Alone and Unobserved

I was stuck in a horrible orientation at the Mormon Church History Library today, WITHOUT PHONE SERVICE. Here are the irate things I jotted down on my phone while I endured it in suffering silence. (If you want to know why I was there at all, consult this page.)

I can’t believe they’re making us watch a Mormon propaganda film. WHAT.

It’s a terrible film, too, all about the sanitized Mormon history they’re “preserving” (read: creating) here at the Church History Library. *vomit* *puke* *gag* *retch*

LET ME OUT OF HERE. I want to see the conservation lab, not this horrific, manipulative glurge.

I’m-a gonna CUT A BITCH if this video doesn’t end soon.

Thank the good nonexistent god it’s over. Why are they showing this crap to professional librarians? We don’t care about your doctrine or your regurgitated feel-good pablum.

“You wouldn’t believe who wrote to Brigham Young in the 1800s. He was the ‘Dear Abby’ of 19th Century Utah.”

OMG, they debunk over-the-pulpit feel-good stories! At last, something USEFUL.

Okay, okay, you’ve made your case for why you needed this special new building. But why am *I* here, and why should I care??

I wonder what would happen if I asked to see my Mormon membership record. “Whaddaya MEAN I can’t see it????”

Every Mormon ward+stake has a historian who submits an annual “history” to Mormon HQ?!

“The financial records of the LDS Church aren’t going to be released to the public, for obvious reasons.” It’s not at all obvious to *me.* Please explain your reasoning!

They are apparently desperately behind in digitizing their collection.

I did survive the orientation, and so did everyone else. But JUST BARELY.

In his pointed discussion of the shrill, crazy-eyed depths to which the Republican Party and U.S. conservatives have sunk, Johann Hari writes:

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have “faith” – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don’t have “faith” that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need “faith” to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

(Full article in The Independent)

This is as neat and succinct a criticism of faith and its pernicious effects as I’ve seen. Religion not only teaches people wrong information, it teaches them to hold illogical, baseless, false ideas in higher esteem than reality-based, evidence-backed facts. No wonder so many of them end up firmly believing such insane, crackpot notions as “The Democrats want to institute death panels for the elderly and disabled,” or “The Earth is only 6,000 years old, as we are taught in the Bible,” or “Human-caused global warming is a myth.”

The sooner religion is relegated to a quaint, historical footnote, the better.

Patron approaches reference desk.

Me: Can I help you?

Patron: I want books on the paranormal.

Me: All right. What kind of paranormal books are you looking for? Ghosts, psychics…?

Patron: You know, true ones.

Me: Uh, right. Sure.

In the book review that got him embroiled in the current wave of compatibility/accommodationist debates, Jerry Coyne writes,

[S]upernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces. . . . [I]f a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

When I read that, I raised my eyebrows and said to myself, “Huh. That wouldn’t be enough, in itself, to convince me that there is a god.”

Now, the appearance of a 900-foot-tall Jesus would be very hard to explain, there’s no getting around that. And it would depend on what you meant by “god.” But, for instance, I honestly can’t think of any evidence that would convince me of the existence of the Christian god (an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, unchanging being with no body that exists everywhere and nowhere), or of the Mormon god (an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, unchanging being with a shining, immortal physical body). These are just such far-fetched assumptions—”all-knowing,” “all-powerful,” “immortal”—that you’d need an infinite amount of evidence to support them. And, given the amount of suffering in the world, the evidence for the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful being is rather less than lacking.

Of course! I’ve heard the religious people say. If God appeared in all His glory and convinced everyone of His existence in an instant, it would take away everyone’s ability to have faith in Him!

Ah. So either we can imagine the existence of an invisible, implausible, omnipotent being who meddles in our lives continually but is so phenomenally successful at erasing all his tracks that we have no evidence for his existence at all,

OR

there is no such invisible omnipotent imaginary being. We are who we appear to be: flawed, intelligent animals, who must learn to live together in a flawed but amazing world with other flawed, amazing creatures, with no help or hindrance from “on high.”

I know which option I find more compelling, more defensible, more reasonable, and ultimately more satisfying. What about you?

If you follow the accommodationist debates at all, you know that one defense both religious and non-religious folk give for the compatibility of religion and science is that each is a different “way of knowing,” or a different way of “reaching truth.” So let’s talk about religion as a “way of knowing,” and about the “truths” that religion nets us.

Imagine you had never encountered a “religion” before, and someone told you that they were a member of an organization that had been founded by a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful being, and that this being had imparted teachings to its followers that explained certain things about the natural world and about the human condition. What would you expect to be true about this organization, and about those teachings?

1. You would expect the claims this organization makes about the natural world to be more correct and more descriptive of reality than the theories and claims of mere humans, since the former claims are based on the teachings of an benevolent, all-knowing being, and the latter are based on empirical evidence at best and on guessing, lies or storytelling at worst.
2. You would expect any claims this organization made about the future to come true more often than future claims made by a mere human.
3. You would expect members of this organization to have a better understanding of human relationships, human happiness and human ethics than could be arrived at by a mere human.

Let’s look at how religion stacks up.

First, are the claims religions make about the natural world even minimally true? Not usually. Religion gave us creationism, after all, as well as various bizarre and often harmful theories of disease. If a religion truly were inspired by some all-knowing deity, you would expect its adherents to have known about the true age of the earth before science discovered radiometric dating, and about the germ theory of disease centuries, if not millennia, before science even imagined it.

Second, how good is religion at predicting the future? Uh, not good. All of the “true” prophecies I’m aware of can either be attributed to chance, to revision of history after the fact, or to creative reading of the prophecy.

Third, science has shown that religious people are happier in a certain sense than non-religious people, so this is potentially a point in religion’s favor. However, I remain skeptical about this, because I don’t feel there have been enough studies to control for all the variables—for instance, whether this greater feeling of well-being is due to a placebo effect of sorts (religious people often feel they are expected to be happy, after all) or to the sense of community religion fosters rather than to some ineffable blessing from god that non-religious communities cannot duplicate.

But whether or not religious people are happier themselves, I feel that religion has a terrible track record on pretty much every other aspect of the human condition. Traditional religious marriages are sexist, oppressive, and heteronormative. Religion is currently the most vocal proponent of homophobia, sexism, racism and xenophobia in the world. You’d think that organizations inspired by a benevolent being would be ahead of the love-and-tolerance curve, not behind it.

I grew up in a religion that makes some very strong claims about its own nature and about reality. I was taught that God had pronounced himself on any number of subjects, through living, inspired prophets that were alive and led his church today. God was very interested in what my family looked like, what people I was sexually attracted to and had sex with, whether I got married, whether I had kids. Furthermore, he had opinions on all those subjects, and I was promised that if I followed his advice I would be happy.

Well, guess what. The Heavenly Father I was taught about is apparently a raging homophobe, and doesn’t even believe homosexuals exist. I am gay, so you can imagine how well his advice for worked out for me. He also apparently knows a great deal about health. For instance, drinking tea, ever, is damaging to one’s health. More detrimental, apparently, than drinking cola, because he’s never mentioned that. The religion I grew up in also believes in a literal interpretation of most of the Bible, including the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (a tale that plays an integral role in the secret ceremonies that take place in Mormon temples), Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and on and on and on.

All of these truth claims are false. All of the special truth claims I’ve investigated in other religions have either turned out to be false, unverifiable, or incoherent. A couple months ago, Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of those “strident New Atheists” accommodationists are always going on about) announced a little contest on his blog, with a signed copy of his book as a prize. Here was the solitary rule:

Using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of truth given below, please name one truth about the world and/or universe that has been arrived at by faith alone, could not be arrived at by secular reason or science, and that is true in that it is in principle verifiable by all people.

OED: Truth: Conformity with fact; agreement with reality

No one won.

I encourage you to read Coyne’s full blog post for a few addenda, and then to read the comments for all the many suggestions people made of truths they thought were revealed uniquely by religion. And then, if you think you can top all of those suggestions, I encourage you to email your contribution to Jerry Coyne. You might not get an autographed copy of Why Evolution Is True out of it, but you might get a reply, explaining why your suggestion is insufficient, and that is EDUCATION. Which is yet another thing science is better at that religion.

Subtitle: “Take My Wife!”

Via RichardDawkins.net

Storm: A Beat Poem by Tim Minchin

At my birthday party last night—YES, IT WAS AWESOME—I got into a conversation with a friend about belief, atheism, and leaving Mormonism. Both of us have resigned from the Mormon church, and both of us have had to break that news to our parents, and we compared stories of how our mothers had reacted to the news.

That conversation made me remember the I wrote to my parents when I resigned, and I realized I hadn’t looked at it since I sent it three years ago, and that I only had a hazy idea of what I had actually put in it. Turns out it was pretty long and detailed! It also turns out that it does not at all resemble the kind of letter (or blog post) I would write today if someone asked me to explain why I am no longer Mormon. But I’m glad I still have it, because the guy who wrote it three years ago was in a very hard place, and that letter (as well as the earliest posts in this blog) keep me from forgetting that he existed.

And then it occurred to me that I had never posted that letter on my blog for the whole world to peruse! So here it is. (Be kind. I was only twenty-four—the merest child.)

Dear Mom and Dad,

This letter is for you. Once you’ve read it you can decide how much of it you want to share with the kids, but I wrote it to you.

I want to tell you something you may not know about me. As I was growing up, starting when I was fairly young (about five or six), I suffered from mild-to-severe depression and anxiety. This continued all through my teenage years and into my mission. On my mission the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive elements became so strong that I began to have panic attacks, and almost decided to go home multiple times. When I asked for help, I was told that a good missionary would be able to overcome such problems with prayer. Things did get better, for whatever reason, and I was able to complete my mission.

After my mission things quickly became much worse. Even though I was praying and fasting and reading my scriptures, my depression, anxiety and self-hate continued to grow stronger, to the point where I even considered suicide. I saw a therapist, but that didn’t help—in fact, it made it worse. I saw a doctor, and he prescribed medication, which did help. Unfortunately, the side effects were so intolerable that I decided I had to learn to function without drugs.

When I asked myself why I was so depressed, I realized it was because I hated myself. I really, truly did. When I asked why, I realized it was because I was torn between my own nature and the teachings of the LDS church. I told you several years ago that I was attracted to men, but I’m not sure either of you understood how pervasive and fundamental a thing that is in a person’s life. I grew up being told that I was supposed to fall in love with and marry a woman, but that was something that only puzzled and horrified me. On the other hand, the idea of falling in love with a man was completely familiar and attractive to me from an very young age. When I really thought about it, I realized that I completely disagreed with the teachings of the LDS church on this subject: I did not think that homosexuality or homosexual relationships were any less valid than heterosexuality or heterosexual relationships.

I realized that I had always been afraid to question my beliefs; in fact, a great deal of my obsessions and compulsions centered around religious matters and making sure that I never wavered in my “faith.” As I began to hold my beliefs up to the light and seriously ask myself if I still accepted them, one by one they turned out to be nothing more than determination to believe, instead of actual belief. When I questioned them honestly they vanished, instead of growing stronger as I was always told true faith will.

This went on for a while. The short of it is, I now consider myself an atheist. I no longer hold any religious beliefs whatever. I accept myself as a gay man. I no longer hate myself, and no longer suffer from serious depression or anxiety. My obsessions and compulsions are now almost gone. I see this as a positive step, and think I have a happy, fulfilling life ahead of me.

I am dating men. All the things that were lacking in my interactions with women are available to me with men—mutual attraction, love, and devotion. I am interested in gay marriage rights, and am considering becoming politically active in the push for marriage equality in America.

As I no longer believe in the LDS church, and am in fact actively opposed to many of its teachings, I am drafting an letter officially resigning my membership. I plan on sending it right after I send you this letter. I know you asked me to only write you about uplifting stuff, but I figured you would want to hear this from me rather than from someone else.

I love you, Mom and Dad, and hope you will understand. If you don’t (and I know this is hard to swallow all in one bite) think it over carefully, and then call me if you have any questions. One thing I’ve missed a lot is a close relationship with you, and I hope we can take this opportunity to be honest with each other and grow even closer. I don’t expect you to agree with my decisions, and I respect that. I hope you can respect my right to make such decisions anyway.

With love,
Your son
Sean

P.S. Call me even if you don’t have any questions.

That I’m in contact with any of my old friends is a miracle—specifically a Facebook miracle. It’s thanks to Facebook that I’m still in touch with former roommates, former BYU friends, former dance partners, former fellow grad students, former coworkers, former professors and former boyfriends, as well as cousins, aunts, online acquaintances, fellow atheists, fellow ex-Mormons, fellow gays and so on and so forth.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is really a good thing. I just lost a friend, primarily because of what each of us has posted openly online (see the comments on this post). She is a practicing, faithful Mormon who supported Prop 8 and who opposes same-sex marriage because she believes homosexual sex is a sin. In fact, like many other Mormons and many fundamentalist Christians, she doesn’t even believe homosexuality exists, per se. She has written a great deal about her views on her blog.

I, on the other hand, am a confirmed atheist ex-Mormon gay man who believes the Mormon church is a man-made organization that is characterized by bigotry, lies and self-righteousness. I believe Proposition 8 was motivated by intolerance and deception and homophobia, and that the Mormon church bears a great deal of the blame for its passing. Just last weekend I participated in a protest against the Mormon church’s opposition to gay rights and support of Prop 8. I have also made no secret of any of these things on my blog.

So she found my blog and was horrified and upset by what she found here, and I found her blog and was horrified and upset in my turn. I wrote a blog post in which I speculated cynically about the true reasons behind the Mormon church and its members’ opposition to gay marriage. She wrote a hurtful comment in response, in which she questioned my integrity and called me bitter and closed-minded. I wrote a cold rebuttal, which I closed by stating that I didn’t feel much friendship for her anymore. She agreed.

Are there some former acquaintanceships that are worth preserving, at least for nostalgia’s sake, but which are too fragile to handle the constant barrage of truth and stream-of-consciousness honesty that accompany an online relationship? Would Summer and I still consider ourselves “friends” if neither of us had a blog and neither of us was on Facebook? Is it possible to preserve a friendship by willfully refusing to know the truth about another person?

Just a few years ago, Summer’s devotion to the Mormon church and opposition to same-sex marriage would have been things we had in common, not things that drove us apart or set us at odds. People change. Our ideas of what friendship is also change.

And then there is my family. I don’t really discuss these subjects with them, but I’m Facebook friends with several of my siblings, and I’ve seen their status updates and the causes they’ve joined. And I’m sure they’ve seen my statuses and notes and causes. How is it possible to preserve a relationship, knowing what we know about each other?

I filled out a BYU alumni survey tonight. The questions and structure felt much more official and “party-line toeing” than the phone survey I blogged about a couple years ago, so there were some places where I didn’t feel like there was an answer that fit me—whoever wrote the survey apparently didn’t foresee the possibility that any gay ex-Mormons would respond, or didn’t care to prepare for that eventuality by including responses the would fit such persons. Nonetheless, I filled it out as honestly as I could, and even responded to the two open-ended questions at the end with mini-essays on why I despised my time at BYU and would never go back. I’m sure my efforts at communicating my experience will fall on deaf ears, but as a personal exercise it was somewhat cathartic.

The survey was divided into sections that correspond to the official “Aims of a BYU Education,” i.e.,

A BYU education should be (1) spiritually strengthening, (2) intellectually enlarging, and (3) character building, leading to (4) lifelong learning and service.

The “Spiritually Strengthening” section consisted of a series of deeply disturbing statements, such as “Each day I accept the gift of grace through Christ’s Atonement.” Um, can you get any more nauseating? Or more Protestant?? Not that there’s anything more wrong with Protestantism than Mormonism, of course.

As for the other sections, it was interesting to see what subjects/achievements/attributes/skills fell under which heading.

Subjects that BYU considers to be “intellectually enlarging,” according to the survey:

LDS History and Doctrine
“How confident are you in your understanding of the following?”

• “The basic doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as taught by priesthood authorities and the scriptures”
• “The origin and historical development of each of the four standard works”—i.e., have you heard the one about Joseph Smith translating the gold plates by looking at a “seer stone” in his hat?
• “The historical development of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 19th century”—i.e., have you heard the real story of the institution of polygamy?

Scriptural Studies
“How competent are you in your ability to…?”

• “Identify underlying principle that are not explicitly stated, but implied in a scriptural text”—I.e., how good are you at massaging/distorting scripture until it means what the prophet says it means?
• “Analyse and interpret figurative language in the scriptures consistent with the author’s intent”—i.e., how good are you at reading Joseph Smith’s mind, as interpreted by Thomas S. Monson and Dallin H. Oaks?
• “Distinguish between the inspired teachings of the prophets on specific issues and contrary points of view expressed by members of the Church”—i.e., how good are you at never having an original thought of your own and at warding off all attempts by evil apostates to infiltrate your mind with unapproved ideas? Oops, my brain just exploded.

Achievements/attributes/skills that BYU considers to be evidence of “character building,” according to the survey:
Strives to live a Christ-like life

• “I follow the promptings of the Spirit to help others, even if it involves sacrifice or costs me in some way”—i.e., voices speak to me in my head and I listen to them and follow what they say.

Views the world through an eternal perspective

• “I am genuinely concerned for the welfare of others”—…because if I didn’t have an “eternal perspective” I would be a hardened rapist/puppy-strangler.

Areas/achievements/attributes/skills that BYU considers to be evidence of “lifelong learning and service,” according to the survey:

Church Service

• “I make financial contributions to my church”
• “I actively strive to share my beliefs with others who are not of my faith” (I answered “extremely well” to this one)
• “I proactively use my initiative to find ways to serve my church.”

Technology Use
“How competent are you in your ability to…?”

• “Use basic office technology (e.g., computer, fax machine, e-mail)”—WTF? Using a fax machine or email is something to be proud of these days? Whatever.

At the end of the survey there were some general questions, such as

Considering the entire experience you had at BYU while earning the degree you earned in 2005, if you were starting your college career over, would you choose to come to BYU?

Definitely not

A significant part of the mission of BYU is to help students develop as educated disciples of Christ. These are disciple-scholars who can blend deep faith and rigorous intellect in every aspect of their lives.

How well did BYU help you to become an educated disciple of Christ?

Very Poorly

There were also two essay questions, which I had a great deal of fun composing answers to.

Describe how an education that integrated faith and intellect has influenced how you apporach your occupation, whether in or out of the home. Please be specific. [emphasis in the original]

I credit BYU with making me an atheist. Having religion crammed down my throat for four years and being surrounded by so many closed-minded hypocrites–students, faculty and religious leaders–for so long really opened my eyes. It was as a BYU student that I first began to question my Mormon faith, and first began to notice the discrepancies and logical inconsistencies that riddle every religious creed. The moment I graduated, I resigned my membership in the Mormon church and renounced religion in any form.

This experience has shaped my approach to being a librarian in the following ways: Having been fed propaganda for so long as a Mormon and a BYU student, I am much more sensitive to bias and bad reasoning than before. Being intellectually oppressed as a student has made me militant about open dialogue, free access to information and intellectual honesty for everyone. And finally, I much more skeptical of unsupported faith-based and pseudoscience claims than I was as a believer.

If you have any additional opinions, experiences, or suggestions, please share them here.

As a gay man who had to conceal his sexual orientation and his growing disaffection from Mormonism from friends, family, fellow students and faculty for four years, I found BYU to be hell on earth. The student body was insincere, closed minded, homophobic, intolerant of difference of opinion and fixated on unachievable perfection. The Honor Code was restrictive, patronizing and overly invasive. Being forced to attend church services did more to harm my belief in Mormonism than sustain it, and it meant being forced to be dishonest at every juncture. Academic and intellectual freedom were severely curtailed, where they were even allowed to exist..

Everything I learned as an undergraduate I consider myself to have learned in spite of BYU’s best efforts to keep me an ignorant, unquestioning sheep. I would not recommend a BYU education to anyone, and would certainly not go back myself if I were starting my education over again.

Ultimately, I am ambivalent about the time I spent at BYU, the time I spent on my mission, and the time I spent as a Mormon in general. It wasn’t all bad, and it had a lot to do with making me the person I am today. But then . . . it made me the person I am today. So it is responsible for a great deal of ca-RAZY.

Bill Maher’s irreligious documentary and anti-religious manifesto, “Religulous,” is already raising hackles and inciting debate across the web. And maybe that’s a good thing: the non-religious, as Maher points out in the film, are now a large but largely silent minority in America, and we need to speak out more.

I loved “Religulous.” Eric D. Snider did not, but the comments that follow his review are just a hoot. You may also be interested in James Rocchi’s somewhat more positive review on Cinematical—and the accompanying comment thread, of course.

Are religious viewers over-sensitive to what they see as Maher’s unfair attacks on religion—and their faith in particular? Perhaps. Are the anti-religious and non-religious insensitive to a genuine imbalance in Bill Maher’s presentation? Also, perhaps. But whatever the film’s flaws, if it gets more non-religious people to come out of the closet and take a stand against irrational belief, I think it will have served its purpose.