this post has much to do with Independence Day, really, but it does have a lot to do with politics. Politics are a subject I'm too thin-skinned to enjoy discussing; it seems a lot of people are very passionate about their political beliefs, and full of vitriol to anyone who opposes them. Which--actually--is sorta kinda what this post is about.

The book selection for last month's meeting of the Skeptics' Book Club was Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, by Justin A. Frank. This was the first book club selection so far that I actually disliked. And when I say I disliked it, I mean I thought it was complete baloney. The book was all about trying to pin all of George W. Bush's shortcomings on circumstances of his infancy and childhood. It strained to try to explain how Bush being the way he is can be blamed on his father not being there for him enough, and on his mother being cold, and on his younger sister's death, and on all sorts of other things all at once--the self-contradictoriness inherent in ascribing the same traits to several different causes at once apparently having escaped the author. Now, I'm certainly no fan of Dubya, but that doesn't mean I enjoy reading a work that turns to long discredited avenues of psychoanalysis to try to analyze his personality. He is the way he is, and there's nothing to be gained by blaming it all on his mother not having loved him enough.

It seems I wasn't alone in my opinion of this book; several other book club members whom I later spoke to agreed that it was nonsense, and shared my surprise that someone in the book club had recommended it. In any case, though, that was after the book club meeting; at the meeting itself, I wasn't looking forward to discussing the book for fear of offending whoever it was who had recommended it (I honestly didn't remember who) with my negative opinion of it. As it turned out, I was freed of this unpleasantness by the fact that by the time I arrived (somewhat late), everyone had already passed on from talking about the book to just talking about the Bush administration in general.

And really, all of the foregoing is just a mostly irrelevant preamble to a bit of an epiphany I had at said discussion. I wondered aloud at one point how so many other mostly sane and rational people could still wholeheartedly support Bush and live in denial of his misdeeds in the face of all the evidence--and even as I said that, something hit me.

It related, actually, to a discussion the preceding week in the mailing list of the Independent Investigations Group. Someone had brought up Christopher Hitchins' outspoken atheism, and someone else had raised the anomaly of Hitchins' support of the war in Iraq. This led to the following message (paraphrased because I don't have access to the original right now--I'll edit the exact words in tomorrow when I do):

I don't understand how he can claim to be an atheist and still support the Iraq War. It seems like a contradiction in terms.

What an odd thing to say, I thought at the time. Oh, certainly there's some negative correlation between atheism and support of the Iraq War. Because (at least in part) of Bush's ostentatious religiosity, he has disproportionate support from the religious, and conversely disproportionate lack of support among the non-religious. But that doesn't mean that opposition to the Iraq War necessarily follows from atheism. They're two separate issues. I may think that Bush hurried the U.S. into war on shaky and even deceptive grounds, but another atheist may disagree and still be an atheist. Support of the Iraq War doesn't necessarily mean belief in God.

But then during the book club discussion I remembered that message, and saw a connection there I hadn't previously realized. Oh, I still don't think opposition to the Iraq War necessarily follows from atheism--or, conversely, that you have to be religious to support Bush, or vice versa. But...there actually is a common element there.

Thinking back about some of the more hidebound politically partisan people I know (including my own parents, strong kneejerk Republicans who'd never consider voting any other way--though even they have found reason to dislike Bush), I was suddenly struck by the similarities between their unchangeable political viewpoints and, well, those of religion. There's a lot of resemblance in the thought processes. In both cases, the person in question tends to discount any evidence against his particular views, while happily seizing anything, however tenuous, that seems to support it. Both the politically and the religiously faithful are characterized by a complete lack of skeptical inquiry about the subject in question--while remaining utterly convinced that their beliefs are well founded. And the word "faithful" in th previous paragraph isn't a misnomer--political "faith" is quite analogous, if not identical, to the religious variety. Just like the religious faithful, the political faithful, having chosen their side, are convinced of its rightness, and will not be swayed from it.

I'm not claiming this is unique to Republicans--even if certainly it's primarily the Republicans who are allied with fundamentalist Christianity. I remember, from my undergraduate years at USC, an old Thai woman who had similarly unshakable faith in the Democrats--Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton in particular, to the extent that when, after she lauded Bill Clinton for his support of the family, someone brought up his adultery, she literally refused to believe that it had happened. Even after she was told he had admitted to it, she insisted it had to be a lie. In her mind, Bill Clinton was an untarnished pinnacle of virtue; he could not possibly have had an adulterous relationship.

So, to return to the original example, is an atheist who supports the Iraq War really a contradiction in terms? Well, no. Maybe Hitchins hasn't turned to his politics the skeptical eye he's apparently used to look at religion, but then people aren't always consistent. But there's certainly a similar kind of mindset at work, in belief in God and in belief in the infallibility of certain men. Now that I think of it, this goes beyond just politicians; maybe there are times people have similar "faith" in other celebrities, in movie stars and writers and even in scientists...

Yeah, I know, this probably isn't really an original idea; I'm sure other people have noted this before. Still, I'd never thought of it in quite those terms before: that faith, even if we don't call it by that name in other contexts, operates in spheres far outside religion. That the mindset that leads to religion operates just as destructively in politics and in other spheres.

Ah, well. Happy Fourth of July, everyone! (What little is left of it by the time I post this...)

Mormonism 101: Mormon Marriage

2007-07-03T23:29:00.000-07:00

So, I've yet again been rather lax in updating this blog (and yes, I know I said the same thing in the last post). I still have quite a backlog of things I've been wanting to post about, though, so I think I'm going to shoot for a post a day all this week again. Anyway, though, on my last Mormonism 101 post, I invited readers to suggest what specific aspects of Mormonism they'd like me to write about, and I got a response: someone wanted me to write a post about Mormon temple marriages and sealings. So I guess I'll oblige.

I'm not going to just reiterate word for word what happens in the ceremony, for two reasons. First of all, because I don't have it memorized. And secondly, because it's available elsewhere on the internet anyway. (Granted, point two sort of invalidates point one, in that it means I guess I could just copy it from that site, but even without point one point two still stands.) What I will do is speak in general terms of what marriage means in Mormonism, and what the temple ceremony is supposed to signify.

"Family" is one of the LDS church's biggest selling points; I don't know how many times I've heard of someone converting to Mormonism because they liked the idea that families can be together forever. (That is, in fact, the title of one of the official church hymns.) "Till death do us part" doesn't apply to Mormon weddings; they are supposed to be eternal.

Well, with certain caveats. They're only eternal if both partners make it into the Celestial Kingdom. Don't worry if you don't know exactly what that means--the Mormon concept of the afterlife is rather complex, and could easily (and probably someday will) make for a lengthy post by itself. The short of it is that only those who stay righteous and attain a high level of salvation are united in eternal marriage. Still, those who are will, in time, become gods and goddesses themselves, ruling over their own worlds and having "eternal increase"--i.e., posthumous spirit children.

(There's another thing, incidentally, that will no doubt be brought to many readers' minds by "Mormon marriage" but that is beyond the scope of this post: Polygamy. Yes, polygamy certainly was widely practiced in the early days of the church, and yes, it still is by some splinter sects, though it's no longer condoned by the main LDS church. There's a lot I could say about its history and about its doctrinal implications...but not in this post. I've got enough to say without opening up that can of worms here.)

The eternal family extends beyond just the man and wife, however. Children are likewise eternally sealed to their parents, in a chain that supposedly links all the way back to Adam. (The apparent idea, though it's not really clearly spelled out, is that if one link in the chain proves unworthy, any worthy children of that unsaved link will be "adopted" by a worthier individual.) Any children born to a couple who have been married in the temple are considered to be "born in the covenant", and automatically sealed to their parents. If the parents marry after one or more children have already been born, however (or if a child is adopted, or under certain other special circumstances), the children may be explicitly sealed to the parents in a ceremony that goes along with the marriage.

Not only is marriage eternal for the exalted, but it's a requirement for exaltation. Temple marriage is, in fact, the fourth and last of the major ordinances that, according to LDS doctrine, are necessary for salvation. In short, in the LDS church, marriage is considered a really big deal.

At least, that's the theory, though you wouldn't really know it from the way it's actually carried out.

Anyway, as such a holy ordinance, the marriage (and the sealing) takes place in the temple. Church members can get married outside the temple, and that of course qualifies for legal purposes--even in the eyes of the church, in the sense that the married couple can have sex without it being considered fornication--but for the marriage to be eternal, and for it to count toward salvation, it has to take place in the temple. This is actually rather a big deal; outside of the ordinances performed for the dead, the only other ordinance that takes place in the temple is that of the endowment, which, again, could make for a post of its own.

One drawback, though, is that this means that only "worthy" members of the church--those with current temple recommends--are able to attend the wedding. If the bride or groom has close family members who aren't members of the church--or even who aren't active members of the church and don't have current recommends--they can't go to the wedding. In fact, in practice, generally the only people present at the wedding are the bride and groom's immediate relatives and perhaps two or three very close friends.

Not that there'd be much room for more spectators anyway--the sealing room in the temple isn't very large. It's a small square room with a few chairs on each side, with mirrored walls that ham-handedly symbolize eternity. Outside of the chairs, the only furnishing in the room is an altar--essentially just a big rectangular block of marble or some other material. The bride and groom clasp hands over the altar as a temple officiator speaks the words of the ceremony. If there are children to be sealed to the parents, they then take the parents' hands and that ceremony is done. The whole deal is very short and rather impersonal, and although the officiator does have the opportunity to speak a few words of counsel and encouragement, given that said officiator is usually a complete stranger to everyone else present this comes across as fairly meaningless. (I related a rather ill-conceived example of an officiator's banter here.)

However, it mustn't be thought that since so few people are present at the actual wedding, a Mormon couple misses out on having a big celebration and receiving presents. No, what happens is that in addition to the wedding, the couple has a wedding reception--which takes place after the wedding, but before the honeymoon (generally just before, in that the couple goes straight from the reception to the honeymoon). It's at the reception that numerous guests are accommodated, that gifts are received, that cake is served and the bouquet thrown. The fact that the wedding itself has already taken place by this time and the reception is purely a social affair (well, a social and gift-receiving affair), though, makes it seem (to me, at least) kind of empty. Not helping the case, either, is that (in my experience) Mormon wedding receptions are generally tacky affairs held in hastily redecorated church gymnasia--impersonal locations that don't really lend themselves to imparting due gravitas to a special occasion that's supposed to commemorate an important milestone in a couple's eternal progression.

So, in short, that's how the Mormon marriage goes. A lot of talk about its eternal importance and spiritual significance, but, in my opinion, with the actual proceedings ringing a little hollow. Still, however unexciting the wedding and the reception may be, it's supposed to represent two people being tied together for all eternity--and I guess that's maybe the main point where the Mormon marriage stands out from that of other Christian denominations. Of course, the divorce rate among Mormon couples remains high enough that many marriages turn out to not even make it to the end of mortality, much less beyond it.

Anyway, so, I hope some readers have found this post informative. As before, if there's any specific aspect of Mormonism you'd like me to write about, let me know in the comments. (Though I won't promise to get to it this week, given that I've already got a backlog of posts I've been meaning to make...)

@!&*$

2007-06-21T23:57:00.001-07:00

Yeah, once again it's been awhile since my last post--I've still been busy with the acting thing, and haven't had as much time to post as I've wanted to, but there are several things I've been meaning to post about once I could find the time. In the meantime, though, there's one thing I want to post about that's, well, acting-related.

Years ago, I happened to see part of an episode of the George Carlin Show. This wasn't a show I watched regularly--in fact, I think this one partial episode was all I ever saw of it--but I think this was while I was an undergraduate in college, and my roommates were watching the show one day. Anyway, that particular episode involved George Carlin's character being brought in front of a judge on charges of obscenity. He managed to get the charges dismissed by goading the judge into letting loose with some choice expletives himself, making him look like a hypocrite if he punished Carlin's character for doing the same. George Carlin's point--or the point of his character, and/or the writer of that episode, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that Carlin himself probably agreed to at least some extent, since it was his show--was that everyone swears sometimes; the right, or the wrong, circumstance can bring out the blue language from anyone. It's human nature, and it's unavoidable.

George Carlin was wrong.

Profanity is not, of course, an inevitable part of human nature; it's not like we have some instinctive drive to periodically utter certain Anglo-Saxon monosyllables (or whatever the equivalents in our native languages might be). People use those words in difficult situations out of habit, and if you never develop the habit it's easy to avoid. I went through thirty-four years of my life without ever uttering any word that would have been unwelcome on network TV. No (excuse the pointless censoring) sh*t, no *ss (except to refer to the ungulate), and certainly no f*ck. The closest I ever came to foul language was when as a very young child I said "crappy", having heard my grandfather use the word frequently and not understanding what it really meant.

That brings us to last week.

Now, in acting, as it turns out (and I didn't know this until recently), one of the most important things for new actors to do is meet casting directors. Casting directors remember actors, and they tend to call on actors they know. Of course, it's not always easy to meet a casting director, but one of the best ways to do so is at a workshop. Ostensibly, the purpose of these workshops is just to let the casting directors improve the actors' auditioning techniques, but in reality they're mostly there to let the casting director meet actors and see them in action. This benefits both the actors--who get to be seen by the casting directors--and the casting directors--who get to find new actors they might want to cast. To avoid wasting the casting directors' time with actors who aren't really ready to be seen, though, the workshops generally require actors to pass an audition before they're allowed into the workshops.

Which, as I said, brings us to last week. Last Monday, specifically. I was at an audition for a workshop, and I was paired up with an actress and given a "side"--an excerpt a few pages long of a script to a television episode or, as in this case, a movie. Specifically, it happened to be an excerpt from The Bachelor.

And it happened to prominently feature the word "sh*t". Three times. (Plus the word "hell" at the end, which however for some reason I don't feel as much need to censor in writing.)

Now, as I said above, I had never uttered this word before in my life. So I had to make some quick decisions. And what I decided was--eh, the heck with it. Sure, I didn't really like using that kind of language, but here I was playing a character, and you know, if I continue into acting, chances are I'll come across other parts that require this kind of language. And really, at this point, I don't really have a moral issue with saying those words. Maybe when I still considered myself a believer, things would be different, but now--it's a matter of taste. I don't particularly like that kind of language; I probably won't use those words myself (when I'm not playing a character); but it's not like speaking those words is inherently evil.

So I performed the part as written. Sh*t and all. And after thirty-four years (getting closer than I'd like to admit to thirty-five) of completely clean language, I uttered my first profanity.

Fast forward to this Wednesday. This was in a different workshop; I'd auditioned that afternoon (this time the audition didn't involve any profanities) and gotten in, and had decided to attend a workshop that very evening, present at which was a casting director who worked on a number of independent movies. And I was handed a side...which included several repetitions, in various conjugations, of the word "f*ck". (Plus one "sh*t", but hey, I'd already crossed that Rubicon.)

Now, okay, this is a profanity of a different magnitude here. Sh*t is one thing, but f*ck is another, rivaled in its intensity only perhaps by a certain four-letter word that rhymes with bunt. Still, again, even if I don't see the point in using that language in my everyday life, I don't now see that just uttering the words when playing a character is inherently evil or anything, so...I did it.

So what would I have done had I gotten into acting a year or two earlier (or taken a year or two longer to deconvert), and had this happened while I still considered myself a faithful Mormon? Honestly...I don't know. I was pretty zealous about things like that--never having uttered a profanity may be a minor virtue, but it's one virtue I had been living perfectly, so I'd cling pretty hard to it. So I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have said the words, but I'm really not certain how I would have tried to get out of it. Maybe I would have tried to substitute euphemisms and hope they went unremarked upon (though in both these particular sides that really wouldn't have worked); maybe I would have requested a different side...but both of those would have certainly gone over very badly, and certainly not made me look good to the workshop people and the casting director. So all in all, I'm quite glad this didn't happen while I still considered myself a believer.

So how did it go? Well, one might think that my first time in my life uttering a profanity, after completely avoiding them for so many years, would be a little awkward--but, apparently, it wasn't. Anyway, in the first case I passed the audition, and in the second case the casting director responded very positively to my performance, and several people complimented me on how funny it was. So apparently I'd managed to make the profanities seem natural, even though to me they were anything but.

Which I guess maybe just gives more evidence that this sort of thing--as odd as I feel writing this, after having assiduously eschewed any such language for so long--really isn't a big deal. When it came down to it, saying those words really didn't mean much.

Either that, or maybe the fact I managed to make it seem natural just means I'm a pretty good actor. Well, hey, I'd like to think so, anyway. ;)

Two Carnivals

2007-06-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

I'm once again a day late with this post, but there were two carnivals yesterday: Carnival of the Godless #68 at Action Skeptics and the third Humanist Symposium at Black Sun Journal.

I have a post in the former; I'd submitted a post to the latter, but it didn't make it in, probably because I cut it too close to the deadline. (In fact, I guess technically, depending on what time zone the editor of Black Sun Journal is in, it might have arrived past the deadline for him.) Ah, well; I've got to not cut things so close next time...

Anyway, open thread, but I'll supply an optional topic of discussion: What's your favorite species of worm?

Moral Decay

2007-06-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

The world is in an unprecedented state of moral decay. People lack the ethical guidance

So say the prophets and preachers of many religions. To many Christians, this moral decay is evidence that we're living in the last days before Christ's second coming, that the sinful world is ripening for the harvest at any moment now. Some others may not necessarily be convinced that Armageddon is quite that imminent, but agree that the moral state of the world is worse than it's ever been before. And, of course, they blame it largely on secularists. The godless and the impious, they say, are destroying the world's morality.

Well, in a way--and choosing certain definitions--they're right. And it's a good thing, too.

First of all, what immoral acts are they talking about, that are supposedly so prevalent nowadays? Violence? Murder? Well, as much as some people like to claim that youth violence, for example, is a dire threat, the statistics really don't bear that out. Despite the high-profile calamities like Columbine and Virginia Tech, on the whole it seems there isn't really more youth violence now than there was in the past. These events make the news precisely because they're unusual, because this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time--and, alarmist rhetoric to the contrary, doesn't show any real signs of increasing in frequency.

What about deception? There's certainly plenty of fraud and deceit going on today, in business and in politics most prominently. But that's always been the case, and, again, there's no real evidence that it's increasing. American history books tend to do some whitewashing of the country's past, but the truth is that earlier presidential campaigns were no more free of scandal than those today, and certainly there's always been plenty of corruption in business and industry. Here, again, there's no real evidence of any precipitous slide toward increasing immorality.

But it's not murder and mayhem, nor mendacity, that the lamenters of moral decay are really decrying. As I've remarked before, when the religious speak of immorality, usually it's sexual immorality in particular that they're really referring to. And that definitely seems to be true in this case. When the religious demagogues get down to specifics about the indications of the world's supposed moral decay, it's this kind of sin they refer to. They point to things like increasing acceptance of homosexuality and tolerance of premarital sex, cohabitation of unmarried couples, glorification in the media of sexual promiscuity. These are their signs of moral decay, and their proof that America's morals are going down the tubes. (Well, not just America's, of course, but here I'm focusing mostly on America, because that, of course, is the place I'm most familiar with, and also because most of the fiery religionists who speak of moral decay are also Americans, and focus on America themselves.)

But...is there really that much more sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and so forth today, or are people just more open about it? I'm not sure--though of course moral crusaders would argue that the fact that people engage in such acts more openly is itself a sign of moral decay. Even if there is more of such things going on than there has been in the past, though, is it really immoral in any meaningful sense, or just called so because of old arbitrary religious doctrines? While these are certainly valid questions, for the moment, let's grant, for the sake of argument, that there are more sexually immoral acts going on in America today than there have been in the past, and that it is really immoral and wrong. (I'm not saying I really believe this--as I said, I'm just granting it for the sake of argument.)

Now, it may seem I've just ceded the whole game to the proclaimers of moral decay, and that there's nothing left to argue about. But there are some important matters that are still being overlooked. Even assuming that sexual immorality has been on the rise in America over the last few centuries, and that there's more of it going on than there has been at any point in the nation's past--well, what else is different?

Let's look back to America shortly after the Revolutionary War. The preachers of moral decay would have us believe that people then were much more chaste than now, that there was much less extramarital and homosexual sex going on. Again, I'm not really convinced this is true (rather, it may have been just hidden better), but as I said, let's grant the point for the sake of argument. So there was less sexual hanky-panky. But then again--there was also chattel slavery. People kept other people as property. That seems to me to be pretty darn immoral. And even if one does hold that premarital sex and homosexuality are immoral, it's hard to make any sort of coherent case that they're worse than depriving human beings of all rights and treating them like animals. So...on balance, I don't think there's really much basis for saying that we're less moral then than we are now.

It was nearly a century before slavery ended, and even then segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism continued until only a few decades ago. It was commonly accepted that some races were just intrinsically nobler and worthwhile than others, and that was that. Of course, today racism is, unfortunately, far from dead, but at least it's no longer written into law, and we don't generally pretend that it has any scientific basis behind it. Again, even if there is more sexual immorality nowadays than before, is that really a worse evil than the devaluation and mistreatment of an entire race? And if not, then is it really true that, overall, the world is less moral now than it was then?

But of course, we may recognize slavery and racism as evil now, but back in their heyday there were all sorts of alleged moral justifications advanced for them--often from the pulpit. Preachers thundered about how God had made the black race to serve the white, and about how everyone must seek his proper place. Not all preachers, certainly--it would be a drastic oversimplification to claim, for instance, that all religious people in the late 1700s supported slavery, or that atheists opposed it. Still, to many, though not all, theists of the time, racism was considered a moral virtue--and opposition to it was considered secular immorality.

So from that vantage point, from the mindset of some of those theists of bygone years who extolled racism and bigotry as positive principles, yes, the irreligious have indeed been responsible for the country's moral decay. But if "moral decay" means greater freedom and equality for oppressed people, means better treatment of man for fellowman, then hey, personally I'm all for it.

No More NOMA

2007-06-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

I used to have a lot of respect for Stephen Jay Gould as a science writer. I still do enjoy his books, but more recently I've come to recognize a tendency he sometimes had for oversimplification of debates and distortion of other points of view. The first thing I read in his books that bothered me, though, was his espousal of what he calls the NOMA principle.

"NOMA" stands for Non-Overlapping MAgisteria--the principle, according to Gould, that science and religion deal with discrete subjects, and cannot come into conflict simply because, when properly treated, they do not overlap. Science deals with facts. Religion deals with morality. As long as they are properly confined to the appropriate spheres, there's no reason there should ever be a disagreement between them. Gould made much of NOMA, which he called "a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to...the supposed conflict between science and religion". He claimed it "follows a strong consensus accepted for decades by leading scientific and religious thinkers alike"--and cites as an example Pope John Paul II, whose suggestion that elements of the creation story may be best taken figuratively marks him, according to Gould, as a proponent of NOMA.

Now, at the time I first read this, I still considered myself a faithful Mormon, and Gould's NOMA argument struck me as absurd. Of course religion purports to deal with matters of fact. Whether or not Jesus Christ ever existed historically (quite apart from the issue of whether he really was the son of God) is a matter of fact, and one that's very important to Christianity. If a prominent historian claimed to have proven that no such person existed, I'm quite sure that few if any Christians would shrug their shoulders and say that, well, it doesn't really matter; that's beyond the scope of their religion. The (alleged) fact that Jesus Christ existed is quite important, and indeed fundamental, to Christianity. Claiming John Paul II as a proponent of NOMA is preposterous; conceding that one particular story in one's religious texts may be largely symbolic is not at all the same thing as conceding that all the stories in one's religion are symbolic or allegorical and that the church will confine itself to morality. He may have made some allowances on creation, but I assume John Paul II still supported the idea that Christ was born of a virgin, that miracles can and do occur, and so forth--questions of fact that entirely violate Gould's NOMA principle.

Gould was not, of course, alone in espousing these ideas, though he's the one who gave them a catchy(ish) name. Michael Shermer, for instance, makes much the same mistake in his book Why People Believe Weird Things, when he writes that creationists, by interpreting Genesis literally, "missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myth", and "took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it". Their literal interpretation of scripture, Shermer says, is "an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science". Now, again, when I first read Shermer's book, I still considered myself a faithful Mormon--but I certainly did not consider myself a creationist. (Well, more specifically, I may have believed in divine creation, because that's what the church taught, but I recognized the evidence for evolution enough to try to reconcile the two rather than denying that evolution had happened.) So I wasn't among the group Shermer was attacking, those who denied evolution because it contradicted their scriptural account. Still, it seemed to me Shermer was speaking nonsense. Myths (in the religious/mythological sense) were originally meant to be, on at least some level, believed--that's what distinguishes a myth from a mere story. Literal interpretation of scripture isn't an insult to religion, if that's what the religion teaches, and if the scriptures are meant to be interpreted literally. The "beautiful story of creation and re-creation" that Shermer refers to was originally intended to represent a factual account (even if different denominations today may quibble on the details of just to what extent), and if taking it as literally true is ruining it then it was already ruined from the get-go.

I think to some extent it's clear what Gould and Shermer were trying to do. They were trying to keep religion from attacking science, while still ceding it a place of its own in the hopes that the religious would be mollified and accept the limitations that NOMA imposed. And certainly the goal of fending off religious attacks on science is a laudable and important one; today, in America in particular, the fundamentalist attacks on evolution and cosmology and an ever-expanding set of scientific theories are relentless, and their success would mean a scientific stagnation and regression with dire consequences for the well-being both of society as a whole and of the individual. But fighting religious advances by trying to convince the religious that fact isn't part of their "magisterium" simply won't work. Religion has always dealt in fact--or in what the religious believed to be fact--and it presumably always will. It has never been only a matter of morality. And any attempt to suggest that it should be only a matter of morality cannot help but be perceived by the religious as an attack. It's not going to help, and it's only going to come across as dishonest, or even as a threat--"you stay off our turf, and we'll stay off yours".

Now, so far, I've been talking about my impressions of NOMA from a religious perspective--what I thought about it back when I still considered myself a faithful Mormon. Now that I'm an avowed atheist, though, I have other reasons for thinking NOMA is dangerous. As I said, religion does purport to deal in fact, but of course its track record for getting the facts right isn't very good. The problem is, its track record when it comes to morality isn't much better. Christianity had no problem in this nation's youth coexisting with the evil of slavery. The atrocities committed by the "chosen people" in the Bible hardly need recounting. And, of course, today, on "moral" principles, the religious right fights gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, and other matters that would ease and improve many lives. If we claim that morality is the sole domain of religion, we're ceding religion the right to decide all these issues, since the religious consider them moral matters. I don't think we really want to do that.

Now, obviously--contrary to the bizarre assumption some theists seem to have that all atheists think as a group, and that what one atheist says all atheists must believe--NOMA isn't a principle that's managed to catch on as widely as Gould hoped it would, even among atheists. Dawkins--while I'm still a little undecided what I think of him (and one of these days I probably ought to read The God Delusion)--deserves some credit for distancing himself from such wishy-washy views and staking out a clearer stand. But some shadows of NOMA still show up occasionally, like those in Shermer's book previously cited. I think we'd do better without such pretense.

Religion does purport to deal with fact, and that isn't likely to change. Pretending otherwise is not only useless, but counterproductive, as it both offends religionists, and gives them more ammunition to use in their attempt to impose their own version of "morality". If we're going to try to resist the impositions of religion on all aspects of life, we're much better off being honest about exactly what it is we're opposing.

So please. No more NOMA.

Last Time In The Temple

2007-06-07T23:46:00.000-07:00

So, this preceding Saturday (and yes, I've been meaning to make this post much earlier; still been busy) I went to the temple for what will probably be the last time. I used to be a regular temple-goer, back when I still considered myself a faithful Mormon, going on average once a month or two. Now, of course, I've decided I have better things to do than sit through a two-hour mildly interactive film that I've seen so many times before and that really isn't very interesting to begin with. (And yes, that is what a typical temple visit comprises; I may make a "Mormonism 101" post about that later.) And, as I've mentioned before, my temple recommend--the slip of paper that allows a Mormon to enter the temple--expires in August, and when it does I have no intention of renewing it, since doing so would require telling the bishop and the stake president that I believe in God and believe that the leaders of the church are real "prophets, seers, and revelators", among other things.

So why did I go this last Saturday? Well, because it wasn't a typical temple trip. There was going to be a special meeting in the rarely-used priesthood assembly room. Most Mormon temples don't have such a room; the Los Angeles temple was the first temple built outside Utah to have one, and remains one of only two temples outside Utah that do (the other being the Washington D.C. temple).

I had never seen the assembly room--and besides I was curious just what this special meeting was all about--so I decided that, since my temple recommend was still good for another few months, I might as well take advantage of that and go.

It turned out to be a letdown in pretty much every way. Not that I was expecting any spiritual enlightenment, of course, but I thought, with all the hype and hoopla surrounding this meeting and the stake's fervency in encouraging everyone to go, that maybe there was going to be some big announcement or some supposed "revelation" given there. Nope. It was a standard meeting in pretty much every way, distinguished from the usual chapel sessions that often precede endowment sessions at the temple only by its length and by the presence of a choir. Apparently this "special meeting" had been called not because anyone really thought they had anything important to say, but just to commemorate the temple's "jubilee"--at least, that's what they called it, though I don't know why; it's presumably supposed to be a reference to some kind of anniversary, but since the temple's construction was started in 1951 and completed in 1955 and it was dedicated in 1956, 2007 doesn't in fact mark any noteworthy anniversary of anything in particular. (It's the 70th anniversary of the announcement that a temple was going to be built in Los Angeles, and the purchase of the land, but that would seem like an odd thing to commemorate. Anyway, it seems they're commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the temple's dedication, but why they're doing it a year late I'm not sure.) There was a talk or two recounting the history of the temple, but beyond that it was the usual pap about how this was the House of the Lord, how powerful the Spirit was here, the joy of helping the dead who weren't baptized in life escape from Spirit Prison (through the ordinances performed for the dead in the temple), and so forth. I had considered smuggling in a small voice recording device to record the events of this much-ballyhooed special meeting, but in the end hadn't really felt comfortable doing so; as it turned out, I didn't miss anything, since nothing happened worth recording.

As for the assembly room itself...well, my first surprise was when I took the stairs to get there. Every bit of space I'd seen inside the temple was lavishly decorated and lovingly appointed--until last Saturday. Those stairways were completely unadorned, plain cement stairs that wouldn't have been out of place in any old utilitarian building. Evidently they weren't used enough that anyone felt the need to make them look nice. The assembly room itself, of course, was more ornate...but still wasn't anything really special. It was big--it seated twenty-five thousand, someone said--but it wasn't anything more than a big empty room with an organ and a stand--some tiered seats and a podium--on either end. The attendees were accommodated by filling the bare floor with folding chairs. One of the speakers mentioned that the room had been recarpeted and otherwise extensively renovated before its use this year, which means that previously it was apparently even less impressive.

Ah, well. Still, now I've been in the assembly room and know what it's like, so I won't say the trip wasn't a total loss. But I wasn't really planning on going back to the temple again after last Saturday, and that utterly unimpressive special temple jubilee meeting certainly did nothing to change my mind.

My Kind of Atheism

2007-06-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

So, after seeing it on a post in King Aardvark's Kick in the Nuts, I decided just for the heck of it to take a "What kind of atheist are you? test. Here's what I got:

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.

Scientific Atheist

83%

Agnostic

50%

Spiritual Atheist

42%

Theist

33%

Apathetic Atheist

33%

Angry Atheist

33%

Militant Atheist

17%

What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Now, obviously, this kind of online multiple-choice test is anything but rigorous, and I went through it pretty quickly, without giving a lot of thought to my responses, but I think in this case the results are probably more or less accurate. Considering my currently semi-clandestine atheism, I'm certainly anything but a militant atheist, though sometimes I think maybe I sort of should be. It's not surprising that "Scientific Atheist" came up first; I'm a physicist, after all (well, a doctoral student in physics, who's done some physics teaching, anyway), and I think I do have pretty much a scientific mindset. I was mildly surprised at first that "Agnostic" came up second, but after some thought it kind of makes sense--it doesn't exactly fit, but it probably fits better than anything else on the list other than "Scientific Atheist". After all, it's not as if I'm 100% committed to the idea that there cannot possibly be a god--it's just that I'm not aware of any good evidence toward such a being's existence, and in the absence of such evidence it's more reasonable to conclude that probably no such being exists.

(Okay, I guess what is kind of surprising is that "Theist" came up as high as it did, tied with "Apathetic Atheist" and "Angry Atheist". I may not be much of an "Angry Atheist" or an "Apathetic Atheist", but those probably describe me better than "theist". For that matter, while I may not be much of an "Angry Atheist", I'm probably more of that than an "Apathetic Atheist". Ah, well; I guess there's little point in quibbling too much about the exact ordering of the lower-ranking choices.)

Anyway, I guess that's what kind of atheist I am, more or less. Anyone else?

A Second Confession

2007-05-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've still been too busy lately to post here as often as I'd like. But today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. And, as I said last month...I've decided to commemorate this one-year anniversary by, um, making another sort of confession.

This one's actually harder for me to admit to than being an atheist, even though logically I know it shouldn't be. But it's also something I've been keeping secret a lot longer. My atheism only dates back about a year and a quarter (I'd already rejected religion a few months before I started this blog). This, I've known about since I was twenty. And as hard as it is to admit to it, it's something I ought to come to terms with sooner or later, and I guess I may as well start by owning up to it here, where I can do so anonymously.

So here goes...

I'm gay.

By which I don't mean that I've ever had any homosexual relations. (I said in my first post that I was still a virgin, and that hasn't changed--and that includes relations with either gender.) But I don't have to have actually done the deed to know which gender turns me on. As I said, I've known I was gay since I was twenty--and had I been brought up in a less restrictive environment, I would no doubt have realized it much sooner. (Once I did finally realize it, it seemed in retrospect to be blatantly obvious.) Ironically, I realized it while I was on my mission for the church, but as tempting as it might be to speculate that being around other young guys prone to lounge about the apartment in their underwear contributed to the realization, I'm pretty sure the timing was just a coincidence.

(That last sentence perhaps requires a little elaboration. Yes, the missionaries on my mission did tend to strip down to their underwear when in their apartment--though I don't know how common this was in other missions (I served in Spain, and, well, it could get hot there), or whether church leaders have since found out about the practice and put a stop to it. However, there are several reasons I really don't think this had anything to do with my realizing that I was gay. For one thing, when I say "underwear", I don't mean boxers or briefs; I'm referring to Mormon temple garments, which are one of the most unsightly and unflattering articles of clothing ever designed. So if anything the missionaries were considerably less alluring in their "underwear" than they were fully dressed...)

I should add, by the way, that I don't think my homosexuality has anything to do with my atheism. After all, I knew I was gay almost fifteen years before my "deconversion". But LDS church leaders in the last few decades have acknowledged that homosexuality may not be entirely a matter of choice, that people may have innate predispositions toward it due to genetic or other causes. They have encouraged members with these urges to suppress them, of course, but at least they don't deny that those tendencies exist. So while I considered myself a faithful member, I just decided not to act on--or indeed, not to tell anyone about--my homosexual inclinations. I managed to go on that way for a decade and a half, and I honestly don't think it was a contributing factor to my eventual rejection of the church; I'd long made my peace with the matter as far as that went, and had reconciled in my mind my tendencies with church teachings.

When I say that I'd decided, as a faithful Mormon, not to act on my homosexual tendencies, I don't mean to say that now that I've "deconverted" I'm planning to go out and start trying to pick up guys. My conditioning has stuck to the degree that I'm still very uncomfortable with that whole idea--I may know that I'm attracted to other men, but the idea of actually acting on that attraction still strikes me as distasteful, even though intellectually I know there's no good reason it should. So...I really have no idea even where I want to go from here, and when I say I ought to come to terms with my homosexuality, I'm not even sure myself what I mean by that. I was helped to come to terms with my atheism by interacting with other atheists both online and in person at the Center for Inquiry. But as for my homosexuality...well, while I guess it wouldn't be hard to meet other homosexuals if I wanted to, at this point I really don't want to. Not that I have anything against homosexuals (that would be rather silly, considering that I am one myself), but...I don't know. I have no interest in trying to assume a typical homosexual "lifestyle", whatever that is, or if such a thing even exists. I'm more or less content with things the way they are.

(Well...except that I really would like to have kids someday. But, uh, it doesn't seem like there's any simple way for that to happen...)

So why am I writing this, and why do I feel there's anything I need to "come to terms with" in the first place? Well, because, while I don't feel the need to go out and find dates, or anything like that...I am kind of uncomfortable with living a lie. (Well, not that I've explicitly told anyone I'm straight, but even so I'm sort of lying by omission...and there've been times I've had to word things very carefully to avoid giving myself away without actually saying an untruth.) But...I'm apprehensive of the consequences of coming out as homosexual. Even more so than those of coming out as an atheist.

Like I said, I know it shouldn't be that way; a number of surveys have shown that there's more prejudice against and distrust of atheists in today's society than there is of gays. But...that's not my personal experience. I've heard from people I know in the church a lot more hostility toward gays than toward atheists. Now, I know that the surveys are probably more reliable than my own personal anecdotal "evidence"--and, in fact, I've got a pretty good idea why I haven't heard as much negativity toward atheists as toward gays. It's because to a lot of people I know, atheists...don't really exist. Or at least, they're not a part of their everyday experience. They've heard of them, but they don't fully believe in them, or at least they haven't known any themselves (or at least known anyone they know to be an atheist.) On their mental maps of society, gays may comprise a distrusted foreign country, but the godless are acknowledged only by some words in some exotic and unexplored corner, stating in an ornate script, "HERE BE ATHEISTS". So if I've heard more invective against homosexuals than against atheists, it's probably because I've been around people who are more familiar with the former than with the latter--but it doesn't necessarily indicate that they feel any less negatively toward atheists. If anything, it makes sense that they'd think even worse of atheists, because of the unfamiliarity; there are enough gays around that they pretty much have to be acknowledged as people, if "sinful" ones, whereas as long as atheists remain abstract and semi-mythical they can be demonized completely.

(This could be taken, incidentally, as an argument for atheists in general to become more outspoken about their atheism. After all, if gays have won some measure of tolerance by becoming better known (certainly not full tolerance, but much more than they had a few decades ago), it seems likely that atheists would be able to throw off some of their opprobrium if they were simply more visible; if people simply associated atheism with people they knew, and not with some semi-mythical people that exist to them only as concepts. In particular, this could be construed as an argument that I ought to fess up to my atheism, and stop trying to keep it hidden from my family and friends. Yeah...I know I should, but I call myself the anonymous coward for a reason...)

Now, all of that I realize intellectually, but it's one thing to grasp it on that level and another to really internalize it. As much as I may know, on an intellectual level, that my coming out as an atheist is likely to have larger consequences for my personal relationships than my coming out as gay, it's hard to overcome the feeling, based on all the digs I've heard against gays, that it would be the other way around. Of course, given that I have no immediate plans to come out publicly in either capacity, for the moment at least it's a moot point. (This, however, is another reason I was kind of reluctant to bring this subject up even here on this blog. I do intend to someday make my atheism public, after all, though I don't yet know just when that's going to be. And when I do, I'd planned to own up to this blog as well. But now, of course, doing that would mean also admitting that I'm gay. Well...I guess it has to come out sometime anyway.)

I do have an uncle who's gay, but I'm not sure, on balance, whether that bodes well or ill for my family's reaction when they find out about my homosexuality. On the one hand, he's evidence that they can, at least, show some measure of tolerance; he's still invited to family gatherings, and everyone in the family still tries to keep in contact with him. But on the other hand, it's clear that he's thought of as, well, a sinner, and a bit of a pariah. To make matters worse, he has a history of certain psychological problems. Those issues are in no way related to his homosexuality...but they mean that homosexuality and mental disorders are now connected in my family's eyes.

The uncle in question is a graphic artist, and my mother is convinced that he was turned gay because he was forced to sleep with another artist in return for introduction to a particular artistic technique. (I said earlier that LDS church leaders have acknowledged that homosexuality may be innate, but that doesn't mean that all church members have gotten that message.) She insists that he wasn't always gay, that he had a crush on a certain girl when he was a boy. He denies that, and, his psychological history notwithstanding, I tend to agree with him that he probably knows how he felt as a boy better than my mother does. In fact, I have a possible guess as to how my mother's conviction of his childhood crush may have come about. When I was in my early teens, my mother would continually press me about which of the girls in the ward I might like. I hadn't yet realized at that time that I was gay, but I did know that I had no interest in any of those girls. Still, my mother kept badgering me about the matter until finally just to get her off my back I picked a girl pretty much at random to tell her I liked. I didn't know the girl in question, and had no better reason for the choice than that her mother happened to be my Sunday school teacher; I don't think I ever said a word to her in my life, or vice versa. But my mother insisted I had to be interested in some girl, so I gave her a name. (I did try to convince myself that I liked her, but to no avail.)

Anyway, now that I'm getting into acting, my mother has a new cause for concern; she's been warning me that the acting business is disproportionately full of people with sinful lifestyles, and to be careful to avoid what happened to my uncle. If she's worried that acting is somehow going to turn me gay, well, it's a bit late to be concerned about that, since I've already been gay for about fifteen years. (Well, okay, I've been gay all my life, really, but first realized it fifteen years ago.)

Looking back at earlier posts, though, apparently I have actually made some progress in coming to terms with this, even just over the last year. Remember my post about marriage, back in August? I alluded then to some "other serious factors...that have stood in the way" of my getting married, but that "I d[id]n't feel like going into" right then. This--my homosexuality--was what I was referring to. But reading that post now, I'm a little surprised to see that in that post I said I still did want to get married. I certainly wasn't referring to gay marriage; I think at the time I had some sort of fantasy that I'd find a woman who would still want to marry me after I confessed to her that I was gay (I wouldn't want a marriage based on a lie) and told her I wasn't attracted to her sexually, but could perhaps still love her in other ways. Even supposing I could find such a woman, why would I want to? Well, basically, I think, because I want kids. But that's not the way to go about it (not, like I said, that there really is a simple way of going about it); even in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a woman was willing to marry me despite my homosexuality, that wouldn't really be fair to her--and wouldn't, in the long term, be a good thing for me either. So I guess I've accepted since that post that I'll likely never marry--that, at least, I've come to terms with.

But again, despite the fact that atheists may be more distrusted than gays, it's my homosexuality that I'm more reluctant to talk about. I have told people (non-anonymously) that I'm an atheist--not just those I met at the CFI, but friends I'd known from before that as well. I haven't told anyone that I'm gay, even my oldest friends, and I really wouldn't feel comfortable doing so. A few months back, someone I'd met at the CFI invited me to a party, where I met for the first time his wife, who, as I found out, actually made a vocation of helping out gay Mormon youth. Now, if there's anyone I should have felt comfortable telling about my homosexuality, it's her--granted, I'm a decade and change past really being able to call myself a youth anymore, but other than that I'm in a situation she's helped many people deal with in the past. But even to her, I couldn't bring myself to say anything about my sexual orientation. Even here, anonymously, I feel a little queasy about bringing it up.

Although...in the end, this may not end up being entirely an anonymous confession after all. I have, after all, told some people at the CFI about this blog, which means that this entry may be read by some people I know face-to-face. I hadn't planned on that happening--in fact, I'd intended just the contrary--but maybe it's for the best in the long run. As much as it may trouble me to admit to being gay, as I said, it's something I do need to come to terms with sooner or later.

Eh. I don't know. I'm not really fishing for advice here (though that's not to say that it would offend me); mostly I felt it was about time I did admit to this, even if for the moment it's only (mostly) anonymously. Like I said, I don't like living a lie, and at the moment, between my atheism and my homosexuality, I'm living two of them. That's...not going to last indefinitely.

Mormonism 101: Mormon Meetings

2007-05-24T23:47:00.000-07:00

Whew. It's been another light blogging week, I guess, thanks largely to (what may be) my incipient acting career. (With regards to which, however, I should own up to a misunderstanding with regard to what I posted here. When the casting company called and said I "got the part"; I assumed they meant the lead role in the commercial, which is the part I had auditioned for; as it turns out, I'd been given a lesser role. Well, I still got a part in the commercial, which is certainly something, especially considering it was my first ever audition for a commercial part.)

But anyway, I said a ways back that, given the interest people seem to have in the workings of the Mormon church (as evidenced in part by the response to my post on Mormon missionary methods, and given how surprisingly little outsiders seem to know about it and how many misconceptions there are (I mean, I'm far from the first Mormon to have left the church; you'd think things would have gotten around more than they have apparently had), I was going to do a series of "Mormonism 101" posts, explaining the methods and practices of the LDS church. And I guess this is as good a time as any to start.

This post's subject: Mormon church meetings.

First of all, to clear up one common misconception, Mormons do not go to the temple for church meetings every Sunday. The temple is for certain special ceremonies, including (but not limited to) weddings and baptisms for the dead, and is visited (by most members) much more infrequently. I'm not going to go further into what goes on in the temple in this post, because there's enough to that to merit a post (or several posts) of its own, but suffice to say for now that Mormons meet on Sundays at church buildings which are much less large and ornate than the temples, but much more numerous. Density of church buildings depends on density of membership; in Los Angeles there aren't that many of them--the church building where the congregation that I'm a member of meets is about two and a half miles from my apartment, and the nearest other building that I know of is about four miles away. In Utah, of course, LDS churches are substantially more common, and except in spread-out rural areas few Mormons don't live within walking distance of their church. Furthermore, often more than one ward (congregation) shares the same building, meeting at different times (though the times may overlap if not all the rooms are needed by each ward at once).

There are two kinds of LDS members: "active" and "less active". The "active" members go to church nearly every week and participate in church activities. "Less active" is a bit of a euphemism, since most "less active" members don't go to church at all, and many of them want nothing to do with the church but are still officially on the church records. (In fact, formerly the term "inactive" was used, but this has been denigrated, presumably as insufficiently optimistic.) The line isn't as fuzzy as one may think; while there are some Mormons who only show up to church occasionally, there aren't really all that many. Most Mormons either attend church regularly or seldom attend at all, with very few in between.

Sunday church attendance in the LDS church actually comprises three separate meetings. These used to be at different times, with some gaps between them, so that members would go home between meetings, but in 1980 (long enough ago that I don't really remember the old meeting schedules myself), they were consolidated into a three-hour block meeting schedule. The order of the meetings varies, but the middle of the three is always Sunday School.

There are two main adult Sunday School meetings going on simultaneously. (This is not counting the children, who have their own classes, divided up by age group.) Most members attend "Gospel Doctrine", which covers the LDS scriptures and related topics. Which scriptures are covered rotates on a quadrennial basis: one year the lessons focus on the Old Testament (plus the Pearl of Great Price, a few additional chapters purportedly by Moses and Abraham and "translated" by Joseph Smith), the next (including this year) on the New Testament, the next on the Book of Mormon, and the next on the book of Doctrine & Covenants, a book of "revelations" of this "dispensation" (i.e. since Joseph Smith--actually, almost entirely by Joseph Smith; only three of the 138 sections aren't written by him. Although it's often said in the LDS church that the words of all modern prophets have the force of scripture, the vast majority of these words have not been formally compiled into a book of scripture). New members and "investigators" (non-members) attend "Gospel Essentials", instead, which goes over more basic doctrinal materials. Sometimes there are also other classes going on during this time (and/or during the Priesthood/Relief Society meeting time, described below), such as temple preparation classes or genealogy classes, but these are intermittent and involve much fewer people.

Before or after Sunday School, depending on the particular ward's schedule, is the priesthood meeting for the men, or Relief Society for the women. (The youth, again, have their own meetings during this time--children younger than twelve are lumped together in "Primary" (which also extends during Sunday School), while older boys and girls have their own classes separated by age--though the boys twelve and older do have priesthood classes, they're separate from the adult men's.) What goes on in Relief Society, of course, I can't say from personal experience, but it's my understanding they generally cover more or less the same topics as the men do in priesthood, though usually with more visual aids. The Priesthood meeting (and presumably the Relief Society meeting as well), aside from whatever priesthood business may be briefly taken care of in the beginning, really isn't too different from the Sunday School meeting in format, though it differs somewhat in subject matter: instead of concentrating on books of scripture, the lessons in these meetings focus on particular topics within the gospel. In recent years, they've given the Priesthood and Relief Society lessons more of a theme, by focusing each year on the teachings of a particular modern prophet (though of course they omit all the objectionable or controversial things these "prophets" have said, often editing their words to render them more palatable).

Lessons in all these meetings are taught by ward members who are asked to do it by ward leaders--either called directly to the position by the bishopric, or asked to fill in by the Sunday School, Relief Society, or Priesthood presidency if the regular teachers are unavailable or felt to deserve a break. I've taught many lessons myself, including, as I mentioned some time ago, one even since my deconversion. There is even (on an intermittent schedule like the aforementioned temple preparation and genealogy classes) a class on teaching that the bishop often requests members recently called to teaching callings to take.

The final meeting--which depending on the schedule can in fact be the first meeting of the block--is the sacrament meeting. This is the longest of the three meetings, at around seventy minutes, and is considered the most important; if a member for some reason can't make it for the entire three hour block, it's the sacrament meeting he does his best to make sure he attends. After the opening hymn and prayer, and whatever ward business there might be to address (announcing new callings and releases, etc.), the first main order of business is the passing of the sacrament. This post is getting long enough without going into detail about that, so maybe I'll make it the topic of a separate post, but at any rate after the passing of the sacrament the bulk of the meeting is devoted to talks by the members, which may or may not have a hymn or a musical number between them. Members are generally asked by the bishopric several weeks in advance to give a talk on a particular day (and are usually given a specific topic to speak about), but it often happens that the request doesn't come till the week previous. In any case, while the bishopric (that is to say, the bishop--who presides over the ward--and his two counselors) conducts the meeting, as far as announcing what's going to come next and trying to ensure that everyone keeps to their alloted time, most of it's done by the general membership at the bishopric's prior request: the talks, special musical numbers, even the opening and closing prayers. A bishopric member may give a spontaneous talk if the assigned speakers run short, but this rarely happens; more often, the assigned speakers run long, and the next meeting, if there is one, starts a bit late (to the endless frustration of the Sunday School teacher in the local ward).

There are a few exceptions to the regular schedule. One is conference meetings. Twice a year is a "general conference", where the church leadership speaks to the church as a whole, most of whom tune in either by satellite broadcast or, more recently, by the internet. (In the old days, of course, church members who wanted to hear general conference had to physically attend--nowadays, though that's no longer necessary, pilgrimages to Salt Lake City to attend general conference are not uncommon.) Another few times a year is "stake conference", where a stake--a collection of nearby wards--meets together, under the direction of the stake presidency.

Furthermore, once a month--usually the first Sunday of the month, though it may be shifted because of conference meetings--is "fast Sunday", when the church members are supposed to fast for a day--abstaining from two meals, generally breakfast and lunch of that Sunday. On fast Sunday, the regular sacrament meeting becomes "fast and testimony meeting"--the ordinance of the sacrament still takes place, but instead of talks the rest of the sacrament meeting is left open for members to "bear their testimonies", coming up to the stand and proclaiming their belief in the church. Matt of Pooflingers Anonymous mentioned something that occurs during fast and testimony meeting as having been the "final point" that turned him away from possibly joining the LDS church: children "bearing their testimony" at their parents' insistence. Matt says it was obvious that the child he saw had been "taught what to say", but it can be much more blatant than that: very often, the parent is actually up there on the stand with the child, openly whispering in his ear. (Almost invariably, in addition to saying that he knows the church is true, the prompted child also adds that he loves his mommy and daddy. The fact that it's his "mommy" or "daddy" who's telling him to say this is...well, kind of off-putting.)

I have to admit I always thought this rigmarole of the child bearing a "testimony" fed to him by his parents was hollow and meaningless--even when I still considered myself a faithful Mormon, it was pretty obvious that the parent was just putting words in the child's mouth--, but I saw it as a failing of the individual members involved, not of the church. Still, Matt saw this as a species of brainwashing--"if this kid repeats this every month until he's in high school, he'll believe it"--and actually, he's right. It's not only for the children, either; older members are encouraged to bear their testimonies often even if they don't have a firm conviction of the church's truth, because if they bear their testimony and say they believe in the church, the Spirit will witness to its truth and they'll gain a testimony. Given the human mind's tendency to change its memories and feelings to fit circumstances, the fact that such a person will over time convince himself that he's had the witness of the Spirit shouldn't be surprising.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'm short on time today, so I think that'll suffice. So, now maybe you know a little more about what goes on at Mormon church meetings. If there's anything in particular about the LDS church that you'd like me to cover in future "Mormonism 101" posts, please feel free to say so in the comments.

Humanist Symposium #2

2007-05-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

One of the many remarkable things about the natural world is the sheer variety of life it contains. So complex is the vast collection of organisms that biologists have devised an elaborate system for classification, known as taxonomy. The standard taxonomic system involves several nested levels of classification, starting with Kingdom at the top, followed by Phylum (or Division, for plants), then Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, with occasional intercalations of suborders and superclasses and other intermediate levels. The genus and species are the two levels with names most familiar (no pun intended) to the layman: Tyrannosaurus rex belongs to the genus Tyrannosaurus and the species rex, for example, and we humans are Homo sapiens--genus Homo, species sapiens. (Not, incidentally, sapien: that final s is a part of the species name; it's not an indicator of pluralization.) But to a biologist, the higher levels are important in the classification as well: We Homo sapiens, for example, belong to the family Homidae, in the order Primates, class Mammalia, subphylum Vertebrata, phylum Chordata, kingdom Animalia. (Some of these no doubt ring a bell to the layman, as well; most people have certainly heard of primates, mammals, and vertebrates, but probably aren't aware of the technical names for these classifications at the order, class, and subphylum levels, respectively.)

(There was a mnemonic taught when I was in high school which I now remember only in part: "King Philip Crossed Over and Found something something." Not finding that mnemonic particularly engrossing, I came up with my own: "Kids Prefer Coke Over Flat Grape Soda". I much later found out that a distorted form of my mnemonic--combining it with the previous one--remained current at the school years after I'd graduated: "Kings Prefer Cans Of Flat Grape Soda". This may be as close as I'll come to making a lasting mark upon the biological sciences.)

The names of the various taxonomic levels, of course, are arbitrary. Oh, there are rules for their formation: they must be of Latin or Greek derivation (with the inclusion of proper names allowed); the scientist naming the taxon can't just string together any arbitrary collection of letters. But the names themselves aren't really important, except as labels. If we renamed class Mammalia to class Piloses, to choose a random example, nothing important would change; the classification system would remain the same, and certainly there'd be no reflection of the name change in the actual organisms the class encompasses. But while the particular names aren't really significant, the classification system is, in that the taxa are chosen in such a way as to accurately reflect the evolutionary and genetic relationships between the organisms involved. This means, of course, that as scientists refine their ideas about the relationships between different organisms, the taxonomic classifications may change, but in any case they reflect the current best understanding about their organism's relationships.

What does all of this have to do with the Second Humanist Symposium? Well, because I decided, just for fun, to arrange the posts according to a (pseudo-)taxonomic system. Of course, by the theme of the symposium, all these posts are about humanist themes, so they're all already related; let's say they're all in kingdom Scriptura (which, incidentally, is just Latin for "writing", with no particular connotation of sacredness), phylum Ephemeres, subphylum Cassium, class Philosophiae, order Humanistes. Beyond that, we'll get to more specific classifications. (It probably goes without saying that, unlike the biological taxonomic system, the taxonomic system used here is pretty much meaningless; like I said, it's just for fun. Also, I should note that my Latin and Greek are very bad, so many of these names may not make as much sense as they're supposed to...)

Family Notioatheidae: Posts of this family deal with specific words and concepts as they apply within humanism and atheism.

Quorsum saepis--The genus Quorsum deals with the question of purpose, as it applies to a life lived without theistic belief. From Gospel of Reason, we encounter a post, Fence Theism--Kick the Habit!, which is at least a marginal member of this genus. Truthfully, I'm uncertain whether this species truly belongs in this genus, since the main nominal subject of the post is the discussion of "fence theists", those who sympathize with religious institutions even without holding to every aspect of their dogmas, but I think it may include enough discussion of the purpose of an atheistic life to justify its collocation in this genus.
Visathei legati--Closely related to the genus Quorsum is the genus Visathei, which deals with the meaning one can find in a life without God--indeed, both genera lie within the subfamily Significationis. An example post from this genus can be found in The Executioner's Thong: a perpetual funeral, a musing on meaning apparently triggered by the writer's reading of Hebrew chants.

Family Atheiscriptidae: While all posts of the order Humanistes, of course, deal with humanism and to some degree with atheism, those of the family Atheiscriptidae deal most directly with what it means to be an atheist, and just what atheism is.

Nullussuperae diacoptes--Atheism is not, of course, a belief system, per se, but rather an absence of certain beliefs, as posts of the genus Nullussuperae take pains to explain. In particular, The Control Group, from A Load of Bright, points out that the absence of some factor often plays an important role in analyzing the factor in question.
Polyathea reapse--Since atheism isn't a single belief system, there's a lot of diversity among atheists and humanists; posts of the genus Polyathea discuss that diversity. The example currently under examination, On True Atheists, from BLIGBI, laments the fact that this diversity is sometimes denied even from within, by some who consider themselves, on fallacious grounds, to be the only "true" atheists.
Atheamplexus calosorisma--Posts of this genus are distinguished from those of other genera in the family Atheiscriptidae not so much by their content as by who they're addressed to: namely, these posts are directed to those new to atheism, to welcome them and to explain just what it's all about. Letter to a New Atheist, from Atheist Revolution, is an excellent example.

Family Vitaesensidae: This family of blog posts comprises humanist takes on life and existence.

Autoexetases holistes--Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living; posts of the genus Autoexetases examine this proposition. The post we find here, The Examined Life from Philosophy, et cetera, is a dubious member of the order Humanistes, in that it never refers explicitly to humanism or any associated philosophy, but its subject matter is sufficiently applicable to humanism to justify its inclusion here.
Logotheo studii--Humanists often tend to embrace learning and knowledge--and in particular, may have an intellectual interest in religion even though they don't believe in it. This is what posts of the genus Logotheo are about, and our present example, Learn Something New Every Day from Spanish Inquisitor, also expounds on the importance of learning in general.
Omninexus circuli--The world--on a human level--is more interconnected now than ever before, a condition that poses both opportunities and challenges, as posts of the genus Omninexus discuss. Our current example, Internetionalism and the Circle of Humanity from Humantide, brings up the promotion of the circle as a symbol for humanism, and what else this implies.
Eumeioses chorou--In some sense, all objects and phenomena can be seen as a fantastically complex combination of individually much simpler particles and interactions. Posts of the genus Eumeioses note and celebrate this fact, and expound on the beauty of it, as exemplified in the post Dancing Molecules: An Atheist Moment of Transcendence in Greta Christina's Blog.

Family Prosopicidae: Most blog posts are, by their very nature, largely personal in content, but those of the family Prosopicidae especially so; these posts deal most intimately with the author's personal experiences and beliefs, as related to humanism.

Apostasia evangelica--Many humanist bloggers choose to tell the stories of how they came to leave religion; the posts containing such stories pertain to the genus Apostasia. In Unhaunting 1: A Brief History of An Evangelical Life, from Candid Folly, we see an example of such a post, outlining the writer's departure from evangelical Christianity.
Atheifides magnipretium--Atheists don't believe in God, but that doesn't mean they have no beliefs at all; posts of the genus Atheifides discuss just what the writers do believe in, in the absence of religion. What I Do Believe, from Sailing to Byzantium, is a particularly beautiful example.

Family Certodeidae: While this family could perhaps be considered a part of Etairiatheidae, below, insofar as it does deal with the relationship of atheism in society, family Certodeidae, which deals in particular with the interplay between atheism and religion, is perhaps distinct enough to form a separate family (though both are within the superfamily Etairiatheides).

Antitheos neoatheis--Posts of the genus Antitheos contend that reason and religion are fundamentally opposed. This example, Support New Atheism from Phil For Humanity, exhorts the reader to support a variety of atheism that emphasizes this opposition.
Patiordeus illusum--What does it really mean for atheists to be "tolerant", or is this plea really one-sided? That's the question addressed by posts of the genus Patiordeus, such as our current example, Tolerance, from Hell's Handmaiden.

Family Etairiatheidae: It's said that no man is an island, and that goes as much for humanists as for anyone else. The place of humanism in a larger society is a subject well worth discussing, and it's this topic that is the focus of posts of the family Etairiatheidae.

Arsathei iereus--Posts of the genus Arsathei deal with specific positions or occupations that atheists have made for themselves in society; the present example, A Humanist School Chaplain? from Five Public Opinions, discusses, well, a humanist school chaplain.
Athealmus pyropneuma--Atheists have a reputation in some circles as being strident and angry; posts of the genus Athealmus argue for a gentler approach. The example here, Firebreathing or Soft-speaking?, from Atheist Self, takes up this theme in the light of the Virginia Tech shootings and other tragedies, and argues that atheists should be ready to speak about other things than atheism.
Athealmus falwelli--A post of the same genus as the above, but with a slightly different emphasis, If You Can't Say Anything Nice..., from Fearless Philosophy For Free Minds, argues that, whatever damage the late Jerry Falwell may have done, atheists and humanists shouldn't callously rejoice over his death and impinge on the grieving of those who were close to him.
Etairiathei adfirmationis--Etairiathei is the type genus of the family Etairiatheidae, and discusses broadly how humanism and atheism can or should relate to society. I intentionally saved this post, Reaching Out, for last, because--while there were certainly many good posts in this symposium--I think this was the one that maybe best represented what the Humanist Symposium is supposed to be all about. Though since this post came from Daylight Atheism, where the Humanist Symposium originated in the first place, I guess that's not too surprising.

Well, that concludes this edition of the Humanist Symposium. The next issue will be up on June 10 at the Black Sun Journal; feel free to start submitting!

Ask Not, And Ye Shall Receive

2007-05-17T22:48:00.001-07:00

Okay, as I think I've mentioned, I've been going through some financial difficulties recently. Well, in searching for jobs to remedy that situation, I've been spreading out my net rather widely. Since I'm still working on my doctoral dissertation, I've been looking for part-time jobs that would allow me to still put in time on my research, but I've been looking into just about any kind of part-time job I feel I might be remotely qualified for.

In particular, I seem to have stumbled into acting.

I say "stumbled into" because, well, I ran across a call for actors for a corporate promotional video on craigslist, and I thought, what the hey, no harm in trying. And, rather to my surprise, I got a part. Getting a part in my first audition ever encouraged me enough that I figured I may as well keep at it, and so I began to look into acting a little more. And a few days later I got an audition for a part in a commercial for a major company. I didn't think the audition had gone well, but apparently it went better than I thought, because I got a callback.

By this point, I was really wanting to get this part. Not only did it pay better than the part in the corporate promotional video, but it was...well, more visible (it may even be a commercial intended to air on national TV--I didn't ask, and I'm not sure), and it would no doubt look much better on my résumé if I decide to keep acting (and at this point, I'm pretty sure I will; based on the reactions I've gotten, I actually seem to be pretty good at it). I wasn't sure what my chances were--sure, I got a callback, but so did at least half a dozen others, and I had no prior professional acting experience (the corporate promotional video not having been shot yet at that point)--but I really wanted this part.

Now. As those who've been reading this blog know, I was raised in the Mormon church. I don't believe in it anymore, of course, but I was a faithful Mormon for more than thirty years (if you count my early childhood when I didn't really understand anything about it). And...even though I don't believe in it anymore, or rather I've accepted that I never really had any reason to believe in it in the first place, and even though on at least one level I've come to terms with that, thirty-odd years of indoctrination leaves marks that don't come off easily. At some levels, there's still a lot of deprogramming to be done.

One of the things that I was raised to believe, of course, is that if you really want something, you should pray to God for help. And somewhere in the back of my mind, in the areas that haven't fully overcome the religious brainwashing yet, part of me wanted to pray that I'd get this part.

With only a little dramatic license, I can cast my thought processes in terms of an argument with myself:

You really want this part. You ought to pray about it.

I'm not going to pray about it. I don't believe in prayer anymore.

Still, you feel like you ought to be doing something about it, right? Go ahead. Pray about it.

That wouldn't be doing anything effective. I'm not going to pray about it. I don't believe in God.

Okay, sure, you don't believe in God, but...why not pray about it, just in case? Sure, you may not believe it'll help, but it can't hurt, right?

I'm not going to pray about it "just in case". I don't believe in God. I have no reason to believe prayer can accomplish anything.

But even if God doesn't exist, prayer isn't going to hurt anything.

It's the principle of the thing. I have to try to get over old habits like that, and I don't need to feel like I'm doing something useful when I'm not. I'm not going to pray about it.

So, despite a bit of an inner struggle with my old self, I stuck to my guns and didn't pray about it.

I got the part.

I'm not saying this proves anything, of course. But I thought it might be worth mentioning.

Mid-May Carnivalia

2007-05-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm a day late mentioning this (mostly because I wasn't anywhere yesterday where I had internet access), but Carnival of the Godless #66 went up yesterday at The Atheist Experience.

Also, I'm even later in mentioning that the 60th Skeptics' Circle is up at Infophilia. I'd intended to submit a post to it myself, but unfortunately I forgot how early the submission deadline was, so...I didn't. But I'll mention it anyway, because there's plenty there that's worth reading. Even if Infophile did employ a format that I'd been thinking of using myself for the second Humanist Symposium when I host it next week (though he did it in a much more elaborate fashion than I had been planning to do). Oh well.

Speaking of my hosting the second Humanist Symposium next week, I'm hosting the second Humanist Symposium next week. (How's that for redundancy?) There've been some submissions already, but there's plenty of room for more, so by all means feel free to submit a post! (And although Infophile beat me to the choose-your-own-adventure format I was considering, I've got another idea, so all remains well...)

Basis For Belief, Part Five: Angels and Aliens

2007-05-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

(I'd hoped to have this post up Wednesday, but between job interviews and sundry other inconveniences, it's been a busy week. Well, anyway, here it is:)

Yeah, the Basis For Belief series was only planned to comprise four posts, but then I read a book that went with the material so well I figured I can include it as an honorary part of the series. The book in question was the May selection for the Skeptics' Book Club, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, by Susan Clancy. (The book was suggested, incidentally, by Ross of The Skeptic Review; the book club's response was generally positive, though one woman did object to Clancy's mentioning being "dressed in purple" as characteristic of people who believe in weird phenomena. You can probably guess what color she habitually wore.) Clancy writes of her experience interviewing people who claim to have been kidnapped by aliens, and of her conclusions about them: that these people aren't crazy; most of them are otherwise ordinary, well-adjusted people who happen to have one particular weird belief.

But the reason I think this book fits in so well with the "Basis For Belief" series is because it describes many of the same processes I was discussing in a religious context, only concerning a different (but equally irrational) belief system. I hadn't read the book yet when I wrote those posts, but the parallels are striking--especially with the third post, about the Holy Ghost. Clancy doesn't explicitly point out the similarities until the very end of the book, but they're obvious long before she mentions them. For instance, those who believe they were abducted by aliens simply know it's true, and refuse to be persuaded by rational evidence; there's no apparent meaningful difference between their insistence on their beliefs and what a Christian calls "faith". They want to believe in aliens, many of them, because it gives their life a purpose; even those who say the abduction was a traumatic experience also say they wouldn't want to avoid having it, if they had to do it all over again. Believing that aliens are abducting humans and performing tests on them lets them believe that there's something greater than mankind in the universe, and that humans--and the abductees in particular--are serving an important purpose. Sound familiar?

The abductees, at least the most "faithful" of them, are not unaware of the logical explanations. Sleep paralysis. False memories. But they discard them. Why? Because they just know what happened, through means they can't explain. "All I can say is that it happened to me; it didn't happen to you. I felt it." "I don't care that it doesn't make sense to you, or that scientists say it can't happen...I was changed, and I know it's true." "I knew it--I just knew it had happened. I felt it in my bones." Again, is all this different in any meaningful way from the way a Mormon who's supposedly received a testimony from the Holy Ghost knows the church is true? Or how any other Christian knows that Christ is Lord, or any theist knows that God exists?

I was also particularly struck by the process by which these "abductees" received their false memories. Nobody, says Clancy, gets up one morning and suddenly decides he was abducted by aliens. He starts thinking maybe he was abducted, and it builds up over time into a certainty. Usually (though not always) this happens with the aid of a hypnotist or therapist who asks leading questions and/or asks the subject to imagine what could have happened. What we imagine enough can often come to seem real to us (and she cites a number of studies that have established this), and even if at first the subjects weren't sure they were abducted, the more they start to mull it over and imagine possible scenarios, the more sure they become.

This has a remarkable likeness to the process that missionaries are taught to use for conversion, especially the step of "identifying the Holy Ghost". They're told to ask whether the investigator felt anything as he was reading the Book of Mormon, and then tell him (pretty much regardless of what he answers, outside of responses like "nothing" or "a toothache") that he just felt the testimony of the Holy Ghost. The missionary explains further, and invites the investigator to remain open to receiving the Holy Ghost's testimony in the future.

Seems to me like pretty much the same process. Therapist: "How did you feel that morning? Well, it's possible you were abducted by aliens. Let's think of what could have happened, and see how you feel about it." Missionary: "How did you feel as we were reading these scriptures? You were feeling the testimony of the Holy Ghost! Let's read some more, and see if you keep feeling it." In both cases, they're identifying a feeling with a particular phenomenon, which tends to make the subject imagine that feeling as being more intense and significant than it had been, and to associate it with that phenomenon in the future. No wonder converts can get such strong testimonies of the church's truth--in exactly the same way that these "abductees" get such strong convictions of their abductions!

Clancy, of course, doesn't believe in alien abductions; she does a thorough job of tracing the history of aliens in popular culture and the roots of the belief. If anything, I think she's rather too pessimistic in her estimates that intelligent life could have evolved elsewhere--but even if it did, I agree that the chances that aliens, who happen to look remarkably humanoid (and even more remarkably like a fictional alien that had just appeared on a TV show a couple of weeks before the first abduction report!), have been regularly coming to Earth and extracting tissue samples from humans for no discernible purpose for the last several decades. I concur with Clancy that, however fervently these people believe they've been abducted, it's quite safe to say they haven't.

But if religious beliefs have the same kinds of basis as alien abduction beliefs--and they do; as I said, the resemblances are quite striking--then why should they be given any greater credence?

"Ten years from now," Clancy writes in an early chapter, "believing in aliens and in their presence among us will perhaps become as common as believing in God."

Maybe--but I'd like to hope that conversely, if not in ten years then perhaps in twenty, or fifty, disbelieving in God will come to be as normal and as fully accepted as disbelieving in alien abductions.

Upcoming Cinema

2007-05-06T04:37:00.000-07:00

Well, huh; I just found out that there's a movie coming out in June in which Terence Stamp plays a great-great-I'm-not-actually-sure-offhand-exactly-how-many-greats-go-here-uncle of mine.

Granted, there are indications in the trailers on the movie webpage that the portrayal of said great-whatever-uncle may not be entirely positive. But that's okay. He may be a relative, but from what I've read about him it seems that the great-etc.-uncle in question was kind of a jerk.

Even if he did get a university named after him.

Basis For Belief

2007-05-06T03:14:00.000-07:00

This is just a wrap-up post collecting the four parts of my "Basis For Belief" series so if I feel like referring to these posts collectively later I can just refer back here instead of linking to the posts individually. So, here they are:

Incidentally, as it turns out, this month's book selection for the Skeptics' Book Club--which I hadn't started reading yet at the time I made the above posts--relates very well to the theme of this series, and reinforces much of what I said here. So, even though this was originally intended as a four-part series, I think I'll add to the list:

Basis For Belief, Part Five: Angels and Aliens

Basis For Belief, Part Four: Avoiding the Evidence

2007-05-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

This is Part Four of a four-part series of posts. If you haven't already, you may want to read Parts One, Two, and Three first to get the full context.

So, in the first three parts, I've pretty much covered the main point I wanted to explore, namely that it wasn't a conviction that there was evidence that disproved LDS doctrine that made me leave the church, but rather the realization that there was no good reason to believe in it--or in any other religious doctrine. But there's one more thing I wanted to touch on, related to the subject of the previous post in the series. I said in that post that the Holy Ghost, which according to LDS doctrine is what lets people know the gospel is true, is an invention of man--but as I said at the end of the post, it's an invention with at least two purposes. One of those is to give people a justification for believing in the church doctrine. But the other is to keep people away from contrary evidence.

Way back at the beginning of the first post of this series, I mentioned that the first commenter I quoted there was misstating LDS doctrine--that while church doctrine did state that the Holy Ghost testified of the truth, it also maintained that the Holy Ghost could be driven away by things uncongenial to it. What kinds of things? Well, sin, of course. But not just active sin. Anything that went against the principles of the church could drive the Holy Ghost away. For instance, R-Rated movies and other inappropriate entertainment. Impure thoughts. And--most importantly for the present point--"anti-Mormon propaganda". Which is to say, anything that reflected negatively on the church.

In the last few months, I've started looking around some sites that, while I considered myself an active member, I wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole. Sites that the church would consider "anti-Mormon", sites like ex-mormon.org and lds-mormon.com and Rethinking Mormonism and The Salamander Society. And I learned a lot about the church that I hadn't known. I had had no idea just to what extent the church had managed to whitewash its history. (And even to cover up some present-day matters that might seem unfavorable--I mentioned in a previous post (the same one I linked to in the first post in this series) the matter of the DNA testing that had established that, contrary to LDS doctrine about the origins of the Lamanites, there was no genetic link between Native American populations and Israelites, but this was something I hadn't heard about before my deconversion. Not that the apologists haven't been making the usual contrived attempts to reconcile the doctrines with this, naturally.)

Oh, there are some things, of course, that are so well known that the church can't possibly try to keep them from its members' ears. Most Mormons are fully aware, for example, that church leaders in the nineteenth century practiced polygamy. But they hear a sanitized, exculpative account of the story: that, well, the reason for it was that so many men died that there were lots of unmarried and widowed women left around who had to be taken care of, and that polygamy was practiced simply as a way to do that, and to make sure all those poor abandoned women had homes and providers.

But most Mormons don't know that some of Joseph Smith's "plural wives" were teenagers--who didn't want to marry him, and agreed to do so only because he told them it was necessary for the salvation of their families! (And that he had already been practicing polygamy in secret before he made it a revelation to the church.) Or that some of the wives Joseph Smith married were already married--and remained married to their other husbands as well, making the early LDS plural marriages both polygynous and polyandrous (and completely giving the lie to that justification about polygamy being instituted to care for poor abandoned women). Or that previous General Authorities of the church expounded on the "evils of monogamy" in much the same language that they use today to attack homosexuality!

I didn't know any of these things before, and I'd been a faithful member all my life, knew the scriptures and knew the doctrines. And all these details about polygamy are just one example of dark things about the church that most members are completely unaware of; there's plenty more where that came from. But these kinds of historical details never make their ways into church lessons; the church does a very good job of covering them up. To find out facts like these, you have to specifically seek them out--and that means delving into the kinds of materials that (gasp!) drive away the Holy Ghost.

(One might argue that the sites I'm getting this information from are biased against the church, and may not be reliable sources. There's something to that--but, on examination, not all that much. All of these facts are well documented, including in books (such as the History of the Church and the Journal of Discourses) that used to be officially condoned by LDS church authorities, apparently until it came to their attention how inflammatory some of their contents are. (Today, the church suppresses these books, not so much in that it explicitly tells people not to read them (that would, perhaps, raise too many suspicions), but in that they're mentioned as little as possible and the church doesn't make them readily available.) The documentation of most of these speeches and events seems so incontrovertible that the best Mormon apologists can muster against them are rabid ad hominems, feeble and obviously nonsensical complaints that they're being taken out of context, and the inevitable empty exhortations to appeal to the Holy Ghost to know the truth of all things. So, while it's true that many of these sites may be colored by an "anti-Mormon" slant and not wholly objective, it's also true that all the evidence seems to fall much more heavily on their side than on that of the official LDS accounts.)

I've run across in my readings many stories of ex-Mormons who left the church because they looked deeper into its history in an attempt to find answers to anti-Mormon allegations--and instead found, to their dismay, that those allegations were correct. That's not my story; I just stuck to the line and ignored all the anti-Mormon material like I was supposed to, secure (or so I thought) in the knowledge that the Spirit had testified to me of the truth. It was only when I finally admitted to myself that I had no real basis for believing that the Spirit had actually testified to anything, or existed at all, that I left. Still, that's not to say that I was completely unaware of some of the problems. I once found a book in my mother's house describing the problems with the Book of Abraham, a scripture supposedly translated by Joseph Smith from an Egyptian papyrus he had purchased--she had apparently mistakenly bought the book without realizing its "anti-Mormon" nature. I didn't read it all the way through--glancing through it was enough for me to realize this was something I shouldn't be reading--but even that brief glance was enough for me to see that there were some serious problems with Joseph Smith's "translation" of the papyrus. This bothered me a great deal, but not enough for me to seriously doubt the church, or at least not to come to terms with my doubt.

All of this may seem to contradict what I said in the first post of the series--that it isn't really having evidence against the church that matters; it's realizing that you don't have any good reason to believe, because there's always a way to rationalize away the evidence. I stand by that...but it's a matter of degree. The more evidence you have, and the harder you have to contort things to rationalize it all away, well, the firmer you have to be in your convictions of your reasons to believe before they stretch too far and you see them for the false construct they are. Had I known then what I know now about the church's history and practices, I'm sure I would have come to terms with my disbelief and left the church a lot sooner--the proximate reason for my leaving the church would still have been the lack of reasons for believing in it, not the evidence against it, but that evidence would have made me more readily see that lack.

There was an interesting thread on exmormon.org entitled "People Like Us Were Never Expected To Leave Mormonism", expounding on the observation that it seems to be the really good and faithful Mormons who end up leaving the church, while the "social Mormons" and "slackers" stay for life. I don't know to just what extent that's the case; I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, and of course all the evidence put forth is anecdotal. Still, I think it makes sense that there may be something to it. Those who really care about the truth are going to be devoted to the church and do everything they can to follow its precepts as long as they believe it's true. But if they ever realize it isn't--and, since they do care about the truth, and are therefore seeking after more of it, sooner or later they are likely to realize it isn't--then they'll accept that, though probably not without some difficulty, and they won't remain in a church they know not to be true. On the other hand, those who don't care that much about the truth, who are content to accept the word of others rather than examine things for themselves, or who simply don't really care whether the church is true or not and just stay in it because it makes them feel good or because they like the social aspect...they're not likely to leave, because they're unlikely to examine things enough to realize the church isn't true, and because even if they do it doesn't matter to them.

In an earlier post, I'd expressed my surprise that someone could realize that Mormonism wasn't true--and then turn around and join another Christian church. Didn't they realize that if the testimony of the Holy Ghost that was supposed to form the basis for their belief wasn't real, if they hadn't really received any personal revelations from God, then they had no reason to believe in any other churches either? I've come to realize since then that, despite the church's nominal emphasis on the witness of the Holy Ghost, not everyone takes it as seriously as I did. I clung to it because I needed to know there was some basis for my belief--I knew the church couldn't be proven on rational grounds, so I accepted that I knew it was true because of the Holy Ghost's witness. I did eventually come to terms with the fact that I'd received no such witness, that I'd been lying to myself, but the point is that I couldn't go on in the church without convincing myself I have some reason to believe. I've since realized that--as alien as the mindset involved is to my own--it seems that many people are willing to go ahead and commit their belief to something without even the pretext of a real reason. To people like that, if they become disenchanted with Mormonism, it makes perfect sense to just go and join up with some other Christian church. To me, no; I have no reason to believe in it.

Of course, it's not an all-or-nothing affair, with some people committed to the truth and some people completely uncaring about it; I've oversimplified a bit, and there's probably more of a continuum. Which is why it would be so dangerous to the church if all its dark secrets were known to every member--even most of the more casual members would find it hard to stomach staying in an organization with so much clear malfeasance and mendacity in its past. The way it stands, though, most members are never likely to find out about those matters, and the church remains, for the moment at least, safe.

So I think that's definitely at least part of the reason the church teaches its members to avoid materials like this that drive away the Spirit--because it realizes that if its members knew about these things, they'd probably start to doubt the church (or doubt it more, if they already had some doubt), and be likely to eventually leave it. Of course, the church would like its members to believe that that doubt comes from the devil, but it's not doubt that's evil. It's unfounded and unexamined certainty that really leads to evil actions, because if one is unwilling to examine one's convictions, one can justify anything at all.

There's a parable often repeated in the church--there's even a primary song based on it. ("Primary" is the church meeting for young children--though actually some Googling shows that this song isn't unique to the LDS church, but is taught to children in other Christian denominations as well. I don't know if the parable is given quite as much emphasis in other Christian denominations as it is in the LDS church, though the omnipresence of the song suggests it is.) It's from Matthew 7:24-27:

24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:

25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

The point of the parable, as the church uses it, is that it's important to keep your belief in the church firmly rooted, by obeying the commandments and praying and maintaining your faith. Otherwise, when adversity comes along, you're going to fall away. But ironically, in reality, its the church that's really analogous to the house upon the sand. Belief in the church has no solid foundation, and when it's subjected to any real scrutiny--it falls. And great is the fall of it. Which is why the church wants to discourage people from carrying out that scrutiny. If they can't build their house on the rock, they'll do their best to keep away the rain. Ultimately, though, however much the church leaders may try to shield it from the metaphorical elements, trying to live in a house with such an unstable foundation just isn't safe.

It's important to really examine the basis for your beliefs--and if you find that they have no firm basis, to be willing to abandon them. Ultimately, there's no firm basis for belief in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--or in any other church that I'm aware of. It doesn't really matter if there's evidence against the church's teachings--as it happens, there is, and plenty of it, but that's not the most important point. The really crucial point is that there's no evidence of any kind for those teachings. And that includes faith, and the Holy Ghost, and all the other empty verbiage that's often trotted forth. They don't stand up under close examination; they're all puffery and pablum and circular arguments. It's not that I've found definitive, unanswerable reasons for believing that the church isn't true. It's that I've realized there's no reason at all for believing it--or any other church--is true.

And that's why I'm an atheist.

Do You Know What Day It Is?

2007-05-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, the fourth and final part of the "Basis For Belief" series of posts should be going up tomorrow, but in the meantime I'd just like to wish everyone reading this a Happy National Day of Reason!

Not that my wishing is going to have any direct effect, of course...

Basis For Belief, Part Three: Whence the Witness

2007-05-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

This is part three in a four-part series of posts. If you haven't already, you may want to read Part One and Part Two to get the full context.

In the last part of this series, I wrote about the fact that the claim that a supplicant could get an answer through prayer was completely non-falsifiable. But the fact that something can't be falsified doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true, and doesn't necessarily mean it can't be verified. Take, for instance, the claim that there is, somewhere in the universe, an emerald three feet in diameter. Since we can't search the entire universe for such an emerald, this is an unfalsifiable claim. But if someone digs into the Earth and finds an emerald three feet in diameter, the claim is verified immediately.

So it seems it could still be argued that, even if the assertion that you can find out the truth of something through prayer can't be falsified, it could still be true. And if it is, well, maybe it would still be worth trying. Wouldn't you want to know if God lived, and if the gospel is true? So mightn't it be worth your time to pray and find out? And then to keep praying if you don't get an immediate answer, because, hey, this is important enough to keep on about?

One problem with this argument is that, well, there's the matter of choosing which gospel to pray about. Mormon missionaries would ask you to read the Book of Mormon and pray and ask God if it's true. Well, in that case, should you do the same about the Koran? The Bhagavad Gita? Emanuel Swedenborg's Arcana Caelestia? Where do you stop? Surely you can't find the time to read and continually pray about every religious text in the world in the hopes that you'll get an answer about one of them--and even if you had the time, is it even possible to simultaneously be sincerely open to the possibility that each of these is true? So why choose the Book of Mormon, or any other religious text, in particular? If the principle is valid--if you can pray about something and get an answer from God as to its veracity--then how do you choose what to pray about? This isn't a problem only for Mormons, of course; there's no more reason to single out the Bible to pray about, for instance, than there is the Book of Mormon.

But that's not the biggest of the problems with the argument above. No, the bigger one is the question of how you know when you've gotten an answer.

When Mormon missionaries (and again, though I'm focusing on Mormons here, really the same basic principles apply to any claim that you can pray for answers from God, regardless of the religion involved) say that if you pray about the Book of Mormon, you'll get a witness that it's true, they don't mean that God is likely to come down in the flesh and personally assure you (they may believe that just that happened to Joseph Smith, but they don't expect it to be a common occurrence). They mean that you'll get the witness of the Holy Ghost. And how exactly does the Holy Ghost bear witness? Well, one common phrase used to describe the witness of the Holy Ghost is a "burning in the bosom".

But--the vagueness of that phrase aside--missionaries and church teachers will be quick to clarify that not everyone feels a literal burning in the bosom. Some people hear a voice testifying of the truth. Some people just get a conviction of it. Sometimes you just get a feeling of peace. In fact, it seems, there are so many different ways the Holy Ghost can bear witness that pretty much anything you feel can be seized on and claimed to be the witness of the Holy Ghost.

But, again, that's not the biggest problem with the whole claim. The biggest problem is the question of how you know that what you felt is the Holy Ghost, and not just some product of your own imagination. The human imagination is a truly remarkable capacity, and is capable of some surprising feats of delusion. People are very good at convincing themselves that they've sensed what they want to have sensed--this is true even with visual witnessing of events, let alone experiencing something as vague as a "feeling". So suppose you do feel a "burning in the bosom". Is that because the Holy Ghost is really testifying to you, or is it because you wanted to believe it would, and the burning sensation is supplied by your own imagination? (Or--if you'll permit me a moment of parenthetical flippancy--is it heartburn?)

Mormons might answer (as I probably would have answered myself, before my deconversion) that you just know, that it's a sensation qualitatively different from any other, or that your soul will recognize it deep down. Which, of course, is no answer at all; again, given the human brain's capacity for self-deception, it would be very easy for a person to convince himself he was feeling a sensation unlike any other, or that he seemed to recognize it at some deep level. There still has to be a way to know for sure that it's not just your imagination. And because the missionaries, or the bishop, or the prophet, or your parents, told you it was the Holy Ghost, isn't a good enough reason. They could be wrong; they could have deluded themselves the same as you're doing. (Or, of course, the more cynical might suggest that they might know perfectly well it's no such thing, but are intentionally deceiving you because it suits their own purposes. I'm inclined to think, however, that the majority of church leaders (though probably not all) are earnest, but misguided.)

But what about faith? That's one of the words most commonly bandied about in Christian writings (LDS included), and I haven't mentioned it at all yet. Can't you just have faith that the answer one is getting is from the Holy Ghost? Sure you can. But why should you?

First of all, what is faith? The most common definition for faith in LDS teachings comes from the Book of Mormon, specifically Alma 32: 21--that faith is a belief in "things which are not seen, which are true"^*. (In fact, the actual wording of the scripture is that to have faith is to "hope for things which are not seen, which are true", though I've usually heard it misquoted as "belief". Still, either way, the same problems remain.) But that doesn't address the question at all of how you know what you're having faith in is true in the first place! Because the missionaries/the bishop/your parents said so? Again, that's not a good basis for belief; for one thing, you can find plenty of people who'll be just as fervent about other beliefs that are completely contradictory. Because of the witness of the Holy Ghost? But that just brings us full circle back to the question we were asking in the first place, and doesn't answer anything! Or do we believe in them just because--as the original wording in the Book of Mormon says--we have hope? Well, sure, it would be nice in some ways if at least some aspects of Mormon doctrine were true--heck, I'd like to have the chance to eventually become a god and design my own worlds--but that doesn't make it so. It would be nice if I had a million dollars, but ("The Secret" notwithstanding) wishing doesn't make it so. Hope and belief are two very different things, and the one is no valid basis for the other.

Naturally, other Christian denominations use different definitions of the word "faith", but I have yet to hear one that gives any answer to the question of how you know that the things you "have faith" in are true, and that doesn't reduce ultimately to one of the three options above: because your parents/a prophet/the Pope/whoever said so, because of the witness of God or of some other supernatural source (without addressing how you know said witness really comes from God and not from your own subconscious), because you "just know" (which isn't appreciably different in practice from the claim of a supernatural witness), or just because you think it would be nice if they were true. None of these gives any reason for concluding that faith is any sort of valid basis for belief--or any reason for regarding "faith" as any more reliable than (or even functionally any different from) any worldly kind of conviction.

(There are, of course, also those who claim to have proof of religious doctrines--who hold up accounts of miracles as evidence of God's power, for instance. But addressing that subject in depth is beyond the scope of this particular post; suffice to say that such claims never stand up under close examination, if in fact they can be examined at all (which merely anecdotal claims, for instance, cannot).)

So we're left with no way of being sure that a supposed witness from the Holy Ghost--or from God, or from any other supernatural source--is really that, and not just something you've convinced yourself you were feeling because you wanted to believe. If God exists, he's not very good at sending messages to his children. But--in light of the principle of the burden of proof, as discussed in the first post in this series--the more reasonable conclusion is that He does not...and that the Holy Ghost is not a witness of the truth, but merely a human invention.

It is an invention, however, with more than one purpose...and that will be the subject of the last post in this series.

A Two-Carnival Day!

2007-04-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

The first Humanist Symposium is up at Daylight Atheism! Go see!

Also, Carnival of the Godless #65 is up at Light Remembered, and the post I submitted made it in--and so, I note rather to my bemusement, did the post I submitted for the last COTG. I was a little late with my submission last time, so I'm not surprised the post didn't make it into the carnival then, but I really wasn't expecting to see it show up in this issue! Ah, well.

Anyway, open thread, but here's an optional topic for discussion, in case you need one: What would be the impact on the national economy if Pepto-Bismol were green?

Basis For Belief, Part Two: The Proof of Prayer

2007-04-29T15:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'd intended to have this post up much earlier, but my sister's wedding reception was yesterday, and I'd been busy helping the family prepare for it, and then get everything taken down afterward. It was...a lot of work.

Anyway, I ended my last post (and to get the full context for this post, you should probably read that one first, if you haven't already) with the mention that many theists do claim to have a reason for believing in God besides just the lack of ironclad, completely undeniable reasons for not believing--and that the first commenter I had quoted had alluded to that reason at the end of this comment. So let's start by revisiting that last paragraph of his comment:

If peace of mind in this matter really is important to you then an honest investigation and perhaps a reevaluation of some other basic beliefs might be [in] order. Moroni 10:4-5 would be a great place to start from. It's not called a Promise for nothing. Of course the positive aspect is usually spoken to in reagrds [sic] to this scripture, but the opposite is equally true. If you come away from a genuine application of the principles mentioned in that scripture and still don't believe then it's all good. Peace of mind will be yours.

The mention of "Moroni 10:4-5" isn't likely to mean anything to anyone not familiar with the LDS church, but among Mormons that's one of the best known and most quoted scriptures of all. As the commenter refers to, these verses from the Book of Mormon (along with the preceding verse 3, which is usually included with them) are often known in the church as "Moroni's Promise", and they read as follows:

3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.

4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

These verses are particularly often quoted by missionaries, who use them to challenge their investigators to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it and ask God if it's true. This is what the commenter is suggesting that I do as well--the fact that, having been raised in the church, I've already done it many times having apparently not occurred to him.

Yet another comment, to my post "Temple Trip", put it a bit more succinctly:

I dont think that u should be going to the temple if you are not worthy. Yes the church is true and u obviously have not prayed and asked about it.

Actually, yeah, I have; been there, done that, thanks. (I find it amusing, incidentally, that this commenter chooses to write of what he apparently considers sacred truth in what seems like chatspeak. It makes me imagine a chatspeak Bible: "Deuteronomy 7:2: And when the Lord ur God will deliver them b4 u, u will smite them, and utterly pwn them; u will make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them. LOL!" Coincidentally, a few days later I discovered that something similar does, in fact, already exist...)

Of course, while both those comments apparently came from Mormons, I know that the concept of praying to find out the truth isn't unique to Mormonism, though the LDS church does put especial emphasis on it. Want to know the church is true? Pray about it. Want to know that the Book of Mormon is true? Pray about it. Want to know Joseph Smith was a prophet? Pray about it.

This is often taken beyond such weighty matters as the truth of the church as a whole, though, to more personal affairs. Often when I've disagreed with my mother about something, she's told me to pray about it. At one point--and this was back when I still considered myself a faithful Mormon--I finally told her that the way she was saying this, she was being extremely arrogant; she was basically saying that she was sure God would agree with her. She hadn't seen it that way before, but when I told her that she said she could see my point. (Which hasn't stopped her from still saying that occasionally, though she does it less frequently now. At least that'll be one positive side effect when I finally come clean about my atheism--she won't be telling me to pray about things anymore. Well, she probably will at least for some time try telling me, as these commenters did, to pray about the truth of the church.)

But arrogance isn't the only problem with the exhortation to prayer--and really, in a way, the apparent arrogance is understandable. I mean, the people who are telling you to pray about it presumably have already done so themselves and think they've gotten an answer, so they think God's told them they're right. But there's a bigger problem with trying to say that if you don't believe in the church, you haven't prayed about it enough. To highlight the problem, let's consider a hypothetical situation.

Readers are almost certainly familiar with James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge. Conclusively demonstrate a paranormal ability under appropriate controlled conditions, and you win one million dollars. (The local Independent Investigations Group has a similar challenge with a more modest $50,000 prize but a slightly lower bar for entry, but for the purposes of this hypothetical situation I'll use Randi's challenge because it's better known.) Now, the rules for Randi's challenge do explicitly say religious claims aren't acceptable, but let's suppose for the purposes of this hypothetical situation that that rule wasn't in place. So, suppose a missionary approached Randi and told him that if he read the Book of Mormon and sincerely prayed about it, he would know for sure it was true and that angels had appeared to Joseph Smith.

Would Randi accept this challenge? Well, no, of course not. Why not? Because of the lack of observable results? Ah, the missionaries might say, but if the Holy Ghost bore witness to him, Randi himself would know beyond a doubt, even if nothing physically changed. Other observers would be welcome to read the Book of Mormon and pray, too, and they could receive similar witnesses. Let's assume for purposes of the argument (improbable as it is) that Randi agreed on this as acceptable evidence. So, would he consider this a valid challenge?

If you're not familiar with the rules for Randi's challenge, look them over. Notice any guidelines (besides the one about religious claims, which we're ignoring for now) that this proposed challenge wouldn't meet?

How about number 15, the one that's in all caps: "EVERY APPLICANT MUST AGREE UPON WHAT WILL CONSTITUTE A CONCLUSION THAT, ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRELIMINARY OR THE FORMAL TEST, HE OR SHE DID OR DID NOT DEMONSTRATE THE CLAIMED ABILITY OR POWER."

See, that's the problem. Saying that you can know the church is true by praying about it is meaningless as evidence, because there's no way to disprove it. Suppose Randi, in a fit of temporary insanity, accepts the missionaries' challenge despite its incompliance with his guidelines. He reads the Book of Mormon, cover to cover. He prays about it, three times a day for a week. And at the end of that week, he comes to the missionaries and says that no, he didn't receive any witness from the Holy Ghost that it was true. Would the missionaries accept that as evidence that the Book of Mormon wasn't true? Not likely. They'd point out that the scriptures specifically said you had to pray with a sincere heart; is Randi sure he was honestly open to the possibility of its truth? Or maybe they'd say he just hadn't prayed enough; sometimes it takes time for an answer to come. The guidelines are too vague; there are too many outs.

Now, it's true that the first commenter I quoted does at least pay some lip service to the possibility of disproof. "Of course the positive aspect is usually spoken to in reagrds [sic] to this scripture," he says, "but the opposite is equally true. If you come away from a genuine application of the principles mentioned in that scripture and still don't believe then it's all good." But does he really mean what he's saying here? If I met him on the street (again, we're speaking hypothetically here, since he commented anonymously and I don't have any idea who he is), and told him I had in fact read the Book of Mormon and prayed about it, and that I still disbelieved, would he really accept that, and decide the church must not be true after all? More likely he'd just say that, well, maybe I hadn't genuinely applied the principles. Maybe I hadn't really been open to the Spirit; maybe I hadn't been praying with a sincere heart. Or, again, maybe he'd just tell me to keep praying. It's all well and good to say that you can pray about something and know it to be true, but there are never any limits set. There's never any way to falsify it. There's seldom a time limit set, so if you've prayed for three weeks and haven't received an answer, they can always say to keep praying.

Similar arguments, incidentally, are often applied to matters other than prayer. In 1996, the president of the church, Gordon B. Hinckley, was interviewed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. At the end of the interview, Wallace remarked that he'd thought about LDS beliefs, but had "not been able to persuade [him]self." "You haven't thought about it long enough!" Hinckley replied. He didn't, of course, but Wallace could have responded just as cogently that Hinckley hadn't thought long enough about the possibility that LDS doctrine wasn't true. Telling someone he hasn't thought about something enough, again, is no argument at all, because (while in many cases it may be true) it's not falsifiable; however much someone claims to have thought about it, you can always just tell him to keep thinking about it. And, of course, this argument isn't just used in religious matters; in discussions on other contexts, too, sometimes a disputant dismisses an argument solely on the meaningless grounds that his opponent just hasn't thought about it long enough. It doesn't work any better on other matters than it does on religion.

But telling someone he hasn't prayed about something enough is even worse, because there are even more outs. Not only is there no time limit, but there's also the fact that the arguer can always just say you weren't really praying with an open mind or heart. (I suppose even in the case of thinking about things, one could make the accusation that you weren't thinking honestly, but that's not nearly as common.) It's like Moroni's Promise says--you have to ask "with a sincere heart". And since you can't prove you were really being sincere, the theist can always say you didn't get an answer because you weren't.

It's like Linus van Pelt on Halloween. If the Great Pumpkin doesn't come, it's not because it doesn't exist; it's because your pumpkin patch wasn't sincere.

So with all those outs, there's absolutely no way to falsify the claim that you can pray about something get a witness that it's true, which renders it pretty much meaningless. But really, that's only half the problem. Not only is there no way to falsify the claim--there's not really a way to verify it, either. But that'll be the topic for Part Three.

Basis for Belief, Part One: The Burden of Proof

2007-04-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

This is part one of a projected series of four posts, inspired initially by a couple of comments I received to old posts on this blog. The main purpose of these posts, of course, isn't to reply to the comments--I've already done that in the appropriate threads, and in any case I suspect that both comments in question were "drive-bys" and that neither (anonymous) commenter is ever going to return to see my response anyway. But the comments raised some issues that I think may be worth addressing.

Comment #1, in response to my post "Callings, Part 4":

Naturally, the gift of the Holy Ghost is only available to those who ask God for it and who are faithful and believing. Which means that, if that doctrine were true, then as an atheist ... I definitely shouldn't have had the Holy Ghost with me, and my lesson should have been completely uninspired. The fact that people still told me afterwards what an effective lesson I'd given... and that not one person remarked on the absence of the Spirit that was supposed to be such an important part of the process, is then perhaps rather telling.

Not really that telling actually because of two basic principles:

1) You're right that the full Gift of the Holy Ghost is only available to people who meet the criteria you listed above. However, the Light of Christ, which is a function of the Holy Ghost, is available to all - member, non-member, less active or atheist. A classic example of this is when missionaries identify the influence of the Holy Ghost when teaching investigators.

2) The Holy Ghost's prime role is to confirm truth. Put simply, it's more about the message than the messenger. As long as you are speaking truth then the Holy Ghost can confirm it. The speaker doesn't "channel" the Holy Ghost they can only help invite its presence by speaking truth. The fact that you don't feel you have the Spirit with you or even believe in what you're saying does not change whether it is true or not or whether the listener can recognise and have truth confirmed by the Holy Ghost.

This is standard and basic church doctrine. It seems to me that you are clutching at straws to justify your "deconversion" (great term by the way) which is apparently not as firmly based in logic as you might believe.

If peace of mind in this matter really is important to you then an honest investigation and perhaps a reevaluation of some other basic beliefs might be [in] order. Moroni 10:4-5 would be a great place to start from. It's not called a Promise for nothing. Of course the positive aspect is usually spoken to in reagrds [sic] to this scripture, but the opposite is equally true. If you come away from a genuine application of the principles mentioned in that scripture and still don't believe then it's all good. Peace of mind will be yours.

Yeah, because it's not like I grew up in the church and had been genuinely applying the principles mentioned in that scripture for decades, or anything like that. (Hint: The previous sentence was sarcasm. It actually is exactly like that.) And yes, I have indeed found greater peace of mind since coming to terms with that and finally rejecting the church, thanks.

I should note, incidentally, that this commenter is a little off base with his "standard and basic church doctrine". (Look, I may not believe in the church anymore, but I'd been in the church long enough I'm quite familiar with its doctrine.) It simply isn't the case, according to church teachings, that "[a]s long as you are speaking truth then the Holy Ghost can confirm it," and that "[t]he fact that you don't feel you have the Spirit with you...does not change whether...the listener can recognise and have truth confirmed by the Holy Ghost." The church puts a lot of emphasis--for missionaries in particular, but for instructors in church classes as well--on teaching by the Spirit and on avoiding things that drive the Spirit away, and is quite clear on the matter that the Spirit will not be present to testify where conditions are incompatible. (I think the church actually has a very good motive behind this emphasis on not driving away the Spirit ("good" in the sense of well-devised and effective, not in the moral sense), but that's something I'll get to in the last post of this series.)

Which, in any case, is beside the point, since this one teaching experience the commenter focuses on was certainly not a defining moment in my deconversion (it couldn't very well have been, since it happened afterward). I even included a "perhaps" in the statement the commenter bolded, so clearly I didn't think this was a particularly important argument myself. The fact that it's this argument that the commenter chose to focus on (and that he did so by misrepresenting church doctrine, though I don't know whether that was intentional or out of ignorance on his part) seems to suggest that I'm not the one who's clutching at straws here.

But there are some hints, I think, that the commenter may be assuming there were certain other factors at work in my deconversion (I guess at least I'm glad he liked that term). But before I address that, let's get to:

Comment #2, in response to my post "And Yet Another Ex-Mormon..."

I am a Universalist-Unitarian. So I am a Christian of sorts, I guess. I guess? Well that’s a strange thing to say. Either you proclaim your faith in god and accept Jesus as your lord and savior or you don’t- right? Well no- there are degrees to everything. And I guess that’s my corny way of pointing that out. Although mainstream Christianity might advocate strong lines between good and evil/ atheism and a belief in god, I believe spirituality to be a complex issue beyond any church authority's comprehension. So the point to my rant? Well, I guess I'm just disturbed at your all or nothing approach to Christianity. I just don't like thinking that a person who grows away from the Mormon religion should become an atheist. If you become disillusioned with a particular sect of Christianity, it does not mean that you are an atheist. If you read a biology book and realize a world full [of] scientists can’t be wrong, it doesn’t mean that god is dead.

I don't really see why the commenter's "I guess" should be considered a strange thing to say. The commenter's apparent assumption that I'm unaware that other denominations of Christianity exist and that they have different beliefs...okay, that's a little strange.

There are other things I want to discuss about this comment, but first, I want to touch on what seems to be a common thread between these two comments. They're coming, you'll notice, from rather different perspectives, and the commenters have rather different goals. The first commenter is trying to persuade me to remain in the LDS Church, the latter to look into other Christian denominations. But they both make similar assumptions about the reasons for my having left Mormonism.

"If you read a biology book and realize a world full [of] scientists can’t be wrong," the second commenter says, "it doesn’t mean that god is dead." The commenter is almost certainly alluding, of course, to evolution; she^* is saying (as I interpret the comment) that evolution and Christianity aren't incompatible, and that just because I couldn't reconcile evolution with Mormonism doesn't mean that I should reject other versions of Christianity that are more congenial.

(^*For some reason I tend to think of the first commenter as male and the second as female. I'm not sure why; I don't actually have any idea what their actual genders are. Still, I'll go ahead and use masculine pronouns to refer to the first and feminine for the second, if only to avoid the awkwardness of writing out "he or she" every time I refer to either of them.)

The first commenter didn't ever refer to evolution directly, but there are some things that make me suspect he was thinking of it. In particular, his statement that "a reevaluation of some other basic beliefs might be [in] order." Quite possibly he didn't write that with evolution in mind specifically, but it still seems that he assumed that I decided I didn't believe in the church because its doctrines conflicted with scientific findings--and it's his view that it's these findings, not the church doctrines, that are in error.

Now, in actuality, my deconversion had nothing whatever to do with evolution (well, at least not directly), or with other sciences either. I didn't decide that Mormonism was false because I couldn't reconcile it with evolution. As a matter of fact, I could reconcile it with evolution--as I mentioned in one of my first posts (a post, incidentally, that I'll be referring to again in the last post in this series), I did come up with an explanation of how I thought the church's creation account could be reconciled with modern paleontology, geology, and cosmology. Now, Noah's Ark was harder, and I never did come up with any way to make any sense at all out of that (and no, a local inundation doesn't do it; the church's doctrine is quite explicit about the fact that the Noachian flood was supposed to be worldwide)--but there I just more or less told myself that maybe there was an explanation that I hadn't thought of.

I guess what I was doing, although I didn't think of it in those terms, was practicing a personal kind of apologetics. I was aware of some problems with the church's doctrine, in light of modern science, but I was doing my best to find ways to get them to mesh. And there almost always are ways, if you're creative enough, and willing to be as broad with your interpretations as you can get away with. There's a prominent institution in the LDS Church (it's not officially an arm of the church, but it's unofficially strongly supported by the church leadership) called FARMS (the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) that does nothing but pump out apologetic material to try to explain, for example, why the Book of Mormon mentions horses, which aren't known to have existed in the Americas in pre-Columbian times...its responses are often elaborate and imaginative and presumably very reassuring to believers, but utterly unconvincing to anyone who doesn't already believe. Still, be that as it may, their explanations, while not necessarily very plausible, aren't entirely impossible. It's true that, for example, the lack of evidence of horses in the pre-Columbian Americas doesn't actually prove, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that the Book of Mormon is false.

And even if, after all one's efforts of imagination, one still can't think of a way to explain something, well then there are still a few options open. One can--as some of the more rabid ID proponents do--simply accuse the scientists of lying or incompetence, and assert that the scientific evidence doesn't exist, though this is obviously a rather desperate ploy. Or one can do as I did concerning the matter of Noah's Ark and just concede that one doesn't know how to reconcile matters, but retain faith that some way to reconcile them must exist. This isn't without precedent in the scientific world--after all, for years scientists knew that Maxwell's Equations and Newton's Laws contradicted each other in certain respects, but kept on using both, confident that there was a way to reconcile them, even if they didn't know what that way was--and of course the reconciliation did finally come, in the form of relativity. By the same token, one might perhaps justify believing in both modern scientific findings and in religious beliefs that seem to contradict them, confident that some reconciliation exists that is merely beyond our present understanding.

So, from that standpoint, both commenters are right--one need not necessarily discard religious belief because of apparent conflict with science.

And that's not why I discarded mine.

The problem is that it's not enough not to have an ironclad reason not to believe something. There has to be a reason to believe it. And that's what I realized was lacking. It's not that I thought science and reason had disproved Mormonism. It's that there was nothing that proved it. There might have been nothing to establish definitively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was false...but there was also nothing that gave any good reason to indicate it was true.

So, when the first commenter says that my deconversion "is apparently not as firmly based in logic as you might believe", what he overlooks is that my deconversion wasn't based on logical arguments that Mormonism wasn't true, but on the lack of any good arguments suggesting that it was. And when the second commenter says there's no reason to believe "that god is dead", she fails to supply any reason to believe that God is alive.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but it's important enough to be worth reiterating--the burden of proof is on the positive assertion. The burden of proof is on the person who says that something exists. You say that I don't have any absolute and undeniable proof that there is no God? I agree. But I don't have any proof that there is a God either--I have no real evidence of God's existence at all, in fact--and in the lack of evidence, the default position is one of disbelief. Is there, at this moment, a purple lawn gnome on top of the Empire State Building? It's a safe bet that there isn't. It's not outside the realm of possibility, but I have no reason to believe that there's any such lawn gnome there, and it's more reasonable in the lack of such evidence to suppose that there isn't than to suppose that there is.

Like I said, I'm not saying anything new here; it's been said before in many forms. Russell's Teapot. The Invisible Pink Unicorn. Carl Sagan's Dragon in the Garage. But it's an issue that some theists--the two commenters quoted above, for example--seem to be unable to grasp. It's not enough to say that you don't know for sure something isn't true. Just because you don't know for sure something isn't true doesn't mean it is. It's not enough not to have absolute ironclad unanswerable reasons for knowing something to be false. You still need some reason to believe it's true.

Of course, theists do claim to have such a reason--and the first commenter above did allude to it at the end of his comment. But that'll be the subject for the next post in this series...

The Poetry of Skepticism

2007-04-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

The 59th Skeptics' Circle is up at Pooflingers Anonymous.

As seems to be the tradition at other blogs with posts announcing carnivals, I guess this is hereby declared an open thread.

A Brand New Carnival

2007-04-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

I ran across an announcement a few days ago at King Aardvark's Kick in the Nuts of a new blog carnival, and it just occurred to me that I should probably mention it here, too; the more people who spread the news the better for the new carnival to catch on.

Originated by Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism, the new carnival is entitled The Humanist Symposium. It's another atheist/freethinker carnival, but with a bit of a tighter focus than the established Carnival of the Godless--rather than just any posts from an atheist perspective, the Humanist Symposium is intended to focus more on posts extolling the benefits and advantages of a life not based on religion and superstition. I think it's a great idea; it's easy to point out the problems with religion, but there's certainly value in taking a more positive view and showing what's good about our philosophy, rather than just what's bad about the alternative.

Anyway, the deadline for submissions for the first issue of the Humanist Symposium is this coming Saturday. I don't know how many have been sent in so far, but there's almost certainly still room for more (for my own part, I submitted my post from yesterday, "The Wonder of What We Are"). If you're interested in submitting something, or just finding out more about the Humanist Symposium, you can go here.

Pass the word on!

Find That Flaw!

2007-04-25T16:45:00.000-07:00

It's time for a rousing game of Find That Flaw! Where you can see if you can find the fatal flaw in a pseudoscientist's arguments!

Today's bit of nonsense comes courtesy of a book called Universe Alternatives: Emerging Concepts of Size, Age, Structure, and Behavior. I've had a copy this book for years, having picked it up at the "gratis table" at the USC Doheny Library, where the library leaves free for the taking books it has somehow acquired but decides not to place in its permanent collection. Almost certainly, the author had mailed a copy of this (self-published) book to the university at his own expense (and no doubt to many other universities around the nation), and the university had, quite understandably, decided it didn't want it.

(And yes, I knew the book was pseudoscience when I took it. But it was free, and I figured it might be amusing.)

The author--I won't bother mentioning his name; almost certainly no one here has heard of him--is a fairly typical pseudoscientist. He's convinced that his ideas will someday be seen as the truth, and that the only reason they haven't been accepted is because of the closed-mindedness of the scientific community. He doesn't limit himself to one specialty, but thinks he can revolutionize all of physics in one fell swoop. Alas, his understanding of the theories he wants to overturn is superficial at best; he's clearly read a few brief popular accounts, but has no real comprehension of them. (By the author's own admission, he has no relevant academic credentials, but is a "Dermatologist" (yes, he capitalizes it).) The entire book is riddled with fundamental misunderstandings so glaring that it leads one to marvel that anyone could convince himself he was qualified to speak authoritatively on subjects he clearly knows so little about. Most of the author's arguments boil down to little more than the assertion that because he doesn't understand something, therefore there must be nothing there to understand, and the scientists are just playing "a carnival con game".

While he takes potshots at everything from quantum mechanics to astronomy, though, his particular bête noire, the concept he spends the most energy attacking, is relativity. To try to debunk relativity, he marshals the longest argument in the entire book, and its only illustration. And yet his whole argument falls apart because of one simple oversight on his part. I thought it would be fun to invite readers to see if they can spot the mistake for themselves--especially since, in this particular case, the mistake doesn't require any knowledge of relativity to see. (Well, okay, maybe a little, but everything you need to know about relativity should be inferable from the excerpt itself.)

(As a side note, I think there's a reason why relativity is so frequently the target of pseudoscientists' attacks, and it has a lot to do with the fact that it's generally so poorly taught. There are a number of problems with the ways relativity is often presented in textbooks and popular accounts, and one of the most significant is the frequent claim that the ether theory was disproved by the Michelson-Morley experiment, in which, in 1887, two scientists tried to measure the speed of the ether relative to the Earth and found no result. But that didn't lead scientists to reject the ether theory, as far too many textbooks say they did; they didn't have any other explanation for how light could be transmitted, so instead they sought ways to reconcile the theory with Michelson and Morley's results. (There were exceptions, most notably Ernst Mach--but then Mach disputed not only the ether theory, but also atomic theory and seemingly everything else that crossed his path, and it seems as likely as not that he opposed the ether theory just because he liked being argumentative, and that the fact that he turned out to be right was completely coincidental.) Each of these refinements of the ether theory was in its turn disproved, and it wasn't until Einstein came along with a viable alternate theory--relativity--that the ether theory was finally laid to rest for good. (Einstein would hardly have felt it necessary to say in his 1905 paper that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous" if scientists had already decided the luminiferous ether was superfluous almost twenty years before!) Naturally, pseudoscientists familiar only with the inaccurate textbook explanation love to seize on the fact that there are other explanations for the Michelson-Morley experiment, an insight they think is original to themselves, totally ignorant of the real history of the ether theory's downfall. So when the author of Universe Alternatives proposes, for example, that the Michelson-Morley experiment's null result was because a part of the ether moves along with the earth, he's completely unaware that this is the very same idea that Michelson himself subscribed to after his experiment--and which was subsequently tested and found to be untenable.)

The author makes a lot of misstatements in setting up his "thought experiment", but they're not really crucial to his point; for the most part, it's possible to conceive of his scenario in a consistent way. The mistake I'm looking for comes after he's laboriously explained the ground rules for his experiment, and once he's finally trying to show the results--it's in the latter half of the argument, after the diagram. If you're not sure whether or not you've found the mistake, you probably haven't; once you see it, it should be fairly obvious.

So, here's his full "disproof" of relativity (warning: it's long!). The argument is reproduced exactly as presented, with no changes or omissions (unless some have accidentally been introduced by my transcription), though I've added a few comments in square brackets. See if you can spot the mistake:

In the following model and thought experiment, we will first try to establish the verifiable reality of simultaneity and synchronization within one light system or reference frame where there is distance but no motion between members of the system. Later, a second system that has constant speed relative to the first will be added. Then, a series of simultaneous events will be constructed that are true and equally acceptable in both systems. And finally, the model will be used to show the contradictions and logical inconsistencies that flow from following the assumptions and perceptual dictates of special relativity.

(Readers who might prefer to avoid the details of yet another thought model refutation of special relativity are advised to skip the next 8 pages.)

Envision a model in which two physics labs (A and B) are located in a volume of intergalactic space that is far removed from large gravitational objects. The distance between A and B is a measured and constant 1,800,000 km, or six light seconds. The space medium between A and B (if such a medium were conceptually allowed) would be static relative to both A and B. The labs at both locations have synchronized clocks that constantly send out light pulses at one second intervals. These pulses contain messages of time and date information so that when A's clock reads 100 sec. into January 25, 1995, he will be receiving the message from B at that same instant which reads 94 sec. into January 25, 1995. Of course, the reverse of this situation concerning B's clock readings is also true. Establishing this synchronization and absolute or proper time frame between A and B to the satisfaction of all observers will be analyzed a little more at this point.

The clocks at A and B can be used to establish or confirm the accuracy of the pre-measured distance of 1.8 million km between A and B in the following way; a light pulse sent from A to B and reflected by a mirror back to A will have a roundtrip time of 12 sec. as measured by A if the distance between A and B is 1.8 million km or 6 light sec. Also, the times required for light to span each leg of this roundtrip will be an equal 6 sec. in both cases. This is true because there is no light media movement relative to either A or B--a fact that can be confirmed by conducting 90° light interference (Michelson-Morley type) experiments at both A and B. The expected negative results in these experiments means that the speed of light is the same in both directions and that the 12 sec. duration of the reflected roundtrip is composed of two equal 6 sec. legs rather than a 5 and a 7 sec. leg for example, which could be the case if there was movement of the light transmitting medium relative to A and B. Thus we have established synchronized clocks and a confirmed distance between A and B as well as setting the stage for simultaneous events.

Any accidental aberrations in the relation values between A and B would be detectable in the following ways. A change in the A-B distance would be manifest as a progressive and cumulative change in the 12 sec. roundtrip message time between A and B, while the date and time synchronization remained unchanged from day to day. Conversely, a malfunction in B's clock (running slow or fast) would be seen as a cumulative day by day mismatch in the original time and date synchronization between A and B, while the 12 sec. roundtrip pulse time remained unchanged. In the event that movement developed between the light medium and the AB observers, the above two values (12 sec. pulse roundtrip and time-date matching) would remain the same, but the results in the Michelson-Morley experiments at A and B would show changes. Lastly, in the case of clocks that were synchronized before separation, any temporary change in clock function due to the separation process would cease when the clocks reached their permanent points of separation at A and B, and it would also be detectable in the subsequent AB exchanges as a small aberration in the original time-date synchronization that would not change from day to day.

So, in summary, any changes in values pertaining to the relationship between A and B, such as clock function, relative clock motion, media movement, or distance changes, would be detectable and identifiable as to their type and quantity by the particular signature left on the messages between A and B or by the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments conducted at both sites.

I would suggest that the concepts of synchronization and potential simultaneity of events between two distant but static observers should be accepted as verifiable realities. However, most written accounts on the subject reveal that relativists still tend to disparage or question the concepts of synchronization and simultaneity by artificially limiting the permissible deductive methods to only that information that can be gained by the exchange of current light speed messages between observers. (For convenience, the term "relativists" will be used to designate those who adhere closely to the postulates and predictions of special relativity.) [Yes, of course the author's claim about "artificially limiting the permissible deductive methods" is untrue, but that's not a mistake in his model.]

The next model component to be introduced is another fully equipped physics lab called TR (for Traveler). TR is self propelled and maintains a constant speed of 1/2 c (or 150,000 km/sec.) in his straight line trip from A to B. It is pre-arranged and understood by all synchronized labs that TR should pass through A at the instant designated as time zero. TR's clocks and instruments are synchronized with those at A by direct physical contact as TR passes through A. Then TR and B exchange all their recorded information at the instant TR passes through B. For example, this exchange information would include (among other things) B's assertion that his clock reads 12 sec. after time zero, and TR's report that he has received only 6 of the 12 pulses emitted by A during the time of the trip. [I'm not sure why a lab should be male, but yes, the author does in fact use masculine pronouns to refer to it for some reason. My guess is he's thinking of TR as the human observer inside the lab, even though the text equates TR to the lab itself.]

In order to emphasize the absolute and non-negotiable nature of the measured distance between A and B, we will now introduce a measuring device in the form of a wheel with a circumference of one meter. The wheel rotates on an axle that is fixed to TR's lab and it also rolls in a track along the A to B route. A device on the wheel's periphery makes a mark at every meter of the entire AB track--1.8 × 10⁹ meter marks along the 6 light second track. The same marking device allows TR's lab to record 1.8 × 10⁹ wheel rotations during the AB trip.

The purpose of this wheel scenario is to show that TR and AB observers should be in agreement about the AB distance because they used the same measuring device at the same time to arrive at a single distance of 1.8 ✗ 10⁹ meters. Of course, relativists might try to claim that TR perceives the wheel in a different way. This, however, might be difficult to sell, since it would imply that one wheel in one location at one instant must have two different and equally valid sets of dimensions. [Which, in fact, is precisely the case, however "difficult to sell" the author thinks it--and the same is true of the track. But those facts, while certainly problematic for his argument, aren't the blatant flaw I'm asking for. That comes later. (They are related to the blatant flaw, though; it's important that his assumption of agreement about distance is wrong.)] Incidentally, it is understood that some of this model's assumed hardware, like the AB track material and the wheel structure, is mechanically impractical considering the distances and speeds that are used. Just presume that the wheel is composed of a virtual reality material that would not explode when rolling along at a speed of 1/2 c. [Unsurprisingly, the author evidently has no idea what "virtual reality" means. Oh well.]

It should be established at this time that all value determinations concerning distance are properly derived only at the source in their reference frame of origin. So, numbers like the A to B distance, distance between pulses from A and B, and wavelengths of light originating in the AB system are all unchangeable or absolute values that should not logically be vulnerable to alteration by observers in other inertial systems. TR, as a moveable recipient, can conceivably claim that he perceives time and its related values, like frequency and velocity, in a way that is different from the perceptions of AB observers, however distance values from the AB system are not directly perceivable to TR. He can only accept the distance values furnished by the AB observers, or re-calculate the numbers using his already distorted perceptions of time as a basis for those calculations. In other words, measured distances in one system are not negotiable quantities that can have different values for different observers. [The author is seriously begging the question here--this whole paragraph is essentially an assertion of much of what he claims to be trying to prove! (Either that or he's simply unaware that special relativity involves length contraction as well as time dilation--which, now that I think about it, is more likely the case, though it makes it all the more astonishing that he'd try to disprove something he's so ignorant about.) But, again, this isn't the mistake in his model that I'm asking for; just ignore this paragraph and move on...]

The next model addition will be the introduction of 6 more physics lab substations (labeled S1 through S6) that are evenly spaced and located at one light second intervals along the AB track. Please become familiar with the diagram on page 52 [shown below this paragraph] and note that there are a series of 3 simultaneous events occurring at each of the 7 labs located at A, B, and the substations. Each triple event represents a confluence in which TR and light pulses from A and B come together at a specific lab location. For example, at 4 sec. into the experiment (4 sec. from time zero), the number 2 pulse from A, the number zero pulse from B, and TR, all arrive simultaneously at the S2 lab. The importance of the event combinations lies in the fact that these undeniable realities are actually experienced at the same instant by TR and the observers along the AB track, so they must necessarily be perceived in the same way by all observers, including TR. Working from this platform of agreement, the manipulation of logic imposed by the constant light speed postulate can be more clearly shown by models involving paired comparisons of closing velocities. However, to avoid lengthy side trips, the pursuit of details in this argument will be left to the discretion of the reader.

Now, getting back to the perceptual consequences of relative motion between two frames of reference as interpreted by various observers, we can trace the events that occur during TR's constant 1/2 c trip from A to B. Recall that both A and B send out light pulses at 1 sec. intervals while TR traverses the 6 light sec. between A and B.

During the single time interval of the AB trip (12 sec. as determined by AB observers), TR receives 18 light pulses from the B direction but only 6 from the A direction according to the following explanation; A sends out 12 pulses during the 12 sec. it takes TR to travel from A to B. Six of these pulses pass through TR and the other 6 are in transit between A and B when TR reaches B at the 12 sec. mark. In the other direction, TR impacts the 6 pulses that are in transit from B to A at the moment the model begins (time zero), plus the 12 additional pulses that are emitted by B during the 12 sec. of TR's A to B trip. Thus, a total of 18 B pulses are impacted by TR. In terms of distance along the AB track, TR impacts A pulses every 300,000 km and B pulses every 100,000 km. This means that TR and the light pulses from B approach each other with a closing velocity that is 3 times as great as the closing velocity between TR and the light pulses from A. Recall at this point that the distance between successive 1 sec. pulses from A and B is a constant 300,000 km. Now, the special relativity postulate holds that TR must perceive the closing velocity of all light pulses from any direction as being 300,000 km/sec. (c). To resolve this impending conflict, TR first considers the 6 pulses from A in the following manner. He sees that it will be necessary to change the 12 sec. duration of the trip to a lesser number by changing the function of his own clock. If he did not make this adjustment, he would be in the position of perceiving 6 evenly spaced A light pulses (300,000 km apart) in a 12 sec. period, meaning that he would be receiving light at the unacceptable speed of 1/2 c. So, by slowing his own clock and reducing the total trip time, TR is able to raise the unacceptable 1/2 c closing speed toward the proper speed of c.

Rather than being concerned with the math equations and the use of the L.C. [that is, Lorentz contraction] factor in these changes, it is more important in the current argument to remember the direction of these time changes that TR makes because of the problems created by the nature of the pulses from A and B.

Now, if TR's only contact with the world outside his frame of reference was the 18 pulses from B rather than the 6 of A, things would be different. His observations would then indicate 18 light pulses (with 300,000 km spacing) arriving in a 12 sec. period with an unacceptably high closing velocity of 1.5 c. So, following the previous reasoning, TR would have to speed up his own clock and lengthen the trip duration in order to reduce the closing velocity with the B pulses from 1.5 c toward the acceptable value of c. However, since this model was arbitrarily set up to include pulses from both A and B, TR is confronted with the problem of having two sets of equally valid trip duration numbers (one higher and one lower than the determination of AB observers). He cannot logically report two values for the duration of a single trip without revealing that his methods are in error. Of course, this paradox or impossible duplicity is the result of the off-base assumption that two observers receiving light from a single source must receive that light at the same speed of c regardless of relative motion between the two observers.

It should be pointed out that in this model TR is a "naked observer" in that all of his instruments are on the outside of the vehicle. In other words, there is no volume of light transmitting space medium surrounding and traveling with TR and his instruments. This point is emphasized for the purpose of avoiding the same type of misinterpretation that came out of the Michelson-Morley experiments when the static nature of the medium in the vicinity of this earth bound experiment was assumed to be an absence of light transmitting medium.

Nearing the conclusion of this A-B-TR discussion, it seems appropriate to summarize the non-relativistic reality of the model in the following way; the one sec. interval light pulses go back and forth between A and B with a speed of c because of the fact that the light transmitting medium between the two is at rest relative to both A and B. Since TR is moving relative to this medium, he receives the 6 pulses from A at 2 sec. intervals and at a perceived and actual speed of 1/2 c. TR also receives the 18 pulses from B at 2/3 sec. intervals and at a light speed of 1.5 c. Both of these sets of recordings indicate a trip duration of 12 sec, that of course matches reality as well as the clock readings of all observers, including TR's. TR is able to perceive these light velocities above and below c because he is a "naked observer" in that he is not surrounded by a cocoon of light transmitting medium that moves along with him.

Furthermore, this thought experiment could have been constructed so that TR was accelerating during the A to B trip, in which case the math would have been a little more complicated, but all of the important paradoxes, denials, affirmations, and conclusions would have been the same. The relativists' idea that accelerated motion should cause anything more than the expected algebraic changes in the results of the single velocity model is probably best interpreted as an attempt to theoretically bind gravitation to light speed perception by using the presumed equivalence of gravity and acceleration to justify the claim that acceleration has more than the normal mathematical effect on light speed perception. More will be said about this in a subsequent chapter.

The essence of the preceding model involves the construction of a series of paired events in which the postulates of special relativity demand that there should be a certain symmetry. To the extent that asymmetry has been demonstrated, it can be seen that these postulates are in error. To summarize it in another way; we have demonstrated that two observers in relative motion, receiving light from a single source, are not interchangeable as far as both perceiving light at the same speed is concerned. This is because the speed of light is tied to the movement of its transmitting medium which cannot have a single velocity relation to both observers.

So, did you find the mistake? Go ahead and post it in the comments if you think you did. If no one has by Friday, I'll post the answer myself...

The Wonder of What We Are

2007-04-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

So we're cousins to moles, to fish and tadpoles,
Don't smile friends, beware--that's called "science" today...

Those are the first two lines of a bit of verse written by Arthur I. Brown, M.D., possibly the most prominent creationist of the second quarter of the twentieth century, though he may not be remembered much today. (Source: The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, by Ronald L. Numbers, University of California Press.) Brown's intent, of course, was to ridicule evolution, and the "smile" he had in mind was one of derision; at the end of the poem he insisted that "Not one ape roosts in my family tree!"

That shows an attitude that's characterized creationists up to the present day; the very idea of relationship with apes and lower animals seems to strike them as distasteful at best. But why should it? What's wrong with being related to other animals? Though frequently it's claimed that this reduces man to the same status as beasts, no more moral and no more valuable, this is a complete non sequitur. Man certainly has something that other animals don't--high intelligence, sentience, and consciousness of our status--, and while the question of animal rights may be a valid issue, it's one that's entirely independent of our biological relationship.

I don't see the fact that we're related to other animals--and, for that matter, much more distantly to plants, fungi, and even protists and bacteria--as anything to get upset about. On the contrary, I think it's wonderful to contemplate that the squirrels we see running across the grass, the birds we hear singing in the trees, even the very trees they're singing in, are in fact very distant relatives, that many millions of years ago we came from the same stock. Even in the case of household pests like the cockroach and the mouse, reviled as they may be, there's something marvelous in knowing that they and we share the same ancient ancestry. We may not be literal children of God, but we are something far more fascinating and more spectacular; we are the result of billions of years of complex processes and slow changes, culminating--for now--in the current life on Earth, humanity as well as other organisms.

Recognizing our relationship to the rest of the biological world doesn't debase man; it uplifts us, more than supposing we're arbitrary creations of some supernatural being ever could. It's often been said (though I've been unable to track down the originator of the phrase) that man is "a little higher than the beasts, a little lower than the angels". Many modern Christians disagree with the first part, insisting that we're more than a little higher than the beasts, but all (as far as I know) agree on the second, which is straight out of Psalms--however high we may be above the beasts, Christianity teaches that we're a little lower than the angels. But the truth is that in a sense we are the angels. We are, again, the only representatives of life on Earth to have attained full sentience and consciousness and the potential to be aware of our condition, and so it falls to us, in a way, to be the messengers (which is what "angel" literally means). In a sense, we do, as the Bible says, have dominion over the other creatures on the Earth--but not because God gave it to us, but because we're the only beings on Earth with the capacity to exercise that dominion.

As awe-inspiring as it is to think on the processes that have led to humanity today, and our relationship to the creatures with which we share the Earth, it is, of course, humbling too. It's humbling to realize that we arose from the same processes that gave rise to the slug and the fly and the dandelion, that we and they operate by many of the same internal mechanisms, that we're much more similar to even the lowliest of our fellow creatures than we may outwardly appear. But it's important not to confuse humility with contempt--I don't think an understanding of humanity's place in nature makes man at all contemptible. Humility is a healthy attitude that even Christianity recognizes as a virtue, and a proper humility allows us to recognize, among other things, that while we may have dominion over other creatures, we also have the incumbency to use that dominion wisely and responsibly.

Of course, it's not only evolution that fosters these feelings of transcendence and humility. Pretty much everything we discover about man's place in the natural world is similarly awe-inspiring. Take cellular biology, for instance. What we see--and experience--as a continuous organism is really a colony of trillions of cells, each in a way a separate organism in its own right. I, at the same time as I am a discrete and conscious entity, am also a community of trillions of smaller entities, working together in concert to make a gestalt whole that I experience as, well, me. Moreover, there's evidence that individual (eukaryotic) cells may themselves have originated as colonies of smaller organisms, that some of the organelles within the cells--the mitochondria, specifically--can also in a sense be regarded as symbiotic organisms in their own right. I am a colony of colonies, a community of communities. So are you. What can be more wonderful than that? Especially when one considers that each cell is itself made up of many billions of atoms. Or when one thinks on the other end of affairs, and considers whether we may in turn be part of larger "organisms", whether, just as the cells in our body combine to give rise to us as conscious entities, there may be a sense in which our communities, collections of people, may in turn be living organisms of which we are parts...

And then, of course, there's astronomy. The Earth on which we live, and on which also live all the other organisms that have been mentioned here, is one of a handful of planets orbitting the Sun, a star a million times the Earth's size. Moreover, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is more than ten thousand times the Earth's diameter, and some of the other planets are an order of magnitude farther out still; relative to the size of the entire solar system, the Earth, the stage of all humanity's existence and experience (the jaunt a handful of humans have made only as a far as the relatively close moon aside), is absolutely minuscule. And yet the Sun itself is just one of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is a hundred million times as wide as the orbit of the outermost planet in the solar system. The Milky Way, in turn, is an average galaxy, possibly one of literally infinitely many in the universe as a whole...And yet, for all the vastness of the universe, we still have something in common with it, and we still have a place within it. We're made of the same basic constituents, the same fundamental particles, as the stars themselves (and presumably as the dark matter that seems to permeate much of the universe, though scientists aren't quite sure just what that is yet). And the stars play an important role in our own development. The atoms that make us up, with the exception of the very lightest, were fashioned by fusion in the hearts of stars, and most of the heavier ones in particular are probably the debris of supernova explosions. The billion-year cycles of star life and death play an essential role in enabling our own much more ephemeral existences. We are made of dead stars. And, though as of yet humanity's impact on anything outside our own solar system has been negligible, who knows what the future may bring, and whether perhaps, as our technological abilities increase, we may yet leave a significant mark on areas beyond the tiny provinicial sphere we've hitherto been confined to?

All of this, it seems to me, is much more interesting, much more awe-inspiring, much more humbling, than any mere supposition that we were simply placed here by some supernatural being, that the Earth and our fellow creatures are nothing more than such a being's relatively recent creations. Contemplating what science has revealed to us about life, about the Earth, about the universe, and about our place in them all, can lead to about as profound and transcendent and--in a sense--as spiritual a feeling as one could possibly hope for.

So yes, Dr. Brown's mockery notwithstanding, we are cousins to moles, to fish and tadpoles--and to mushrooms and lobsters and paramecia and, less literally, even to stars and comets.

And, yes, it is something to smile about.

I Think, Therefore I Blog (or something like that)

2007-04-23T20:55:00.000-07:00

Hm, well, my attempt to post for seven consecutive days didn't work as well this time around as the last; I had a busy weekend and missed two days in a row. All right; I'll try to post for seven consecutive days starting today, I guess. (And I may post more than once some days, to try and make up for the days I missed, but we'll see.)

Actually, today's been busy too, but this was going to be a brief post anyway. I'll make the post I had intended to make on Saturday--and which I really should have made several weeks ago. This is in response to another "meme" of sorts I was tagged with, and this longer ago than the one that was the subject of the previous post (which means I probably really should have responded to it first; hmm...)

Anyway, last month Akusai of Action Skeptics tagged me with the "Thinking Blogger Award", "because reading posts by someone so recently out of the church (and still kind of in the church) is a new and enlightening experience". (You know, though, to some degree I can't help but suppose that if I were really thinking about things as much as I should have been I'd have left the church a lot sooner than I did.) Actually, it's come as a surprise to me how interested people seem to be in the esoterica of the Mormon church; my post on Mormon missionary methods seemed to interest readers much more than I expected, and I'm frequently asked questions at the CFI about Mormon doctrine and practices. This took me aback a little at first, because after all to me these are all things that I grew up with, and that I guess because of that I'm sufficiently accustomed to that they seem unremarkable; it didn't occur to me that all these things might be so interesting to people who weren't familiar with them--but it's become clear that they are. Accordingly, I've been kind of considering making an irregular series of "Mormonism 101" posts, along the lines of my Mormon missionary methods post, describing different facets of LDS lifestyle and beliefs. (I'm still thinking of doing that, but probably won't get to it till next week.)

Anyway, apparently I'm supposed to tag five more bloggers that "make me think". I actually don't read all that many blogs (and lately my time's been constrained enough I haven't even been keeping up with the ones I do read), so choosing five blogs to "tag" is a little daunting, but...actually, as I've mentioned previously, I think that reading some blogs was a factor (not necessarily the biggest factor, but definitely a factor) in my finally coming to terms with my religious beliefs and realizing how unfounded they were, so in that respect, those blogs certainly did make me think, in a very significant manner. Therefore, I guess I'll "tag" some of the blogs I read at the time that contributed to my "deconversion"...although most of these are "big-name" bloggers that (a) have quite possibly already been "tagged" by someone else (though I've at least avoided duplication of those already tagged by Akusai), and (b) almost certainly will never read this and know they've been "tagged":

Pooflingers Anonymous, for finding a way to use fecal matter as a force for truth.
Pharyngula, for sticking to the truth even in the face of armies of trolls.
Cosmic Variance, for maintaining the beauty of science free from superstition.
The Bad Astronomy Blog, for taking the time to show the evidence against bad science.

And--hm--well, that's only four, but those are the only four blogs I can think of offhand that I was reading at the time of my "deconversion" and that haven't already been "tagged" by Akusai. So I'll add as a fifth a new blog that's just been started within the last week, which is by someone who I didn't meet until after my "deconversion" but who--along with others I met at the Center for Inquiry--I think did play some role in helping me to work through the ramifications.

The Skeptic Review, for bringing another fresh skeptical voice to the "blogosphere".

(Yeah, there's some overlap between the blogs I "tagged" this time and the ones I "tagged" in the previous post. Like I said, I don't read a lot of blogs...though I know there are a lot of other really good atheist, humanist, and skeptical blogs out there that I ought to find time for. My blogroll has been expanding over time, albeit very slowly, and will probably continue to do so.)

Blogging Rationale

2007-04-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

So, I've been memed by King Aardvark, with the request for me to post about why I blog. I'm a week and a half late responding to this, but better late than never, I guess. (This is part of why I decided to go for a week of posting every day again; there are a number of things I've been meaning to post about but haven't had time for, some of them going back much longer than this.)

I wasn't quite sure whether to explain why I blog in general, or why I have this blog in particular--because those are two different questions, with different answers. So, I guess I'll answer both.

This isn't my first blog, you see. I've had a LiveJournal, where I post reasonably regularly, for more than three years now--I won't link to it here, because, well, it's not so anonymous as this blog is, and I'm not quite to the point yet where I'm comfortable publically revealing my identity here. But anyway, that was my first entry into blogging. (I guess maybe one might argue that a LiveJournal isn't the same thing as a blog, but it seems to me that's a hard argument to sustain.)

So, as for why I started that--it was because I realized I was already more or less blogging anyway, and I may as well make it more official. It all started, more or less, with a webcomic that I launched in August 2000. (Again, no link here, to maintain my anonymity. I suppose if you were really determined, you could try to track down all the webcomics that started in August of 2000, and figure out my identity that way, but I'm gambling that nobody's going to be determined enough to do that.) In the beginning, I'd generally write a little bit in the "news" posts below each comic about that comic, or the circumstances surrounding my making it. Over time, this grew into little snippets about what was going on with my life in general, whether or not it was comic-related, and then those little snippets grew into long essays. It got to the point sometimes the comic was delayed because there were things I wanted to write about in the "news" posts that I hadn't had time to write about yet.

Well, I'd noticed by then that a lot of other webcartoonists I respected had their own LiveJournals, and I figured I may as well get one too, and that way I could shunt all of my writing about my life there, and leave the "news" posts on the comic page to things that actually related to the comic. And so I did. The end.

But of course, in a way that sort of begs the question. Basically, I started blogging "officially" because I was already doing so "unofficially", via my webcomic "news" posts. That doesn't really answer why I was doing the latter in the first place. And honestly, I'm not sure I could explain that too well. I guess...I guess I just like sharing my life. I like putting my deeds and thoughts and misadventures out in a public venue, where anyone can read about them. I don't know if I can really explain it any better than that.

So I guess that does it for the first question. Now for the second: Why this blog, in particular?

Well, that's a question I've already answered before, in my very first post. And I won't repeat here everything I said there--you can always go back and read that post if you really want to know. But, to briefly summarize: to help come to terms with my realization that there was no basis behind my religious beliefs. I wasn't ready to come out publicly as an atheist just yet (which is why, for example, I haven't mentioned it on my LiveJournal--my mother and my brother both read that), but I didn't want to keep my newfound atheism entirely to myself either; I felt like I had to say something about it somewhere. Hence, this blog, where I could do so anonymously, having an outlet for my feelings about what I was going through, my reevaluation of my beliefs, and my thoughts on religion and atheism, while still keeping my atheism a secret, for the moment, from my family and from people I knew in the church.

Since then, I've found other avenues for that--the Center for Inquiry, most notably, where I can interact with other skeptics and atheists, some of whom have gone through similar "deconversion" experiences. In some ways, that's better than the blog, because these are people I can talk to face to face, on a more personal level. Of course, though, the blog allows me to interact with people from beyond my immediate vicinity, so it still serves its purpose. So I'm not saying I'm going to discontinue the blog just because I have found other people I can talk to about these matters.

As a matter of fact, I've thought of on another purpose the blog might serve, since, well, there's another matter that I think it might be healthy for me to discuss. But...this is a subject I'm still psyching myself up to broaching, so it's not going to be just yet. I'm planning on making my second big confession, so to speak, on the day of this blog's first anniversary--May 30, a little over a month from now. I'm both kind of dreading bringing up something I'm not really comfortable talking about, even anonymously--and also kind of looking forward to it, because it's something I think I really should talk about, even if--or maybe even especially because--it makes me uncomfortable.

But that's another matter, and it'll wait. For now, I guess I've answered the question--both questions--to the best of my immediate ability.

Apparently by the terms of the "meme" I'm now supposed to "tag" five other bloggers. I've never liked that aspect of these "memes", but I guess I'll do so anyway, but with the explicit caveat that their response is optional, and that they should in no way feel bad if they choose not to answer. (Not that anyone should feel bad about choosing not to participate in any case, but I figure I may as well make the matter explicit.) That being said, I'll point to Akusai of Action Skeptics, Austin Atheist, Ross of The Skeptic Review, and...um...heck, just to round out the five, throwing in a couple who I'm pretty sure will never read this and never even know I tagged them, Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and Clifford Jones of Asymptotia. There we go. (If you're curious, you can see the "meme"'s track here...)

[EDIT: Oh, wait, looking back at the original version of the meme, we were supposed to give five reasons in list form. Um...huh. Okay, fine; briefly, and combining the reasons concerning both my LiveJournal and this blog:

As an outlet for my thoughts.
To publicly share some interesting experiences.
As a place to show work-in-progress
To help me come to terms with changes in my life and outlook
To be part of a worldwide community

There.]

Wedding Jests

2007-04-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, once again there are a lot of things I've been wanting to write about but haven't had time for, so I think I'm going to make an effort to post every day for a week again, starting today. That seemed to work the last time I tried it, even if it didn't have the desired long-term effect of getting me to post more often.

But anyway, one of the things I've been meaning to post about is something that happened just last Saturday. My sister got married.

As an active Mormon, she was, of course, married in the temple--the San Diego temple, to be exact. (She lives much closer to the Los Angeles temple, but I guess she liked the look of the San Diego temple better, or something.) I've said before that I'm not going to renew my temple recommend when it expires--since that would require directly lying to the bishop and stake president in response to many of the temple recommend questions--but that's not till August, so I was able to attend the wedding. I'm not going to go into full details here, but there is one thing I wanted to comment on.

The core of the LDS wedding ceremony is the "sealing ceremony", where the bride and groom are united "for time and all eternity". The sealing is performed by a temple ordinance worker called, naturally enough, the "sealer".

Well, the sealer at my sister's wedding apparently fancied himself a bit of a card, and slipped in a bit of (what he thought was) humor when he explained the ceremony. When he talked about the consequences for unrighteousness, for example, he said, addressing the groom, something to the effect of, "When you make mistakes--and we all know she's not going to be making mistakes; it's going to be you..." Later, when he pointed out that, according to the wording of the ceremony, the bride gave herself to the groom but the groom did not give himself to the bride, he explained that as being because--again addressing the groom--"you're not much of a catch". He did state afterword that he was just joking--but still it seemed a little mean-spirited.

On the way back from the sealing room, I talked to the groom about it, hoping to salve any hurt feelings. "I was feeling kind of bad for you back there," I said. "It seemed the sealer was making all his jokes at your expense."

"You noticed that too, huh?" he replied. "Yeah, I felt kind of bad for me too."

I can guess at the sealer's motives for making his jokes at the groom's expense instead of the bride's. Women, he was probably thinking, are more delicate, more to be respected; the men can take the joke better. Men don't have to be protected like women do; it's okay to poke some fun at them.

The problem is that, in this case, frankly, the woman could have taken it better. The groom had had a rough life, in some ways, and he had made some mistakes, which he'd done his best to recover from. Moreover, he already considered himself below his bride-to-be in some respects; she has a graduate degree and makes good money as a physical therapist, while he has no college education and doesn't have a real career. He already questioned whether he really deserved this marriage, and whether it was going to work out. So given the groom already had, well, something of an inferiority complex, the sealer's jokes were about the worst things he could have said.

I'm not saying, of course, that this in itself is proof the church isn't true, and that the church as a whole should be held responsible for this one sealer's errors. While church doctrine does hold that people in priesthood positions--such as that of the sealer--are supposed to be inspired by the spirit and speak the words given them by God, it's acknowledged that they're still human, and do make mistakes. So this, by itself, certainly wouldn't have been enough to make me question the supposed truth of the church, if I hadn't already done so. Still, though, I thought it was kind of an unpleasant way to launch a marriage...

Something For Nothing

2007-04-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

This month's selection for the Skeptics' Book Club was Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I thought it was an interesting book and a good read, but I won't say much about it here, or about the discussion at the book club, because (previous blog entries notwithstanding) that isn't really the point of this blog (insofar as this blog has a point). I bring it up mainly to mention that it was as I was reading this book (the day of the book club meeting yesterday, since I kind of put things off and didn't end up buying it till the last minute), a thought occurred to me that I thought might be worth blogging about here. It really wasn't related to the book it all; it just happens that as I was reading a short bit about gambling, I thought about the attitude toward gambling in the LDS church--and realized (what I see as) the essential hypocrisy of it.

First of all, though, I want to make it clear that this post isn't meant as a defense of or apology for gambling. I may not believe in the doctrines of the LDS church, but that doesn't mean I've suddenly started gambling just because I no longer believe that God said not to. There are good reasons for not gambling, and God has nothing to do with it. So I agree--to an extent, anyway--with the church's stance on gambling. I just think it's not consistent with some aspects of the church doctrines.

Why does the church come out against gambling? Well, for a fairly concise explanation, we can turn to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism--which, while technically not an official church publication and certainly not considered on the level of canonical scripture, draws from statements by church leaders, has been (unofficially) sanctioned by the church leadership, and generally gives an accurate description of LDS doctrines and attitudes. Here's (in part) what the Encyclopedia has to say about gambling:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints condemns gambling, games of chance and lotteries as moral evils and admonishes its members not to participate in them in any form. Gambling is based on the morally wrong philosophy of getting something for nothing, of taking money without giving fair value in exchange. Not only is gambling morally wrong, but is also bad economics for customers. The lavish gambling centers around the world stand as ample evidence that the chances of winning are weighted heavily in favor of the establishment and against the bettor.

Now, that latter part, about the bad economics, I have absolutely no quibble with. Gambling certainly is bad economics, and if the church excoriated it on that reason alone, that would be entirely defensible. But that first point, about the "morally wrong philosophy of getting something for nothing"...let's take a closer look at that, shall we?

I have a great deal of sympathy with the church's viewpoint on this, actually. I don't particularly like the idea of getting something for nothing; I honestly wouldn't much want a fortune to fall into my lap with no effort on my part--largely because then I'd never know whether I could have succeeded on my own, and I think I have a good deal of potential to do so (though admittedly my current financial status doesn't provide much evidence toward that hypothesis). Whether or not it's really a moral wrong, getting rich by pure chance, with no work or talent involved, isn't something I'd be comfortable with. So, at least for the sake of argument, I'm willing to go along with the church's condemnation of this on general principle.

However...is the church really opposed to getting "something for nothing" on general principle? Hm...well, let's see. What about the whole doctrine of the Atonement?

The Mormon church, like other Christian churches, teaches that Jesus Christ suffered for our sins...though some of the details are a little different. By His death on the cross, and His later resurrection, he enabled all of us to someday be resurrected as well. By His taking upon Himself all our sins in the Garden of Gethsemane, He made it possible for us to get forgiveness and exaltation.

Now, some other Christian churches criticize the LDS church for its supposed focus on works--for its insistence that man has to follow the commandments and undergo certain covenants in order to gain full exaltation. This contradicts some other denominations' teachings that all you have to do is accept Christ into your heart and you'll be saved--a clear case of "something for nothing" there. Nevertheless, the LDS church's position isn't really all that different. We aren't saved because of our works, the church teaches; we could never be saved by our own effort. Our following the commandments, and so forth, isn't what saves us; it's just something we have to do to take advantage of Christ's atonement. But the atonement, the offer of redemption, is a free gift, something we'd never have the power to do ourselves.

So the Atonement is something for nothing. Or at the very least it's taking something of value--eternal salvation--without giving fair value in exchange. Again, this is a point that's made over and over in church teachings, that nothing we could do could possibly make up for what Christ has given us. Quoting Mosiah 2:21 from the Book of Mormon:

I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.

That seems to me like a pretty explicit statement that we're not giving fair value for what we're getting.

Of course, there are other examples, too. There's resurrection, which according to church doctrine is even more of a freebie, in that we don't even have to follow the commandments to get it--everyone who lives or has ever lived on the Earth, regardless of how wicked and sinful they are, will eventually be resurrected. And, of course, there's Pascal's Wager, which is often used in some form or another to try to justify religious adherence (frequently by people who seem to think they've invented it themselves and to be unaware of its ubiquity). Heck, it's even called a "wager". The reason I focus here on the Atonement specifically, though, is because it's so central to the church's teachings. Christ's Atonement is supposedly "the most important event in the history of the world"; it's the keystone of the church's doctrine.

That's one of the big appeals of religion, I think--not just the LDS church, but many other religions as well. Getting something for nothing. Being able to affect our destinies through prayer--which involves negligible effort. Gaining eternal bliss and salvation for nothing more than--in some denominations--just saying you accept Christ. The popularity of gambling shows that the chance of getting something for nothing is a big motivator--and I think it may be what motivates a lot of people to be religious, too.

So, yeah, if the LDS church wants to condemn gambling (and of course similar remarks could apply to many other Christian denominations too)--I'm fine with that; I'm no fan of it myself. If it wants to proclaim that the idea of getting something for nothing, or for less than fair value, is a "morally wrong philosophy"--I don't have much problem with that view. But you know, if the church really feels that way about getting somethng for nothing, it seems a bit inappropriate for it to center its entire doctrine around it...

A Conversation With An Old Friend

2007-04-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

Phew. I've been busy enough lately that I still haven't had much time for blogging--there's a lot I've been wanting to write about, but I just haven't found the time to write it. (And yeah, I know I've been saying that in almost every post lately; sorry for repeating myself.) But I just had a conversation this evening that I want to write about while it's still relatively fresh in my memory.

One of my oldest and dearest friends is a Jew from New York City named David. I mention that he's Jewish because it's relevant to what follows. (The fact that he's from New York City, on the other hand, isn't really relevant at all, but I guess I mentioned it anyway.) When I say that David is a Jew, however, I mean only ethnically and, to some extent, culturally. In terms of religion, the impression I got from our talks about the subject--though I don't recall whether he ever stated this explicitly--was that he was an agnostic. He had an intellectual interest in religion--at one point, he even asked me for a Book of Mormon--but he didn't seem to have any real religious beliefs himself.

That is, until he got married, whereupon he seemed to become much more religiously active. He got married in a Jewish wedding ceremony; he even put up mezuzot by the doors of his apartment. I wondered to what extent he had really become a believer, and to what extent it was just a cultural thing, but I never directly asked.

A similar source of puzzlement was the fact that David had joined the Freemasons. I had had some interest in the Freemasons myself, though I'd never gotten around to making any serious attempts to join, but that David had become a Freemason surprised me, since I knew one of their requirements was the belief in a Supreme Being--which, at least from our conversations during our college years, was something I thought David didn't have. I did actually ask him about that, in one e-mail, but I didn't get a response (possibly the e-mail had been accidentally filtered out as spam and he'd never received it), and I didn't press the issue.

Nowadays, I don't see much of David--he lives on the East Coast, and I on the West. I think in the last five years or so I've only seen him three times--once for his wedding (I was one of the groomsmen, and, like all the male members of the wedding party, wore a purple kippah with gold trim), once for his daughter's Brit Bat, and once when he was in Los Angeles on business and we made arrangements to meet up. I don't even talk to him on the phone much; we're both busy enough we don't often get around to calling each other, and when we do it often involves extensive sessions of phone tag before one of us finally finds the other available. Still, even though circumstances prevent us from being in frequent contact, I still consider him a close friend.

I don't remember how long ago it was that I last talked to David before today, but recently I decided it was about time I got in touch again and found out how things were going with him. As usual, it was hard to get in touch with him, with his busy schedule, but this evening I finally caught him at home.

I hadn't planned on discussing with David my atheism, but I knew there was a chance it would come up. He'd been encouraging me to join the Freemasons (I had mentioned to him I was interested), and if that came up again, well, I'd have to tell him I no longer met the requirements.

Well, it did come up, and as it turned out we had a long talk about religion and skepticism. And it cleared up some things I'd long wondered about David's religious beliefs.

David had started out, as I'd surmised, as an agnostic. His grandparents had originally been practicing Jews, but had turned away from religion when his mother was still quite young due to a family tragedy that made them doubt the existence of a benevolent god. His mother was a hard-line atheist, at times vehemently anti-religious. (I knew David's mother, but hadn't realized she was so opposed to religion--oddly, despite my being an active Mormon, she always seemed to like me, and considered me a good influence on David.) David took a somewhat more moderate path, and considered himself, as I said, an agnostic, until he took a class on existentialism that made him reevaluate his thinking. While he couldn't know for sure whether there was a god or not, he came to realize that there was really nothing he could know with an absolute certainty, and that it was best to behave as if anything that had more than a 50% probability of being true was the case, and anything with less than a 50% probability was false. (I'm sure this is an oversimplification, but that's how I remember him having put it.) In any case, he didn't--and still doesn't--believe in any sort of personal God.

As for his seeming conversion to practicing Judaism after his marriage, it was all, as I'd surmised it might be, a cultural thing. I guess I hadn't realized just how powerful a force Judaic culture was--even David's strongly atheistic mother bowed to Judaic tradition when it came to naming him. (There's an interesting story behind that--two stories, in fact--but I'm not sure whether I should share them here; while I write this blog anonymously, and I haven't given any real identifying information about David (I'm sure there's more than one Jew from New York City named David), the possibility still remains that eventually my identity will come out, and it then wouldn't be too hard to figure out David's identity, and I'm not sure these are stories that he'd want made public. I'm only saying here things that I'm reasonably certain he wouldn't mind being stated in a public venue; matters that he might consider too personal I'll omit.) In fact, for his wedding, he'd specifically sought out a rabbi who was willing to perform the ceremony in such a way as to avoid all mention of a personified God. It wasn't easy; the first rabbi he and his then-fiancée had talked to flatly refused, and even questioned why, if they felt that way, they would want to have a Jewish wedding at all. The rabbi they finally chose for their wedding was of a reformed faith, and opined that, in fact, real Judaism didn't include belief in a personal God, and all the references to God as a person in the scriptures were metaphorical and were only there to make them easier for man to understand. If David and his wife-to-be were beyond those crutches, he was certainly willing to perform the ceremony accordingly.

As far as the profession of belief in a Supreme Being required for Freemasonry, David told me that, while he didn't believe in a personal God, he did believe that there was something that was greater than man--be it mankind as a whole, or the physical forces behind the universe, or what have you--and that after much soul-searching (so to speak) he eventually decided that that was enough for him to feel comfortable saying he believed in a Supreme Being. I'm not sure how much I agree with him on that point--while there may be things that are in some sense greater than man, considering any of these entities or forces to be a Supreme Being in the sense that seems to be intended by the principles of Freemasonry doesn't seem quite right to me. But David said he considered the matter for years before coming to that decision, so apparently he had some trouble with it as well. As a matter of fact, David claimed that rationalistic, humanist thinking is very common among Freemasons, and that 90% of those he'd met had attitudes similar to his--although I'm a bit skeptical about that, since it doesn't really jibe with what I've heard about Freemasonry elsewhere, or for that matter with the fact that it requires a belief in a Supreme Being to begin with.

Anyway, though, David was surprised to hear about my turning away from religion, but he was supportive of my decision, and sympathetic to what I was going through, and to my reluctance to talk to my family about the matter--David knows my family well enough to understand my concerns about how they might react.

At any rate, David isn't the first person I've told about my atheism, but the others I've told are people I've only known for a few years at most. David, as I've said, is one of my oldest and closest friends, and it was really good to have the opportunity to talk to him about the matter, and to know that he supported me. I mean, I know several people have commented telling me that true friends would stand by me through my deconversion, and I knew that on an intellectual level, but actually talking to an old friend about the matter and knowing that our friendship remains as strong as ever...well, it's a good feeling.

Becoming A Pickle

2007-04-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, any increase in posting rate achieved by my making myself post every day for a week was apparently short-lived; my posting here has once again become rather sporadic. But I have a reason; I'm kind of going through a hard time financially right now, and so my time has been occupied by, well, trying to get things worked out; blogging has, for the moment, had to take a back seat. But anyway...

Twice a year, the LDS church has a "general conference", in which normal church meetings are replaced by discourses by church leaders. In the old days, when the church was small and localized, I think all the members were expected to personally attend the conference meetings; now, of course, they're broadcast over cable TV and over the internet, although many members still do make the trek to Salt Lake City to be there in person.

This weekend was one of the weekends of general conference, and I had no plans to watch or listen to it. However, my mother called a few hours ago, and asked if I'd watched that morning's conference session, saying that there were things said there that had really touched her. Now, I'm still not quite ready to tell my family about my disenchantment with the church, but on the other hand I'm certainly not comfortable with outright lying about the matter, either. Still, I managed to avoid the subject, implying that I'd watched conference without actually saying so (which I suppose is arguably still a form of lying, even though I didn't actually say anything false--but, as I said, I'm really not ready to tell my family about my atheism yet).

Still, though, I decided I may as well listen to this morning's session, if nothing else just so that I could respond appropriately if my mother wanted to discuss specific talks (as well as out of some curiosity to see what had touched her so much). It wouldn't really be a waste of time, since I could just have it on in the background while I was doing something else; I wasn't going to focus all my attention on it. (Actually, I listened, I just realize, to the wrong session; today's Sunday and I listened to the Saturday morning session. Eh. Oh well.)

As I expected, I hadn't been missing much. The last talk, by the first counselor in the church's First Presidency, and the next in line to become the president of the church when the current one dies (which, at his age, may not be long off), was particularly annoying (and rather disingenuous), starting with a deceptive selection of culled quotes to foster the impression that all agnostics and atheists are ignorant pessimists who place no value on human life. But one talk...well, one talk featured what may be the most bizarre religious metaphor I offhand remember ever hearing.

This talk, by recent addition to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles David A. Bednar, centered around a metaphor likening the change that a convert undergoes through the Holy Spirit when he comes unto Christ to the change that a cucumber undergoes when it becomes a pickle. Yes, seriously. This wasn't just a comparison mentioned in passing; this was the central metaphor of his talk.

I certainly didn't start this blog to mock the LDS church, or religion in general. I don't believe in God; I think religion does a lot of harm to the world and has done a lot of harm to me personally; there are a lot of members of the church I like, but the church itself, as an organization, I harbor little goodwill toward. But I don't know that mockery is the most suitable attitude. For the most part, I'd rather couch any criticism in clear and direct terms, rather than hiding it in sarcasm and parody.

But this--this pickle metaphor is so utterly ridiculous it's hard to let it pass without mockery. Except that it's so absurd on its own face that there's not much left to mock; it's hard to make it seem more ludicrous than it already clearly is.

If you're curious and want to hear it for yourself, you can find it online here. Just click on the "MP3" link to the right of the name "David A. Bednar" in the "Saturday Morning Session" section. Normally I wouldn't necessarily recommend listening to the General Conference talks, but this one almost has to be heard to be believed. (Or read, I suppose, but the text won't be available online till Thursday or so.)

So, remember. The Gospel of Christ is like brine, and taking Christ into your heart is like becoming a pickle. An Apostle of the Lord said so.

Godless Teachers

2007-03-28T23:45:00.000-07:00

One event that goes on at the Center For Inquiry that I don't think I've mentioned before is Cafe Inquiry, a get-together with a different speaker every month talking about some topic of interest to skeptics and/or atheists. To tell the truth, Cafe Inquiry wasn't something that was a high priority for me, and I'd forgotten all about it, until I heard that this month's topic was "The Challenge of Being an Atheist Teacher". Seeing as I'd worked in teaching myself, this sounded interesting enough I decided to go.

The speaker was one David Layton, who had written an article on the subject in a recent issue of American Atheist Magazine. The talk ended up spanning a wide range of subjects, but I think here I'll repeat the core: six common myths about atheist teachers. These are things that Layton gleaned from his experience teaching and from reading over many blogs both by atheists and by theists of various stripes, and he stressed that these are things that it seems many people do actually believe.

#1. There are too many atheist teachers.

In fact, Layton said, it seemed to him that, except perhaps in the sciences, the proportion of atheists in the teaching profession is about the same as in the general population; they're not overrepresented. Then again, to many believers, one atheist teacher is too many.

#2. Atheist teachers are poisoning the minds of the children.

Personally, I'm not sure this really belongs as a separate myth; I think it's maybe a facet or restatement of #3 and #5. But anyway...

#3. There are special atheist schools and other clandestine systems by which atheists indoctrinate children.

In fact, looking into the matter extensively, Layton was only able to find two private schools, both of which happened to be in Florida, that were founded on principles of secular humanism. There simply is not a widespread network of secret atheist schools.

#4. A majority of Americans are Christians, and the majority rules. Therefore, atheist teachers should just shut up.

Of course, what's wrong with the premise of this statement is probably already familiar to everyone reading this, and I won't go over it again here. But the conclusion itself is unnecessary, because by and large atheist teachers do "shut up"...on which more later.

#5. When atheist teachers teach, they are teaching atheism.

As Layton said, does this mean that when a Catholic teacher teaches he's inevitably teaching Catholicism? When a Jewish teacher teaches is he teaching Judaism? Is there a special atheist mathematics that's different from regular mathematics?

Layton's field of teaching is English, and he said he'd found that, far from teaching atheism, he often found himself, in a way, teaching religion. Many Christian students in his classes were completely unfamiliar with the doctrines they claimed to espouse, and in order for them to understand the works of authors and poets like Milton and Donne he had to teach them the religious doctrines underlying these writers' worldviews.

#6. Atheism is a religion.

This, again, is a myth about which enough has already been said I don't think there's much use in expanding on it here--though I don't quite see what it has to do with teaching, specifically, so I'm not entirely sure why Layton included it.

Anyway, Layton gave many anecdotes from both his own experience and news stories demonstrating the situation of atheists in the teaching profession. Although, as already mentioned, the proportion of atheists among teachers seems about the same as in the general population, the same does not seem to be true, Layton said, of those in administrative positions, among whom atheists are very much underrepresented. In any case, the preconceptions about atheist teachers are prevalent enough to jeopardize their jobs; many teachers have gotten in trouble because students who found out about their atheism complained to administrators that they felt threatened, and Layton has had one of his bosses tell him point blank, on finding out he was an atheist, that he wouldn't have hired him had he known that beforehand. Others have gone to extremes to try to "bring him to Christ". Layton said that about the best a teacher could do is just not to tell people about his atheism--but then, of course, what happens if someone asks him about it directly?

Fortunately, my teaching has been in the sciences, where these problems don't exist to this extent--atheism is much more accepted and widespread among scientists than among those in other fields. But it seems pretty clear that atheists are being discriminated against in the teaching profession. Then again, that's not a surprise; atheists are being discriminated against plenty of other places too--this is just one more example...

Award-Worthy Television

2007-03-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

One of the agenda items of the last Independent Investigations Group meeting I didn't mention in my previous post about the subject was the discussion of the IIG Awards.

Briefly, the IIG Awards are to be given to television shows and individuals who best exemplified the skeptical viewpoint--or its opposite. There will be four awards given, one each for best and worst shows and individuals.

The idea is to invite the awardees, and representatives from the winning shows, to come and accept their award in person, and to have a whole ceremony about it. Probably it's not going to be that big a deal this year, but this is the first year it's being done; the hope, I think, is that it will build up over time.

The nominees for this year's awards don't have many surprises; I'd post the full list here except that I, uh, seem to have misplaced it. But anyway, last week I think I saw a show that I'm definitely going to nominate for next year's award for worst show.

I don't watch much TV--rather for financial reasons than because of any lofty intellectual high-mindedness; I just can't really afford cable TV right now, and I don't have good enough reception to get even the network channels reliably without it. (Not that there's much I'd be interested in watching on the network channels anyway.) But I happened to be visiting at my parents' house last Thursday, and they had the TV tuned to the History Channel. And a show came on that doesn't really have much to do with history, or with anything else outside of pseudoscientific nonsense.

The show in question was called "Decoding the Past - Earth's Black Hole". And it was--well, heck, rather than try to describe it myself, I think I'll quote straight from the History Channel webpage's description:

Explore with us the wonders and mysteries of the Black Holes in our universe. Is it possible that areas on earth might, in fact, show black hole like tendencies? We take a hard scientific look at an area known as the Bermuda Triangle to see if there are indeed any similarities between the supposed forces in the triangle and the destructive force of a black hole. From a research boat trip through the triangle to interviews with scientists at the US Geological Survey, Harvard University, and the UK's Cardiff University, we go far beyond the event horizon to explore the dangers in this area and what relation they might indeed have with its counterpoint in space.

Okay. Outside the fact that the show took the thoroughly debunked Bermuda Triangle myth at face value, it was just chock full of bad science and ridiculous arguments. At one point the idea was advanced that the Bermuda Triangle and a similar area off the Asian coast might be connected by a wormhole. Why? Apparently for no better reason than that there were similar myths about the two areas, and the show's writers thought wormholes sounded cool. Certainly there was no attempt whatsoever to explain why a wormhole might have caused any of the phenomena that supposedly occurred in either location.

But the single worst bit, I think, not that the rest of the show was much better, was when the show brought up white holes, implying that they might be behind the creation of new crust in the oceanic trenches. Leaving aside the fact that white holes are purely theoretical mathematical concepts which almost certainly don't exist in the real world (although the producers of the show seemed unaware of this, and spouted the popular but outdated idea that a white hole is the "other end" of a black hole, where all the matter that falls into the black hole is ejected from), claiming that anything so exotic is necessary to explain the creation of new crust is ludicrous. The processes behind the creation of new crust in the oceanic trenches are very well understood; they're formed by the cooling and solidification of upwelling magma as tectonic plates move apart. Likening the moving of preexisting matter to the creation of matter ex nihilo, or the bringing of matter from other universes, is completely absurd--yet that seems to be the entirety of the argument in the show, that because white holes produce matter they may be behind the production of new crust. That kind of bad reasoning would be out of place in an elementary school science fair.

Like I said, I don't watch much TV. I haven't seen many programs on the History Channel. But if "Decoding the Past - Earth's Black Hole" is at all representative, it doesn't seem like I'm missing much. Then again, it's not about history, the channel's nominal focus, and maybe when it comes to actual history the channel's better at picking programs that get their facts and arguments straight. If that's the case, the History Channel really ought to stick with what it knows.

So, anyway, that's going to be a nominee for next year's IIG Awards for worst program. Though the year is still young; it's possible something even worse will yet turn up--though it would take some doing to be worse than that utter pile of nonsense.

COTG #62

2007-03-19T16:19:00.000-07:00

I should have posted this yesterday, but...Carnival of the Godless #62 is now up at Black Sun Journal.

(Actually, it's probably redundant for me to post about this, since probably anyone reading this already knows about the Carnival of the Godless from other sources, but I'd feel remiss not mentioning it myself...)

Continuing Investigation

2007-03-17T23:58:00.000-07:00

As usual, there are a lot of things I want to post about that I haven't had time for, but I said in my last post that I was at least going to try to make a point of posting about any events at the Center for Inquiry West, so I'll make the time to make a post about today's meeting of the Independent Investigations Group, a skeptical group dedicated to investigating claims of a paranormal, fringe science, or otherwise extraordinary nature.

I may rethink this new policy of posting about any CFI events, though, because, once again, short of giving a point-by-point account of the meeting, which doesn't seem particularly productive, I can't think of too much specific to post about. (Are these posts about CFI events interesting enough to anyone to warrant continuing them?) Some highlights of this meeting, however, included the following:

Planning the procedure for the testing of a self-professed dowser who wanted to participate in the IIG's $50,000 challenge. As I've mentioned in a previous post, this person seemed, if not more confident than prior claimants (according to other IIG members; I haven't been in the IIG long enough to be familiar with prior claimants myself), much more collected and coherent, leading to some suspicion that, rather than being delusional about his abilities, he may have some sort of scam in mind. Accordingly, we're trying to be very careful to design the test in a way as to eliminate any possibility for cheating (this is, of course, always a concern, but this time it seems even more warranted than usual).
A presentation about a UFO cultist named Billy Meier--I'd never heard of him before myself, but apparently he's quite well-known in ufological circles. Anyway, an associate of Meier's had approached a member of the IIG to present a skeptical viewpoint on Meier to be included in a video he was producing. The IIG member in question had only agreed upon being guaranteed in writing that he would have the chance to review and if necessary reject the footage of him that was going to be used before the release of the video, and that he would not be defamed in any way. The filming for the video was going to take place on Monday, but he showed his presentation at the IIG meeting to get feedback and suggestions.
An account of two IIG members' visit to first a creationist museum near San Diego and later a semi-secret Scientology compound called "gold base". The latter visit had not been particularly fruitful, since Scientologist security had prevented them from lingering even on what was supposed to be a public road, but another IIG member told of his own experiences with Gold Base, where he had worked for a time on the installation of a video system (and resisted the Scientologists' efforts to convert him).

There was lots more, of course, but as I said, I don't see the point in enumerating every single agenda item. I will mention one more thing of significance, though: the IIG West website has received a much-needed update, and is much more up-to-date and informative now (as well as more attractive and user-friendly). So if anyone's curious about the IIG West and maybe followed a link in one of my previous posts on it to the rather sparse and messy old version of the website, you might want to check out the new and improved version.

An Unread Book

2007-03-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

So. I figured that, while I'm not going to be posting every day, I'd at least post about anything I went to at the Center For Inquiry. Such as the Skeptics' Book Club meeting tonight.

Unfortunately, there's...not much to write about. This was the second month devoted to American Theocracy, the idea being that it was a long enough book to justify devoting two meetings to it. I already blogged about the first meeting. And...well...there's not much new to say. Especially since very little of the meeting was actually devoted to discussing the book...since few members of the book club ended up reading the whole thing. Which is unfortunate, because I was kind of looking forward to discussing the third part, the part about the financialization of America's economy--this was something that was new to me, and I was curious about the others' take on it.

Eh. Oh well. There was still plenty of interesting discussion; it just didn't have much to do with the book. And there's little point in just reiterating it all here.

So, in lieu of that, I'll just remark on one thing.

I've mentioned many times that, despite my disbelief in the church, there are still plenty of church members I like, and hope to remains friends with once I come out with my atheism. They're good people, and I don't want to lose touch with them.

I've kind of anticipated that some commenter might try to claim this as evidence of the church's truth. See? You've said yourself that the church is full of good people! If good people are drawn to the church--or if the church makes people good--there must be some truth and value to it, right?

So far, fortunately, nobody has tried that argument. However, I suppose I might as well anticipate it with the obvious rejoinder: Yes, I know good people in the church. But I also know good people outside the church. The church has no monopoly on good people, and I've seen no evidence that the proportion is any higher inside the church than outside--it's just that, having been active in the church for thirty years, I know a lot of people in the church.

And, in fact, it seems to me that on balance the people I've met at the Center For Inquiry West, most if not all of whom are avowed atheists, are just as good and decent people as those I know in the church. These are people I like and enjoy spending time with.

Sure, there are good people in the church, but that doesn't mean that they're good people because they're in the church, or that they're in the church because they're good people. If anything, in some ways I suspect they'd be better people if they didn't have the church guiding their actions...but in any case the fact that there are people I like in the church is in no way evidence that the church is true.

Um...okay, I guess all that was kind of stating the obvious. But hey, like I said, there wasn't much to write about the Skeptics' Book Club meeting this month, so I figured I might as well post about something at least tangentially related.

Playing God

2007-03-08T13:51:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago--actually, as it happens, the day after the IIG meeting I wrote about here--my mother called me, and somehow in the conversation the subject of cloning came up. For reasons I can only guess at, my mother attended some kind of seminar about cloning a few years back, and thinks she knows more about the subject than she does. Among other things, she has some sort of bizarre idée fixe that scientists at Caltech figured out how to clone large mammals many years before Dolly but kept the matter a secret because of the ethical issues involved; they didn't want the methods getting out. I don't know whether she misunderstood something at the seminar she attended or whether the speakers there really did advance this astonishing claim, but she refuses to be persuaded that this isn't really plausible.

But that particular belief of hers, I was already aware of. What really took me by surprise in this conversation was when she asserted that part of the potential ethical problem with cloning was that clones might not have souls.

I was speechless. I think "What?" was about all I managed to get out.

Clones might not have souls, she repeated, because they weren't supposed to be created. I don't remember exactly how she worded it, but apparently the idea is that since clones weren't created naturally and weren't part of God's plan, there were no souls allotted for them, so they could come out as soulless monstrosities.

This had me completely dumbfounded. Oh, not that I'd never heard this idea broached before, but I'd only heard it in the context of plots of bad horror movies. To think that someone in the real world would actually believe this--and not just some random fundamentalist, but my own mother--was not something I had really anticipated.

Sensing my disbelief, my mother pressed the issue. This was a real concern, she insisted. She had heard it expressed by church leaders (or maybe by scientists who were members of the church, or something--to be honest, I was still too bewildered at this point to completely register what she was saying). Which may have been a misunderstanding on her part, but at this point I wouldn't really be surprised if it wasn't, and if she really had heard those concerns raised.

A few years ago, my brother stated rather vehemently that he thought the church ought to publicly condemn human cloning. That struck me as a knee-jerk reaction with nothing to back it up; certainly he didn't give any reasons for his contention (though I didn't ask). But I think a simple knee-jerk opposition to cloning without any reasoning to back it up still makes more sense than believing that clones wouldn't have souls.

Okay. First of all, with regards to its not being a natural process it's not clear exactly what makes cloning any different from, say, artificial insemination. I doubt she believes babies produced by artificial insemination lack souls; why would cloning be any more unnatural or any more against God's plans? And it can't be just the genetic identity, since, well, there are identical twins. Is one of every pair of identical twins a soulless monster?

But there's more wrong with this contention than even that. So clones wouldn't have souls because...because God didn't plan for their existence? Wait a minute here. Isn't God supposed to be omniscient? Wouldn't God have known that these clones were going to exist? And if he really doesn't want them to, if they're that much of an aberration against his plans, couldn't he prevent them from existing? The whole thing makes no sense!

This goes well beyond cloning, though; these same issues are involved whenever one talks of "playing God". Okay, there are some hypothetical situations under which I can see "playing God" as being something of a legitimate criticism. Suppose that you had a virtual reality world so advanced that the virtual entities had real sentience, and you were in a position to--well, do with them whatever the heck you wanted. Here, well, okay, given that you'd be tinkering directly with the lives and very existences of sentient beings, and potentially altering their world and surroundings on a large scale, sure, I guess you could call that playing God, and yes, I think there'd be some real ethical issues involved. (And considering how, according to the Biblical account, God has treated his own creations, I think God has done a pretty poor job of playing God himself.)

But popularly the phrase "playing God" is used to describe...well, pretty much any advanced scientific development, especially in the field of biology. Cloning. Genetic modification. Trying to understand the workings of the brain. These are playing God. And they're eeeeevil.

Why? Because man is trying to usurp God's prerogative. He's trying to meddle in God's domain. Sometimes this is assumed to be a conscious goal of the scientists--as the title character says in the 1931 Frankenstein, "Now I know what it feels like to be God!"--but even if it isn't--or especially if it isn't, because then the scientists are just casually disregarding God's affairs--it's still an act of extreme and impious hubris.

Needless to say, for an atheist, that argument doesn't hold a lot of water. (Well, neither does the whole business of "souls", of course, but that's a side issue.)

But really, it didn't make any sense to me back when I still considered myself a believer, either.

The following is an excerpt from something I wrote many years ago, when I still considered myself a faithful Mormon:

I think to claim that mankind has the ability to usurp the powers of God against His will shows far more arrogance and blasphemy than any attempt at cloning or genetic manipulation ever could.

Because really, if man is able to arrogate God's powers to himself against God's will...what does that say about God? In order for these accusations of playing God to make any sense at all, God must be quite a weak and ineffective deity, unable to prevent his own powers from falling into mortals' hands. I'm pretty sure most people who accuse scientists of "playing God" don't think of God that way. So even from a religious perspective, these accusations don't make any sense.

Now, all this isn't to say that there may not be some ethical issues involved with cloning. Does it open the doors to the wealthy and powerful flooding the world with genetic copies of themselves--and if so, is that something that should be prevented? Might cloned children have unfair expectations of living up to the same interests and talents as the people they're cloned from? What about the possibility that as methods are being developed for human cloning, the studies could result in the creation of imperfect or incomplete clones as the methods are being perfected? Is that a problem?

These aren't all necessarily easy questions, and though I personally don't think cloning is inherently unethical, I do recognize that there may be some sticky issues involved.

But "playing God" isn't one of them. If man can take for himself the powers of God against God's will, then God doesn't seem to be much of a god at all.

No Offense

2007-03-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

Well, I succeeded in my goal of seven consecutive days of posting. Which means, since the goal has already been met--yesterday's post was the "seventh"--today's post is not made to further that goal, but just because there's something I've been wanting to post about. The reason for my wanting to try posting for seven consecutive days in the first place was to get myself in the habit of posting more regularly; it seems it may have worked. We'll see how long that lasts.

Anyway, I've mentioned at least once before (in this post) the fact that church lessons in the LDS church go on and on about people leaving the church due to being offended at the actions of another member. The way this gets repeatedly stressed, one would think that was the main reason for people leaving the church. I have serious doubts that that's actually the case--as I've said, offense certainly has nothing to do with my own deconversion--, but again and again the connection is made in church lessons. People usually apostasize initially because they get offended and stop coming to church--that seems to be what all this emphasis is implying.

Well, last Sunday (or a week ago last Sunday, I guess, more specifically), the entire lesson in the Elders Quorum meeting was about that theme. More specifically, it was about a talk by David A. Bednar, one of the newest members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, about that theme. And yes, once again he claims that most people who leave the church do so because they've been offended.

Elder Bednar speaks of having, as a stake president, made "hundreds and hundreds" of visits to "members who commonly are described as 'less active'". A bit of definition of LDS terminology may be in order here. A "stake" in the LDS church is an administrative district comprising a number of local congregations (called "wards" or (where the church is less developed) "branches"); the stake president is, of course, the main person presiding over the stake. And the term "less active" is used to refer to people who are on the records as members of the church but who do not regularly attend church meetings--including those who don't attend at all, and haven't for years. (There used to be more of a distinction made between "less active" and "inactive", but the term "inactive" has latterly been deprecated, presumably because it's too pessimistic; "less active" seems to draw less of a distinction between these members and the church regulars, and therefore imply more hope they can be coaxed back to full activity.) So what Elder Bednar is saying is that he paid visits to people within his ecclesiastical area of authority who were listed on church records but who weren't coming to church.

And he insists that, in most cases, their reason for not coming to church was because they had been offended:

Each individual, each family, each home, and each answer was different. Over the years, however, I detected a common theme in many of the answers to my questions. Frequently responses like these were given:

"Several years ago a man said something in Sunday School that offended me, and I have not been back since."

"No one in this branch greeted or reached out to me. I felt like an outsider. I was hurt by the unfriendliness of this branch."

"I did not agree with the counsel the bishop gave me. I will not step foot in that building again as long as he is serving in that position."

Many other causes of offense were cited—from doctrinal differences among adults to taunting, teasing, and excluding by youth. But the recurring theme was: "I was offended by..."

It's that same claim again, only more explicit than usual: Most people fall away from the church not because they disbelieve, but because they are offended. This had never made sense to me, and doesn't make any more sense to me now. If someone truly believed in the church, believed that its doctrines were necessary for salvation, would they really cut themselves off from it just because of personal differences? Elder Bednar's talk didn't make this seem any more credible:

Most of the "less-active" people I have ever visited had a discernible and tender testimony of the truthfulness of the restored gospel. However, they were not presently participating in Church activities and meetings.

And then I would say something like this. "Let me make sure I understand what has happened to you. Because someone at church offended you, you have not been blessed by the ordinance of the sacrament. You have withdrawn yourself from the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost. Because someone at church offended you, you have cut yourself off from priesthood ordinances and the holy temple. You have discontinued your opportunity to serve others and to learn and grow. And you are leaving barriers that will impede the spiritual progress of your children, your children's children, and the generations that will follow." Many times people would think for a moment and then respond: "I have never thought about it that way."

It seems quite unlikely to me that anyone who firmly believed in the church wouldn't have thought of it that way.

But Elder Bednar insists that these people, yes, did firmly believe in the church. "Most of the 'less-active' people I have ever visited had a discernible and tender testimony of the truthfulness of the restored gospel." And the fact that he feels it necessary to emphasize that makes me think I might finally understand why this claim is being made.

You see, there is, in the LDS church, a great emphasis on "gaining your own testimony"--on getting your own personal witness, by the Holy Ghost, of the truthfulness of the church. (Of course, this "personal witness" is really just a form of self-delusion, but it took me far too long to realize that.) People are supposed to be members of the church not because they like the other members socially, not just because it sounds good to them, but because they know it's true, because the Holy Ghost has testified to them.

So if someone leaves the church...well, what does that mean? Why would they do such a thing?

Obviously, it would be difficult for a Mormon to accept that someone would leave the church just because he concluded that it wasn't true, that the testimony he thought he'd received from the Holy Ghost was an illusion. That couldn't be; the witness of the Holy Ghost was supposed to be unmistakable; a person couldn't leave the church because he'd honestly decided it wasn't true, without other inciting factors first. So there had to be some other reason for not coming to church. And taking offense arose as a plausible reason. If all these "less active" members couldn't really have stopped coming to church because they didn't believe, then it must be because someone at church has offended them. That way, the members of the church are supplied with a plausible explanation for the often high levels of inactivity (or less activity) that doesn't call the whole basis of their testimonies into question.

Did the church leadership intentionally work to come up with such an explanation for apostasy, or do they honestly think that people do mostly leave the church because they're offended? I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, but I suspect the latter. The impression I get, while I could be wrong, is that the leaders of the LDS church are earnest but misguided men who really believe what they're saying. They're not con-men; they're just as self-deluded as the common church members. But regardless of whether the offense explanation is a conscious ploy to salvage the doctrine of spiritual testimonies in the face of the apparent counterevidence of apostates or something the church leadership has convinced themselves of as much to soothe their own misgivings as those of the other members, this does strike me as the best explanation yet for why, despite its inherent implausibility, this claim that most people who leave the church do so because they've taken offense continues to be repeated. After all, it makes a more acceptable explanation--as far as the faithful members are concerned--than that they could have left the church due to honest disbelief.