Saganist

Reason's Greetings in Utah

2011-12-15T19:46:00.000-08:00

I've never really gotten into billboard and bus campaigns. Occasionally I will read blog posts about how a new atheist or skeptical billboard has gone up in some location. The stories are usually about how a billboard was vandalized or prohibited or allowed, or about how a skeptical or atheist group has raised or is raising money to erect another one.

Believe it or not, despite my love of ideas and conversation, and despite my skeptical blog on the Internet, I don't generally seek out religious discussion with people I hardly know. Or rather, I don't do it nearly as much as I did when I was religious. So billboard campaigns as a concept have never really done it for me. Dueling billboards seem too much like a shouting match, and I'm not interested in shouting.

But tonight something happened. I stepped off the train in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I saw this:

My first thought was, "Wow, that's awesome!"

My immediate second thought was, "What is that doing in Utah?"

And then it hit me. There are people like me here. Not in Ohio, not in Virginia, but here. There are enough people like me, apparently even in Utah, to put up a billboard and say, "Hey, we're here!" And I finally experienced what everyone says the billboards are there for: I felt like I was not alone.

Unexpectedly, tears came to my eyes. It felt like what the Christmas spirit is supposed to feel like. It was like hearing O Holy Night for the first time, but without any religious baggage. I wish I had a better way to describe it. It didn't feel like shouting, and it didn't feel like making a point. It just felt like a hug from someone who understands. Sometimes that's all you need, you know?

I know I'm not alone in Utah. There are groups of skeptics and atheists, and I have been to a few events and made some friends. But I'm not particularly close with anyone who shares my views. I don't attend events very often, and I don't hang out with anyone on a regular basis. Nearly everyone I know is religious. Being an atheist and a family man in Utah can be a very lonely road, and much of the time I do feel alone.

So thank you, FFRF. Thank you for reaching out. I didn't even know I needed that, but I really needed it. About the billboard campaigns... I think I get it now.

Strong

2011-12-10T09:17:00.001-08:00

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a wizard. But you don't need to ride a broom to know that there's something wrong in this country, when Muggles and Mudbloods can openly attend Hogwart's but our kids can't even use the Cruciatus curse. As president, I'll end Dumbledore's war on wizards, and I'll fight against liberal attacks on our magical heritage. MAGIC made America strong. It can make her strong again. I'm Voldemort, and I approve this message.

Primary program

2011-09-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

I went to church today for the first time in months, because it was the primary program. I know the primary program is supposed to be cute and fun, and it certainly had that effect as I was making faces and waving at my own kids. But after a while, I just couldn't stand it anymore. I was glad that my 18-month old was acting up so I could take her out in the hallway.

As I sat in the pew today, I began to suspect that the primary program is the epitome of why I can't stand church. It wouldn't be so bad if most, or even some, of the kids went up and said things like, "I know I can be a good person by helping others." Or, "I can help my family by sharing my toys with my sister." Or, "When I mess up I know I can be forgiven." Or even, "Jesus told us to love everyone so I need to try to do that."

But did any of the kids say anything like that? Not hardly. Without a pause, four-year old after four-year old streamed up to the podium and announced things like, "I'm thankful we have a prophet we can follow, and his name is Thomas S. Monson." Or, "I know the prophet will never lead us astray." Or, "I know Joseph Smith saw Heavenly Father and Jesus, and Moroni helped him translate the Book of Mormon." Or, "I'm preparing to go on a mission." One six-year old had a black missionary nametag.

I've come to accept that this is standard fare, but come on. Far from uplifting, I find this extremely depressing. Can we ever let kids be kids? Do we really need to make every single one of them parrot doctrinal garbage when some of them are barely out of diapers? I don't like to think that my kids are being indoctrinated, and stuff like this primary program certainly doesn't ease my mind.

At least we ended the service by singing only two verses of "Praise to the Man". It could have been worse.

My Scrabble interview with BBC radio programme "More or Less"

2011-09-09T09:56:00.000-07:00

This post doesn't have too much to do with skepticism, except insofar as my skeptical outlook has also improved my thinking about the likelihood of various coincidences in life. In case you didn't know, I am a competitive Scrabble player and I have written a program called Zyzzyva to help players learn words quickly and easily.

This past week, I was interviewed by Tim Harford of the BBC 4 radio programme "More or Less" regarding an interesting Scrabble situation. The interview has just been posted on the BBC site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14852052

If you want to hear the interview in the context of the show, listen to the last 5 minutes of the 09/09 show here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

... Oh, and yes, I know that 20,000 squared is not 500 million. Both of those numbers were approximate but I probably should have made them consistent. :-)

Ideological Turing Test for Atheists

2011-07-10T00:42:00.000-07:00

I came across a very interesting Turing Test-like exercise today. It's 15 people responding to a set of four questions. There are some atheists who were instructed to answer the questions honestly, and there are some Christians who were instructed to answer the questions as if they were atheists. The point of the exercise is, can you tell the difference?

If you want to take the test yourself, stop here and go take it. I don't want to sway your opinions by what I've written below. You can probably finish the test in two hours or so. I'm a slow reader and that's about how long it took me.

The answers I judged to be from Christians tended to focus on questions of atheism versus Christianity. The answers I judged to be from atheists tended to have a more pluralistic view of atheism versus religion in general. Also, I tended to judge personal stories to be more likely from atheists, and academic, philosophical explanations to be more likely from Christians.

I also used the guideline from textual criticism that "what is embarrassing or uncomfortable tends to be true", and any responses that shared anything like this seemed to me more likely to be written by atheists.

For the truly curious, here are my answers and reasoning. I refer to all respondents as "he" although I know that any or all of them may be women. Some seemed slam-dunk easy, but many were difficult to judge. I'm curious to find out how well I did.

#1 was a very cogent explanation of what an atheist might believe, and I couldn't find much to disagree with or suspect. Atheist.

#2 constantly talked about Jesus and compared himself to Christians. This Christianity-centered view suggests that the author is a Christian. Christian.

#3 admitted to a natural tendency toward belief. That's a very real phenomenon, and the fact that it is somewhat embarrassing to admit makes it more likely to be true. I don't think a Christian would put those words in an atheist's mouth since it would tend to weaken the atheist's position. Atheist.

#4 took a very black and white, negative, hostile, and unempathetic view of believers. This struck me more as a Christian idea of what atheists think of them, not a genuine atheist view of religious believers. Also, the "gods exists" near the beginning suggested that the text originally read "God exists" and then was changed to sound more like an atheist. The respondent also appealed to philosophers as authorities more than appealing to philosophical ideas on their own merits. This answer reads more like a position paper than a personal story. Christian.

#5 also reads like a position paper. I don't think an atheist would say that "anything which is true is known by the senses". We tend to realize how deeply flawed our own perceptions are. Also, an atheist would know that Uri Geller is not a skeptic, but a psychic fraud. The miracles required by this respondent are pretty ambiguous, which is what I would expect from a Christian, not an atheist. Atheists tend to hold God to very high standards of unambiguous clarity. He also takes a very negative and uncompromising view of believers, which is not the way I think an atheist would represent himself in a forum like this. Christian.

#6 is like #1 to me. Straightforward and honest, and from a personal point of view, not an academic one. And he made an offhand reference to the Trolley Problem, which suggests to me that he is actually familiar with secular ethics and has had many of these kinds of deep conversations. Atheist.

#7 struck me as a Christian at first, making lots of references to specifics of other religions in order to build credibility. But when I hit the "religion is true" part, I had to go back and rethink. This is something I might actually say myself, particularly with the reference to The Myth of Sisyphus. So now I tend to think this respondent is an atheist, but I'm less sure than for some of the others. Lean Atheist.

#8 frames atheism against a strongly Christian backdrop, and refers to "mainstream Christians", a phrase I have rarely heard from an atheist but often heard from Christians. The answers to the last two questions plausibly sound like they could be written by an atheist, though. Lean Christian.

#9 is sweet and to the point. No clues that this might not be a real atheist. Atheist.

#10 talks about Christianity constantly and makes a whole bunch of weak arguments against it. Seems like he's trying too hard. Christian.

#11 seems very personal, which I find compelling. He occasionally uses Christian-sounding language like "all of creation". But the way he talks, particularly the use of the phrase "post Christian" and his reference to G.K. Chesterton, makes me think that he was raised as a Christian but has left the faith. Atheist.

#12 reads sort of like #6 to me. His answers resonate with me. I also laughed out loud at "like pointing out that language or story-telling has persisted" and I tend to think that any entry that gets me to laugh in agreement is probably written by an atheist. He makes a few references to Christianity, including specific references to Calvinism and Paul's admonition of celibacy. But there's just enough snarkiness in his questions that I get the sense he's familiar with Christianity because he used to be a Christian. Atheist.

#13 is a difficult one. He uses the word "worship" many times and his answers seem mostly detached and academic, which strikes me as a Christian trying to portray an atheist. His reference to "modern theologians" at the end seems unlikely for an atheist. He also claims that the religious view is that "morality consists solely of obeying arbitrary taboos", which I don't think most atheists would really say. But his explanations and reasoning are generally very reasonable and believable. It's a toughie, but I'm leaning toward Christian. Lean Christian.

#14 is similar to #7 in some ways. Many academic-sounding references to different philosophies, which raised some alarms. But then an explanation of having studied philosophy in college, which mostly satisfied me. The last paragraph in particular was a very lucid and personal explanation of an atheist's way of dealing with the hard questions, and it convinced me this respondent is an atheist. Atheist.

#15 seems a little incoherent. I don't think an atheist would probably say things like "how could I ever believe one [a god] existed"? I thought for a while about the idea that "faith is the opposite of certainty". I have two thoughts about this sentence. First, I would tend to think that an atheist would say that faith is certainty (probably false certainty). Second, I find it unlikely that an atheist would hold up certainty as something to be desired. Most atheists I know have struggled hard to deal with the fact that uncertainty is inevitable, and that acknowledging and quantifying it leads to progress. Christian.

Farewell, Space Shuttle

2011-07-07T18:34:00.001-07:00

I’m young enough that for me, the symbol of space travel has always been the Space Shuttle. I had a glow-in-the-dark Lego Space Shuttle when I was a kid, and I used to put it together and tear it apart all the time. I remember watching the movie Space Camp, which affected me profoundly as a kid. I watched it again recently and was surprised that it holds up pretty well. For me, the Space Shuttle has always been an inspiration and tightly connected with my love of astronomy.

I was in about 3rd grade when the Challenger exploded, and I have an impression of being on the playground at school when I heard the news. This is probably inaccurate, given the malleable nature of memory, but I have the impression anyway. I think I was mostly disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to watch the live video of Christa McAuliffe answering kids’ questions while in outer space. I wish I could say I didn’t repeat any of the stupid jokes about NASA standing for “need another seven astronauts” but I know I did. We were all stupid kids and we didn’t know how to deal with it.

As an adult, I have a much greater appreciation for the determination and the sacrifices that so many people have made for the sake of science and exploration. Not just in the Space Shuttle era, not even just in the space era, but throughout history. It’s hard work and many people have given their lives to see it through. The fact that we keep doing it gives me hope for the future. I sure hope we keep going. I don’t know if there is a secular equivalent of “so long and godspeed”, but if there is, then I would make it my farewell to the Space Shuttle.

On being wrong, a talk by Kathryn Schulz

2011-05-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

This may be one of the best talks I've ever seen. Kathryn Schulz talks about being wrong. Take 20 minutes and watch the video. It's absolutely worth it. Okay, I'm reasonably certain it's worth it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

Diverging wills

2011-04-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

Read this. After you return from the bathroom having puked your guts out, come back here. I'll wait for you.

. . .

Feel better? Good. Let me ask you something.

Do any of you unbelievers feel anything remotely like the "once-believer" described in this apparently anonymous article? Are any of you consumed with self-loathing? Seeking out increasingly dangerous indulgences to satisfy your insatiable primal urges? Do you dread the evil denouement you know is coming, and wish you could command the rocks and mountains to fall upon you to hide you from God's judgment?

Yeah, me neither.

I am a mediator by nature. It is a fundamental part of my personality that I try to reconcile people who have differences. I try to help people find compromises. I try to help people heal their broken relationships. I value dialogue and listening, and I try to encourage people to see things from another person's point of view. To me, the cultivation of empathy is one of the most important things we can try to do as members of the human family.

What irks me about this article is that it attempts to do the exact opposite. To encourage faithful members to remain in the fold, it caricatures unbelievers as vile, degenerate sinners who are forever miserable. Its intent is to polarize, not to reconcile, except in the rare case where reconciliation means falling back into line under the church's direction. If you're not with us, you must be against us. And furthermore, you must be a bad person. Articles like this actually make it more difficult for me to have relationships with true believers, because they read this tripe and think it somehow reflects who I really am. The article actively impedes dialogue. In fact, that seems to be its main goal.

For the record, the "once-believer" described in this ridiculous article could not be a less accurate description of me. I am not miserable. I am not seeking out ever-increasing levels of indulgence. I do not fear judgment. In fact, I am more at peace with myself and my existence in the world than I have ever been. I am beginning to realize that I am capable of incredible things, and I feel like I have some idea of how to use my talents to make the world a better place.

I wish the LDS church would stop using its official outlets to publish divisive rhetoric. The message of "happy us versus miserable them" is reinforced every six months at General Conference, as well as every so often in the church's other publications like the Church News and the Ensign. Please guys, just knock it off. And yes, my admonition applies equally to unbelievers who claim that all believers are repressed and secretly miserable, though my experience tends to indicate that unbelievers are generally more accepting of a less black-and-white mentality. As in many other areas of life, neither extreme is the truth.

There is more than one way to be happy in the world. There are believers who are very happy with their beliefs, and there are unbelievers who are equally happy with theirs. We should be working together for the common good and understanding. Sadly, this kind of article makes me think that's not what the church is truly interested in. And that's a shame.

Doubting your doubts

2011-03-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

Just now, I read a Mormon Times article by Orson Scott Card, called Guessing leads to knowing. I actually liked most of the article, which surprised me since I don't generally think much of OSC. He's correct that almost all human progress comes from someone who had a hunch or a guess or a crazy idea that they decided to try out. Guessing is indeed a good thing.

However, his reasoning is flawed because his proposed "tests" (praying for confirmation, following church commandments) are not really experiments in a scientific sense. People can believe they feel the Holy Spirit confirming wildly different ideas. How do you know which is correct? Science measures hypotheses against objective reality. OSC proposes testing hypotheses against subjective experience. At best, the experiments may prove which ideas resonate with you personally. If that's all you're after, that's a fine result. But you can't then extrapolate your findings as objective truth.

My father-in-law told me to "doubt my doubts" when he first found out about my disaffection with the LDS church. It didn't make much sense to me at the time. But now I think I understand the premise behind the phrase: that your "doubts" are really just new beliefs. As such, they should be subject to scrutiny just as your original beliefs were. If I accepted the premise that doubts are just new beliefs, I would certainly accept the conclusion that you should "doubt your doubts".

However, there is a fundamental difference between belief and doubt. A belief is a positive assertion that something is true. A doubt is a neutral assertion that I don't know whether something is true. For example, I might say that I doubt the Book of Mormon is a historical record. That statement by itself does not imply that I believe it is not a historical record. It simply means I don't know. I make no assertion in either direction.

Now, one can certainly examine the evidence and come to a tentative conclusion with a reasonable degree of certainty. Would I say the Book of Mormon is more likely to be historical than not? No, based on the evidence I have encountered I would say I believe it's more likely to be biblical fan fiction. However, this statement is not a statement of doubt. It is a statement of belief based on evidence. Do I doubt this belief? Of course! I am willing to change my assessment based on new evidence. And you can believe that's true because I have done so already.

If this is what is meant by "doubting your doubts", then I suppose I already do. But do I doubt the mechanism of doubt itself? Should I boomerang back to my original beliefs before disappearing in a puff of logic? That would be silly. As Orson Scott Card said himself, doubt is the vehicle of progress. To doubt the act of doubting would be like using the Internet to spread the message that all technology is evil. It would be inconsistent, and achieve nothing but a smug self-satisfaction in a castle built on semantics.

So doubt your beliefs. Doubt all your beliefs. If they are worth believing, they are worth doubting. But don't test your beliefs against your feelings. Test them against evidence. And is it worth the self-inconsistency of trying to "doubt your doubts"? I doubt it.

Oh dear, the end times are here (again)

2011-03-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

[Somehow, I was never notified of several comments that were waiting for approval on various blog entries over the past few months. If you made a comment that was not approved until today, I'm sorry!]

I got a visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses this morning. They've been around before, and I am usually far too accommodating. I tend to smile and nod and listen for as long as they want to talk. I usually avoid confrontation whenever possible, and I find it difficult simply to say I'm not interested, even though it would save us all a lot of time.

One of the men introduced himself and asked if he could share a short message from the Bible (he emphasized the word "short"). I said sure. He began to read from Matthew about how Jesus had said there would be wars and famines and... yes, even earthquakes as signs of the end times. He specifically said that the recent earthquake in Japan was a fulfillment of these words. I smiled and nodded and failed to mention the many hundreds of earthquakes and other natural disasters that happen each year. Not to mention the countless number throughout the ages since Jesus allegedly spoke those words.

I choose to interpret these constant signs over thousands of years somewhat differently. I believe it is the fulfillment of the laws of physics. These prophecies are not written in the pages of the Bible, but in the very fabric of the universe from the beginning of time. Far from being signs of the end of the world, they are signs that the universe is still doing just fine, thank you very much. With or without Jesus, with or without the kingdom of God... and frankly, with or without humanity. To think that earthquakes are a sign given specifically to humans seems pretty self-centered.

Anyway, he continued talking about how we would be okay as long as we are part of the kingdom of God. At the point where he asked me, "What do you think the kingdom of God is?" the jig was up. I couldn't just smile and nod anymore, so I said, "I don't really know and honestly I'm not interested in spending much time talking about it." He was very polite and thanked me for my time and the opportunity to share their positive view for the future despite the calamities in the world today. I was surprised at how quickly and graciously they left me alone. I think I need to try directness more often.

I'm not sure whether I should be offended that the JWs showed up on my doorstep using such a horrible tragedy to push their religion. I'm not one bit surprised, of course. People have been doing that for all of recorded history. It's hard to fault them too much for actually believing what they're teaching, either. People like to try to make sense of the world, especially the parts that are senseless. For them, a giant earthquake simply confirms what they already believe. Just like every other natural disaster, and just like the great invisible Second Coming of 1914. People see what they want to see.

So I think I'm not offended. But the tactic of capitalizing on others' misfortune to push your own agenda, used consciously or not, still strikes me as poor taste. At least I had the good sense to articulate my disinterest, or I would probably still be standing in my doorway right now.

Why I don't go to church

2011-02-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

It doesn't seem that long ago, but I guess it's been over six months now. I was giving church another shot, not as a believer but as a curious fringe participant. I was interested to see whether the LDS church could be an enjoyable place to socialize even without being a fully invested member of the in-group. You can probably guess how it went.

It goes without saying that I think the supernatural claims of the church lack credibility. I was not trying to make myself believe those claims, nor to pretend to anyone that I believed them. I wanted to see if I could ignore them and find other positive reasons to attend church. At first, I thought it might help to treat the supernatural claims as part of a fantasy epic like the Lord of the Rings, and treat the church like a dedicated book club. It's nice to discuss what we can learn from the fact that Bilbo was the only character to give up the ring voluntarily. Why couldn't discussions about Joseph Smith and the First Vision be the same?

That worked for a while. It was actually kind of fun to treat the entire experience as interactive fiction. But I found I could only go so far before it became very tedious. In a book club discussion, everyone recognizes the meta-reality of the situation and there is common understanding that the story didn't literally happen. You can step outside the walls of the story and take a look from the outside. But the stories at church are not like that, at least not in the LDS church. You don't get to say, "I find Joseph's story to be a good metaphor for the search for the divine within all of us." No, what you're supposed to learn is that God and Jesus are real, and that they are separate beings with ten fingers and ten toes. We're talking about literal truth here. At least that's what the manual says.

So the stories are mostly fiction but everyone treats them as real, and they're not pretending. Which is fine, I expected that. Mormons spend a high percentage of church time simply talking about the stories, and it's difficult for me to ignore being totally disconnected from reality for so long, but I tried. What I wanted to know was, would the remainder make up for it? At church, could I glean insights into my own life like I used to? Would I learn anything worth learning?

As a Christian in high school and college, I went to church because I felt it helped me become a better person. We often talked about compassion, love, and service, and I surrounded myself with others who were dedicated to these propositions. Don't get me wrong, there are many people in the LDS church who also value these things. But as the weeks passed, I began to see that we mostly weren't discussing how to be a good person. We were discussing how to be a good Mormon, which is something else entirely. And in many ways, for me, becoming a good Mormon would run directly counter to becoming a good person.

For example, one of the virtues I value most highly is empathy. I wish everyone could put themselves in someone else's shoes and see things from their point of view. I try to do that often, but not often enough, and I feel that improving at it would make me a better person. But at church we don't generally try to see things from other perspectives. If anything, another perspective might be raised only to show how it is wrong. Again, this stems from an inability to step away from our personal fictions into the meta-reality of the situation to view ourselves from outside.

There are many other examples that are just as fundamentally wrong, in my opinion. The characterization of LDS teachings as "pay, pray, obey" is not too far off, and I disagree with every item on that list. I feel that I need to give money and service to those in need, and to worthy causes that need support. The church teaches us to give money to the church, for them to use as they see fit, but only a small percentage of that goes to those who need it. I feel that I need to find the inner strength to overcome life's challenges and stretch myself to become a better person. The church teaches that we should let a supernatural being take care of the hard stuff, and sometimes even the easy stuff. I feel that I need to determine my values for myself, and that a bottom-up approach to problem solving, with many ideas from many perspectives, is likely to produce good solutions most of the time. The church teaches that they alone hold the authoritative keys to true doctrine and true morality, and that if you stray from their top-down edicts, you will suffer. And the list goes on.

So that's why I don't go to church. I don't believe the stories, and it doesn't help me become a better person. I disagree with much of what is taught, and there is no freedom to have meaningful discussion about why. I've said before that I like to find meaning in my life by contrast with my environment. But when contrast is all there is, it gets tiresome. My approach to life is so fundamentally different from many other people at church that sometimes it's difficult to relate to what anyone is saying. So I think I've finally admitted that church is not really for me. I haven't gone at all for several weeks, and I've probably attended only a handful of times in the last six months. It's nice to skip being irritated for three hours on a Sunday, but I also haven't found anything to replace it. I keep thinking I should, because despite my introversion I know I need social interaction. But so far, the status quo is okay.

David and his concubines

2010-11-17T12:42:00.000-08:00

I have much more to write at some point soon, but here's a quickie someone pointed out to me yesterday. I'm a little surprised I was not aware of the relationship between these particular passages of scripture, which appear very interesting when juxtaposed. D&C 132 is worth reading in its entirety, by the way. It gets good at about verse 50. Anyway, without further comment:

Doctrine & Covenants 132:38-39
38 David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants, as also many others of my servants, from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me.
39 David’s wives and concubines were given unto him of me, by the hand of Nathan, my servant, and others of the prophets who had the keys of this power; and in none of these things did he sin against me save in the case of Uriah and his wife; and, therefore he hath fallen from his exaltation, and received his portion; and he shall not inherit them out of the world, for I gave them unto another, saith the Lord.

Jacob 1:15 (Book of Mormon)
15 And now it came to pass that the people of Nephi, under the reign of the second king, began to grow hard in their hearts, and indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son.

Jacob 2:23-24 (Book of Mormon)
23 But the word of God burdens me because of your grosser crimes. For behold, thus saith the Lord: This people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the scriptures, for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son.
24 Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord.

NaNoWriMo 2010

2010-10-31T23:57:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month again this year. I've written up a more detailed post about it on my personal LiveJournal. I'm not planning to live-blog it like I did last year, though I may be willing to share if anyone is interested, and I probably will post occasional excerpts on my LJ. It's going to be a fun November!

Follow us... or die!

2010-10-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm officially a cynic. For anyone watching the LDS General Conference... Is it just me, or is there a lot of emphasis this time on trusting God and his authorized servants? I've been listening with half an ear, and it seems like I've heard at least a few speakers say this exact thing. Eyring said it about half a dozen times. Oaks's talk seemed to be all about how you can only find God and happiness through the LDS church, and anything else is Satan leading you astray. I guess I should be used to it by now, but somehow I'm still surprised by the blatant self-aggrandizing of the "LDS church versus Satan for your eternal soul" story that is recited continuously from the pulpit. Are we really supposed to believe the world is that simple, and the white guys in suits have the miracle cure?

Another boring Sunday. Why bother?

2010-08-22T17:16:00.000-07:00

Yet another boring Sunday, sitting through three hours of church. Honestly, it's gotten to where "enduring to the end" means staying awake for all three hours. Is this supposed to be inspiring? Is this supposed to pump me up or "recharge the batteries" so I can go out and make the world a better place and myself a better person? I feel the drive from within myself to do those things, but most weeks it feels like church sucks the life out of me. I'm certainly not recharging anything by going there. I'm sure someone must be getting something positive from it, but that person is not me.

I commented to my wife this morning that I think Jesus would be pretty uncomfortable in our church. He doesn't seem like the white shirt and tie kind of guy. Of course, I said this after failing to get a haircut for a couple months, failing to shave in the past week, and throwing on a green collared shirt after rolling out of bed and taking the world's quickest shower. So I guess I was looking for someone to champion the cause of the bed-headed schlub. I still contend that Jesus has got my back on this one.

A lot of Sundays, I look around and wonder what in the world I'm doing at church. For the past year or so, I've been keeping a positive attitude about church and my own participation in it. In my own mind, my main reason for doing so has been because I enjoy the community and I like being at least a little bit social.

But lately I've been asking myself, is that really true? I can't think of anyone at church I'm particularly close to, and in fact I'm not sure anyone at church even likes me very much. I obviously don't fit in, I wear brightly colored shirts, and the only time I speak up is when I feel I have something worthwhile to say. Unfortunately, that means I rarely say anything because I'm not willing to answer questions like, "What is the definition of priesthood?" Questions like that have no relevance to my life, but the call and response routine is apparently what we have been reduced to. And whenever I do speak up, I usually get blank stares as if I had said the moon is made of cheese and I just had some for lunch. Stunned silence, thinking, "Okaaaaay..."

When I joined the church, I was looking forward to having interesting discussions about deep topics in Sunday school. I was accustomed to that in the Christian churches I previously attended. But in the LDS church, there is no such discussion. It's taken me ten years, but I've finally realized there can be no such discussion in this church because everyone thinks we already know all the answers. Question about the meaning of life? Reference the chart with three circles. Question about the nature of the divine? Reference the Joseph Smith testimony in the back of your book. Question about whether it's okay to wear flip flops to church? Reference last month's General Conference talk. Seriously, we have canned answers for everything.

Because I happened to have it on my iPod, today I also read Why the Church is as True as the Gospel, a Sunstone article by Eugene England from many years ago. He makes some valid points, and I can see what he's getting at, but overall I got the feeling that the church as he experienced it doesn't really exist anymore. The church doesn't stretch me to prove contraries or help me to grow my love for others through service to needy people. It simply annoys me, week after week, as I silently listen to bold proclamations of things I find disagreeable, unsupportable, or factually incorrect.

Some people stay because it's their family, it's their tribe, it's where they feel comfortable, or whatever. I understand that, and that can be a valid motivation. But I've never felt that way about Mormonism myself, even as a believer. For my entire life since high school, I have regularly attended various churches on my own, because I wanted to be challenged and stretched. I have wanted what Eugene England wrote that we should experience in the LDS church, a deeper experience of meaning through struggling to make peace with opposition in all things.

In fact, I would say that's one of the main reasons I still attend the LDS church at all; because I tend to define my own ideas by contrasting them with other ideas that are not mine. "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." I sharpen my ideas by testing them in the marketplace and keeping the best ones, and for a long time as a Christian, I found that church was a good place for me to do that. So somehow I still try to do it in the LDS church. But you know, after a while being constantly beaten down with iron gets tiresome. I'm not experiencing both truths on either side of a paradox. I'm experiencing one truth, running unopposed, and I'm not sure how long I can stand it.

So what's the point? I guess I need to branch out socially. Visit other communities, go to more skeptics meetings, volunteer my time actually doing something useful. It's hard to find the time, but that's not a great excuse. Whatever I'm looking for, I'm apparently not finding it here, and I need to expand the horizons.

Why wage war on certain people's genitals?

2010-08-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

In all the heated Prop 8 arguments that seemingly exploded from every point in the universe simultaneously, there's one idea I hardly ever see mentioned, despite its crucial importance. Perhaps it's never mentioned because it's simply too obvious. I'm referring to the fact that disallowing gay marriage is legal discrimination against certain people because of their genitalia. The official reason that two men cannot be married in most states is because they both have penises. Likewise two women and their vaginas. For all the fuss and foofaraw about religious freedom, freedom of speech, rights, benefits, and tradition, it simply boils down to genitals.

And why? Why should we care so much about what kind of private parts a married couple has in their pants? Why do the parts become not-so-private when it comes to marriage? Is it society's business to inquire about such things, or even further, to ensure that every state-sanctioned blessed union comes with one snail and one oyster? If so, why?

One group of people that is profoundly affected by this policy, but also seems generally forgotten in the public discourse, is the community of people whose gender identity is ambiguous or has changed. Specifically, intersex and transgendered people. In fact, I personally have a friend who was living as a girl when I knew her in high school, but he is now living as a man and is engaged to be married (someday) to the woman he loves. He and his fiancee seem very happy together, and I am happy for them. I have not specifically asked my friend whether he now has a penis, whether he formerly had a vagina, or whether his sex organs are or were ambiguous. The reason I haven't asked is because it's none of my fucking business. Yet from what I understand, our society has taken up the mantle not only of investigating my friend's genitals, but of making it very, very difficult for a transgendered person to be married to anyone.

Again I ask, why? What useful purpose does it serve to forbid certain marriages because of sex organs? If society (somehow) benefits by hiring a bouncer to check people's underwear at the chapel door, does that outweigh the benefit of two people's pursuit of happiness and equal protection under the law?

As usual, the Onion hits this point much better than I ever could, so enjoy this video from a year or so ago:

Conservatives Warn Quick Sex Change Only Barrier Between Gays, Marriage

Just say no to laws based in religion

2010-08-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard that Prop 8 was overturned by a federal judge two days ago, you're welcome. Facebook and the rest of the interwebs have, of course, exploded, which is great because it's been a while since I got a good dose of internet venom. Personally, I think it's much ado about nothing until the appeals climb all the way to the Supreme Court.

When Prop 8 was passed almost two years ago, it seemed clear to me that it had no real basis aside from private religious views. Maybe it's my relatively small sample size of friends, but it seems like that is still the case. Judge Vaughn Walker said this explicitly in his decision, and the Prop 8 defense lawyers apparently couldn't make a very good argument otherwise.

I almost hate to say this, because I want to think the best of people and I know there are some people who have been convinced to support Prop 8 on grounds other than religion. But for the great majority of Prop 8 supporters in my experience, it simply boils down to the idea that God, the Bible, or church leaders said so. Deep down at a bedrock level, that is the fundamental reason to support Prop 8. It really, really is.

Of course, no one ever leads by saying they object to gay marriage because of their religion. We all pay lip service to the idea that our laws need to serve some secular purpose. But I've seen too many people trot out arguments like "homosexuals can't procreate" or "homosexuals are inadequate parents" or "churches will be forced to perform gay marriages" or "marriage has always been between a man and a woman." And when each of these arguments is refuted, it usually comes down to, "Well, I believe God said it's wrong."

But private religious views cannot be the basis of law in the United States. I wish more people would realize that the separation of church and state is as much a protection for your religion as anyone else's. Just because your religious view happens to be a majority does not make it constitutional to pass discriminatory laws based on your religion. If the rise of Islam overtakes Christianity in the next century, will you fight to pass laws criminalizing graphic depiction of Muhammad? If you understand why not, you should understand that Prop 8 has been rightly struck down for the exact same reason.

Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us

2010-07-10T23:32:00.000-07:00

We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
~ Carl Sagan

It's been a while since I made a Sagan Sunday post. I discovered this video today and loved it. The world could use more people like Carl Sagan. Happy Sunday.

52,000 Nephite coins discovered in Mexico!

2010-07-08T22:15:00.001-07:00

Okay, not really. Today, a friend elsewhere on the Interwebs pulled this exact same April Fool's prank in July. (If you're reading this, I hope you don't mind me stealing it!) He linked to an amazing article about a treasure hunter finding 52,000 Roman coins in Britain and titled the link as if someone had found Nephite coins in Mexico.

The point is that the Romans were in Britain at about the same time the Nephites are alleged to have been in the Americas. Yet while Roman artifacts are constantly unearthed in the UK, we have yet to find any coins, or any other evidence for that matter, of Book of Mormon peoples anywhere.

Frankly, I'm shocked that anyone would assume that we should find any actual archeological evidence of the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations in America, just because we find abundant evidence of ancient Romans everywhere in Britain. Hello...? That was like, totally across the ocean! Think, McFly, think!

Also, Moroni is well-known to have taken Book of Mormon evidence back to heaven in the form of brass plates. Since this is the only action he is known to have taken vis à vis BoM evidence, why would we think he would leave some evidence behind? It doesn't fit with what we know of his character.

Those senines and shiblums and amnor coins were Moroni's wishes, Moroni's dreams. And he took them back. He took them all back.

Chrissy Satterfield's kind of vandals

2010-07-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

The Friendly Atheist reports about a billboard that was recently put up along the Billy Graham Parkway by the North Carolina Secular Association. Naturally, it was vandalized within a week. I would expect no less.

Any normal person, regardless of their affiliation, would condemn vandalism and destruction of property, right? Well, apparently not everyone. Chrissy Satterfield of WorldNetDaily thinks the vandals are heroes for sticking it to the atheists. She says,

I would like to extend my deepest thanks to the man or woman responsible for this vandalism. I appreciate the action you took. Thank you for reminding me that I'm not alone. It took a lot of guts to do what you did – and the fact that you haven't stepped forward to take credit makes you a hero.

A hero indeed. Some heroes defend our nation on the front lines of battle, and others defend it with a can of spray paint in the middle of the night. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Chrissy Satterfield also asks, "How is this billboard not offensive to me?" And she's right. I feel really terrible that Chrissy Satterfield, along with countless other Christians in North Carolina, had to be exposed to a quote from the Pledge of Allegiance as it was originally written. This billboard went too far. Atheists have no right to make their presence known on a billboard, especially not on the Fourth of July, and especially not on a street named after Billy Graham. Do they have no respect for our country or its Christian leaders? If atheists want to exercise their freedom of expression with a billboard, they should do it on a back road somewhere where nobody can see it, and they certainly shouldn't imply that they can be patriotic Americans just like religious folks. Talk about wolves in sheep's clothing! In a way, it was every patriotic American's duty to vandalize this billboard, to make sure America stays #1.

There's a bright side, though. In the comments to the Friendly Atheist article, Ryan Tombleson wrote:

I’d hate to be the one to break it to Ms. Satterfield, but the billboard in Charlotte was repaired on the Friday before the holiday. I would also like to thank the man or woman who committed the vandalism. Because of his or her action, the billboard gained national attention and membership of CAA has exploded. We’re on pace to set a record amount of attendees at our next social meeting and will be joined by a local reporter who is covering the group. Because of someone’s ignorance, people who were stuck in the bible belt and unaware of our presence now have a place to meet other link-minded individuals. It’s a beautiful thing.

In a way, it's interesting to me that the vandalized billboard accurately reflects the Pledge of Allegiance itself: "one nation indivisible" with the words "under God" incongruously scrawled by someone who felt the need to inject their personal religion into our secular government. Thanks indeed to the Christian vandals for their clear demonstration of how the words "under God" got there in the first place.

Why America is worth defending

2010-07-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

~ The original Pledge of Allegiance

Today's lesson in church was all about how the United States is a choice nation blessed by God himself, how the Constitution was divinely inspired, and how true patriots should love and follow the Lord Jesus Christ. The instructor even got in a dig against all those silly people who want to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance. "Chill out," I think he said. But seriously, everything that is good about America was flatly asserted to be tied to belief in God, Jesus, and specifically, the Mormon church.

I get a little tired of all the quote-mining and emotional rah-rahing that is supposed to prove that obviously this is a Christian nation and obviously God blesses us only when we believe in him and marginalize those who don't. One lady during testimony time said something like, "The more I read the New Testament, the less I understand how the Jews could reject Jesus. He's so clearly the Messiah!" Um... yes, I suppose one might get that impression by taking the Christian scriptures at face value. I don't think I've ever slapped my forehead so hard during church, and that's saying something.

Normally I tend to keep quiet because I'm not sure I have anything helpful to say, but today I needed to speak up.

I didn't bring up the fact that the Constitution does not mention God, Christ, Jesus, a Creator, or anything like that. I didn't mention that the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797, states explicitly that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion". I didn't mention that the "under God" clause was only added to the Pledge of the Allegiance in 1954 at the height of McCarthy anti-communist xenophobia.

What I did share is something absolutely dear to me. I said that to me, the heart of patriotism and my love for freedom is embodied by a quote commonly attributed to Voltaire (a French philosopher, I dared to mention). "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This is the attitude on which is based our freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association... all the basic human freedoms America claims to value and ensure.

I said that you cannot go to every country in the world and vocalize your dissatisfaction with your neighbor or your government. In some countries, you will find yourself incarcerated or even executed. I think that perhaps the most fundamental virtue of America is the fact that we have the right to disagree peaceably. I have noticed an escalating polarization, especially in our nation's politics, where we tend to demonize those we disagree with, to call them unpatriotic, not real Americans, or worse. I said that we need to recognize that we are all trying to do what is right and what is best for our country, and it does not help when we refuse to listen to those we disagree with. I expressed hope that we are not taking for granted our individual right to express ourselves, and the corresponding responsibility to hear others' expression.

Okay, that's probably not exactly what I said. But it was pretty much along those lines. My point is that flag-waving means nothing to me. It's too easy and superficial. I don't believe the USA is #1 just because we wave a giant foam finger that says so. I believe that America has fundamental strengths that many of its citizens don't fully appreciate. They are difficult strengths and rare human virtues, the kind that have to be paid for with the blood of patriots. It's not just a matter of repeating a mantra, that America is the "greatest" nation in the world, whatever that means. It's also not a matter of promoting our own religious ideology above all others. It is a matter of honoring the freedoms that our valiant dead have died for, and treasuring the exchange of ideas that our system makes possible. It's a matter of defending our right to disagree, even when it feels more natural to try to squelch the competition by shouting them down. Let's not take that greatness for granted.

Bedtime conversations are the best

2010-06-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

Sometimes my five-year old son, Alex, likes to trade beds with his younger brother. He likes to sleep in his brother's car bed and drape blankets over the openings for "privacy". But last night the darkness of the room, exaggerated by the privacy blankets, started to freak him out. He came out of his room and said he felt like there were ghosts in the bed. Frowning, he told me, "Autumn [his older sister] said ghosts aren't real. But sometimes I feel like they're real in here," pointing to his chest.

I said, "That can be scary, huh. Sometimes our feelings tell us one thing but we know it's not really true." I held him for a while and we talked some more. Finally I told him that his mom was baking cookies and that if he went back to bed, I would bring him a cookie when they were ready. I went back with him to his room, and we pulled the privacy blankets off the bed to help him feel less scared.

As he was yanking on an afghan to cover himself with it, I said, "Do you know who made this blanket?"

He said, "Mom."

I said, "Nope, not Mom..."

He guessed, "Grandma?"

I said, "Nope, not even Grandma. It was my grandma. Grandpa Thelen's mom. Her name was Florence, and she was a really nice grandma. I loved her very much, and that's why we named Anita [our baby] after her, with her middle name Florence."

He asked, "Is she still alive?"

I said, "No, she died... probably about fifteen years ago."

Then Alex took the conversation in a direction that I always find a little uncomfortable, because I'm never sure what to say. He said, "My teacher at church said that when you die, then you come back alive."

I said, "That's what some people think, huh. That's what they teach you at church."

And then he asked the salient question I knew was coming. "Is that true?"

I thought about it for a few seconds. I said, "It would sure be nice, wouldn't it? It's a nice idea, and I would really like it to be true. But I just don't know. I think sometimes you just have to say, I don't know, but I hope so."

He said, "I hope so, too."

It was a touching moment for me. I think my son is a lot like me, and he often thinks about these kinds of things. We have conversations about it every so often. Even though I'm never sure exactly what to say, I always love the feeling of helping my kids explore their ideas about this existence we find ourselves in.

Of all the things that one could hope to be true about religion, I think the idea of an afterlife is the one I would actually want to be true. I don't particularly care whether there is a god, or whether Jesus was who Christians think he was, or which church is God's One True Church. I certainly don't care about most of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity or any other religion. But to be able to prolong my own existence, and to spend time with those I love, even after death? Yeah, I could live with that one. It seems extremely unlikely, and I don't have any evidence for it, and I have no good reasons to believe it whatsoever, but I actually do hope that one is true.

Defending genocide in modern religion

2010-06-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I was sitting through a Sunday school lesson about 1 Samuel 15, in which Saul is commanded to slaughter the Amalekites. Men, women, children, and livestock; none were to be left alive, but Saul screwed up. He brought back the king as a prisoner, and he also spared the best sheep and cattle to be sacrificed as burnt offerings. Because Saul failed to kill everyone and everything as he was commanded, the Lord was mightily pissed off.

Somehow the discussion did not center around the question of why our murderous deity would command genocide and then burn with anger when his servants fail to carry it out. Instead, the main thrust of the lesson seemed to be Samuel's words in verse 22:

But Samuel replied:
"Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD ?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams."

Ah yes, obedience. I was just thinking it had been at least seven days since I heard a lesson about that.

At some point, someone in the class did raise the question of why Saul had such a problem killing the best few cattle when he apparently had no problem killing every Amalekite man, woman, and child. And eventually, the instructor asked the class why it was necessary to obliterate every living creature in the rival civilization at all.

Various participants came up with a number of rationalizations. The Amalekites were evil and perverted. They worshiped false gods. They wanted to lead the Israelites away from their true religion or covenants or whatever. Someone said that it may have been the same reason God told Nephi to kill Laban in the Book of Mormon. I think someone said that God has his reasons, and that even if we don't understand the reasons, we just need to obey.

I'm sorry, but these ideas are crap. Not only are they pure speculation, but even if it were possible for every single person in a society to be irredeemably evil, that does not justify the murder of children. The Bible is not the only religious book that advocates slaughtering infidels in defense of the faith. We don't tend to think very highly of other religious folks that perpetrate large-scale violence in the name of their god. Why should we seek to justify genocide simply because the religious text is ours?

These kinds of stories are not what the world needs right now. This is a tale of Bronze Age warfare, not an Information Age life lesson. I hate sitting through discussions about how we can learn obedience from Old Testament war stories, and how we can try to apply it to our lives today. Can we just admit that some things in the Bible just do not apply? Can we admit that some things in the Bible are truly fucked up? Can we please admit that if this story is literally true, then God is a sadistic, twisted puppy? No, you can't say that out loud in Sunday school. So I'm saying it here.

Infinity

2010-06-22T13:28:00.001-07:00

Infinity is a funny thing. When I was a kid, my mom always used to tell me that she loved me to the moon and back infinity times. Not long ago, it occurred to me that she might as well have said she loved me to the grocery store and back infinity times, or the width of a hair and back infinity times, or to the edge of the galaxy and back infinity times. It's all exactly the same distance. But I guess some infinities sound larger than others.

My kids, especially my 5-year old son, have started using the word infinity to describe everyday things, which almost always produces an amusing mental image in my head. For example, my son will say that he wants a snack and he would like infinity popsicles please, and of course I have to picture the entire known universe filled with popsicles, and then some.

A few days ago, I fixed our Nintendo Wii, which was making a horrible grinding noise, and today it started making the noise again. I told my son that it shouldn't take me very long to fix it again this time, and I should be able to fix it more permanently because I got some practice last time. He said he hoped I wouldn't be fixing the Wii for infinity days... or worse, infinity years.

Of course, infinity years is not at all worse than infinity days. I asked him, "Do you know when you could use the Wii if I had to fix it for infinity days?" He said he didn't know, and I said, "Never!" And I said the same for infinity years. Then I reassured him that it probably wouldn't take anywhere close to that. Then again, whether it takes me one hour or three days, either possibility is equally close to infinity years, which is to say, nowhere close.

My kids also don't tend to use a million or a billion to stand in for a very large number. They usually say a googol. The other day I was remarking to my wife that a googol is probably much larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and she wasn't convinced. I did a back of the envelope estimate and came up with about 10^80 atoms in the universe, which by sheer dumb luck turns out to be very close to the actual best estimate we have. And a googol is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than that.

So ten times the observable universe is still nowhere close to a googol atoms. One billion observable universes is still about 100,000,000,000 times less. You have to take one hundred billion billion observable universes to get about one googol atoms. And that is equally distant from infinity as the number of atoms in my pinky fingernail. Infinity is a funny thing.

We each have our reasons for staying or leaving

2010-01-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted at Main Street Plaza.)

I posted this elsewhere not too long ago, and it seemed to get positive feedback, so I thought I would share this experience here and get your thoughts about it.

During a conversation with my wife in the car after meeting some fantastic believing/disaffected couples for dinner last week, I realized something that has somehow completely eluded me until now. My wife and I approach the church very differently because it has fulfilled completely different needs for each of us.

I joined the church as an adult convert ten years ago. Previous to that, I had many deeply spiritual experiences as a Christian, but not in the LDS church. I did not join the LDS church because I felt anything special, or because I felt it met any particular spiritual or emotional need I had. If anything, I found the LDS style of worship definitely lacking in the profound spiritual feelings department.

Instead, I joined the LDS church because, based on my investigation, I believed it was true. Many of the beliefs made a lot of sense to me, and as I read much of the material that has been written about the LDS church, both pro and con, I believed I had found something that fulfilled prophecy and had the true gospel. Or at least something as close to such a thing as I was likely to find.

Consequently, as I have reexamined my assumptions and my beliefs over the past few years, I found it easy to disconnect from the church emotionally once I no longer believed in it intellectually. After all, I did not join for the emotional, spiritual, or social aspects of the church. I joined the LDS church because it made sense. Once it no longer made sense, I had no reason to hold onto it, and I let go almost immediately.

My wife, on the other hand, still enjoys being a part of the community and enjoys the good feelings she experiences when she goes to church. As she has learned more about the historical or doctrinal problems in the church, I have sometimes been confused as to why many things don’t seem to bother her as much as they bother me.

But last week I realized that she did not join or stay in the church primarily for intellectual reasons. It doesn’t matter as much to her whether everything makes sense in a rational way, or whether there are problems with the history or doctrine. Those are not her reasons for being there. She feels spiritually connected in the LDS church, in the same way I felt as a Christian before I joined it. That’s why I look back on those times with fondness, and that’s why she stays in the LDS church today. Whether it’s true or not has little bearing on that.

I think a lot of us disaffected folks approach the church in the same way I’ve described my own approach. We see it as failing the test of truth, and therefore try to distance ourselves from it. That’s certainly a valid way of dealing with it. But I realized that there are other reasons people might reasonably choose to stay despite the problems, and I think that’s fine too. After all, I think just about everyone needs something spiritually fulfilling (note I did not say religious or supernatural). While I personally do not find that in the LDS church, and I never have, some people do. And that’s why my wife probably will never have the same problems with the church that I do, and that’s okay.

Now if only we could get the warm fuzzies without the authoritarianism, life would be golden!

Santa Claus is a good metaphor

2009-12-24T22:25:00.000-08:00

A recent blog post on Dale McGowan's Parenting Beyond Belief (highly recommended) talks about kids' belief in Santa Claus as a dry run for their belief in Jesus. The experience of realizing that Santa Claus doesn't literally exist has many parallels to the experience of realizing that God and/or religion also aren't all they're cracked up to be. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of a way in which they're significantly different.

- Everything seems to work by faith and magic despite logic and evidence.
- Parents teach their children and hope they continue to believe as long as possible.
- If you're good, you get good gifts. If you're bad, you don't.
- He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake.
- Jesus will return to earth, and Santa Claus is coming to town.
- We all gather regularly to sing songs in praise of both.

I guess the extremity and duration of the "eternal" good gifts and bad gifts might count as a difference. But the main significant difference seems to be that a whole lot of adults continue to believe in Jesus. Here's where I insert a link to another very enjoyable blog post I read a few years ago: What It Feels Like to Be an Atheist. I think about this article all the time, because I think Santa Claus is nearly a perfect metaphor.

So tonight, Christmas Eve, I got my kids hyped up for Santa Claus to come. We tracked him on the NORAD Santa Tracker. We talked about what presents Santa might bring, and whether they've been good kids this year. We put out cookies and carrots in anticipation of his arrival. My seven-year old daughter wrote him a beautiful note, which I will probably keep forever.

But Santa won't read the note. Santa won't eat the cookies. We will have to eat the cookies ourselves, and sprinkle a few crumbs on the counter as "evidence" of Santa's visit. We will act surprised when we discover what presents Santa brought. We will speculate about how he gets in and out of the house, how he can know when everyone is asleep, and what exactly you have to do to avoid getting a lump of coal. We will do this every year, until eventually the children will figure out that Santa Claus is not really coming to our house. In fact, despite our innocent hopes and dreams, he was never there at all.

Profound conversation with my 4-year old son

2009-12-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

The following is a conversation I had last night as I was tucking my 4-year old son, Alex, into bed. Autumn is his 7-year old sister.

Alex: I have a cramp, and I think my toe bone is almost broken.

Me: Oh no, we'll have to check it tomorrow and see if it's okay.

Alex: How can we even do that?

Me: We'll just see if it still hurts in the morning.

Alex: I think I'll know if it's broken even since I'm four years old. I don't want to have a broken bone, and I don't want to die either.

Me: You don't want to die?

Alex: Yeah, but I think everyone has to die.

Me: Well, that's true, but I hope you don't die for a long, long time. I think you'll live a long life and be very happy.

Alex: Autumn said everyone has to die sometime or somehow.

Me: But you know what? No matter what happens, I will always love you, forever. And Mommy will too.

Alex: I will always love you, too. And Mommy, and Autumn. And I love Netflix.

Me: They have good stuff to watch, don't they?

Alex: Yeah, like Sponge Bob.

Me: Good night, I love you.

Looking for critical feedback of my latest novel

2009-12-06T22:25:00.000-08:00

Well, November is over, and that means NaNoWriMo 2009 is done. On November 30 at about midnight, I finished the first draft of my latest novel, which is a little under 60,000 words. That would be maybe 200-ish pages in paperback? I'm looking for critical feedback, so if you're interested in ripping into my novel and telling me what's wrong with it, please let me know! You'll need to send me your email address so I can invite you to the private blog, where you can leave your comments. You can send me an email at mthelen *AT* (gmail dot com).

I'm actually pretty happy with how the story turned out, for a first draft. Several people who have read it or are reading it have had good things to say, which I find encouraging. At the same time, it does need a lot of work. I'm going to let the draft sit until March before I try to revise it at all. At that point, the story will be less fresh in my mind and I should be able to approach it more objectively than I could today. I will also be taking everyone's criticism very seriously as I revise it. I'm interested in all manner of ideas, from typo corrections all the way up to complete plot overhauls. Everything is subject to change, but I want all the changes to make the story better.

NaNoWriMo is always a blast. My wife and I did it together again this year, and we both won. Last year, I wrote 50,000 words, but the story was about half-finished when I quit. Can you guess whether I ever finished it? I wrote another 5,000 words about 10 months later, but that's it. I was determined not to do that again this year. Regardless of anything else, I wanted to finish the story, and I did. It feels great to set a goal and accomplish it.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson answers "Do you believe in UFOs?"

2009-11-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

This video has been sitting open in a tab in my browser for a couple weeks now, so I figure it's about time to post it. Someone asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson, "Do you believe in UFOs or extraterrestrial visitors?" His answer is wonderful. For those too busy to watch nine minutes of awesome, his answer is summed up by the following:

"Somebody sees lights flashing in the sky . . . they say, 'I don't know what it is. It must be aliens from outer space visiting from another planet.' Well, if you don't know what it is, that's where your conversation should stop! You don't then say it must be anything!"

This is a classic argument from ignorance, and Tyson explains it very well. He also touches on the value of eyewitness testimony, and gives a strategy for UFO abductees to use if they want to be taken seriously by science. Great stuff.

Neil Tyson talks about UFOs and the argument from ignorance.

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

2009-11-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

In honor of Carl Sagan's 75th birthday, Broward College is hosting the 1st annual Carl Sagan Day today. Speakers include D.J. Grothe, Phil Plait, James Randi, and others. Do something to honor his memory today, if you like. Watch an episode of Cosmos, take the telescope out for a spin, or encourage someone to think skeptically about something.

Carl Sagan's writing has been instrumental in helping me to understand my own point of view better, and was critical in allowing me to admit to myself and others that I am a skeptic. I owe him a lot. I'll post more about that someday, but today is not the day. I have a novel I need to be writing. I haven't posted much about Carl Sagan here lately, mostly because I'm too lazy. But I'd like to get back to having a Sagan Sunday at least once a month.

Here's a video I recently discovered, in which Carl Sagan features prominently, along with Richard Feynman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye. I could watch this over and over. It's basically a spiritual experience for me. I hope you enjoy it.

Symphony of Science - We Are All Connected

The Daily Show: The 11/3 Project

2009-11-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

For the love of Pete, wake up people! They are coming for your internal organs! If they can take Glenn Beck's burst appendix to save his life, who's to say they can't take your healthy appendix tomorrow and eat it in front of you and your children?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The 11/3 Project

www.thedailyshow.com

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The Daily Show: The 11/3 Project

Iraq security forces using dowsing rods as bomb detectors

2009-11-06T09:50:00.000-08:00

This story is scary as hell. There is nothing in this story, and in fact nothing in the entire body of scientific knowledge, that would suggest dowsing wands are capable of detecting bombs or anything else. False positives and false negatives are easily rationalized away, and in fact both are done by Iraqi officials in the course of this short story. It really would be funny, except that people will die because of this. It's as if TSA wanted to swing a magic crystal pendulum around your head to detect any weapons before you could board an airplane. It's ridiculous.

Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri says, "I know more about bombs than anyone in the world." He also confidently dismisses all the rigorous experiments done to determine whether the dowsing wands are actually capable of... you know, detecting bombs. "I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them," he says. "Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs." Really? You actually care about that? If you care, you might bother to examine the evidence instead of putting people's lives at risk based on your magical interepretation of the ideomotor effect.

Colbert - Mormon Church Trespassing

2009-11-04T11:27:00.000-08:00

This Colbert clip is fantastic, as always. It's about the two guys who were arrested for criminal trespassing on Main Street Plaza, and not at all because they are gay. In case there was any doubt about that, hear the money quote: "I am absolutely not a professor of sticking it to the gays."

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Nailed 'Em - Mormon Church Trespassing

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Nailed 'Em - Mormon Church Trespassing

Read my NaNoWriMo novel in progress

2009-11-01T09:50:00.000-08:00

I've been debating with myself whether to share this year's NaNoWriMo novel in progress, but I've decided to do it. This year I'm writing a story about the first commercial cruise to Mars, in the year 2060 or so. If you're interested in reading it, shoot me an email at mthelen (at) gmail dot (com) or leave your email address in a comment - I think I need your email address to invite you. However, if you think you are interested, there are a few things you should be aware of.

1. It will not be good, and I'm not trying to make it good. I'm trying to write as many words as possible, as quickly as possible, and I am turning off my Inner Editor. Trust me, I will eventually be as bothered about my bad writing as you are, but not now. You may be horrified to learn that the story will even contain notes to myself, written in square brackets. This will be a rough draft in the truest sense of the word.

2. Along these same lines, I will eventually be interested in critical feedback, but right now I'm mostly interested in adulatory praise and flattery. I'm also interested in knowing what you find most interesting about the story, and what you're looking forward to reading next. I won't promise to satisfy you, but I think I will find that kind of feedback valuable.

3. For the most part, I plan to write the story straight through, but I may very well write scenes or entire chapters out of order. If this happens and it confuses you, try to remember that this is just a pile of rubbish anyway. I will do whatever I need to do to get my 50,000 words by the end of the month. I apologize, dear reader, that I am not truly writing for your benefit. Yet.

4. There will potentially be offensive language, mature themes, embarrassing dialogue, and unlikable characters who might seem an awful lot like you. I will be writing whatever comes to mind, and I will not be censoring anything for anyone. If this might bother you, please don't read it! You've been warned.

5. I may eventually try to get this story published, so please don't share any portion of it without my explicit permission. The blog is by invitation only, so if you've been invited, consider yourself special and please respect the limited nature of this draft's distribution. Obviously, all contents of the blog are copyright 2009 Michael Thelen, all rights reserved. Yadda yadda.

It's NaNoWriMo time again!

2009-10-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

Last November, I finally took the plunge and participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. It was a blast, and I actually pulled it off!

Unfortunately, I can't show you the finished product, because... well, it's not finished. Although I wrote 50,000 words, the story was just starting to get interesting. In the past 11 months, I've only added about 5,000 more words, so the novel's current status is still "half-finished first draft". I've learned my lesson, and this year I will be completing a full story arc by 50,000 words even if I have to write scenes consisting entirely of a single sentence such as, "Here is the scene where two of the alien's three heads confess their love for our hero, while the third head spits in his face."

Here are a few more lessons I learned from last year's NaNoWriMo experience.

Give yourself permission to write a shitty first draft. No, seriously. I pretended to do this last year, but in hindsight I wasn't really committed to it. I did a lot of re-reading, cleaning up dialogue, closing plot holes, etc. That is absolutely not the way to pump out a first draft in 30 days. During the month of November, your Inner Editor is your enemy. Sure, it will be your best friend on subsequent revisions, but not in the next 30 days. Go for quantity, not quality. The goal is to get it written, not to get it right. Detailing David's lovely locks before you even chisel out the bottom half of his body makes it less likely you'll finish the sculpture at all.

But just how shitty are we talking here? Without your Inner Editor, does this mean your plot may not make sense? Yes. Does this mean your characters may be boring stereotypes or wild caricatures of your cow-orkers? Yes. Does this mean your dialogue will be full of clichés, and will probably read like it was written by a second grader? Yes. Does this mean you will leave stray commas, parentheses, and adverbs where none are needed? Yes. Does this mean you will write run-on sentences from hell? Yes. Does this mean you will make up impossible fantasies instead of spending hours of research to ensure your sci-fi devices obey the known laws of physics? Oh, hell yes. Make something up. Pretend you're an expert. Write love notes to yourself and use them toward your word count. Don't worry too much about where this is going. Just go, go, go!

Don't fall too far behind. To write 50,000 words in 30 days, you need to average about 1,666 words per day. This can seem daunting, but less so if you write without the Inner Editor reading over your shoulder. However, even if you write like the wind, there may be times when you fall behind. Especially during Week 2, when the novelty has worn off and your story starts to get stuck. Last year on November 16, I was 10,751 words behind pace. I was supposed to have written 26,666 words, and I had only written 15,915. I saw the writing on the wall; unless I made a drastic change, I wasn't going to make it. I confessed to my wife that I didn't think I was going to finish. It was fun while it lasted, and I wouldn't feel too bad for falling short.

Fortunately my wife talked some sense into me, and I kicked it into high gear. Making up ground is possible if you fall this far behind, and it can even be thrilling, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's much better for your sanity if you can stay on pace by writing every day. Write a ton during the rush of Week 1, and you will give yourself a cushion that Week 2 will do its best to destroy.

If you do fall behind, catch up with sprints. Writing in short, focused bursts is a good way to crank out high word counts while avoiding burnout. I like to do what Simon Haynes suggests; write in chunks of 500 words, four times per day. Each sprint should last about 20-30 minutes. If you get behind, Simon also has a fantastic catch-up plan that will net you 7,500 words in a single day. I did this last year on November 22 and it made all the difference. I went from 6,000 words behind to right on track. Talk about a confidence booster!

So what are you waiting for? Have you ever wanted to write a novel but haven't sat down and made it happen? Almost no one has done it, but writing a novel is well within reach, and there's no better opportunity than NaNoWriMo. Sign up now, and while you're at it, add me as a writing buddy. Even if you're not participating, you can follow my progress at the link above, and I'll be posting about it periodically on this blog as well. Any questions? Let me know. Happy noveling!

Are you a Mormon?

2009-10-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted at Main Street Plaza.)

At Main Street Plaza, we recently discussed the various names we use to refer to ourselves (liberal Mormon, NOM, post-Mormon, ex-Mormon, etc.) depending on how we each perceive our relationship with Mormonism. I’m interested in much more direct question, which I’m never quite sure how to answer. Are you a Mormon?

It seems like a straightforward question, but I find it surprisingly tricky because it’s not always clear what is meant by “Mormon”. If it means a member of the CoJCoLdS, then my answer should be yes, because I am still on the records as a member of that church. If it means someone who has ever had the experience of being a Mormon, then my answer is also yes. If it means a person who considers oneself a part of the Mormon culture or believes Mormon doctrine, then my answer should be no, because I am neither. For others, the situation may be reversed; you might not be a member of the church anymore, but still consider yourself part of the Mormon culture. So are you a Mormon?

In my own mind, I’ve pretty much moved on from Mormonism, but to answer either yes or no without further explanation seems strange. I tend to give a different answer depending on the context. If a stranger asks, I’ll usually just say no unless I’m interested in having a conversation about Mormonism. If I actually feel like talking about it and they seem interested, I might start with something like, “Technically I am a Mormon, but…” I’ve heard of others using the phrase “I was raised Mormon,” which I would love to use, except that I was an adult convert. Do the details really matter? Maybe the phrase “I used to be a Mormon” is an acceptable substitute.

However, there is one situation in which I always say yes: whenever I run into LDS missionaries. I’m not interested in arguing with them, and I’m not interested in their attempts to convert me, either. So I just say yes, I’m a Mormon; no, I don’t have any referrals; good luck, elders, and have a nice day.

When I sat down to consider this question, I was surprised to discover that my answer depends mostly on whether I feel like getting into a discussion. In a way, my approach feels a little shady, but I think I’m okay with it. How about you? How do you answer the question? Are you a Mormon?

Should we beat this guy up for violating Leviticus?

2009-10-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

The Friendly Atheist has an interesting post illustrating the dangers of cherrypicking from Leviticus. Apparently there was a brutal beating of a gay man in Queens recently, and one of the attackers' buddies proudly displayed this tattoo.

The tattoo reads, "You shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22." Ignore for the moment that "abomination" means ritual uncleanness in the exact same way as eating shellfish or touching a menstruating woman. Ignore for the moment that Leviticus also prohibits eating pork, wearing clothes made of two kinds of material, trimming your beard or sideburns; and prescribes the death penalty for talking back to your parents. Ignore all that for now.

Let's simply skip to the next chapter, Leviticus 19:28, which says, "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD." Levitical law is apparently very important to this idiot. But not important enough to read more than a single verse that appears to justify his prejudice. Well, Levitical law is very important to me too, and I think I would be justified in beating this guy nearly to death for violating it. Wouldn't I?

Dallin H. Oaks is wrong again

2009-10-15T15:58:00.000-07:00

It can be frustrating when the LDS church always insists on framing itself as the innocent victim, even when they are actively seeking to oppress others. They seem very interested in speaking out of both sides of their mouth in the past few weeks, first with Bruce C. Hafen's anachronistic address on the evils of homosexuality and now with Dallin H. Oaks's recent statements about religious freedom, in which he compares the LDS church to oppressed black people in the 1960s. (No, I'm not kidding.) I read the address from Oaks in its entirety, so I understand his statements in context. Here are my responses to Oaks's five points of counsel concerning religious freedom.

First, we must speak with love, always showing patience, understanding and compassion toward our adversaries. We are under command to love our neighbor (Luke 10:27), to forgive all men (Doctrine and Covenants 64:10), to do good to them who despitefully use us (Matthew 5:44) and to conduct our teaching in mildness and meekness (Doctrine and Covenants 38:41).

Yes, please. I'm on board. After all these press releases and the recent General Conference addresses attacking everyone from gays to unbelievers to parents who teach their children to think for themselves, I would love to see a little more mildness and meekness.

Second, we must not be deterred or coerced into silence . . . We must also insist on this companion condition of democratic government: when churches and their members or any other group act or speak out on public issues, win or lose, they have a right to expect freedom from retaliation.

I completely agree with this. However, what Oaks and his ilk seem to want is not freedom from retaliation, but freedom from opposition. That is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution. There is nothing illegal or immoral about boycotting the businesses of those who contribute money to causes you disagree with. There is nothing illegal or immoral about denouncing bigotry broadly and loudly. Oaks did get one thing right, though: vandalism is wrong. Vandals deserve to be prosecuted and punished under the law.

This next statement seems to be the one that has gotten everyone riled up:

It is important to note that while this aggressive intimidation in connection with the Proposition 8 election was primarily directed at religious persons and symbols, it was not anti-religious as such. These incidents were expressions of outrage against those who disagreed with the gay-rights position and had prevailed in a public contest. As such, these incidents of “violence and intimidation” are not so much anti-religious as anti-democratic. In their effect they are like the well-known and widely condemned voter-intimidation of blacks in the South that produced corrective federal civil-rights legislation.

Okay, in the context of his argument, the point would be technically valid if religious voters were actually intimidated against voting on Proposition 8. However, I haven't seen any evidence of this. All the "retaliation" he cited happened after the election, and most of it was not intimidation but simply free speech.

While I think I understand why he said it, I'm frankly amazed that he chose the "blacks in the South" analogy, and that he stuck by it when pressed. It's a very, very bad analogy for several reasons.

First, if any group is being deprived of its civil rights analogous to blacks in the 1960s, it is certainly not the LDS church. It is the gay people who are being denied the right to marry. Duh. I mean, mega-duh.

Second, as I said, it's not clear that anyone was actually intimidated against voting in the Proposition 8 contest. People didn't just boycott black businesses in the '60s. Call me when Prop 8 opponents start lynching and turning the fire hose on Mormons on their way to the voting booth.

Third, the LDS church actively discriminated against black members until 1978, at least a full decade after the rest of the country got with the program. LDS church leaders have made many extremely racist remarks in their official capacities as officers of the church. Most notably, Brigham Young spent three decades preaching racism and hatred from the pulpit, including the doctrine that "if the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so." Considering the circumstances, Oaks's comparison of the LDS church to blacks struggling for civil rights is thoughtless and offensive.

Just because you have a persecution complex doesn't give you the right to compare yourself to every group that has ever been oppressed. Especially when you yourself were the oppressor then, and you are still the oppressor now. Come on now.

Third, we must insist on our freedom to preach the doctrines of our faith.

No problems here. Freedom of religion entails the freedom to preach bigotry. Freedom of religion does not entail the freedom to enact bigotry into law simply by virtue of its religious nature. However, all people, religious or otherwise, have the right to vote as they please.

Fourth, as advocates of the obvious truth that persons with religious positions or motivations have the right to express their religious views in public, we must nevertheless be wise in our political participation. . . . religious persons will often be most persuasive in political discourse by framing arguments and positions in ways that are respectful of those who do not share their religious beliefs and that contribute to the reasoned discussion and compromise that is essential in a pluralistic society.

Excellent. I assume this means the church is retracting the false assertions it advertised widely during the Proposition 8 campaign: that churches will be forced to perform gay marriages, that schools will be forced to teach young children about gay sex, that private adoption agencies will be forced to give children to gay couples, etc. Not to mention the biggest, most ridiculous lie of all: that gay marriage somehow takes away the rights of heterosexual people. Spreading lies about your opponents seems less than respectful.

Fifth and finally, Latter-day Saints must be careful never to support or act upon the idea that a person must subscribe to some particular set of religious beliefs in order to qualify for a public office. The framers of our constitution included a provision that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” (Article VI). That constitutional principle forbids a religious test as a legal requirement, but it of course leaves citizens free to cast their votes on the basis of any preference they choose. But wise religious leaders and members will never advocate religious tests for public office.

Top-notch advice. This is in contrast to Rick Warren's statement, for example, that he "could not vote for an atheist", and the 2007 Gallup poll where 53% of respondents said they would not vote for an atheist presidential candidate. As a likely result of these kinds of attitudes, the number of Congresspersons who listed their religion as "unaffiliated" in a 2009 Pew Forum survey is exactly... zero. In fact, according to the survey, "In 2007, Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a Unitarian who joined Congress in 1973, became the first and so far only member of Congress to publicly declare that he does not believe in a Supreme Being."

Far from "persons with religious-based points of view [being intimidated] from influencing or making the laws of their state or nation," as Oaks would have you believe, the current situation is the exact opposite. Lack of religious belief is political suicide. But it shouldn't have to be.

For the most part, I agree with many of the principles Oaks outlined. My main beef is that I don't believe the LDS church generally follows its own advice in this regard. And the comparison to "blacks in the South" was completely unjustified and ridiculous. I understand that playing the victim is a cherished LDS tradition, but sometimes you need to own up to your actions. Dallin H. Oaks, you're truly not the victim here.

General Conference impressions

2009-10-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I keep putting myself through this. We spent the day at my in-laws' house, and of course they watched both two-hour sessions of the LDS General Conference on TV. I decided to pay attention, because even if I disagree with much of what is said, every once in a while someone will say something interesting.

The morning session was okay. I don't remember much except Eyring explicitly emphasizing that you and every member of your family need to be "worthy" if you want to be with your family in heaven. This strikes me as a particularly nasty mafia tactic. Awfully nice family ya got there; it would be a shame if anything happened to it. Every other religion that comes to mind already believes that you will be reunited with family after death. Only the Mormons make it conditional.

The afternoon session was much worse. Holland went off on a tirade about how Joseph Smith's miraculous story of the golden plates is the only possible explanation for the Book of Mormon, and that all other explanations are "silly theories" and "pathetic answers". Anyone who doesn't believe this story is "foolish" and "misled", and must... well, actually, I'll let you read the words for yourself.

[T]ell me whether in this hour of death [Joseph and Hyrum] would enter the presence of their Eternal Judge quoting from and finding solace in a book which, if not the very word of God, would brand them as impostors and charlatans until the end of time? They would not do that! They were willing to die rather than deny the divine origin and the eternal truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.

For one hundred and seventy-nine years this book has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other book in modern religious history—perhaps like no other book in any religious history. And still it stands. Failed, often silly theories about its origins have been born, parroted and died—from Ethan Smith to Solomon Spalding to deranged paranoid to cunning genius. None of these frankly pathetic answers for the book has ever withstood examination because there is no other answer than the one Joseph gave as its young unlearned translator. In this I stand with my own great-grandfather who said simply enough, ‘No wicked man could write such a book as this, and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.’

I testify that one cannot come to full faith in this latter day work—and thereby find the fullest measure of peace and comfort for our times—until he or she embraces the divinity of the Book of Mormon and the Lord Jesus Christ of whom it testifies. If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to reject 531 pages of a heretofore unknown text teeming with literary and Semitic complexity without honestly attempting to account for the origin of those pages—especially without accounting for their powerful witness of Jesus Christ and the profound spiritual impact that witness has had on what is now tens of millions of readers—if that's the case then such persons, elect or otherwise, have been deceived and, if they leave this Church, they must do so by crawling over or around or under the Book of Mormon to make their exit. In that sense the book is what Christ Himself was said to be ‘a stone of stumbling,… a rock of offence,’ a barrier in the path of one who wishes not to believe.

First, every religion has its martyrs. Joseph and Hyrum Smith did not go meekly to the slaughter, but died in a gunfight while incarcerated on charges of destroying a printing press that was being used to expose Joseph's polygamy and aspirations to set himself up as a king. All of this is well documented, and completely irrelevant to whether the Book of Mormon has divine origins. My point is that Joseph Smith did not choose to "die rather than deny". He was violently killed by a mob after continually provoking those outside his Latter Day Saint movement.

For the record, my personal assessment is that Joseph Smith probably did not consider himself an "impostor and a charlatan", but was a devout Christian and believed that the Book of Mormon would bring more people to faith in Christ. The Book of Mormon is like Christian fan fiction, except it desperately wants to be part of the canon. Joseph may have even felt "divinely inspired" while dictating the story from a rock in a hat. But I tend to think he knew on some level that he wasn't, which explains the extremely lame excuse for the lost 116 pages. Anyway, all of this is armchair psychology, and also irrelevant.

Here is what is relevant. Any of the explanations mentioned by Holland (Ethan Smith, Solomon Spalding), as well as the null hypothesis that Joseph Smith simply wrote the Book of Mormon himself, are much more plausible and better evidenced than Joseph Smith's miraculous story of angels, golden plates, seer stones, and a "Reformed Egyptian" language no one has ever seen before or since. This explanation is supported only by the testimony of Joseph's friends and family, who claimed they saw the plates "with the eyes of their understanding". Nearly everything that is falsifiable about this explanation has been falsified. If you're going to call unbelievers foolish for disbelieving the paranormal story that is contradicted by evidence, you're going to need to come up with some damn good reasons why this story is more likely than the null hypothesis.

Holland made a brief allusion to such an alleged reason when referring to "Semitic complexity", which I must believe refers to chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. The problem is that chiasmus also exists in James Strang's Book of the Law of the Lord, the INFORMIX-OnLine Database Administrator's Guide, and even, according to LDS apologists themselves, in "random" (unintentional) places in the Book of Mormon. The human brain is extremely adept at finding patterns where none exist, especially when one is looking for the pattern in the first place. The presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon is evidence of its ancient origin just as the presence of the word adieu is evidence of its French origin. In other words, it's not.

Also, how do I account for the fact that the Book of Mormon has had a profound spiritual impact on millions of people? The same way I account for the fact that billions of people believe the Pope speaks for God. The same way I account for the fact that billions of people have been profoundly spiritually impacted by the Qur'an. Excuse me, I think misspelled a word. I said billions, but I meant to say BILLIONS. The only way Mormonism can win the numbers game is not to play. Oh yeah, and I should mention that the numbers game is, of course, irrelevant. Millions of Hindus can't be wrong either.

The point of Holland's talk seems to have been polarization. I believe his talk will strengthen believers while also pissing off and alienating unbelievers. Is this what we really need? Is it useful somehow? I can understand his frustration with the increasing numbers of Mormons leaving the church lately, but launching into a rant about how stupid you must be not to believe in the obvious truth seems like a bad long-term strategy. If the church wants a small group of fundamentalist fanatics, they should continue to make inflexible, literal-minded speeches like this one. If they want a large group of believers of various level of orthodoxy, they will need to be a little more tolerant.

Before this talk, I actually considered Holland to be one of the more understanding and compassionate members of the Q12. From what I've read, and the talks I've heard from his own mouth, I believed he had a bit of insight into the mind of an unbeliever, or at least a bit of empathy for anyone who has tried to believe but simply cannot. I am greatly disappointed in him. I don't know why I keep expecting people, religious leaders even, to be rational rather than polemic. I'm starting to realize that such a hope is completely naive. People simply do not change, and religion gives them the perfect excuse.

So to sum up. Is the Book of Mormon a stumbling block, something that must necessarily trip me up in my irrational desire not to believe? Hardly. As an unbeliever, must I hopelessly crawl through the muck, always to curse God and never to find true happiness? Not really. Is it going to be easy to continue dealing with the personal attacks and vilification from the octogenarians with chips on their shoulders and heads up their asses? Apparently not. I really have to get better at tuning this crap out.

General Conference predictions

2009-10-02T23:03:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted at Main Street Plaza.)

Back in the days when I paid attention to LDS General Conference, I always attended the priesthood session with my wife's father and brother. I enjoyed the tradition of returning to report some fantastic fictional revelation to my wife and her mother. I call this a tradition because I did it every time, but I was the only one who ever did.

When I returned from the priesthood session in October 2000, shortly after I was baptized, I reported that President Hinckley had a revelation that all worthy women should be allowed to receive the Aaronic Priesthood, beginning on the next Sunday. They were flabbergasted and asked if that was really true. "No," I said. "But he did say you're supposed to wear only one pair of earrings."

I think the reason I did this is because I longed for true revelation. Something that could make a real difference. Even as a new convert, I recognized that no longer do Prophets Of God boldly proclaim Revelations From The Lord about the Very Nature Of God And Humanity. These days, "thus saith the Lord" has been replaced with "thus saith the manual", and dress codes and style guides pass for revelation.

I've forgotten most of the fake revelations I came up with over the years, but every once in a while, I still wonder what kinds of "revelations" from the LDS church leadership I would actually be impressed with. Here are some things I would love to hear. They may be implausible, but hopefully not totally out of the realm of possibility.

- All members will be afforded the same opportunities regardless of genitalia, social standing, business background, or sexual preference.

- The church's finances will be made public again, as they were before 1959, so everyone can confirm the incredible charitable work that has been done with members' donations. And for the next month, all donations will be given to those in the Philippines who desperately need it.

- Members are encouraged to express concern or dissent with the church's policy or actions, because that is a necessary part of a healthy community. Church leadership will seriously consider members' feedback instead of excommunicating them.

- The Word of Wisdom means what it says. Don't scald your throat with hot chocolate and don't eat three Big Macs in one sitting. Beer is okay, as are tea and caffeinated drinks. Better yet, disregard the Word of Wisdom entirely and follow the recommendations of your physician instead.

- Members are encouraged to examine church history from all perspectives, thinking critically about the evidence for the church's claims and trying to be as objective as possible in reaching their own conclusions.

- Previous revelation states fairly clearly that a proper tithe is 10% of one's surplus. Especially in these difficult times, this interpretation is emphasized, without any subtle implications that you should pay 10% of gross income instead.

- An earthquake of epic proportions will hit the Salt Lake Valley on March 22, 2010. Everyone pack up your handcarts. We're heading to Missouri.

Okay, maybe it's too much to hope for. Sadly, I think the chance of any of these revelations is nearly zero. Almost any of them would be a good start in making the world a better place. Instead, what we will hear from the prophets, seers, and revelators is probably more like this.

- Obedience is the first law of heaven. But don't just obey any old person. Obey the prophet. He says exactly what God would say if God could talk.

- Tithing is the first law of heaven. We won't come right out and say how much you should give. Just give as much as you possibly can, or preferably even more. It would sure be a shame to miss out on all those blessings, wouldn't it?

- Speaking of money, we're building a dozen new temples. That's called faithful stewardship, and it's certainly not a wasted opportunity.

- For God's sake would you please stop sending your kids to church in skirts and flip flops! How many times do we have to say this?! The Lord is displeased!

- Pornography is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly bad it is. By the way, you can find lots of it very easily on the Internet. But don't look at it. Don't even think about it. In fact, don't even think about trying not to look at it. We shouldn't even be talking about it right now. But we can't stop talking about it. That's how bad it is!

- I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that this is the true church of Jesus Christ on the earth today. I know that Thomas S. Monson is a true prophet. We love our dear prophet so much. We are unworthy to kiss his feet, or even to unloose his oxfords. May the Lord bless him with good health, and long life, and lots of sweet widow stories forever and ever. Oh yeah, and nameofjesuschristamen.

What would you love to hear in General Conference? Got any predictions of your own?

Hey preacher, leave those kids alone!

2009-09-19T07:04:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted at Main Street Plaza.)

I have a 6-year old daughter, and one issue that will start coming up soon is baptism. It’s not the actual baptism that bothers me; I basically see it as a rite of passage. I think eight years old is far too young to decide to join a religion, but if my daughter wants to do it, that’s great. What makes me most uncomfortable is the prospect of interviews with the bishop.

Interviews make me uncomfortable for several reasons. First, I’m not thrilled about a relative stranger probing for private, personal details of my children’s lives, especially without her parents in the room. I’m not okay with the church acting in loco parentis when the parentis is already loco. Second, the church ostensibly teaches a concept of Jesus Christ as a mediator between us and God. However, in my experience, the institution itself likes to usurp that place, and interviews are a powerful way to do that. Third, most of the shortcomings one is asked to confess are not really shortcomings. The bishop asks questions to determine whether you are a good Mormon, not whether you are a good person. And finally, the horror stories. Oh, the horror stories.

Our bishop seems like a good guy, but I’ve heard the stories many times, from people I know. The perverted bishop who pried for details about a young girl’s level of intimacy with her boyfriend. The girl who had no idea what oral sex was until the bishop described it in detail. God forbid, the actual sexual abuse that occasionally shows up on the evening news. I’m sure that most interviews are not like this, probably not even close. But you never know when it will happen. In a private room with a closed door, with a young girl who believes the bishop speaks with the authority of God, inappropriate things will sometimes happen. And as the parent of a daughter, it worries me.

Strangely, I’m not as worried about my younger sons, at least not as far as the inappropriate questions and behavior. Maybe that’s because they’re not old enough to be interviewed yet. Or maybe it’s because almost every horror story I’ve heard happened to a girl.

I see value in the act of confession, whether it be to another person or simply in your own private reflections or prayers. It can help us become better people by identifying our shortcomings, but only if we define a plan of action for overcoming those faults and improving our lives. I think it’s interesting that in the Catholic church, you are given the choice to speak with the priest face-to-face, or to keep your confession (theoretically) anonymous. I can see how anonymity could help you feel that you are confessing to God, not just to the guy across the desk. I can’t ever see the LDS church moving toward anonymous confessions, because the point of the interview is to identify a connection between your identity and your status vis-à-vis the church. I think the interview is meant to strengthen one’s loyalty to the institution, not one’s penitence before God.

On a related note, has anyone noticed that the LDS church has gone a little interview crazy lately? Tithing settlement, temple recommends, PPIs, and you had to get a special recommend to attend the recent temple dedications in the Salt Lake Valley, for crying out loud. This screams of control tactics to me. I don’t remember Jesus grilling his apostles about masturbation. He usually just said, “Come, follow me.”

Anyway, I’m not sure of the best course of action. I think all the potential problems may be alleviated by insisting that my children not be interviewed unless one of their parents is present in the room. It still doesn’t thrill me, but at least I may retain a modicum of control over the situation. If my child feels less inclined to divulge personal secrets that way, so much the better. It's none of their business anyway.

Do you have any interview stories of your own? Do any of you have kids that have been through interviews? How did you feel about it? How did you handle it?

MSP: The Ethics of Speaking Up

2009-09-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

C.L. Hanson invited me to blog over at Main Street Plaza (don't worry, this blog isn't going anywhere), and today was my first post. It's called The Ethics of Speaking Up, and I hope you enjoy it. It's about a question that has been on my mind for a long time, which I don't have a good answer to. When do you speak up, what do you say, and who do you say it to? Especially in the context of church or conversations with believers, I have no idea what the right answer is.

Gay scientists isolate Christian gene

2009-09-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

Swiped this from de-conversion:

Drinking Skeptically with Salt City Skeptics, tomorrow night!

2009-09-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

For any of you in the Salt Lake City area who are interested in good drinks and good conversation, there's a Drinking Skeptically event tomorrow night (Wednesday), 7:00 at Piper Down. I went last month and had a great time. Eat dinner beforehand or order something there, either is fine. Just be there!

Good week at church today

2009-09-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

Most weeks for me at church are really irritating, but this week was actually pretty awesome. I think it started last night as I was dreaming about (not really dreaming, more like my brain was trying to work out) how I could be more active and part of the church community even as total unbeliever. I'm not sure I want to commit to anything regular, like - heaven forbid - a calling. But I like some of the people at church and I could probably stand to be more social.

So I approached the day with a positive attitude. My wife got a migraine just before we were about to leave the house, and I surprised her when I said I would take the kids to church by myself. Not for all three hours; I'm not that crazy. But long enough for my wife to take a nap.

The Elders Quorum lesson was about profanity. The instructor is one of my favorite people at church, because he always has an entertaining way of saying things. He took an interesting approach wherein he alternately would write "fake" swear words on the board, but then refused to say "Dios" out of respect, even though he said the word in English when he asked, "What's the Spanish word for God?" I volunteered "cheese and rice" as fake swear words. He didn't get it, and I didn't explain it.

I brought up the recent study showing that using actual swear words can alleviate pain in physically painful situations, and the instructor said that you could probably find a study to support any position. He mentioned conflicting studies about the benefits of wine, and said we should take those kinds of studies with a grain of salt. The guy next to me and I looked at each other immediately. He said, "Salty wine?" I said, "Maybe with a margarita, but not with wine, ugh!"

The instructor then proceeded to cite a few scientific studies as part of his lesson. For some reason I can't remember which studies they were, but they were good ones. I thought the irony was kind of funny, but then again, I was amusing myself throughout the whole lesson. Other people piped up and talked about how the most offensive part of profanity was the (sometimes) hurtful intent behind it, not necessarily the words themselves. Not everyone was convinced.

After the lesson, one guy came up to me in the hallway and said he had read about the same study I cited. We got talking, and I was surprised that we agreed about nearly everything regarding profanity, even down to the idea that words truly have no meaning except the meaning we give them. It was perhaps the coolest conversation I've ever had in church.

The Sunday School lesson was about "celestial marriage", and I was prepared to bite my tongue hard when the instructor started reading from D&C 132. But instead, it turned into a discussion about nice things we can do for our spouses to show them we love them. I enjoyed the conversation so much, I even stopped reading my book! In fact, I was in such a good mood by the end, I even said the closing prayer when I was called on spontaneously to say it. Most weeks I either would have declined, or seated myself farther back to begin with.

Anyway, as long as I'm going to church, and I don't see that ending anytime soon, I think having a positive attitude helps a lot. I'm going to try to do that more often, and to look for ways to interact that don't require me to share everyone else's beliefs. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it was a good day and I'm feeling encouraged.

He wants evil powers

2009-09-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, my wife and I were substitute teachers in a primary class at church. I remember it was my son's class, so it must have been the four-year olds. I usually like teaching primary, and try to focus the kids' attention while also being goofy and uncontroversial. I enjoy being goofy and uncontroversial, which doesn't seem to happen much at church anymore. I also enjoy teaching lessons like "I'm Thankful For My Toes". Apparently they've recently changed the lesson manual so the lessons are more like "Follow the Prophet" (big surprise), but that's another story.

I also love all the funny things kids say. At some point during the lesson, my wife held up the picture you see above. It's a picture of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane. My wife asked, "What is Jesus doing in this picture?" And one girl replied immediately, "He wants powers. He wants evil powers." I couldn't stop laughing. The same girl mentioned "powers" at least two more times before the end of the lesson. Primary is awesome.

Radio Lab: Moments

2009-08-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

This four-minute film, Moments, was recently featured on the Radio Lab podcast as short #16. I definitely recommend it. I also recommend listening to the rest of the Radio Lab "Shorts" podcast episodes. They are all short, and they are all incredible.

Life as distraction

2009-08-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I've had a gnawing feeling at the back of my consciousness. I've tried to shake it — believe me, I've tried — but it's always there, floating around the back of my head like storm clouds just over the horizon. Sometimes I can ignore it, but never for very long. Although it has been my lifelong companion, I haven't been able to identify this feeling until recently.

Here it is. I've always felt that I am filling my life with busywork to distract myself from the difficult task of figuring out who I am, what my purpose in life is, and what I need to do about it.

I have felt this way not only when doing actual busywork, but also when doing things that are ostensibly worthwhile. I have felt this way while reading classic literature in high school, serving inner-city kids on a college mission trip, improving my skills at chess and Scrabble, playing volleyball on the Lake Michigan beach, fixing computers, and writing blog posts. I've felt this way while studying history and religion, which is ridiculous because I love those two subjects so much that I have often spent all my spare time learning more about them. Maybe love isn't the right word. Maybe it's more like obsession to the point of distraction, which is sort of the point.

Joining the LDS church quelled the feeling of distraction very well, because church-related activities will suck away all your time if you let them. That was one of the things I liked best about it. There's precious little time to discover your true self, when you're losing yourself in the Lord's work. And when I was reading my scriptures, preparing lessons, and attending ward activities, I felt like I was making the world a better place. In some ways, I was. At the same time, much of it was definitely busywork, and none of it was my true calling. Someone else assigned me a plausible life purpose, and I happily followed it. I feel like I've been indulging that avoidance mechanism for my entire life. Mormonism was perhaps the biggest distraction I've ever provided for myself.

I have filled my time with plenty of other distractions, too. Competitive chess and Scrabble, computer programming, amateur astronomy, foreign languages, skepticism, reading, podcasts, and way too much time on Facebook. These are all worthwhile pursuits, and I believe I am a better person because of them. But they're not who I am, and they're not what I ultimately want to do with my life. Unless they are, but I haven't figured that out yet.

I think it's likely that I'm already doing some of the things I ought to be doing with my life, probably not to the extent I ought to be doing them. Or maybe I should be doing something I haven't discovered yet. Who knows? Because I haven't identified my purpose yet, everything feels like a distraction. Of course, even if I find my true calling in life, it's impossible to break free of all distractions without joining a Zen monastery. Hm, maybe I ought to join a Zen monastery. At least I have given this feeling a name, and I will let it inform my life instead of ominously looming over it.

So what's my point? What's my purpose? I don't know, but I want to find out. I am the only person who can determine the right answer to this question. That's assuming the question has an answer, but I suspect it does. Has anyone else felt like this? If so, and if you have found any answers to this question for yourself, how did you find them?

A crappy review of The Reason For God

2009-08-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

About 10 months ago, a friend recommended that I read The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. Here is a blog post I made at that time, with my impression after reading the introduction. I'm sad to say that my impression of the book did not improve much after reading it.

I finished the book many months ago, and I've been meaning to write a review ever since, but I've found it difficult to commit myself to spending the time necessary to do it justice. So I've decided to write a crappy review instead. Here's what you'll get:

1. A basic overview of what the book claims to be, and my impression of what it actually is.
2. A summary of the biggest problems that became increasingly frustrating as I read the book.
3. An unedited transcript of my notes, which I hastily scrawled on index cards, natch.

Despite all the negative things I say throughout the review, I would mildly recommend reading the book if you're interested in this kind of thing. At the very least, it did make me think, and I appreciated that. Also, the book seems to be pretty popular, and it may be useful to be familiar with it. On to the review!

1. What the book actually is

The book bills itself as helping skeptics to evaluate their doubts in the same way they evaluate belief. That's fine, and I think this is a noble goal. I am in favor of everyone reevaluating their beliefs, and questioning not only why they believe certain things, but why they doubt as well.

As for me, I know exactly why I doubt: lack of evidence. When the evidence is good enough, I believe. Unfortunately, this book never addresses evidence. It presents many philosophical arguments against some questions that I doubt many atheists would actually care to ask, such as "How can one religion be right and the others wrong?" Um, I don't have a problem with that concept. But I also don't have a problem with the concept that they're all wrong. Although it is logically consistent for one belief to be correct, and many others to be wrong, that does not imply that your particular belief is correct. For that, we would need evidence.

2. The many problems with the book

Reading this book made me increasingly frustrated for many reasons.

First, despite the book's billing, the author approaches every question from the point of view of a believer justifying his belief, not the point of view of a skeptic looking for evidence. This leads to a lot of begging the question, e.g. "Our existence is evidence of God's existence." No, in fact that's not evidence. That's just assuming the thing you are trying to prove.

Second, he often falls prey to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. He dodges legitimate concerns about Christianity by claiming that people who believe X, Y, Z are not true Christians. For example, those who support violence, injustice, a literal hell of fire and brimstone, etc. Just because you don't believe something as a Christian doesn't mean it's not a real consequence of believing in Christianity for many Christians. Yes, true Christians.

Third, and most importantly, he is a philosopher, not a scientist, and the book reflects this. The entire book is about philosophy and never addresses evidence. That was probably the most frustrating thing to me. I expected something very different.

Oh yeah, and chapter 9 ends with a quip about how anyone who disagrees with him is dishonest and lacks integrity. That didn't thrill me either. I do question my beliefs, and I do question my doubts. I question everything, and I try to base my beliefs on evidence. In doing so, I reach a different conclusion from Timothy Keller, but I don't believe he is dishonest or lacks integrity.

3. The unabridged brain dump

Enjoy this. I would like to hope that my frustration was not in vain. I apologize for the rough nature of the notes, but I just can't bring myself to go back through the book again to make them more coherent.

I make no claims of being unbiased; as I recall, I tended to take notes mostly on the things I disagreed with. Also, if you are offended by colorful language, be sure to skip the notes from chapter 8. If you enjoy colorful language, be sure to skip directly to the notes from chapter 8.

Ch 2: Suffering
- Our sense of justice is evidence of God
- Therefore, Jesus suffered and died for our sins because the Bible says so
- Suffering is a good thing because it will make the glory and joy of heaven that much greater

Ch 3: Christianity is a straitjacket
- He sure likes to attack straw men. "All truth is a power play"? Please.
- Christianity is more like African supernaturalism than secularism is.
- This guy is in love with C.S. Lewis.
- This chapter was mostly a waste. This is not an issue that I have any problems with.

Ch 4: Religion breeds injustice
- "No True Christian" would be a fanatic
- Secularism has started just as much violence as religion (???)
- The Crusades were caused by values outside Xianity, therefore we should more fully embrace true Christian values
- Christianity is the only belief system that could perceive the injustice of slavery & segregation, b/c MLK was a Christian
- Let's pick and choose lots of good Christian examples of charity, shall we?
- Those who support injustice are not "true Christians". Ta da!

Ch 5: God sends people to Hell
- This guy is in love with C.S. Lewis.
- Someone should tell Christians about Keller's idea of Hell. I don't think they've heard of it.
- If everyone chooses Heaven or Hell for themselves, where does Christ come in?
- Evidence? None.

Intermission
- I don't want "proof", just some evidence that shows how God's existence is the most likely explanation, or at least more likely than the null hypothesis. Is that too much to ask?
- You CAN study the sun best by looking directly at it.
- Saying that our existence supports the argument for God's existence is BEGGING THE QUESTION.

Ch 8: Clues of God
- Who caused God? And why don't you mention this objection? You only like accusation of self-insufficiency against skeptical logic? Does the existence of God imply the existence of infinite gods?
- Welcome mat: BTQ again. We exist and have evolved to adapt to the universe, not the universe to us. This is a misunderstanding of evolution.
- The regularity of nature is an argument for God ... why exactly?
- The Clue of Beauty: it is the nature of an illusion that you don't know it is an illusion. (or find it hard to believe) The existence of beauty implies the existence of God ... why exactly?
- Interesting that the lack of evidence is transformed into "clues"
- Holy flying fuck, he really actually went there. He's trying to claim that reason is a product of evolution and therefore we can't trust it. Give me a fucking break. What about EVIDENCE!? Evolution is not philosophy, it is science! "We can't know anything, therefore this might even be a dream world, therefore God exists." Huh?
THIS WHOLE F-ING BOOK IS ABOUT PHILOSOPHY AND NEVER ADDRESSES EVIDENCE.

Ch 8 cont.
- Just because our emotions are the result of chemical reactions doesn't mean they are not REAL.
- A secular person doesn't say "Maybe the Big Bang caused itself." She ought to say, "we don't know what caused the Big Bang but we're trying to find out."
- He assumes too much.

Ch 9: Knowledge of God
- "Everyone knows there is a God" is not a radical thesis, it's an arrogant one. What about everyone who lived before the concept of monotheism was even developed?
- Perhaps no values are objectively better than others, since we are the measure of our own values. But subjectively we each believe our own values ARE better, so we fight to give them influence. This is not a contradiction.
- What is the basis for human rights? I am. And so are you. Not our beliefs, but our persons. We must act in a way that would be fair to us if we were in the minority. Appealing to God doesn't provide a solution any more than appealing to the sun. We believe in human rights because we are humans.
- "There is no God" may lead to the conclusion that napalming babies is culturally relative. I don't know. Just because I have an opinion doesn't mean that opinion is objective, even if I feel it is. It is the nature of subjectivity to feel objective. There are cultures that have practiced human sacrifice. it is a culturally relative morality. This is true and consistent. And subjectively, it is wrong. Sez me.
- Living with dignity despite the nonexistence of gods is not a lack of integrity. In what universe does that make sense? There may be no objective meaning of life, but we are here. Now. And we create our own.
- This chapter ends with a real stinker. Anyone who disagrees with him is dishonest and lacks integrity. Whatever.

Ch 10: The problem of sin
- Not everyone has to live for something. I believe I live for many things. I don't need cosmic significance, just to make the world a better place.
- Why is God the one thing that can bring fulfillment? Why couldn't it be my imaginary friend Marvin?

Ch 11: Religion and the gospel
- This chapter is pretty much right on, even though there's a fair amount of "true Scotsman" logic happening.

Persecution pop quiz!

2009-08-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

Pop quiz! Test your knowledge of persecution! In which of these situations are you being persecuted?

1. Other people are granted the right to marry even though you object to their marriages on religious grounds.

2. Wal-Mart stays open on Sunday even though you do not shop on Sunday for religious reasons.

3. Someone expresses skepticism at your religious beliefs, and asks you straightforward but difficult questions that you can't answer.

4. Public schools teach scientific facts about natural history instead of teaching the creation myth of your religion.

5. Someone pays for a bus advertisement or billboard promoting a religious point of view that contradicts your own.

6. You are denied the right to marry because other people object to your marriage on religious grounds.

7. Because of your religion, you are forced to fight against armed combatants and wild beasts for the amusement of others.

8. Most of your family is killed and your village is burned to the ground by a neighboring tribe whose religion tells them that God is on their side.

9. You are tarred and feathered and run out of town because you claim God told you to marry other men's wives, and you follow through on it.

Time's up! How did you do? If you answered that you are being persecuted in all of these situations, you're not alone! But you're wrong. The correct answers are #6, #7, and #8. You might be able to make a case for #9, but I tend to think that if you're doing that sort of thing, you have to expect a little heat to come your way. In all the other cases, no one is taking away your freedoms, your rights, or anything else you are entitled to. This is not persecution. This is part of living in a secular society that protects individual liberty.

Incidentally, if you are being persecuted (or, to use the vernacular synonym, criticized), it is not necessarily an indicator that your ideas are true. If being criticized were an indicator of truth, then some of the most correct people in the world would be Nazis, Scientologists, George W. Bush, opponents of vaccination, and people who use the center turn lane for merging into traffic. Hell, if antipathy polls are any indication, atheism must be the most correct philosophy on earth, and we know that can't be right. By itself, criticism or persecution is not necessarily evidence of anything at all. Think carefully before you claim you're being persecuted, and think extra carefully before you claim persecution as evidence of truth.

Notes from the Richard Dutcher talk

2009-08-10T21:53:00.000-07:00

I attended a talk by Richard Dutcher this past Sunday at a local Unitarian church. It was totally worth it. I took copious notes, which I have synthesized below. Be warned, it's long! But for those of you who aren't interested in reading all the details, here's a 64-word synopsis of the main message I took away. This may not have been the message Richard intended to convey, but it's what struck me most powerfully.

The search for truth will necessarily lead you down paths you never could have expected. In this search, a real artist must be willing to open the doors that he is afraid to open. In doing so, he will discover more about himself and about ultimate reality than he could have thought possible. It is a difficult journey, but the only journey worth making.

That's Richard Dutcher looking sophisticated and me looking goofy. Here are my notes from the talk. Everything in boldface is a direct quote; everything else is my own words.

Richard started out by asking whether anyone had ever had the experience of preparing a talk, only to discover two minutes beforehand that you don't actually like it. This happened to him, so he delivered page one of the "old talk" (that part wasn't so bad, in his opinion) and then decided to wing it.

In an email to an LDS friend, Richard encouraged him to attend this talk, saying, This historic speech will rock the very foundation of civilization and will be known as the turning point in the evolution of human spirituality. But apparently the friend had to babysit in primary instead.

The first movie Richard ever saw was The Cowboys, starring John Wayne, at age 7 or so. The reason he didn't see any movies before then was because he was raised Pentecostal and it wasn't allowed. TV was okay for some reason. When his mother married his stepfather, a Mormon, he discovered that Mormons were allowed to watch movies. A great benefit! He fell in love with movies and watched everything he possibly could.

An embarrassing moment, trying to get in to see The Exorcist while underage. The cashier asked, "Do you have ID?" Richard responded that he had forgotten it. The cashier grabbed his wallet, which Richard had set down, and Richard said, "Oh, there's one!" One of the most embarrassing things he's ever said.

The Holy Ghost was far better behaved in the Mormon church than in the Pentecostal church. Also, the story of Joseph Smith's martyrdom was the coolest story ever. They took him to jail, then they shot him, then he fell out a window, then they shot him some more. What a story!

Deciding whether to go on a mission, Richard really wanted to head to Hollywood instead. No one could convince him otherwise. Then he saw Return of the Jedi. He had a change of heart and decided that going on a mission was the right thing to do. It's all George Lucas's fault. (Incidentally, this reminded me of my own experience when I saw God's Army, which I mentioned to Richard later. I guess I can say it's all Richard Dutcher's fault I joined the LDS church.)

He almost made it two whole years on a mission in Mexico without seeing a movie. But he couldn't hold out, and went to see Splash. It was like giving a bowl of soup to a man who hasn't eaten for a week. He thought it was an outstanding movie that should be nominated for every award in the book. He convinced his companion to go see Police Academy after that, but 30 minutes into it, the companion was convinced Satan was in the theater, so they had to leave. If I ever meet Satan, I'm going to ask him how it ended.

After the mission, Richard went to Hollywood and spent some time writing vampire stories and other stuff that didn't make it big. His first movie Girl Crazy was where he learned filmmaking, and it took five years of his life, but the movie itself had no lasting importance. He wanted to make movies that would tell his story, say something important, something to be proud of.

When someone once asked a famous writer, "What do you think about X?" the writer responded, "I don't know, I haven't written about it yet." They all say "write what you know" but what we know is boring to us. So we avoid it, but we can't get by just writing vampire stories. Richard realized that no one had made a movie about what it's like to be a Mormon missionary, and that was his story.

He wrote about ten revisions of God's Army, and found himself weeping at times because it opened up thoughts and feelings that he didn't realize were unprocessed. His wife reviewed it and said, "It's good, but there's not enough of you in it." Finally, he decided to make the story his own and no one else's. I don't care if President Hinckley likes this movie.

At Q&A sessions, everyone always asked, "What does the church think about the movie?" He never knew how to respond until once he said, I don't know... you're the church; what do you think? Elder Haight's wife was in the audience and applauded his answer. So that was how he answered that question from then on.

He thought for sure he would get in trouble for the scene in which a missionary is reading "anti-Mormon" stuff and says, "What if they all know it's a lie? Damn them to hell!" But no one made a peep about that scene. They were all upset at the scene where a missionary is on the toilet. Apparently missionaries do not go to the bathroom. But I was a missionary, and I knew different!

Suddenly Richard was being compared to Ozu, Tarkovsky, Bresson; and he had never heard of them. He started exploring Tarkovsky's idea that film is its own language. It's not theater, not music, not photography. What is its nature? It's perhaps the medium where you can come closest to seeing the soul of the filmmaker. He doesn't particularly like Tarantino movies, because those movies show no soul.

He carries around a piece of paper with about 30 good ideas for stories that fascinate him. Subjects that interest him but he hasn't figured out yet. I probably shouldn't tell you guys this, but he is currently working on a project dealing with the prostitution problem in 1908 in Salt Lake City. Murders, how the culture responded to the problem, etc. Fascinating stuff.

Normally when Richard makes a movie, he loves to see a packed house. After the premiere of Falling, though, there was something so intensely personal about it that he had a strong impulse to go up to the projection room, take the film away and never show it to anyone again. It's like baring your soul for the world to see. If people don't like his other movies, that's no problem. But if they don't like this movie, they don't like me.

My notes get much more fragmented at this point. I think this is when the Q&A period began. The first question was about how Mormonism has shaped his storytelling, and Richard said that just after he finished up his talk, he realized he hadn't really touched on his journey through Mormonism at all!

No other art form besides film has such an ability to express a human soul. Art can transcend the specifics that normally prevent communication. Barriers of time and place. One person two hundred years ago in Africa can speak directly to someone right here, right now.

There's no arriving. When I made God's Army, I thought I had arrived. And I was so wrong.

Directors he would recommend: Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujiro Ozu, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes.

I don't say I lost my faith. I say I lost my belief.

These virtues that religions coopt don't belong to them. They belong to humanity. Things like love, kindness, honesty, etc. They were not invented by religion and they are not exclusive to religion.

His spiritual journey has taught him to have humility about his own beliefs. He is no longer adamant that his own point of view is the correct one. I was so very wrong and so very sure.

It is very difficult to change one's beliefs, and it took a long time to deal with it. Who did this to me? Or did I do it to myself? He had a transcendent experience looking up at the Lincoln Memorial.

About whether the Joseph Smith story is on the list of ideas for stories he still wants to tell: Yes, I have to tell it. That's unfinished business. But you won't know about it until it's done. Someone interjected, "Which version?" Richard responded, "My version."

Why do Mormons struggle with creating good movies? Richard suspects that Mormons struggle because a real artist is searching for truth, and that will necessarily lead them out of Mormonism. There are some doors that dare not be opened. But as an artist, you need to go through those doors.

He told a Buddhist parable he recently read, about a man who was journeying through a forest and came to a wide river. He constructed a boat, which allowed him to cross safely. Once he reached the other side, he was faced with a choice. He was grateful for the boat because it had helped him on his journey. Should he therefore pick up the boat and carry it with him on his back? Or could he instead simply express his gratitude and move on? For Richard, Mormonism is like the boat. It helped him when he needed it, and he is grateful. But he has said goodbye and moved on.

I think this might be where I raised my hand and asked my own question. I started by saying that God's Army was my Return of the Jedi, and that it helped me decide that I should join the LDS church. I quickly followed up with, "But don't feel bad about that!" and everyone laughed. I asked Richard whether it has been difficult to deal with friends and family who are still believers, and how he deals with it. Then I quickly sat down, because although I don't normally get nervous when speaking, even in front of large groups of people, I realized that for some reason I was starting to shake violently.

I didn't hear much of Richard's answer, because I was too busy thinking about how weird it was that I was so nervous. But I think he said that it's not too much of a problem dealing with LDS friends because most of them don't want to talk to him at all. I think he said he tends not to talk religion with them, and if they want to know more about what he thinks about that, they can read about it in the paper.

Films with plenty of spirituality: Blue Angel, The Bicycle Thief, It's a Wonderful Life, To Live by Ozu. Trying to think of a modern example. The best he could come up with was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I wish someone would ask me a question like, "How does it feel to kill a person on-screen?" What about when the death is implied, off-screen? How does it feel? This is a very important kind of question to ask.

Richard thinks that when people see Evil Angel, they may think it contradicts what he's saying in this talk, but it doesn't. In filmmaking, one is always trying to come to greater understanding; what you are continually creating is yourself. Experiment! If there are brushes in your box that you "shouldn't use", then you should definitely use them! You will learn. Either you will learn why you shouldn't have used them and will never use them again, or you will learn that the people who told you not to use them were full of crap. Either way, you have learned something valuable.

So that's the synopsis. I apologize for the disjointedness of it. It's the best I could do in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute. Oh yeah, and after I left, I realized that although I went up and shook Richard Dutcher's hand after the talk was done, I never properly introduced myself. Richard, if you ever read this, my name is Mike. It was nice to meet you.

Richard Dutcher at the Summer Forum 2009 at First Unitarian church

2009-08-04T21:23:00.001-07:00

This coming Sunday, August 9, Richard Dutcher will be speaking at the Summer Forum 2009 at First Unitarian church. That's the awesome-looking church up by the University of Utah, near the corner of 1300 East and 500 South. The talk begins at 10:00am and will last about an hour and a half. Anyone interested in going? I'm definitely planning to be there.

Richard Dutcher is a talented filmmaker who basically started the "Mormon cinema" genre with his film God's Army in 2000. Interestingly, that film played a fairly significant role in my decision to join the LDS church as a 22-year old convert. That's a story for another time; I plan to post more about my complicated religious journey fairly soon. But I vividly remember sitting in the theater with my wife and her family, thinking, "You know this is true. You know this is true." That was the closest thing I ever got to an answer to Moroni's promise. Apparently it was good enough for me at the time.

Anyway, Dutcher has since left the LDS church, as he stated in an open letter published in 2007. It seems that many of the questions he raised in his films led him to unexpected answers, and "a spiritual path which may ultimately prove incompatible with Mormon orthodoxy". Because his talk on Sunday is entitled "A Spiritual Journey Through Film", he will probably be talking about his experiences of the past several years, and I'm very interested to hear what he has to say. I would guess he's traveling along a similar path to many others who have left or are leaving the LDS church. Which is to say, he must have been offended and left because he wanted to sin. Right? Right?

If you're interested in attending, post a comment, or send me a private note, or just show up. Try to find me if you like. I'll be the one wearing clothes. Hope to see you there.

Skipping church... again

2009-08-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

My wife enjoys going to church each week, so I usually go as well, because I love her and want to support her. Also, one adult trying to wrangle three kids aged 6 and under, keeping them quiet for a 75-minute sacrament meeting, qualifies as one of the worst babysitting jobs in the world. I don't want to leave my wife alone to face that cruel task, so I usually go to church.

Lately, though, I've been finding my church experience, especially the first two hours (Elders Quorum and Sunday school), to be more annoying than it's worth. So I've been skipping the first two hours more and more often. At this very moment, in fact, Elders Quorum is being dismissed and Sunday school is about to begin. I am sitting at my desk in the basement of my house. All is quiet. Out the window, I can see clouds, sky, and grass. I am content.

Whenever I attend church, I find myself disagreeing with almost everything that is said. That is pretty amazing in itself, as I am not a particularly disagreeable person. Since it would be somewhat impolite to vocally express disagreement with everything that is said every week, I usually scribble my thoughts furiously on index cards so that my head doesn't explode. I don't mind being in a setting where I disagree with those around me, but I've started to decide that I'm not going to put myself through it week after week without a damn good reason. Masochism has its limits.

I would probably find more to agree with if every week weren't a Joseph Smith lovefest. Last week's Elder's Quorum lesson boiled down to "Be like Joseph Smith. He was awesome." But what if you have good reasons to think he was not so wonderful? There are also plenty of admonitions about how important it is to sit through the temple movie for the jillionth time, and to visit your list of assigned neighbors each month and pretend to care about them while taking notes on their religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Of course, that's not exactly how it's phrased, but that's the gist.

I know people of various belief levels who go to church and just tune most of it out, and I don't understand how they do it. If I'm in a situation like that, especially a situation that looks and acts like an actual discussion, as Sunday school does, I can't help paying attention and trying to contribute. It's very frustrating to feel that my contributions would not be welcome, and that's how I feel whenever I go to church. I don't learn anything new. I can't contribute. I'm not challenged in any way except via frustration. I feel like an outsider.

So I attend church less and less. Somehow this feels like a failing, not because other people expect me to attend church, but because I have expected it of myself basically forever. However, the reason I expected myself to attend church as a believer was because I wanted to be challenged and enlightened as often as possible. In fact, this desire has not changed. But the sad fact is that church no longer fulfills this need in my life, so I need to move on. Not just physically but emotionally as well. And that's okay.

I will still be attending church for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning of this post, but I'm going to try to improve at tuning it out. I know why I'm there, and it's not for anyone but my family. I shouldn't continue to behave as if it's for me.

I know there are plenty of unbelievers of various persuasions reading this blog. Do any of you still go to church? If so, what kind of church do you attend, and why do you go? How do you deal with it? Do you tune out, pay attention, speak up, start discussions, or what? I'd love to hear any of your coping mechanisms, and maybe try them myself.

Is this a negative blog?

2009-07-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I was asked by a faithful LDS person not to do any "negative blogging" while at this person's house. The request caught me off guard, especially considering I had just finished fixing this person's wireless network, and I stammered something conciliatory. There's plenty I could say about the concept of asking someone not to indulge their personal thoughts in unobtrusive silence. I won't. But I will say two things. (If this person happens to be reading this entry, my comments aren't directed to you personally, but our interaction sparked some thoughts I felt like expressing.)

First, I don't consider what I do here to be negative. This person was obviously referring to this blog, where I am sometimes critical of the LDS church, as well as other organizations and belief systems I find to be suboptimal. I try to promote the virtues that are most central to who I am as a person. These include honesty, integrity, evidence-based critical thinking, kindness, empathy, and not making shit up while claiming divine truth. I think these are among the highest virtues, and to support them is a very positive thing indeed.

I will always be critical of people who proclaim virtues with their lips while denying them by their actions. This sometimes includes the LDS church leadership, though they're certainly not the only people who do this. I genuinely hope others will treat me in the same way, and will let me know if they think I am falling short of my own ideals. If I were not open to criticism myself, my criticism of others would be hypocritical. Criticism does not mean simply to tear something down. It means to try to examine it objectively, perhaps even to improve it. Although criticism is one thing the LDS church seems not to value, I continue to express it because I believe it makes the world a better place.

Second, in the "wink, wink" nature of the request, I perceived an implied, unspoken agreement. Maybe it was a misperception, but the attitude seems to be that unbelievers like myself know we are wrong, and we know deep down that we are fighting against the truth. Hence the ease with which the word "negative" is used to describe my actions, and I'm supposed to just nod my head in agreement.

Well, I disagree. In fact, I do not believe deep down that I am doing something wrong. I do not believe that I am fighting against the truth. When I say Korihor was right, I'm not being flippant; I mean it. However, I would not say that Mormons are really atheists who are fighting against the truth. I would not say that deep down, Mormons know their beliefs are harmful. I understand that we have honest differences, and I respect those differences as valid disagreements.

Here's something I would hope we can all agree on: Regardless of whether there is a creator god who loves us and wants us to grow, I believe we should try to do so anyway. The more questions we ask, the more we learn. The more we learn, the more we grow. The more we grow, the better we are. Progression is a valid principle, even if not an eternal one.

However, I no longer see the value in artificially constraining the answers to my questions. For example, I don't see the value in seeking answers only as long as the answers don't challenge faith in Joseph Smith or the LDS church. I also don't see the value in seeking answers only as long as the answers don't indicate anything paranormal or supernatural. I'm not interested in protecting my personal answers at the expense of hard questions. I am only interested in what is true. As Joseph Smith himself once said, truth will cut its own way. In other words, if something is actually true, it will withstand scrutiny. So I scrutinize, and I believe that makes this a positive blog.

Have you reached a conclusion yet?

2009-07-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

When I first told my wife a few years ago that I was starting to doubt the claims of the LDS church (and my belief in God, for that matter), she was understandably freaked out. Thankfully, we gave each other time and space to deal with what was happening, and our relationship now is better than ever.

But one question she asked me every so often during those first few months was, "Have you reached a conclusion yet?" The implication was that I was going to reach a final conclusion that the LDS gospel was "true" or "false".

It was a little frustrating to answer such a question, because my answer was, and still is, "yes and no". Yes, I have reached a conclusion. My conclusion is: No, I may never reach a conclusion. And that's okay. I no longer subscribe to the concept of reaching a final conclusion that cannot be changed by further evidence. I now regard all conclusions as tentative (yes, even this one!) and contingent on being supported by good evidence.

The false dichotomy that the LDS church is either wholly true or wholly false is often emphasized by church leaders. For example, Gordon B. Hinckley gave a General Conference talk in April 2003, in which he boldly stated, "Either the Church is true, or it is a fraud. There is no middle ground. It is the Church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing."

This is obviously oversimplified. It is a fact that there are many positive things about the church, many true principles taught by it, and many good people who believe in it. However, it is also evident that Joseph Smith's foundational mythology includes many claims that are... shall we say, not entirely grounded in reality. Must we conclude that Joseph Smith was either the Prophet of God on the earth, or else a willful liar and a fraud? No. I don't believe the evidence completely supports either claim. Life is much more complicated than that.

Someone on a discussion board recently asked, "What would it take for you to believe again?" For me, that question is kind of like asking, "What would it take for me to believe the earth is flat?" It would take a whole heck of a lot of observational evidence, as well as a coherent, parsimonious explanation for all the other evidence that seemed to indicate that the earth is a spheroid. The same is true of belief in the LDS church. In principle, I suppose the dead could start walking the earth, testifying of Joseph Smith and the restoration. That would challenge both my naturalistic worldview and my view of the LDS church. In practice, the possibility seems so unlikely as to be ignored.

To summarize: Yes, I hold certain tentative conclusions with an estimated probability, given the evidence I know about. I may believe the likelihood of the existence of gods is very small, and I may believe the likelihood of the LDS church being a true church (whatever that means) is even smaller. However, given enough good evidence, I am willing to change my mind. So, have I reached a conclusion yet? Yes... and no.

Apollo moon landing sites imaged by LRO

2009-07-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the Apollo moon landing sites. You can see the lunar modules that were left behind, and in an Apollo 14 image you can even make out a trail of astronaut footprints in the dust! Freaking incredible.

My thoughts on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2009-07-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

My wife, brother, and I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in a souped-up Extreme Digital theater last night. They packed more digits into that sucker than I ever would have thought possible. I recently read the book again, so the story would be fresh in my mind. Also, that makes it much easier to criticize all the ways in which the movie diverges from the book.

On the way to the theater, my brother said that when he's talked to people who have seen the movie, they all liked it. But he also heard rumors that "some people thought it sucked". After watching the film, I can understand some reasons why some people might think that, even if I disagree with them about whether these problems push the movie into overall suck territory.

The main shortcoming of the film is that it's so unrealistic. Okay, it's a story about magic and wizards. That's fine, I get that. I'm okay with magic wands, spells, apparition, flying smoke Death Eaters, invisibility cloaks, love potions, cursed jewelry, vanishing cabinets, wrackspurts, werewolves, zombies, killing curses, pulling cinematic memories out of your head for later review, etc. I loved all that.

However. There is one scene near the beginning of the movie where you can see the night sky out a window during summertime. I didn't recognize any constellations, but that's fine. It's fiction, after all. Later in the movie, there's another scene that occurs at night, about six months later, and the exact same arrangement of stars is visible in the sky! That would never happen! I can suspend my disbelief, but there's a limit to how much unrealism I can accept, and that was way over the line. I imagine this is probably the primary complaint of most people who thought the movie sucked.

Of course, the same stars might be visible if the first scene took place just before sunrise and the second scene took place just after sunset. Come to think of it, maybe that's what happened. I take it all back.

Other than that, the movie was excellent. It's probably my favorite Harry Potter movie so far. Of course, they made some changes from the book, but none of the changes detracted from the story, and in fact some changes actually improved my enjoyment of the story. I'm thinking of one particular change near the end, in which the implications of the final events were made even more profound and personal. I absolutely loved that change.

I definitely recommend it. The entire movie was so intense and enjoyable that I didn't even realize it was almost three hours long. I think I'll be going again sometime soon.

Anything but that

2009-07-07T00:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a pointer to an Atheist Cartoon that's right on the money. Except he forgot to mention the virtues of eating babies:

anything but that

Can we be good without my friend Marvin?

2009-07-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

I've had a good friend ever since I was a child. A best friend, really. We grew up together, and I feel like we've never really been apart. His name is Marvin, and I don't know what I would do without him.

There are a few things you need to understand about Marvin, though. First, he thinks it's funny or clever to show up at random times when I'm not expecting it. He even tracked down the B&B where my wife and I spent our wedding night, and started banging on our door, yelling about purity during what happened to be a particularly personal moment. That was annoying at the time, but I guess it was kind of funny. Maybe you had to be there. Good old Marvin.

Second, he's a pretty big guy, not the kind of person you want to mess with. He always has some kind of weapon, usually a baseball bat, and he enjoys using it whenever I do anything wrong. One time, we went golfing together, and he left his driver at home in favor of the baseball bat. I hit a particularly bad drive into the rough, and found my ball stuck behind a tree. Thinking that Marvin wouldn't see or wouldn't care, I casually rolled my ball about two feet to the left, so I could have a clearer shot to the green. All of a sudden, thwack! Marvin clocked me in the back of the head with his baseball bat. "Thou shalt not cheat," he said with a smile. I had to admit he was right.

Third, he loves to give hugs all the time. But only when I'm doing something right. Last year after I finished my taxes, he scared the hell out of me by bursting into my home office and giving me a giant bear hug. I asked him what that was for, and he said he was proud of me for not cheating on my taxes. The thought of cheating had never occurred to me, but I appreciated the hug. I like how Marvin is always thinking of me, and helping me do the right thing even when he's not there. I never know when he might show up and give me a hug, and that just makes me feel good inside.

As you can see, my friend Marvin is a little quirky, but I know he means well. And to be honest, I think he makes me a better person. Sometimes when I'm putting the kids to bed and they're screaming and belligerent, I think I ought to punch them in the face. But then I remember the last time I did that. Marvin jumped out of my daughter's closet and whacked me in the kneecap with his baseball bat. I couldn't walk for a week. And just the other day, I saw an old lady fall down on the sidewalk in front of me. I was going to walk right past her, but then I realized that if I helped her, Marvin would probably show up and give me a hug. And he did. He was so proud of me.

I wonder sometimes, is it really possible to be a good person without my friend Marvin? I have some friends who think so, and they claim they've never even heard of Marvin. I don't entirely believe them. I figure they must be embarrassed to admit how many times Marvin has smacked them with his baseball bat. Or maybe they have friends of their own - not Marvin himself, but someone just like him. Maybe a friend with boxing gloves instead of a baseball bat. Without my friend Marvin or someone just like him, what would stop them from punching their kids in the face? Why would they help old ladies cross the street? Without my friend Marvin, would life be worth living at all? I don't see how.

To everyone who wants prayer in American public schools

2009-06-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

To everyone who wants prayer in American public schools: I say fine. That's a great idea. In fact, it would be much more convenient, especially for the dhuhr, if it were led by school officials. That way, no students would have to worry about drawing attention to themselves when they take out their individual prayer mats at whatever time they deem best. After the recitation of adhan and iqama over the public address system, the gym would probably be the best place to gather for school prayer. That way, everyone can say the prayer together and no one will feel left out. There could even be markings on the gym wall to ensure that everyone knows the exact direction to Mecca.

What's that you say? You don't want to take part in these prayers? I will remind you that Allah's mercy is great for those who believe in him and obey, but he has little patience for infidels. Nevertheless, you will not be forced to take part in school prayer. You may sit around the edges of the gym and watch. Everyone is free to participate or not. There's no need to feel you are being discriminated against, just because you choose not to take part in the historic American tradition of school prayer.

You're still not satisfied with this arrangement? I thought you were the one who wanted school prayer in the first place! Oh, I see... you only want school prayer in the manner of your religion. Well, I'm sorry to say that not everyone believes in your religion, and we can't have school prayers for every possible religion! That would be ridiculous! Why don't you just pray silently to your own god while everyone else is reciting the school prayer?

Still not good enough? Okay, how about this compromise. Instead of trying to shove any particular religion into public schools, why don't we just focus on educating the students instead? Let's not have an official school prayer for any religion. That way, no religion gets special treatment. No one needs to feel offended, embarrassed, or left out. You can pray to your own god or gods, on your own, whenever you like, and everyone else can do the same if they choose to do so. It's too bad you're not okay with the school prayer solution I suggested earlier, because it would bring glory to Allah and would be really convenient, but I suppose I can live with the compromise.

Now that I think about it, I guess the compromise is more in line with the First Amendment, anyway. No school prayer means your children and mine will not be discriminated against for abstaining from a prayer they disagree with. It means your children and mine will not be forced to sit awkwardly and silently through a prayer they disagree with. It means no official state endorsement of a religion you or I disagree with. That works for me. Doesn't it work for you?

A modest dress code proposal

2009-06-13T10:33:00.001-07:00

Stolen directly from Dissenting in Part: a BYU student asks that the university mandate school uniforms because the current dress code "obviously [is] not strict enough."

I think the student's suggestion of standard-issue BYU T-shirts and pants to enforce modesty is a good one, but the problem with this suggestion is that it doesn't go far enough. Obviously there's no modesty problem with men (except for the fact that the modesty problem is all in their minds), so men should be allowed to wear whatever kind of BYU T-shirt they choose. Women should be required to garb themselves from head to toe in a burqa, lest any exposed skin accidentally titillate an unsuspecting male student, teacher, or General Authority. The sale of BYU burqas could be a great source of revenue for the school during these tough economic times. And I know plenty of men who grew up in cultures where they had this dress code, and they loved it. It's a win-win-win situation all around.

Main Street Plaza

2009-06-07T20:53:00.001-07:00

I just noticed that my last post was highlighted over at Main Street Plaza. Thanks, chanson! For anyone who doesn't know already, MSP is a community for anyone interested in Mormonism, and most of the posts provoke good thought and discussion. If you like my blog, I think you'll like MSP as well. Give it a look!

Avoiding personal apostasy

2009-06-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

In this month's Ensign, there is an article entitled Avoiding Personal Apostasy. It's pretty much what you would expect. It addresses none of the real problems with church doctrine, history, or evidence. It assumes that those who leave the church do so because they want to sin, they are offended, or they find fault with church leaders. Naturally, any substantial criticism of the church or its leaders can't possibly be true, and must be an indication of personal apostasy which came about for one of the above reasons.

I won't even bother addressing the majority of the article, except to say that the reason for my unbelief, and the unbelief of many others I know, has nothing to do with anything Elder Claudio D. Zivic assumes must be the cause. As with everything I believe or disbelieve in life, for me it comes down to evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and in my view, the evidence for the LDS church's extraordinary claims is woefully insufficient. The only way I could hold a literal belief in the LDS church would be for me to decide ahead of time that I would believe, and then twist and interpret the evidence to fit the belief. I did that for long enough to know that I can't do it forever. Plenty of people are able to do it, but I am not one of them.

What concerns me more is the paragraph in which Elder Zivic casually dismisses the possibility that the LDS church is in error. In fact, he goes even further, dismissing the possibility that the LDS church could ever be fundamentally in error. He says,

We need not be concerned about the possibility of another apostasy of the Church of Jesus Christ. We have the privilege of living in the dispensation of the fulness of times. This gospel dispensation, which began with the Prophet Joseph Smith, is the last one before the Second Coming of the Savior.

First, people have been saying this kind of thing about the end of the world for millennia. Christians have been saying it ever since Jesus was said to have preached that the kingdom of God was near at hand, and that many within the sound of his voice would not taste of death before they saw the Son of Man coming in his glory. Seriously, the second coming has been "any day now" for two thousand years. Joseph Smith, Sr., the first patriarch of the LDS church, gave many, many blessings during the 1830s and 1840s, in which he claimed that the receivers of the blessings would live to see the Second Coming. Shouldn't we start to suspect that maybe "imminent" doesn't mean what we think it means?

Second, and more importantly: "We need not be concerned." The prophet will never lead us astray. Never mind that the prophet led us into polygamy. Never mind that the prophet implemented institutional racism for 130 years. Never mind that the prophet is still implementing institutional sexism. Never mind that the prophet made up a "Egyptian alphabet and grammar" that bears no resemblance to actual Egyptian, and used it to translate a history of Abraham from papyri that have nothing to do with Abraham. Never mind that... never mind that... oh, never mind anything that's not in the Sunday school manual. Anyway, thou shalt not criticize the prophet, and don't worry yourself about any of these "apostate" ideas. We need not be concerned.

It frightens me whenever anyone uses the words "we need not be concerned", especially in reference to religious belief. Advising others to abdicate their responsibility to think critically about their beliefs, and advising them to follow their leaders without question, is extremely dangerous. It's not the kind of advice that would be considered valuable in any arena except religion. "We need not be concerned" leads to tragedies like the Peoples Temple suicide, the September 11 martyrs, and to take a Mormon example, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This is not melodrama for its own sake; this is what happens when you think you have God on your side, and are not concerned about the possibility of being wrong.

I much prefer the words of my favorite LDS prophet (if I have to pick one), Joseph Smith, Jr. He said,

We have heard men who hold the priesthood remark that they would do anything they were told to do by those who presided over them, if they knew it was wrong; but such obedience as this is worse than folly to us; it is slavery in the extreme; and the man who would thus willingly degrade himself, should not claim a rank among intelligent beings, until he turns from his folly. A man of God . . . would despise the idea.

Others, in the extreme exercise of their Almighty authority have taught that such obedience was necessary, and that no matter what the saints were told to do by their presidents, they should do it without asking any questions. When the elders of Israel will so far indulge in these extreme notions of obedience as to teach them to the people, it is generally because they have it in their hearts to do wrong themselves.

Need we be concerned about the possibility of being led astray? Despite the assurances of Elder Claudio D. Zivic, there is, indeed, cause for concern.

Religious ignorance is faith's ally

2009-05-26T16:50:00.001-07:00

Lately I've been reading 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God by Guy Harrison. I like it. Last night, the following passage struck me as interesting, so I thought I would share it.

[O]ne of the fastest ways to turn a believer into a nonbeliever is religious education. Teach someone, especially a child, an honest and objective overview of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, traditional Chinese beliefs, Buddhism, animism, Sikhism, Judaism, Jainism, Bahism, plus the basics of a few extinct religions, and there is a good chance that this enlightened person will have a hard time convincing themselves that one of these belief systems is valid and all the others are not. Religious ignorance is faith's ally. Religious education is faith's enemy.

I've found this to be true for me as well. It's interesting to me how fundamentally similar the claims of many religions are, and this becomes increasingly clear as one learns more about other religions. Each set of religious followers is as convinced of their own religion's truth as the others are of theirs. Usually based on the same evidence, too: experience, testimony, visions, miracles, holy writings, etc. How is one to judge the truth of one religion over the others with such conflicting claims? Why is my religion more likely to be true than any other religion? Because it's mine? Because I happened to be born in this place at this time in history? I doubt it.

How to discern good spirits from evil ones

2009-05-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

In church today, one of the lessons was about how to discern good spirits from evil ones. Very practical stuff, of course, but I was surprised that no one mentioned the "three grand keys" that were revealed by Joseph Smith, which give specific steps for detecting whether an other-worldly being is really an angel or a demon. It's such an important scriptural principle, in fact, that I will reproduce it here in its entirety. Those of you who are not Mormon or have never been Mormon will probably be skeptical that Mormons actually believe in this wonderful piece of literature, but I promise you it's real.

Doctrine and Covenants 129
1 There are two kinds of beings in heaven, namely: Angels, who are resurrected personages, having bodies of flesh and bones—
2 For instance, Jesus said: Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.
3 Secondly: the spirits of just men made perfect, they who are not resurrected, but inherit the same glory.
4 When a messenger comes saying he has a message from God, offer him your hand and request him to shake hands with you.
5 If he be an angel he will do so, and you will feel his hand.
6 If he be the spirit of a just man made perfect he will come in his glory; for that is the only way he can appear—
7 Ask him to shake hands with you, but he will not move, because it is contrary to the order of heaven for a just man to deceive; but he will still deliver his message.
8 If it be the devil as an angel of light, when you ask him to shake hands he will offer you his hand, and you will not feel anything; you may therefore detect him.
9 These are three grand keys whereby you may know whether any administration is from God.

To me, this passage is evidence of only one thing. Well, actually two things. First, Joseph Smith apparently did a lot of drugs. Secondly: the devil, the father of lies, the author of sin and master of deceit... is the stupidest con man ever. According to this passage, the reason "a just man" won't offer to shake hands is because he is unable to deceive. And the devil, because he is trying to deceive you as to his ability to shake your hand, will offer his hand but you won't feel it.

Now, I don't claim to be a genius, or of any special intelligence whatsoever. But it occurs to me that this may not be the devil's most effective method of deceiving you. Specifically, why wouldn't he just pretend to be "a just man" and tell you he can't shake your hand? Or is the devil unaware of this little loophole in the order of heaven?

Joseph Smith really enjoyed making up stuff like this to keep people's attention. It works as long as no one thinks too hard about it. I'm reminded of Stan's exclamation in the South Park episode All About the Mormons: "Mormons actually know this story, and they still believe Joseph Smith was a prophet?" Yep, they do. But I think these three keys must be a little too grand for my limited earthly comprehension.

Perspectives on Church History from the Community of Christ

2009-05-08T11:39:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, I came across a message from Community of Christ (formerly RLDS) president Stephen M. Veazey, regarding church history principles. But the person who told me about it had copied and pasted the text, modifying a few names and presenting it as the words of LDS church president Thomas S. Monson. I pretty quickly realized it couldn't have been written by any leader of the LDS church, because it says things like this:

Because of my exploration of various credible works, and probing discussions with historians, some of my previously held notions have been challenged and adjusted in the face of additional knowledge. The “apologetic” approach to church history—presenting our story in as favorable a light as possible—is not sufficient for the journey ahead. That approach does not evidence the integrity that must be fundamental to our witness and ministry.

and this:

If we say that a book on history is the only true telling of the story, we risk “canonizing” one version, a tendency we have shown in the past. This blocks further insights from continuing research. Good historical inquiry understands that conclusions are open to correction as new understanding and information comes from ongoing study.

I could imagine someone like Joseph Smith saying these things, or Joseph F. Smith, or even David O. McKay. But I cannot in my wildest imaginations see Thomas S. Monson saying them. First, he would have to admit that it is possible for his own notions to be challenged and adjusted in the face of evidence, which would imply that he is capable of learning "additional knowledge" he doesn't already have. Second, he would have to admit that the whitewashing of LDS church history in recent decades has been a mistake, which would imply that church leadership is capable of making mistakes. Third, he would have to admit that serious study of church history (i.e. from actual historians who examine source materials from outside the faith-promoting manual) is a valuable endeavor, and can actually give us a more accurate picture of the early church than what is taught each week in Sunday school.

I don't see any of this happening anytime soon. Instead, we get talks from Boyd K. Packer telling us that some things that are true aren't very useful. And in the latest General Conference, we are told that doubt is one of the "destructive Ds", and that unfavorable descriptions of the church are untrue and unfair. There is no nuanced discussion about when or where doubt or skepticism may be appropriate, or criticism of the church might be fair. Doubt is always wrong, and as Dallin H. Oaks reiterated during the Frontline story on the Mormons, it's wrong to criticize leaders of the church even if the criticism is true.

Here's the thing. Truth has nothing to fear from scrutiny. If something is really true, then it will stand up to thorough investigation. Examining all the evidence can only confirm the truth. So if the church-approved version of LDS history is true, then why is it taboo to study history from other credible sources? Why is it wrong to be unsatisfied with taking church leaders' word for it, and to examine the evidence for oneself? Why are we counseled against reading anything that is not faith-promoting? What is there to fear? The truth has nothing to fear, but irrational belief certainly does.

In my opinion, contrary to what Kevin Pearson says in the General Conference talk linked above, doubt is not "a negative emotion related to fear," which betrays a lack of self-confidence. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Fear is what kept me from acknowledging my doubts for a long time. In critically examining my own beliefs and doubts, rather than succumbing to fear, I have begun to overcome it. Rather than revealing a lack of self-confidence, I have become more confident in my ability to discern truth, and in my ability to handle many other areas of life as well. I don't have all the answers, but I am no longer afraid of not having all the answers.

If the LDS church's attitude toward its own history were more in tune with Stephen Veazey's statement, I would feel a lot more at home in the LDS church. I would love to have discussions about actual church history in Sunday school. Not because I want to tear down people's faith, but because I find the subject interesting and I would like to explore it with other people who claim to care about it. Unfortunately, this is not possible for two reasons: most members don't actually know very much about church history; and discussing anything that challenges the faith-promoting story is essentially verboten. It doesn't have to be that way. It hasn't always been that way. But I also don't see it changing anytime soon.

Baracknophobia - Obey

2009-04-30T23:17:00.001-07:00

I've been noticing a lot of freak-out hyperbole coming from right of center lately. Have you noticed this? Jon Stewart says everything I've been thinking, so much better than I could say it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Baracknophobia - Obey

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

First 100 Days

Jon Stewart: Baracknophobia - Obey

The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad

2009-04-24T21:24:00.000-07:00

Nation! If you haven't already seen this clip, you must watch it now. The storm... is coming!

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad

colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Gay Marriage Commercial

One thing that's always bothered me about the Book of Mormon

2009-04-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

I know what you're thinking. One thing? Yeah, there's plenty to be bothered by, but today something else occurred to me that I hadn't specifically put my finger on yet.

In addition to the anachronisms, the incorrect flora and fauna, the lack of women, the blatant copying of the Bible (including errors)... one thing that's always bothered me is that the Book of Mormon seems to be written for a modern audience. In general throughout the course of human history, no one ever writes anything for the benefit of those in the distant future or past. And I mean no one, except Doc Brown. Pretty much everything is written for the benefit of those who will read it in the present or very near future. This applies to everything in the Bible, everything written on cave walls, papyrus, giant stelae, the Internet... everything. You just don't see people composing novels specifically for the benefit of their extremely distant ancestors.

But when we examine the Book of Mormon, which was allegedly written about 2600 years ago, we find that it is constantly referring to Christianity, and specifically to 19th century theological arguments. It doesn't seem to be written for the benefit of the ancients; it consistently and explicitly refers to those who will eventually read it in the distant future. It even goes so far as to explain what "reformed Egyptian" is, and what the brass plates are. If it were common for ancient people to write in Reformed Egyptian on brass plates, there would be no need for the author to explain any of this. Even if it were rather uncommon, anyone reading the plates would obviously be familiar with both the medium and the language. So these explanations can only be for the benefit of a modern audience who is unfamiliar with such concepts.

It even explains who will eventually find those plates, what his name will be, and what his father's name will be. Is there anywhere else in Christian scripture where prophecy works like that? And why would ancient American Jewish proto-Christians care about the name of a prophet 2400 years in the future? Pretty much the entirety of 2 Nephi 3 (Joseph prophesying about Joseph son of Joseph) was either miraculous (and irrelevant to the ancients) on a scale that the world has never seen, or reflective of an enormous amount of gumption on the part of Joseph Smith. I am reminded of David Hume's maxim: testimony is sufficent to establish a miracle, only if the testimony's falsehood would be even more miraculous than the fact it is trying to establish.

To me, the observation that the Book of Mormon was written specifically for a modern audience is good evidence that from the perspective of the Book of Mormon's author, that audience existed in the present, not the distant future.

Brian Cox talks about Carl Sagan

2009-04-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how long this will continue to be available, but a few days ago, The Bad Astronomer mentioned an hour-long BBC program (I guess that would be programme) featuring Brian Cox and Ann Druyan talking about Carl Sagan and Cosmos. I found it inspiring, and I would recommend listening to it if you get a chance.

What kind of Mormon are you?

2009-04-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

Sabayon referenced an interesting quiz called What Kind of Mormon Are You? and I decided to take it. Apparently I am a "Radical Mormon" - scoring with fairly high knowledge; very low cultural homogeneity; and very, very low orthodoxy. Not too surprising. Take the quiz yourself, it's fun.

My Results:

Radical Mormon

-10 Orthodoxy, 5 LDS knowledge, -16 Cultural homogeneity

People like you have been excommunicated. In fact, you might be personal friends with some of them. Your feminist/liberal/revisionist/free living lifestyle just doesn't click with most Latter-day Saints, but you don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Jesus born on April 6? Um, no.

2009-04-09T23:50:00.000-07:00

This year in Sunday school, we're studying the Doctrine and Covenants. It can be a little painful because I would love to be able to speak up and say, "By the way, the date of this revelation was changed in order to make it seem more prophetic," or, "Did you know that revelation was actually edited by Joseph Smith a few years later?" But I don't. It would serve no purpose.

Last week (err... a few weeks ago; we've been out of town), the topic was "The Only True and Living Church." I could tell it was going to be a good one, and it did not disappoint. I have plenty of notes from the class, but I'll just share one thing that really stuck in my craw.

The teacher read D&C 20:1, which says:

The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days, being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh, it being regularly organized and established agreeable to the laws of our country, by the will and commandments of God, in the fourth month, and on the sixth day of the month which is called April—

He then asked, "What is special about April 6, the day the church was founded?" I started thinking, hmm, maybe it was Passover in 1830. Or maybe he's referring to the fact that temple construction was both started and completed on April 6, forty years apart. Someone in the room raised his hand and said, "Well, we believe that Jesus was born on April 6, so that was the perfect day for the Lord to bring back the restored church."

Uhhhh. I don't know why I continue to be surprised when people say things like this in church. The church was not organized on April 6 because it was Jesus' birthday. The only reason people believe Jesus was born on April 6 is because they misinterpret D&C 20:1, which established the church! The reasoning is dizzyingly circular.

Read the passage again. The whole thing is basically five dozen words of flowery language in order to say, "Today is April 6, 1830, and we're organizing a church." That's it. It does not mean Jesus was born on April 6, any more than the Book of Mormon's claim that Jesus was born in "the land of Jerusalem" means that he was born within the city limits. Even Michael Ash, a prominent Mormon apologist, has a page that debunks this popular Mormon myth for crying out loud.

These kinds of Mormon myths drive me crazy. They spread like wildfire and everyone believes them without question. Ask me about the Three Nephites sometime. But anyway, was Jesus born on April 6? Sure, maybe. But without much better evidence than a flowery prelude, I don't see any reason to believe so.

Expressing myself beyond the index cards in my pocket

2009-04-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

Although I think the likelihood of gods existing is pretty low, and the likelihood of the Mormon church being the "one true church" is even more remote, I still attend church somewhat regularly. I do this because my wife likes to go to church, and I like to be with my wife.

I used to find church somewhat interesting, even as a nonbeliever, but lately it's increasingly become an exercise in frustration. I'm never sure what is appropriate to say in the company of believers who come to church to be spiritually uplifted. Even when something is an undeniable, well-verified fact, it will often make people very uncomfortable unless it fits in with the "faith-promoting" history that is taught every week, which never seems to be questioned, at least not in Sunday school.

What especially kills me is that most of the things I would want to speak up to clarify are things that every member of the church would have known, 160 or 120 or 80 years ago. But no one seems to know about them anymore. It becomes scandalous even to imply that doctrine has ever changed, or that errors were ever made, or that church leaders have ever perpetrated anything worse than a few youthful indiscretions. These are all dismissed as "anti-Mormon lies", and to refer to the (non-church-approved) history books is to lose all credibility.

Since I'm not sure where the line is between myth-busting and outright heresy (if there's any difference at all), I mostly shut my mouth. I haven't decided yet whether this is a personal weakness or strength. Instead of speaking up, I usually write my thoughts on an index card, which provides a bit of a release from the tremendous frustration of silence. But even that is not really satisfying, in the way that writing in a journal is not as satisfying as calling up a friend.

For this reason, I plan to use this blog to post more of the thoughts that I routinely self-censor at church. Not really for the purpose of mocking anyone, although some of the things I hear in Sunday school are such ridiculous clunkers that it's almost impossible not to be amused. But mostly for my own catharsis, and hopefully for the general edification of you and me both. I really need to express this stuff, because I don't want to end up as a crazy old hermit with nothing but a basement full of exasperatedly scrawled index cards.

25 random things about me

2009-02-06T00:03:00.000-08:00

This meme has been going around Facebook, and I finally succumbed. Here are 25 statements about me. Enjoy.

1. The 25th statement is false.

2. Sometimes I stand conspicuously in the Sexuality section at Barnes & Noble, in order to feel awkward and embarrassed. I occasionally like feeling voluntarily uncomfortable.

3. Every night I look up at the sky, and I name all the celestial bodies I can see. Sometimes I close my eyes and point to where I think things should be, and then open my eyes to see how well I did. I usually do pretty well.

4. If I ever hear "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys while in the car, I have to crank up the volume and sing at the top of my lungs.

5. I wanted to name our youngest son Archimedes, and call him Archie for short. My wife didn't go for it.

6. I have been baptized four times.

7. I once walked about 12 miles across the Japanese countryside in the middle of the night, alone. I made my way by following the stars.

8. I spent a summer developing web pages in a cabin in the middle of nowhere outside Red Cliff, Colorado. The cabin did not have electricity or running water. It was the best summer I've ever had.

9. I play tournament Scrabble, and am currently ranked as one of the top 250 players in North America.

10. I suspect that nearly every major decision I've made in my life has been because of a girl.

11. I love to laugh, and I love to make other people laugh. Most days, almost every word that comes out of my mouth is intended to be funny, even if only to myself.

12. I am a last-second sipper. Whenever I am leaving a restaurant, I have to take at least a few last-second sips of my drink before leaving. You never know where your next Diet Coke is going to come from.

13. In the last two years, my wife and I paid off about $44,000 in debt and have started building up an emergency fund. All we had to do was pay some attention to what we were doing with our money. We are now debt-free except for our house, and will never go back.

14. I call myself a Saganist because I think Carl Sagan expressed the most sensible and inspiring view of the universe, and our place in it, that I have ever heard. It's a shame I never read any of his work until relatively recently.

15. I own about 25 CDs from the Time-Life "Sounds of the Eighties" series. They just kept sending me CDs, and I just kept sending them money. And it was totally worth it.

16. Throughout my whole life, I've often suspected that I keep myself busy to avoid feeling empty.

17. I share too many intimate personal feelings in public forums.

18. On the McDonald's menus in Japan, the price for a "smile" is "free". So I ordered two of them. 「スマイルをふたつお願いします。」 The girl behind the counter was extremely confused. I think a lot of people thought I was a stupid gaijin.

19. Before I proposed to my wife, I asked her what her favorite dessert was. She said it was strawberry shortcake. But I didn't know how to make that, so I made her brownies instead. And I also bought her a blender. I am so romantic.

20. Back in 1996, I wrote a Java applet that ended up being published in a book called Teach Yourself Sunsoft Java Workshop in 21 Days. It was a somewhat crappy Minesweeper knock-off called "LimeSweeper". I haven't written anything in Java since then. I heard a rumor that Java has changed a little bit.

21. In 7th grade, I told my drafting teacher than when I grew up, I would eat pizza for every meal. He said I would get sick of it. In summer 2000, I proved him wrong when I ate Papa John's pepperoni every night for three months, and never got tired of it. I did gain a few pounds, though. Pizza is still my favorite food.

22. I subscribe to 32 podcasts and 220 blogs. That's way too many.

23. When I was a kid, I used to play video games all the time, but could never afford to buy any. Now that I have the money to buy video games, I don't have any time to play them. I often listen to video game music while working, so I can almost feel like I'm playing. Almost.

24. I hope the world will be better for my having been here. My ultimate goal in life is for those who knew me to say, "I'm glad I knew that guy. He made my life better." Most importantly, I hope my family thinks of me as a good dad and husband, and they know how much I love them.

25. The 1st statement is true.

A skeptical moment with my kids

2009-02-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

About ten minutes ago, my 4-year old son was afraid to go in his room because the light was off. "There are ghosts in there!" he said. "I think ghosts are real!"

I went in and turned on the light, and asked him why he believes ghosts are real. He said that one time, one of his toys fell off a shelf, and no one pushed it. It fell by itself, and that's why ghosts are real.

I explained that sometimes when you put toys on a shelf, they might stay there for a while, but if they're not secure, they might fall off by themselves. This doesn't mean ghosts aren't real, but I didn't think it had to be a ghost just because the toy fell by itself. Sometimes that just happens.

My 6-year old daughter walked in the room and joined us. My son continued, "But Dad, Berlin [the neighbor girl] said she thinks ghosts are real!" My daughter nodded her head, confirming the story.

"Well, you shouldn't believe something just because someone else believes it," I said. "You get to decide for yourself what you believe. I don't believe ghosts are real, but that doesn't mean you have to believe that, either. It's up to you to decide."

"Do you know how I decide what I believe?" I asked. They shook their heads. "I see if I can figure out what's really happening. And if I find an idea that explains everything I can see happening, then I tend to believe it. If I don't see any reason to believe something is really happening, then I don't tend to believe it."

Then my daughter said something that totally took me by surprise. "I don't know yet if I believe in ghosts or not." That was an excellent answer, and I told her so. My son wasn't convinced though. He still believes in ghosts, and that's okay.

What to do with religious literature

2009-01-30T16:21:00.000-08:00

The other day, I ate lunch at Apollo Burgers, my favorite burger place in the Salt Lake valley. When I went to use the restroom just before leaving, I saw that someone had left a bunch of Jehovah's Witness literature in the restroom. There was one copy of the Watchtower in English, and three copies of what looked like "Awake!" in Spanish, sitting on the toilet tank and draped over the handrail. I thought about throwing them out, but I'm generally a "leave it as you found it" kind of person, so I just left them. I'm curious, what would you have done?

Edward Current is too awesome for words

2009-01-19T10:32:00.000-08:00

Give God Some More Credit!

Checkmate!

How religion (for me) is like Where's George

2009-01-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

Although I think this story makes a nice parable for my experience with religion, it has the additional benefit of being entirely true.

About two years ago, I was rooming with a guy for a Scrabble tournament in Phoenix, Arizona. One night in the hotel room, I noticed him flipping through dollar bills and typing on his laptop. I asked him what he was doing, and he explained that he was entering his bills' serial numbers into Where's George, a web site that lets you track where your dollar bills end up throughout the nation or the world.

At first I was a little resistant to the idea. Part of my resistance was due to the fact that it seemed a little weird. But most of my resistance was due to the fact that I know myself pretty well, and I knew that I might get a little obsessed with Where's George if I started doing it myself. I am a completionist and a perfectionist by nature, and there is no limit to the amount of energy I can pour into any random inane task, if I put my mind to it. "Where's George is awesome," said my friend. "Well, okay, maybe I'll give it a try," said I.

And it was pretty awesome. Within a few days of entering some dollar bills on the web site, I had two hits (people who had found my bills) in a suburb of Pittsburgh! All the way across the country, and I had no idea how the bills got there! Where would my bills show up next? This was exciting stuff. Every time a bill showed up in a new state, it was thrilling.

I got a free Where's George stamp from a printing supplies web site, and I started stamping all my bills whenever I made a withdrawal from the bank. I started stamping not just dollar bills, but also fives, tens, and twenties. Whenever I went out to lunch with others who had unmarked cash, I would ask if they wanted to trade bills, so that I could stamp more money and enter it into Where's George. I chided my wife whenever she got change from the grocery store and re-spent it without letting me stamp it first. The world seemed filled with cash, just begging to be stamped and tracked. Sometimes I would daydream about tracking every dollar bill in the world.

I started noticing that my stamped dollar bills were a real conversation starter. Nearly every time I spent any cash, the cashier would look at the bills intently for several seconds, trying to figure out what the weird blue markings were for. Sometimes they would ask me why I had stamped the bills, and I would smile and give a one-sentence spiel about Where's George and how fun it was. They never seemed convinced. Most of the time they shrugged it off. Sometimes they rolled their eyes. A couple times, they joked that I might go to jail for defacing currency.

I also started noticing that some people didn't appreciate my stamped cash at all. A few times, the marked bills caused an actual confrontation. Most of the problems occurred when my bills had a hard time being accepted by automated machines that were designed to accept cash. More than a few times, a grocery store employee had to step in and accept my cash manually in the Self Checkout lane. This did not make them happy. My wife said she even had someone say they wouldn't accept the stamped cash at all. Of course, they had to accept it—it is legal tender, after all—but it seemed strange to me that someone would react so negatively to my Where's George markings. I couldn't understand why it would be a big deal at all.

I happily continued stamping my cash and entering it into the web site after every paycheck, which took between one and two hours each time. I continued getting hits in various states, but about 80% of the hits came from within 30 miles of my house. The thrill of Where's George notification emails was starting to wear off. A few times, I wondered whether it was worth my time to continue doing it, but each time I convinced myself that it was really interesting to see where the bills were going, even those that weren't going anywhere. And who could say when a bill might show up in Alaska or Hawaii? I got a hit in Okinawa once, and it kept me going. More than anything, I felt compelled to continue simply because I couldn't bear the thought of a dollar bill slipping through my fingers without being tracked. What a lost opportunity that would be! And besides, the Where's George web site told me that my George Score (I kid you not) was in the top 5% of all Where's George users. Why throw it all away just because I was a little bored?

I persisted out of inertia for at least a year. Then a few weeks ago, as I was stamping bills for what would turn out to be the last time, I came to the realization that it truly wasn't satisfying anymore. I had started doing Where's George because it was fun and interesting, but it had devolved to the point where it had become a monotonous, and not very important, chore. I didn't even know why I was doing it anymore. The words of a friend rang in my ears, "I have better things to do with my time." Wasn't my time valuable? Couldn't I be doing more fun or important things instead of stamping money, which only seemed to annoy people anyway? What was the point?

So I quit. It felt weird the first time I got a dollar bill as change, and I knew I was going to spend it without entering it into the Where's George web site. I had no idea where that bill was going to go. Once I spent it, I would never again have any way of knowing where it would end up. And that was okay. For the first time in a long time, I felt free to let the dollar bills find their own paths, without me. I could not track them all, and I no longer wanted to try. I spent the bill, purposefully and intentionally, without a stamp. It felt great.

Since then, I've come across a couple bills that others have stamped with their Where's George stamps. It makes me a little nostalgic. In fact, yesterday I hit someone else's bill just to be nice, and gave some details about where I got it and where I was planning to spend it. It was satisfying to type an individual message about a bill, instead of entering a single generic message for a stack of several hundred bills. And it felt good to give a hit to the anonymous person who had stamped the bill. I wish them the best, and I hope my message was encouraging to them as a Where's George user.

As for me, though, I think I'm done with it. I'm happy to hit other people's bills when they come my way, but I won't be stamping any more myself. I might occasionally enter a few bills if I have reason to think they're especially likely to go somewhere cool. But if so, that will be by choice and not by compulsion, not even self-compulsion. Where's George has been fun, and I don't regret having spent so much time doing it. But as someone once said to me, I have better things to do with my time.

Notes from a Unitarian Universalist service

2009-01-04T17:11:00.000-08:00

My wife and kids are out of town for a week or so, and I thought today would be a good day to check out the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. I had heard good things about the Unitarians, and had been meaning to check them out for a long time. I'm not big on church these days, but I figured that if there were any church I might enjoy going to, UU would be it. I wasn't disappointed. Here is a synopsis, compiled from the notes I took on my PDA.

When I entered the chapel, I was astonished to find a room of laughing, smiling people loudly greeting and socializing with each other. It was like I had crashed a house party. Everyone seemed really happy to be there, and enjoying themselves immensely. Almost immediately I felt welcome, like these were my kind of people.

I found a seat, and someone rang a bell. Everyone quieted down and found their own seats. The first thing the minister said was something like, "Welcome to First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City, which is home not only to this church, but also to the undefeated Sugar Bowl champion Utah Utes!" That got a round of laughter and applause. Applause in church. It was awesome.

The minister was a witty guy who knew his stuff. I found myself interested and engaged by what he was saying. Before reading from the Book of Revelation, he said, "Unitarian ministers don't often read from the Bible unless they have a good excuse," which drew a laugh. After reading about the wrath of God and the devastation of the earth, he said, "Thus endeth the reading. And thus endeth the world." This was followed by ominous piano music and more chuckling from the congregation. Lest you think he was simply making fun of the Bible, he did actually have a point, which he eventually came around to making during the sermon.

Next, though, was a reading of the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to become immersed in the imagery. I actually felt like I was in high school again (in a good way). He talked about the poem for a while, and at one point, someone in the congregation shouted, "Amen!" The minister didn't miss a beat and responded with, "Amen! But! ... How do you follow an 'amen'? With a 'but'!" I found this highly amusing, and highly refreshing.

At one point, he talked about how scientists had believed until recently that gravity would overcome the expansion of the universe, and that the universe would end in a Big Crunch. He explained that more recent evidence indicates that the universe will continue to expand forever, eventually ending in proton decay and black holes evaporating into virtual nothingness "more than a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years from now. And the universe is only 14 billion years old. So we have some breathing room." I have never heard anything like this in a sermon, in any church. I just about wanted to jump out of my seat and shout "amen" myself.

Anyway, the main theme of the sermon seemed to be that despite the turmoil that always surrounds us in life, despite everyone who thinks that the Obama presidency (or the Middle East conflict, or whatever) will result in the end of the world, and despite the fact that the end of the world actually is coming someday, we should:

- Repent from the past.
- Live a good life in the present.
- Look with hope to the future.

It was a simple message, but I found it inspiring. It made me think of some specific ways in which I can do all three of these. We closed with a hymn that was about how thankful we are for life. It was very nice.

There were coffee, snacks, and mingling afterward, which was also nice. There were several stations with information about the various projects that church members can get involved in. And they had a mini bookstore, where I noticed that they were selling (among others) The Secular Conscience by Austin Dacey. Yeah, this is the kind of church I could get used to. I'm not putting my name on the membership rolls or anything just yet, but I think I'll definitely be going back.

Preferring the hard truth

2008-12-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions; that is the heart of science.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Today's Sagan quote is one of my favorites. One of the things I've been learning to let go of in the past couple years is the illusion that an idea is correct simply because I am the person who believes it. I remember back in Mr. Ferguson's journalism class in high school, when a student was vigorously questioning something he was teaching. I was shocked when Mr. Ferguson said something like, "The difference between my position and yours is that I am willing to admit I might be wrong." Wow! From a teacher! I think I learned more in that moment than in most of the rest of my high school career. Although I learned this lesson a long time ago, I kind of let myself forget it once I joined the Mormon church. After all, when you have the fullness of the restored gospel, the chance of being wrong is very low. Isn't it?

A few weeks ago, I came across an article that blew my mind. I found it on the de-conversion blog, and it's called The Psychology of Apologetics: Biblical Inerrancy. I was once a fundamentalist Christian, and so I know what it's like to believe that the Bible is inerrant. The mind-blowing idea from the article is illustrated in the following paragraph.

What does this have to do with apologetics? This model of belief-formation bears directly on how we resolve potential contradictions between evidence and belief, and between one set of evidence and another. If we are willing to sacrifice some simplicity, parsimony, and the like, we can always maintain a consistent web of belief while simultaneously holding on to any particular belief we wish. Creationists do this all the time. So do conspiracy theorists, end-times theorists, and radical ideologues of every stripe. These folks all have a strong commitment to a handful of central claims, and they are able to retro-fit the rest of the data in around them. They say they can answer every objection – and they can.

When I read this, I realized that this was something I had been doing for a long time. I believed that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and the LDS church was the true church of Jesus Christ. Whenever I encountered anything that seemed to undermine these beliefs, it could be explained away by creating a more contrived understanding of some other aspect of reality. And in fact, you can do this with just about any belief, which is why evidence is not always sufficient to convince someone that their beliefs are in error. Evidence can be explained away.

The Book of Abraham isn't anywhere close to an accurate translation of the Egyptian papyri Joseph Smith claimed to be translating? Well then, it must be a "spiritual translation", or we must have the wrong papyri (despite the evidence), or maybe the word "translate" means something else entirely. Joseph Smith married 33 women behind Emma's back, many of them teenagers or already married to other men? Well then, God must have commanded him to do so for mysterious reasons, or they must have been married to him only posthumously (despite the evidence), or maybe he was only acting as a man (prophets are only infallible when acting as such, after all). And so on. It doesn't matter how implausible and convoluted these explanations become; it's possible that everything happened exactly this way, and the cherished belief remains intact.

These days, I try to avoid having any cherished beliefs. I have been mistaken so many times in my life that I know I am always capable of being mistaken again. I try to approach knowledge from the standpoint of a skeptic who simply wants to know what is true, and how we know it is true. That is probably an unattainable goal, but I think it's worth striving for every day.

For example, I currently believe the existence of a god or gods is extremely unlikely. I come to this belief based on the lack of evidence for said gods, and my own life experience. But I do not hold this belief as sacred. I could be wrong. For that reason, I'm currently reading a few pro-theist books such as The Reason For God by Timothy Keller. So far I don't find his arguments convincing, but I love that it makes me think.

I would also love to believe that we can be reunited with our loved ones after death. I can see why this idea is so enticing to so many people. I would love for it to be true. I don't see any reason to believe it, except for my own desire for it to be true, which is all the more reason to be skeptical. Again, I would be extremely happy to be wrong. But as Sagan described Kepler, I prefer the hard truth to my dearest illusions.

Sometimes I miss belief

2008-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

This morning, Runtu posted a link to this video. If you're a believing Mormon, you'll probably enjoy it. If you're not, you may find it strange, confusing, boring, or creepy. I actually kind of liked it.

As I watched the video, I found myself strangely emotional. Kind of in a good way, but not really. It was more of a sadness, a longing or a yearning for the days when I actually believed all this stuff. I can imagine my former bishop saying that this feeling is the Holy Ghost trying to tell me that the gospel is true. That's what he said to me about a year and a half ago, when my wife and I were first telling him about my unbelief, and I admitted that this is a painful process. But it's always painful when you find that the world isn't the way you thought it was. The pain itself is not evidence that changing your beliefs is good or bad, right or wrong.

It was nice to have a narrative in which the world could neatly fit. God loved me, Jesus was our Savior, and Joseph Smith restored the gospel so that we could all live eternally with God and our families if we had faith and lived right. It was a simple, encouraging story, and it came with an entire life framework. It had its quirks, but it was relatively straightforward. Follow the prophet and you'll be all right. I made my checklist of daily, weekly, or monthly tasks, and completing the checklist felt good, dammit. Like I'm getting something worthwhile done here! We're on the path to celestial happiness!

No matter how good it felt, watching this video reminded me why I just can't be a believer. I couldn't watch Joseph Smith kneeling in prayer in the Sacred Grove without remembering his many different versions of the story, each more grand and detailed than the last, and each coming at a time when he needed to bolster people's faith in him as a prophet. I couldn't watch him finding the golden plates without remembering his stories about a huge cave inside the Hill Cumorah, filled with books and treasures. I couldn't watch him translating the golden plates without remembering that he did so via a seer stone, with his face buried in a hat, often without the plates even being in the same room. I couldn't watch him receiving the priesthood from resurrected beings without remembering that he never mentioned this alleged event until years later. I couldn't watch him rocking babies with Emma without remembering that he married 33 other women, some of them teenagers, most of them secretly, and many of them already married to other men. And so on.

I actually knew all of this (and more - there's so much more) before I joined the church. But I found the feelings and the narrative so compelling that I shelved the cognitive dissonance and got baptized anyway. Apparently through sheer force of will, I got myself to a point where none of the discrepancies bothered me anymore. And why should they? I was happily married with kids, had a good job and a nice house, and church activity fit right into our happy little life. Everything was nice and simple, and we were filled with certainty. Until I met Carl Sagan and the shelf started to buckle. The weight of the evidence demanded my attention. Fortunately, we still have a happy little life, but of course it's not the same as it used to be.

I think that's what I miss most. Certainty. These days I am learning to be comfortable with ambiguity, probability, uncertainty, and unanswered questions. It's difficult for me to be uncertain, but in light of the evidence I have seen over my lifetime, I must admit that I am. As Carl Sagan correctly asserted, "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." I wouldn't trade where I am today for where I was then. My eyes are wide open, and shutting them doesn't make the world go away. But I still miss it.

Why we can't imagine death

2008-11-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
— Carl Sagan, "In the Valley of the Shadow," Parade, March 10, 1996

I think about death almost every day. I remember once as a small child, I asked my grandmother why they buried people in the ground after they died. "If you're under the ground," I asked, "how do you breathe?" She told me that people no longer breathe after they die, and I was dumbfounded. The idea just made no sense. I'd never experienced not breathing. How would it be possible to not breathe, forever? If dead people stopped breathing, they would... well, die! It seemed absurd to me then, and it seems absurd to me now. And yet it is literally the most natural thing in the world. Death is something that happens to all of us, yet it is completely outside our experience. What a paradox!

I came across this Scientific American article a little while ago, and it really articulated this phenomenon well, complete with scientific studies to support the idea that all of us tend to perceive our own consciousness as persisting beyond death, even if we believe otherwise. The article is well worth reading.

There were two specific ideas that particularly resonated with me. The first is that our own immortality is unfalsifiable from a first-person perspective. In other words, if I believe myself to be immortal, no experience of mine will ever disprove this to me. I'm reminded of the wise words of Stephen Wright, who said, "I intend to live forever. So far, so good." I cannot experience my own non-existence. It's simply not possible. And yet, as Shaun Nichols is quoted in the article, "When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there's an obstacle!"

The second thing that struck me was the idea that even those who do not believe in an afterlife tend to instinctively think of consciousness as persisting after death. I know I do it. To pick a random example, I know that Carl Sagan died over ten years ago, and his body is presently... shall we say, not in working order. And yet, when I wished him a happy birthday last week, it felt like I was really talking to someone who could perceive my words. Like a mystical Carl is floating around somewhere in the cosmos. Intellectually, I know that makes no sense. And yet, the idea seems so intuitively hardwired that it's very difficult to shake.

I had a similar experience last year after my grandfather died, fairly soon after I had begun coming to terms with my skepticism. At the viewing, everyone was milling about, talking with each other, exchanging stories, laughing, and catching up on each others' lives. It was so surreal, like everyone was at a social party, but no one seemed to notice or mention the fact that there was a dead guy at the front of the room. Not that there's anything wrong with that; different people and different cultures deal with death in different ways, and this is how we do it where I'm from. I heard several family members say something like "it's not really him in there" or "he's in a better place now". Obviously, this may help us feel better, to imagine that the person we love is not truly dead and gone, and that someday we will see him again. I would love to see my grandfather again. He was a hard-working, honest man who loved his family and made the world a better place. He was a good person. But I have to accept that it really was him in the casket, and I will never see him again.

This is why I think about death. Not because I find it fun or satisfying to consciously ponder unconsciousness or to imagine my own non-existence (although I admit, that can sort of be fun). Not because I have no imagination or no compassion or no desire for eternal life. I would love to be surprised by an afterlife. Seriously, that would be wicked cool. But as Dr. Sagan pointed out in the quote above, there does not seem to be any evidence that it is more than wishful thinking. I think about death because life is precious, and I know how short it is. We find ourselves in an amazing, almost impossibly improbable situation, alive and aware, floating through space on a chunk of rock with only each other to hang onto. It may not make sense to us. It may in fact be the height of absurdity. But we need to make the most of life while we have it, because this is the only one we get.

Lori Lipman Brown at Skeptrak

2008-11-12T11:41:00.000-08:00

The latest episode of Skepticality (episode #89) has a fantastic talk by Lori Lipman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America, entitled Pastafarian, Zoroastrian, Atheist — Can't We All Just Get Along?. She talks about the secular vote, and what we can do to advance secularism in America. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the talk.

A bit about "psychology of privilege", starting about about 23:49:

I have noticed along the way... How many of you have heard people talk about how oppressed Christians are in society today? How many of you have heard how oppressed white people are? How oppressed heterosexuals are? You know, other people want "special rights".

I know there is at least one psychologist sitting in the audience who can tell me if this is an official thing, but just anecdotally I've noticed that if someone is in a privileged majority, they don't usually notice the perks they're getting. For example, if I walk into a store and buy a box of Band-Aids, if it's called skin tone, it's my skin tone. Never really thought about that before.

But they don't notice, and they're just used to having it all, society is all around them. So if a Christian is used to everything being about their religion, as soon as people who are not Christian, whether they be pagans or Buddhists or atheists or humanists, suddenly it's not, "Oh, these people also want to be acknowledged and be part of the fabric of society." It's like, "You're taking away our rights! Because we always had Christian prayer in our school!" And they didn't realize that's not actual equality, that's just a privilege they'd been getting for years and years and years.

A slight move toward any inclusion of a minority feels like an attack. I don't think these people are making this up when they say they feel oppressed. It's a ridiculous feeling. I even asked one person who said that, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "Well, I keep trying to talk to my co-workers about Jesus, and they don't want to listen!" And it's like, "Well, I guess they don't feel like talking about that." You know, it's like, "How dare they? They're attacking my Christianity by not letting me try to give them the Good Word." I mean, that's what they see as oppression. It's like, "Okay, try saying you're an atheist and see how you're treated."

And a bit about the sexuality double standard, starting about about 35:20:

Expose the double standard. When people were talking about LGBT people "flaunting their sexuality and their gender", I stopped keeping a picture of my partner on my desk at school, and I stopped wearing my wedding ring, and I stopped referring to him with any kind of gender specific information. And when people would get confused by that, especially when they would find out who my partner was, they would say, "Why didn't you tell me he was your husband? I thought maybe you were a lesbian." I'd say, "Well, I didn't want to flaunt my sexuality."

The double standard is big-time because my gay and lesbian friends, if they even talked about going on a date, "oh, you're flaunting your sexuality". But all these heteros could talk about anything they were doing with their dates or partners or whatever.

Same thing with "special rights". I got over 1,000 special rights 22 years ago, and I still have them. But people don't think of them as special when I get them, because my partner happens to have the right genitalia for their rules.

I especially love the bit about "flaunting your sexuality". That is so totally right on.

Happy birthday, Carl

2008-11-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

Today, November 9, 2008, would have been Carl Sagan's 74th birthday. Sadly, he passed away in 1996, but not before leaving the world a great legacy of scientific inquiry and compassion for all humanity. I think about him often, and I am sad that I never met him. This week's quote is one I think of nearly every day, and it even comes with an accompanying video. Dr. Sagan's words taught me to put the earth in perspective, and not a day goes by when I don't visualize the earth from a distance outside the moon's orbit, outside the solar system, outside the galaxy, or across the universe. Thanks, Carl. You made the world a better place.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Thousands in downtown SLC protest the LDS church's Prop 8 involvement

2008-11-08T21:05:00.000-08:00

This is just excellent. Apparently thousands of people swarmed downtown Salt Lake City last night, to protest the Mormon church's involvement in passing Proposition 8 in California. I really wanted to be there, but I needed to spend some time with my family, and that's more important. Gee, it's nice for me to be able to spend time with my legally wedded spouse and our children, don't you think? I wish everyone were able to enjoy the same privilege.

Shockingly, the church finds the protest "disturbing" and objects to being "singled out" for exercising its right to free speech. Well, here's a news flash. When you, a large tax-exempt religious institution, claim that your leaders speak for God and then mobilize your membership by telling them that they need to vote in a certain way on a particular political proposition regarding the civil issue of same-sex marriage... you're going to get singled out.

You can't have it both ways. On the one hand, you call this issue your "Gettysburg", read letters about Prop 8 from the pulpit, call for donations and volunteers, organize call chains, and generally make it felt that every member of your religious organization in the state of California is expected to sacrifice for the cause of taking away others' right to marry. On the other hand, you act surprised and hurt when those whose rights have been stripped become angry, members of your own church actively voice their disapproval, and thousands of protesters show up at your doorstep to protest your coordination of this exercise in codifying discrimination into law. Pardon my candor, but what the hell did you expect?

In the comments to the Salt Lake Tribune article linked above, a commenter named slgb8 condemned the protesters, saying that the church has its own right to free speech and the protesters were trying to take that away. He said:

Don’t take rights away from others that you would not want to have taken from you. I think we should be careful not to take away others rights to free speech even when we don’t agree with them. We could start the country on a road the end with none of us having basic rights.

I agree with that completely, but Prop 8 is not a free speech issue. It's an issue of marriage. Let's substitute the phrase "free speech" with the word "marriage", shall we?

Don’t take rights away from others that you would not want to have taken from you. I think we should be careful not to take away others rights to marriage even when we don’t agree with them. We could start the country on a road the end with none of us having basic rights.

Much more relevant. It's the correct idea, but this particular commenter had the wrong idea about who is attempting to take away rights from whom. In fact, who has succeeded in doing so.

I seriously am about as close to resigning my membership as I ever have been. This has been an emotional election season, and I am emotional as I type this, but I think that even with a clear head and a calm spirit, I do not want to be part of an organization that so confidently proclaims its willingness to take away others' rights. That is the exact opposite of what I hope to stand for.

Hey, that's my pumpkin!

2008-11-03T11:29:00.003-08:00

Looks like the pictures of my FSM pumpkin made it onto the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Halloween page, as well as The Friendly Atheist. Cool!

My Flying Spaghetti Monster pumpkin

2008-10-31T15:50:00.000-07:00

My family and I went to the in-laws' house last Sunday, as we usually do, and we all carved pumpkins. I usually abstain, and go sit on the couch and read instead. But this year I felt inspired to create something, and here it is. Unfortunately by now, almost a week later, the center part is mostly shriveled up, but the overall shape still looks okay.

Reading The Reason For God

2008-10-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'm a little disappointed with how much time I spend thinking, reading, and writing about religious or philosophical topics. On the one hand, it's obviously a very important subject, and one that I've been giving a lot of thought to in the past few years. On the other hand, I don't think it's very important at all, and it bothers me that I spend so much time on a subject that is essentially arguing about fairy tales.

Recently, a Christian friend on another message board recommended The Reason For God by Timothy Keller, so this week I checked it out from the library. It purports to address the most frequently heard "doubts" that skeptics raise, and to point the way to the true path and purpose of Christianity. So I was hopeful that this book might contain some actual meat. Unfortunately, here is the list of specific questions the book appears to address:

Why does God allow suffering in the world?

How could a loving God send people to Hell?

Why isn’t Christianity more inclusive?

How can one religion be "right" and the others "wrong"?

Why have so many wars been fought in the name of God?

I can only speak for myself, but these are not the kinds of questions I tend to ask. These questions seem to presume the existence of a God, and not just any God, but the Christian God. They seem like questions that a struggling Christian might ask, not questions that an actual atheist or skeptic would ask. My questions are more along the lines of, "Why is it necessary to posit the existence of a supernatural realm?", "What does the evidence suggest?", and "How does the God hypothesis explain the data better than naturalism?"

After reading the Introduction, I don't have very high expectations of this book, but I would love to be surprised. The major premise seems to be that skeptics ought to doubt their doubts. Funny, that's the exact same thing my father-in-law said to me after I came out as a skeptic, and it still makes no sense. Doubting your doubts will lead you to believe anything and everything. For example, check out this paragraph:

Some will respond to all this, "My doubts are not based on a leap of faith. I have no beliefs about God one way or another. I simply feel no need for God and I am not interested in thinking about it." But hidden beneath this feeling is the very modern American belief that the existence of God is a matter of indifference unless it intersects with my emotional needs. The speaker is betting his or her life that no God exists who would hold you accountable for your beliefs and behavior if you didn't feel the need for him. That may be true or it may not be true, but, again, it is quite a leap of faith.

I don't see why not believing in God is a huge leap of faith. Is it a huge leap of faith not to believe in Santa Claus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Here's my version:

Some will respond to all this, "My doubts are not based on a leap of faith. I have no beliefs about the Flying Spaghetti Monster one way or another. I simply feel no need for the Flying Spaghetti Monster and I am not interested in thinking about it." But hidden beneath this feeling is the very modern American belief that the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a matter of indifference unless it intersects with my emotional needs. The speaker is betting his or her life that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists who would hold you accountable for your beliefs and behavior if you didn't feel the need for him. That may be true or it may not be true, but, again, it is quite a leap of faith.

I simply substituted the word "God" with "Flying Spaghetti Monster", and now it sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? Is it really a leap of faith not to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Why not? What's the difference between this paragraph and the original one? What makes this one ridiculous while the other one supposedly isn't?

The only difference I can see is that humanity has a long history of believing in an anthropomorphic "God" (or gods), thus the concept is so familiar to us that it does not seem crazy when someone talks about it. The Flying Spaghetti Monster enjoys no such tradition.

I'm not sure whether the book will get better once I dig into it, but I'll let you know if it does.

More Prop 8 nonsense

2008-10-27T23:38:00.001-07:00

Three things.

First, the arguments being used to support Proposition 8 are generally false, misleading, and based on faulty logic. Don't take my word for it; see Mormon lawyer and scholar Morris Thurston's rebuttal of the "Six Consequences" memo for detailed examples. It bothers me greatly that the Mormon church is doing all it can to push this deceptive nonsense forward.

Second, apparently the latest Yes on 8 ad uses images of children without their parents' consent and against their wishes, and some of these children's parents want it taken down. Just beautiful. Way to go, Yes on 8. Way to think of the children. Oh, the irony.

Third, conservative Christian leaders are quoted in the New York Times as calling Prop 8 "Armageddon", "more important than the presidential election", and saying "we will not survive . . . as a nation" if Prop 8 does not pass. Yes on 8 is looking to raise $2 million this week, and with this kind of rhetoric it's likely they'll get it. If you care about this issue, please donate any amount to Equality For All (at the bottom of the page). Polls are showing that voters are moving back and forth on this issue, and the outcome may well depend on who spends more advertising dollars in the home stretch. Sad but true.

If you're in California, please vote NO on 8.

Standing For Something

2008-10-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.
– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

As you may know, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), though my personal beliefs and feelings seem to move farther in the opposite direction day by day. On Friday, I had the privilege of joining a group of about 50 Mormons and former Mormons who delivered a package to Church headquarters, to protest the Church's heavy involvement in the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in California. The event was organized online via the web site Signing For Something.

Proposition 8 is a proposed amendment to the California constitution to ban marriage between people of the same gender. The Mormon church has used church time and resources to actively campaign for Prop 8, and has directly solicited the time, money, and effort of its members to campaign for Prop 8's passage. It has organized massive efforts via its membership network, which we believe violates its own stance of political neutrality, for example as stated in Doctrine & Covenants 134:9, "We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government."

Our delivery on Friday contained about 300 letters written by individuals, carnations to symbolize those who have lost their lives over this issue, and copies of a petition explaining why we oppose the church's involvement. The petition can be found here, and has currently been signed by about 700 people, Mormons and non-Mormons alike. Those who have signed the petition hold various positions on the issue of same-sex marriage, but all are opposed to the Mormon church's attempts to use their religious influence to impose their beliefs on the larger secular society in this civil matter.

The event was covered on almost all of the local news networks, and you can see coverage at the links below. You can actually see me in some of the videos; I have a beard and ponytail, and was wearing a purple dress shirt and tie.

Fox 13 - I consider this the best coverage, with the clearest explanation of our position.

KSL - a station owned by the Mormon church; it's interesting to compare how they chose to report the story.

ABC 4 - also good coverage.

Salt Lake Tribune

Deseret News - a newspaper owned by the Mormon church; again, interesting to compare the differences.

Honestly, I doubt the petition or the letters will have any effect on the church's stance toward same-sex marriage, much less its stance toward homosexuality. But I cannot imply my agreement on this issue by remaining silent. I find it sad that the church characterizes this as a moral issue, when I see the issues of gay rights and same-sex marriage as analogous to the issues of black civil rights and interracial marriage in the 1950s and '60s. This has nothing to do with morality.

If you are in California, please vote NO on 8. Wherever you are, please donate to Equality For All (at the bottom of the page - contributions through ActBlue are being matched only through today!), sign the Signing For Something petition, talk to your friends and neighbors about this issue, or do whatever you can. And regardless of your feelings on this or any other issue, remember to vote on November 4.

Why I trust science

2008-09-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

I guess this week is the week for publicly posting all the email I send. This post is adapted from an email I sent to Stephen Gibson of Truth-Driven Thinking. He no longer does the podcast, but I highly recommend listening to some of the past episodes. He has very interesting interviews with well-informed people, and the interviews challenge conventional wisdom on a variety of topics.

One of the last podcast episodes I listened to was Epilogue #5, a guest appearance with Don Johnson Ministries, and it kind of pissed me off. You don't have to listen to the episode to appreciate this post, but it might help.

I felt like the Christian interviewers were trying to pigeonhole Steve as a "materialist" so that they could dispatch him with their stock philosophical arguments, instead of actually listening to what he was trying to say. At the same time, they kept insisting that this was a dialogue for the purpose of greater understanding. To me, it came off as disingenuous, though I believe they may have honestly thought they were trying to participate in an open dialogue.

Particularly bad was their assertion that the best worldview is the one that explains what others cannot, and therefore scientific naturalism is inferior because it cannot explain the supernatural. So how about the assertion, "I believe science, reason, and evidence are the best way of understanding the world. I accept the scientific consensus on all matters pertaining to reality. Also, I have an invisible dragon in my garage." Is this a more correct worldview because it explains something supernatural that pure naturalism cannot explain? If my friend says that my garden is beautiful, and I say, "Yes, but did you know there are also fairies at the bottom of it?", does that make my point of view superior? I don't think so, because the addendum of "God did it" doesn't really explain anything. There is no value in arriving at an explanation via Making Stuff Up.

If you're going to compare worldviews, you need to examine them against the evidence. The evidence for scientific naturalism is that science works. The space shuttle flies, and vaccines work, and the reason they work is because science allows us to make testable predictions about the universe. Our understanding of reality has increased by orders of magnitude in the past, let's say, 2000 years. We know that we are progressing in understanding because we are able to make successful predictions that we weren't able to make before. Science is the tool for doing so, and it is also the tool for measuring our progress. That is the evidence.

How has our understanding of reality been increased by Christianity? How would we even know? Does Christianity make any testable predictions about the world? In a way, you could say that prophecy is a testable prediction. Unfortunately, most prophecies in the Christian tradition are so vague that they can be interpreted in dozens of ways. Even prophecies that are specific are not falsifiable, because any failures can be conveniently explained away with "God works in mysterious ways" or "I guess the people weren't faithful enough" or any other rationalization you can come up with. Would the space shuttle fly in a Christian universe? Sure, probably. Did God tell us how to make the space shuttle fly? No.

Does the practicality of science prove that matter is all that exists? No, but it certainly suggests that it is a very valuable approach to assume that we live in a natural universe. As Steve said during the interview, asking for proof that "matter is all that exists" is really asking for proof of a negative proposition. One can no more disprove the existence of God than one can disprove the existence of the invisible dragon in my garage. It is the onus of supernaturalists to demonstrate a single counterexample to the proposition of naturalism. It is not the onus of naturalists to disprove every conceivable example of anything that would fall outside the realm of naturalism.

I found it interesting that they demanded this impossible evidence in order to support the naturalistic view, yet when claiming evidence of their own position, the best they could do were ideas like:

- "Thoughts and emotions aren't physical." (Why?)
- "Is rationality rational?" (Why not?)
- "The gospels tell what Jesus' contemporaries thought of him." (No, they were written about 100 years later.)
- "Plenty of people have debunked Ehrman." (This is an argument?)

In a way, this is a specific rant against the Christians in a particular interview, but it's also a more general complaint about supernaturalism in general. If a supernatural explanation were better than a scientific one for explaining any part of reality, I wouldn't have such a problem with it. If prayer could help someone regrow an amputated limb, I would pray. Hell, if prayer were shown to have a significant effect on anything at all, external to the person praying, I would pray. But as far as I can tell, naturalism is sufficient to explain everything we see and experience. And furthermore, science works. That is why I trust it.

Taking some control

2008-09-18T22:47:00.000-07:00

As I was writing an email to a friend tonight, I realized that I have recently made a lot of changes for the better. In the past 18 months or so, I have:

Taken control of my own mind as I realized that I am free to believe what makes sense to me, and I no longer believe in the church. I have pretty much come to terms with what I do and don't believe, and why. I like who I am, and my family still loves me, and that's really all that matters.

Taken control of my finances. We've been focusing on paying off debt for the past 17 months, and in 12 days from today, we will be totally debt-free except our home. I think the feeling of freedom that comes with paying off debt is one major contributor to my reassessment of where I am and what I want to do with my life.

Taken control of my health, by paying attention to what I'm eating and by exercising. I've lost about 30 pounds in 4 months, and I now run 3 miles every other morning, whereas a year ago I could barely walk up a flight of stairs without being out of breath. I feel so much better, and it just adds to the feeling of empowerment over my own life.

Started taking control of personal organization, after reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It's basically a system for getting everything out of your mind and into a written system so you don't have to worry about everything you're doing or not doing at any particular moment. I haven't gotten too far into it yet, but I can already tell it's going to be a very positive change. The simple act of capturing my thoughts on paper instead of trying to hold them all in my brain has been very freeing.

I feel like all these positive changes are part of the same phenomenon that's happening in my life, and they all support each other. It's like I'm systematically finding areas of my life that I'm unsatisfied with, and consciously making changes to improve them. It feels a lot like cleaning out 10 years worth of garbage that has accumulated through laziness and negligence, so that I can move forward and actually do something positive. Like filling in a bunch of holes I dug for myself, so that I can finally start to build something.

About two years ago, I remember sitting in church and writing down the question on a piece of paper: "What do I really want?" I thought about it for a while, and finally I wrote the answer: "Freedom." By this, I didn't mean freedom from anything in particular. I meant freedom to dream and to dare, freedom to explore, to create, and to achieve. In all of the areas I mentioned above, I can see how something was holding me back (religion, debt, laziness, disorganization), and I can see how eliminating that thing has given me more options. I feel like I'm starting to experience more freedom in all these areas, and it's because I decided to change my life in order to get what I really want. I'm not sure what caused me to stop and write down that question two years ago, but I think that was the beginning of all these big changes.

Science is never finished

2008-09-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

I've decided to start posting a quote from Carl Sagan each Sunday, to remind me of why I have chosen the name "Saganist" to identify myself on this blog and in other places around the Web. Carl Sagan had a way of expressing many of the hopes and ideals I would like to express myself, except that he was much more elegant and succinct than I am. I hope you enjoy the quotes.

I urge you to bear in mind the imperfection of our current knowledge. Science is never finished. It proceeds by successive approximations, edging closer and closer to a complete and accurate understanding of nature, but it is never fully there. From the fact that so many major discoveries have been made in the last century – even in the last decade – it is clear that we still have far to go. Science is always subject to debate, correction, refinement, agonizing reappraisal, and revolutionary insights. Nevertheless, there now seems to be enough known to reconstruct some of the key steps that led to us and helped to make us who we are.
– Carl Sagan

Recently on another site I frequent, someone implied that scientific naturalism requires as much faith as theism, and as evidence for this claim, he pointed to the fact that physicists disagree with each other just as theologists disagree with each other. Specifically, he said,

I notice today in the news...Stephen Hawking has a $100 bet that the elusive "God" particle won't be found by the new particle collider and it will be back to the drawing board for even the "standard model".....yikes....Again, it seems to me that physicists disagree among themselves as much as theologists do.....

The difference between physicists and theologists is that physicists do experiments. Whatever evidence the LHC provides, scientific theories will need to be adjusted to account for it. This is not a weakness of science; this is science's greatest strength. It is what connects scientific understanding to reality. Theology does not need any such connection.

I actually agree with the assertion that science is not infallible. It is a method used by humans; and humans make mistakes, take wrong turns, disagree with each other, and play politics. But I believe science is simply the most effective method we have found so far for discovering the nature of reality, and in the long run it maintains the balance of wonder and skepticism that is necessary for finding truth.

The fact that physicists disagree with each other is a good thing! It means that there is much left to discover, and we don't have all the answers. I think the media tends to portray scientists as thinking they have all the answers, but continual uncertainty is integral to scientific inquiry. As Dr. Sagan said, science is never finished. If you think science claims to have all the answers, I think you misunderstand science. Disagreement among scientists is usually about how to interpret the evidence, or which theory best explains the evidence. It is not disagreement about whether to follow the evidence at all, and that is what makes it so different from religion.

I leave you with a quote from Bertrand Russell:

The scientific temper of mind is cautious, tentative, and piecemeal; it does not imagine that it knows the whole truth, or that even its best knowledge is wholly true. It knows that every doctrine needs emendation sooner or later, and that the necessary emendation requires freedom of investigation and freedom of discussion.

The devil wears Birkenstocks

2008-09-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

I love This American Life, and last week's episode, "The Devil in Me", was fantastic as usual. It's worth listening to the whole thing, but especially Act Three: The Devil Wears Birkenstocks. I found myself laughing and clapping several times, because it is so right on. Here's the brief description:

Some people battle inner demons, but contributor Dave Dickerson went one step further. Dave tells the story of the time he took on an actual demon in his college classroom. (10 and 1/2 minutes)

Dave was raised as a fundamentalist Christian, and at a point where he thought he was mostly past all that, he found himself placed in a situation where his belief in angels and demons was brought to the forefront of his mind in a very real way. Listen, you won't regret it.

The power of Christ compels vampires!

2008-09-02T21:30:00.001-07:00

I love Jack Chick tracts. They're just so over the top that you can't take them seriously at all. Even as a Christian I thought they were way too goofy. Here's one where the heroine uses the power of Jesus to convert a vampire! Rock on! In the next episode, I bet she uses the sword of the spirit to slay unicorns!

December 22, 2012

2008-09-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

Mark the date on your calendars, if you have a long count calendar that actually goes that far. I don't normally prophesy, but this is an official prophecy. The world will still be here on December 22, 2012.

We are they

2008-08-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

This beautiful National Geographic article reminded me of something I've been thinking about for quite a while. The article is about how an archeological find in the Sahara confirms theories about certain groups of people who lived there when it was more temperate, several thousand years ago.

The image that struck me was of the Stone Age Embrace, a grave containing (presumably) a mother and two children with hands interlaced. This arrangement of bodies touches me deeply, because it shows that people who lived thousands of years ago may not have been so different from us today. When I think of the people who lived in ancient Egypt, or Sumeria, or medieval Europe, or prehistoric North America, I often wonder about the nameless masses of people who lived and died without leaving a trace of their existence. We know almost nothing about any specific person who may have lived and died so long ago.

But they were like us. They loved each other. They loved their children. They were afraid of the dark. The sun gave them light, and the earth gave them water. They looked up at the same stars we see. They wondered about the meaning of life, and their place in it. They mourned the deaths of those they loved. They were afraid to die, and they wanted to be remembered. Now I'm projecting a bit, but I like to think that these things are true. And the Stone Age Embrace makes me think that I'm not too far off. I think they loved their lives just as much as we love our own. And one day in the not-too-distant future, we will become them.

I often try to look at life and existence from many different angles. It helps me to understand and appreciate my place in the universe. Here is one way of looking at it: We are now living in the past. Just as those who lived and died thousands of years ago are in our distant past, we are in the distant past of those to come. People will wonder who we really were, and what life was really like so many years ago, back in the 21st century. What will they think of us? How will they know who we were? Will they admire us for our achievements? Will they thank us for having made their world a better place? I hope so. And I hope they will find some of us buried in an Information Age Embrace.

Feed your kids if you don't want them to die

2008-08-12T23:01:00.001-07:00

This story just totally broke my heart. How could anyone do this to their own child? I don't buy the line that it wasn't her decision not to feed the boy. If she hadn't made a decision not to feed the boy, she would have fed the boy.

This is an extreme example of the spirit vs. conscience concept I was talking about the other day. I don't care if you believe that God, or God's prophet, or the Holy Spirit, or Jesus himself told you that your two-year old child is a demon and you shouldn't feed him. If you have any sense of human decency, you feed your fucking child. And then you get far, far away from whoever told you otherwise.

It's OK to be uncertain

2008-08-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.
—Carl Sagan

I'm fairly new to this skepticism business. Well, I am and I'm not. In many ways, I've been a skeptic since I was two years old, when I used to ask my parents where God came from. However, I have always craved certainty, and my religious history reflects this. I'll save the full story for another time, but let's just say that although I have always asked deep questions and sought true answers, I have never allowed myself the freedom to be uncertain.

Even now, spilling my thoughts to the world, I feel like I need to have everything figured out before I propose even the simplest idea. If I want to talk about the cosmos, I ought to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics. If I want to talk about science and skepticism, I ought to be an expert in philosophy, and I ought to have extensive scientific research experience. If I want to talk about religion, I ought to have an M.Div. and speak half a dozen ancient languages. If I want to talk about the human condition, I ought to be an expert in psychology, sociology, political science, and so on.

The fact is, I am an amateur. I am educated, and I am always becoming more so. I have a point of view, which I try to base on evidence, but I am not an expert. I am uncertain of many things, and I am trying to allow myself to accept this. It is impossible to know very much with certainty, yet I strive for better understanding. Mostly, I think I would like my understanding to be complete, but I am coming to grips with the fact that this will never happen.

One huge benefit of uncertainty is its flexibility. I am open to new evidence, and I am willing to be persuaded. I try to accept good ideas and reject bad ones, no matter where they come from. In this way, I hope to learn much about how the universe really works. This is how science works as well, building upon imprecise understanding in order to fit our theories to reality, not the other way around. I guess this blog is my peer review.

I started with a Sagan quote, and I think I'll end with one too. This quote is from The Demon-Haunted World, and epitomizes the attitude I strive for.

I’m frequently asked, “Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments—there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.

Often, I’m asked next, “What do you really think?”

I say, “I just told you what I really think.”

“Yes, but what’s your gut feeling?”

But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

Conscience trumps spirit

2008-08-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion.
—Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg

I've been giving it the old college try at church for the past few weeks. Trying to look for positive things I can appreciate, and trying to contribute positive thoughts of my own. Some weeks are better than others.

This past week, I learned something while sitting in Sunday school. I don't think it had to do directly with the Korihor lesson, but maybe something in the lesson jogged my brain. I had the thought that conscience is more important than spirit. In other words, if you feel like the "Holy Spirit" is telling you to do something, but your conscience is objecting to it, follow your conscience. Your sense of spirit is messed up.

Here's an example to illustrate. Let's say you believe that the spirit is telling you that there is no God but Allah, therefore all American infidels must die, and you should accomplish this by poisoning the water supply. Er... okay, that example would work fine, but let's try something slightly less obviously destructive to the entire world. Let's say your co-worker has a gay son who just died, and you are a Christian who believes that homosexuality is an abomination. Should you:

A. Picket the funeral, shouting and holding signs that say "God hates fags" and "Thank God for AIDS".
B. Express to your co-worker your sorrow that his son will spend eternity in hell, and share with him the good news of Jesus Christ so he can avoid the same fate.
C. Express condolences to your co-worker because he just lost his son, and do not mention homosexuality at all.

Personally I have nothing against homosexuality, so of course C is the obvious answer. A is right out! Yet sadly there are a few nutjobs who think A is the thing to do. At a time in my life when I was a Christian who believed homosexuality was wrong, I can imagine myself being torn between B and C. I believe that I might have thought of this as a good opportunity to share the gospel, and I would have attributed this idea to the Holy Spirit, but I also believe my conscience would have been telling me that this is not an appropriate time to be pushing religion. As fellow humans, we ought to treat each other as we would want to be treated. When someone is in need of comfort and understanding, we ought to be listeners, not preachers.

This hypothetical situation reminds me of Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer's Unwritten Order of Things talk, in which he said that funerals should be about preaching the gospel, not about remembering the deceased. This makes me want to throw up. Not only that someone would think this characterization of funerals is appropriate, but that they would use their considerable influence to demand such behavior of all good believers. My conscience would not allow me to ignore the deceased at his own funeral, and I would hope I'm not the only one who finds this unwritten order of things repugnant.

This kind of "conscience vs. spirit" quandary used to happen to me all the time as a Christian. Airplane rides were the worst. I never felt comfortable pushing my religion on anyone else, particularly if they hadn't initiated the conversation by asking about it. But I always felt guilty, like I should be talking to everyone about religion all the time, because that's what God wanted me to do, right?

The bottom line is that the "spirit" is usually a mental playback of something someone else told you to do. It might be the right thing to do, or it might not. Your conscience represents your own beliefs and values. If you perceive a conflict between the two, follow your conscience. You're the one who has to live with yourself, so live by your own ideals.