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It’s also interesting to me that, since the time of Brigham Young, no Prophet that I know of (including the Apostles) has outright QUIT the the Church and written a shocking tell-all expose´about how the Mormon leadership fools millions of followers into believing that the First Pres. and Q12 are Prophets. Imagine what would happen if Pres. Eyring apostatized and wrote some book about the tactics that the First Pres. and Q12 use to persuade people to believe they are Prophets when these 15 men are in fact no more than a CEO and board of directors for one of the most successful financial scams of the last two centuries. It would be the best selling book of the decade! If the Church is really nothing more than a corporation that knowingly sells quack religious products and services to its members for the fee of tithing, it seems to me that at least one of the hundreds of men who have been among that elite 15 would have stepped forward and said, “I can no longer in good conscience tell people that I and the 14 men who lead this Church are Prophets. I cannot continue to live this lie. We cannot heal anyone. We cannot accurately predict any calamities. We can’t translate any ancient records. I don’t even know where my car keys are right now and I don’t expect God to tell me where they are. The truth must be told, and I will tell it, whatever the risk. We are not Prophets, and we possess none of the supernatural powers that primary children are taught that we have.” But this has never happened. No Prophet has ever stepped forward and exposed the Church as a fraud. But then again, no Pope has tried to expose the Catholic Church as a fraud. I don’t think that this is good evidence for the idea that the First Pres. and Q12 are Prophets with a capital “P.” But if I was ordained to that office, I would expect to be able to raise my hand in front of me and say to a kid in a wheelchair, “Take up thy wheelchair, and walk,” and I would fully expect him to do it, and when that didn’t happen, I’d start to ask some questions about what kinds of powers I was letting people believe I had.
In a website I got to from a post on this site, I read about the book Why People Believe Weird Things.The author of that book (I think) asked the question, “Why do smart people believe weird things?” He gave this answer: Smart people believe weird things because smart people are skilled at defending beliefs that they acquired for non-smart reasons.I can see that this is true for smart Mormons. Hugh Nibley was as good as they get at defending his beliefs, though we are left to wonder how he came to these beliefs in the first place. My roommates are smart- one is a grad student in astrophysics and the other has a master’s degree in English- and they are both obviously Stage 3 TBMs. They have all the classic defenses for some of the problems in Church history and doctrine. I believed what I did because a group of men in business suits who had so much authority they had to rent extra storage space for it told me what to believe. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, and a guy like me becomes quite skilled at defending the indefensible. Part of this process is breaking down all of those old defenses, the “bad apologetics.” A lot of stuff associated with the Church is simply indefensible, and it’s a big relief to have some logical congruity in those areas by realizing that.
I grew up with sort of a strict policy of no spending on Sunday, though I’m not sure where this came from, because my parents weren’t that strict about it. Perhaps it was influenced by stories like the one about the father who walked a long way to church on Sunday instead of driving his car so he didn’t have to buy gasoline on Sunday. But at BYU, you can buy dinner on Sunday at the two cafeterias, and it’s a more expensive meal that it is on any other day. KSL and Deseret News operate on Sunday. As I understood it, the reason for not spending money on Sunday was so that people didn’t have to work on Sunday, but the Church (and I assume you) consumes electricity on Sunday for lighting and air conditioning etc. which requires people at the power plant to work on Sunday, so some people have to work on Sunday to allow Church meetings to proceed. So the Sunday work/Sunday money spending issue has been confusing for me. I propose that much of this matrimonial mess can be explained if we consider that the Church’s first priorities as an institution are survival and growth. The logic is clear and simple: the practice of giving the youth of the Church high expectations for their future spouse is actually a retention effort. If I had a group of youth, and I wanted them to stay active in the Church and to keep the commandments, I would tell them that they will be rewarded with an attractive and desirable spouse if they keep the commandments. The Church also does this with tithing: if I want people to pay tithing, I tell them that they will be blessed materially if they pay tithing (and even let them believe that they will get more back than they paid); this gives people unrealistic financial expectations, which can probably partially account for Utah’s high bankruptcy rate.
At this point I would contend that the body of singles in the Church (age 18 to whatever) consists largely of a group of people who are eagerly anticipating the fulfilling of the promises that the Church has made to them regarding a desirable spouse. The problem here is that the Church has made promises that it doesn’t have the
powerto keep. The Church does not have the power to make one person fall in love with another and thus does not have the power to fulfill the promise of a desirable spouse to everyone who keeps the commandments. I think that the same thing happened in the 1970s when the Church encouraged members to have many children as soon as possible after marriage regardless of their financial situation and promised that God would provide for their financial needs. The Church did not have the power or the resources to keep this promise, and many families struggled with too many kids and not enough money to pay for them, so the Church stopped teaching this.
I read another thread on this site called “Promises Promises” which outlined some failed promises. It seems clear to me that the Church (or perhaps Mormon culture) makes a large number of promises that it simply does not have the power to keep. For some lucky ones in the Church, these promises are fulfilled, and they are the ones who get up in Sacrament meeting and testify that God loves them and has fulfilled His promises to them; there are others for whom the promises are not fulfilled, and they are left to wonder why God doesn’t love them as much, and they feel confused, shortchanged, inferior, lied to, and they sometimes end up leaving. I have my own hypothesis for why the Church (or Mormon culture) makes promises that it knows for a fact it can’t keep, and it has to do with organizational survival, but it’s a little conspiracy-theory-ish, so I won’t post it now.
On the issue of helping people develop realistic expectations, it needs to happen, but it’s really hard issue. As I said, the promised reward of an attractive spouse in exchange for obedience is largely a retention effort, and if you were to say to a group of teenage Priests that they probably weren’t going to marry a supermodel no matter how good of a missionary they would be, they would say “Screw you!” The real problem is that the Church (and other religions) likes to link good moral behavior with some kind of temporal blessing, in this case sexual attractiveness or a desirable spouse as a reward for obedience; but the fact is that sexual attractiveness and good moral behavior are not directly related and function more or less independently (unless someone is truly morally destitute.) The fact that attractiveness is not directly related to good moral behavior is outside the Church’s “obedience-blessing” cause-and-effect paradigm, so the Church can’t really teach the reality of the situation.
I’d be in favor of the Church doing a better job of teaching young men how to be attractive to women. I was told that spirituality was the key to attracting women, including being taught that at BYU, and it’s just wrong. Beyond qualifying for a temple recommend, additional spirituality does not make a guy more attractive to women.
Since giving a “reality speech” about marriage to a group of Priests and Laurels would be kind of a downer, I think it’s a good start for the Church to stop teaching that God will reward an obedient person with an attractive spouse. Since this teaching is mostly a retention effort, I don’t see that change happening soon.
I think I can speak to this issue quite well. I’ve been in the Mormon singles scene longer than most, and think that the Mormon Marriage Crisis is, more than anything else, about a single idea: expectations. This especially applies to expectations for the level of positive qualities and attractiveness of the spouse people are looking for. We, as Mormons, were taught from a young age to have high expectations for our future eternal companion, and most importantly, we were taught that God would grant us a desirable spouse if we we were faithful and obedient. What missionary didn’t hear that he would be rewarded with a beautiful wife if he tracted in the rain? And what young woman wasn’t taught that she would be rewarded with a handsome prince RM if she remained a virgin? We were all taught these things, AND WE BELIEVED THEM. Why shouldn’t we believe them? And we were raised to have high expectations for the quality of the marriage relationship. The high expectations are driven even higher by the eternal marriage factor: if I get to only be married to one person for all eternity, I better be dang sure I find someone I really like. The monogamy factor also increases expectations: if I only get to have sex with ONE person for my whole life and for all eternity, I better be dang sure I pick someone I want. And when guys like me see other guys getting desirable women for wives, we believe that we’ve been faithful enough for God to reward us equally. But God doesn’t work that way. In fact, in a moment of transparency for me, I admit that the “attractiveness inequality” is what first brought about my crisis of faith. Previously, I could deal with doctrinal and historical problems, but I couldn’t deal with a God who didn’t create me to be attractive to the pretty girls in the ward. No matter how much I accomplish,
it’s never enough for them. They’ve always wanted something morethan I am. It’s compounded by the fact that there is no good theistic explanation for why an intelligent, responsible, reasonably good looking guy like me isn’t what Mormon girls want. Why would God design Mormon women to be attracted to bad boys on motorcycles instead of intelligent, creative, athletic guys like me? Why would God do that?After doing the research, I finally have a good answer for that question: God didn’t do that. We were created by the forces of nature, namely evolution, and women’s preference for a bad boy on a motorcycle over a NASA nerd is a matter of both genetic hard-wiring and culture. As unsettling as it is, spouse selection is truly natural selection at work. I can say that I have a testimony of this principle, because I’ve seen it happen right in front of my eyes over and over: people who are attractive and healthy get married young and easily, and they marry people who are attractive and healthy. People who are unattractive, have mental or physical health problems, or have unrealistic expectations get married late or not at all, and get married to people who are less attractive and less healthy. There as some exceptions, but that is the rule. The attractive people get married and pass on their genes, while the unattractive and unhealthy people are weeded out of the gene pool. That’s natural selection, and Mormonism isn’t immune to it. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can watch it happen
right in front of you.I now know that God does not hand out attractive spouses to people based on their obedience to the commandments, with the most obedient people getting the most desirable spouses. Spouse selection in the Church is governed by the rules of natural selection, just like it is for every other religion and for non-religious people. I think that the elephant in the room in this case is that most people are looking for someone who is much more attractive than they are, and I admit that I may fall into this category. But you can’t tell people to lower their expectations for an eternal companion, especially given that some people really do find what they are looking for and given the lofty promises the Church (or perhaps Church culture) makes to people who keep the commandments.
That’s not to say that I haven’t had some success with women. I’ve had several girlfriends, two of which were talking about marriage to me. One I’m glad I didn’t marry, and the other one would have been a great wife and I sometimes regret not taking the offer. They’re both married now. I was considering marrying my last girlfriend (though we hadn’t talked about it yet) when she had a revelation that she needed to dump me. She’s married and pregnant right now. The fact that God seemed so deeply concerned about getting her married to the right person while leaving me out in the cold also brought about my faith crisis. Why won’t God lead me to the right person the way that God led her to the right person? The fact that she’s the only woman I’ve ever fallen in love with makes the sting that much greater and more confusing. At this point, I’m coming to a naturalistic explanation for these events- one that does not require God.
I could go on for a long time on this whole topic, but I’ll stop there.
Quote:That’s what is the hardest part of faith, imo – the fact that “spiritual / religious evidence” is so subjective and, as you said, InquiringMind, apparently distributed so randomly.
This is particularly interesting to me. I recall hearing that C.S. Lewis said that he “resisted the approach of him who he so desperately did not want to meet,” meaning God. Another person I was talking to said their son didn’t want to go on a mission, then was shocked by God while in the shower one day and was told he needed to go. Then there is the story of Alma the younger in the BofM who had an angel sent to him to reclaim him, and there is Saul’s conversion story in the NT. It’s curious to me that God seems to proactively pursue certain people and clearly shows his existence to them while letting others pursue their agnostic course; God also sometimes (often?) ignores the prayers of others who plead and pound on his door who ask if he exists. This distribution of individuals to whom God asserts his presence and power seems to be as you say: random. There seems to be no good reason why God chooses to give a powerful spiritual experience to one atheist to reclaim him from his disbelief while leaving another atheist to go on his merry unbelieving way.
A curious part of significant spiritual experiences seems to be that they are unplanned: they are not within the individual’s conscious control. I spent a long time waiting for Moroni’s promise to be fulfilled for me, thinking that if I kept on the path, the witness would come to me. It didn’t (as it doesn’t come to many people.) The ability to receive spiritual experiences does seem to be randomly distributed and not related to good moral behavior.
RagDollSallyUT, if I understand your posts correctly, it seems that you and I are fighting the same inner battle in that we want to believe in a personal God who knows our name and answers our prayers and cares about the little details of our lives, but the evidence we have based on our experience, observations, and logic clearly tells us that this view of God is at best unsupported. I find myself going back and for with, “I want to believe..but the evidence contradicts belief…but I want to believe…but the evidence contradicts belief…but I want to believe…but the evidence contradicts belief…” And so I find myself fighting the battle of my feelings wanting the Church to be true and wanting to hold a traditional view of God and the clear evidence that indicates that there is are no good reasons to believe in a personal God or a one true church. The fact that God seems only to answer the prayers of a select elite favored few while ignoring the prayers of the less fortunate is one piece of evidence that you and I have seen that does not support the personal God hypothesis, as it could be called. I’m not sure which one will win out for me- my desire to believe or the strength of the evidence (and the disappointment of unanswered prayers.) I suspect that in the end I’ll just have to follow the evidence, wherever that leads me, because the internal dissonance I have when I believe something that I know is probably wrong is hard for me to deal with. Some people can ignore the evidence- that’s a notable part of Fowler’s Stage 3 Faith. But I can’t ignore good evidence anymore. And I can tell that you can’t either, which is why you seem to be fighting the “feelings vs. evidence” battle. I really think that the anti-caffeine folk doctrine in the Church got started as a way to try to explain why tea and coffee were banned by the WoW, because there isn’t good medical evidence that tea and coffee pose significant health risks. So people had to come up with a reason for the ban, and the reason was caffeine. And if tea and coffee were banned because of the caffeine in them, then it makes sense that caffeinated soda should also be banned. But if we look at the tea and coffee ban as economically motivated and unrelated to caffeine content, then there is no reason to condemn caffeinated soda. I have personally always liked robes (like those worn by Catholic priests, Baptist choirs, and Jedi knights.) I think that they have a much more religious/spiritual tone to them than business suits, and I think it’d be cool if Mormons wore robes to Church. Now that I’ve mentioned robes, the temple robes are not full robes, so they don’t do it for me.
I personally have never been able to see anything especially spiritual or divine about wearing a white shirt with a dark business suit and a conservative tie.
It seems to me that the Church has made some marketing decisions in its missionary efforts: it has decided to appeal to conservative, educated, white-collar business-type people. It also looks to me like the Church’s upper leadership is getting a little more ethnically diverse while simultaneously getting more occupationally homogenous. The First Pres./Quorum of the 12 has 4 graduates from the Harvard Business School and 3 in the Q12 are lawyers. There are no scientists, theologians, musicians, entertainers, or historians. There are a few educators, one doctor, one engineer, and one pilot. All of them are white, and only one is not American. The Church’s recent efforts to market itself as diverse (with such things as the “I’m a Mormon” campaign) have in my view been undermined by decisions to maintain a remarkably homogenous leadership of white American businessmen and lawyers. And the missionaries (of which I was one) are dressed as miniature businessmen. It’s almost like the Church is trying to stay “on message.” The message is that Mormons are socially and financially successful and prosperous, which is what Max Weber described in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism.The trouble with this is that people who don’t respond well to that specific message or do not fit into that occupational mold do not respond as readily to the missionary effort. So I don’t think that the Church will make an effort to reach out to the working class because that would be “off message.” I think that the Church may be shooting itself in the foot by being a little too narrow in its marketing efforts.
DevilsAdvocate wrote:I don’t know about that; personally I can’t imagine a simpler and more adaptable answer than “Goddidit” by itself. It is mostly when people try to defend all the details of Mormon doctrine and history at the same time or ideas like the Bible being completely inerrant and inspired from beginning to end that Mormon/Christian apologetics becomes complicated and difficult to buy into.
For me, the reason that I find Occam’s Razor to be on the side of atheism is that supernatural explanations are always more complicated than naturalistic explanations because supernatural explanations require the use of both physics and metaphysics, while naturalistic explanations require only physics. Newton asserted that planets required both gravity and God to keep them in orbit; Laplace showed that only gravity was necessary, and that God was not needed to explain planetary orbits. Since “gravity + God” is a more complicated explanation that just “gravity,” it makes sense to accept the gravity-only explanation. Also, in my experience (and much to my frustration) I find myself asking, “If God did THIS, why didn’t he do THAT? If God answers one person’s prayer, why didn’t he answer this other person’s prayer who asked for the same thing?” When I try to come up with an explanation for why God does what he does and doesn’t do what he doesn’t do, the explanation becomes so wildly complicated that it’s simpler to say God didn’t do anything and that the world ran its natural course without divine intervention.
In reference to Wayfarer’s comments about early Christians being atheists, it’s interesting to think that we are all atheists about certain gods. We are all atheistic about Zeus. We are all atheists about about Aphrodite, Ra, Wotan, Thor, the gods or Celtic mythology, etc. I’ve heard an atheist put it this way in speaking to a theist: “We’re both atheists, I just believe in one less God than you do.” I’ve become atheistic about the in-vogue Mormon Heavenly Father, the God who is deeply concerned about the little details of my life, whose job it is to make sure that the chips always fall my way, and who showers me daily with dozens of acts of tender mercy. I don’t have any good reason to believe in that God. That God is a fairy tale. And if I get to make up whatever I want about God, then it seems to me that the God that I imagine would be just that: imaginary. Thus we have Mormon Atheism.
Cadence wrote:The more I read and listen to the atheist point of view the more I realize they have the intellectual high ground in their argument. They do not require mind bending approaches to make their world work.
I find myself coming to the same conclusion. For me, the intellectual honesty of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins gives us a view of the world that is simple, clear, requires few assumptions, and leaves very few questions unanswered. By contrast, theist apologists create a complex and mysterious world where many assumptions must be made and many questions remain unanswered. It seems to me that Occam’s Razor is on the side of atheism. I spend a lot of time these days staring into the abyss, pondering the possibility of my consciousness ending at the death of my brain. I hate this scenario, but there is no evidence that either heaven or hell exists. My study and experience seems to be converging on the horrifying conclusion that the universe was created by the laws of physics (as a spatially flat universe like ours could be) and that we were created by the laws of nature (subsets of the laws of physics) and when we die, our consciousness ends, because our consciousness exists solely in our brain. I fear that human beings really aren’t anything more that just “stuff,” and humans invented religion because we feared the extinction of our consciousness, so we created a way to persuade ourselves that we do live forever, even though we don’t. We know that the atoms in our bodies were made in stars, and when the stars died catastrophically, they seeded the void with the carbon and oxygen that would become our flesh and bones. In 5 billion years the sun will swell up as it begins to die, and the earth and all the atoms that were once in our bodies will be swallowed up by the sun, then ejected out into space to become part of another solar system and possibly another earth. As a professor of mine said, “From the stars we came, and to the stars we will return, now and for all eternity.” The scenario is poetic, beautiful, and unspeakably horrifying.
By my post was on Mormon Atheism, so I’ll stick to that.
It’s true that few would understand why I came to church if I didn’t believe in God and people would probably be afraid of anything I said. This thread has me thinking about Christian Atheism and why Mormon Atheism seems like an oxymoron. Christian Atheism can work because Jesus’ ethical teachings have ethical value in the real world and are valuable even if there is no God and no afterlife. But many of the teachings of the Mormon behavior code have little value if there is no God and no afterlife because most of the uniquely Mormon behavioral teachings are based on a promised reward from God for obedience or are given on the basis that “God said so.” Take the Word of Wisdom. I can see some ethical value in abstaining from alcohol and tobacco, but I don’t think anyone would consider consumption of tea and coffee to be unethical. Tea and coffee are forbidden by the WoW because God said so, at least according to our theology, and one obeys because one wants the promised rewards, not because drinking tea and coffee is unethical. The law of chastity is similar- the prohibition of adultery is certainly grounded in good ethics, but I don’t think any health professional outside the Church would condemn many of the other activities that the Church teaches are impure on the basis that these activities are unethical. Since Mormon theology attaches a blessing from God to most acts of obedience, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about adherence to these behaviors without a God to administer the promised rewards.
So I guess that if Mormon Atheism works for me, that’s great, but I don’t expect it to catch on.
I’ve read the book Wild at Heartand it was great. I think of myself as something of a masculist, a man who would like to reclaim masculinity and men from oppression by imperialistic feminists who would like to replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy. OK, maybe that was a little political, but men aren’t men anymore, and I know for a fact that most of my single guy friends bore single women to tears. Church culture is terrible at training boys to be men- it’s much more interested in teaching boys to be submissive, conforming, obedient, acquiescent, sanitized, hairless (literally- we must shave, right?), and cautious. I could go on for a long time on this topic, but I’ll stop there. Something I’ve wondered though- the feminist critique is pretty hard on the Mormon “benevolent patriarchy.” But if the Church offers a much better deal to men than to women, why are men leaving the Church in larger numbers than women?
