Daniel Midgley – Page 15 – Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

Author: Daniel Midgley (page 15 of 15)

OT Lesson 10 (Eternal families)

8 March 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

Birthright Blessings; Marriage in the Covenant

Genesis 24–29

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29
LDS manual: here

Background

This lesson is about Abraham’s son Isaac, and grandson Jacob. Strangely, Jacob’s story is almost a complete rehash of Abraham’s story, in fine detail.

You can read my great summary, or you can watch this video. (Language, casual misogyny, unpleasant depictions of birth.)

Ch. 25: Isaac has two sons, Esau (hairy guy) and Jacob (smooth guy). Esau is starving, so Jacob convinces him to sell his birthright.

Ch. 26: Isaac goes to Abimalech, king of the Philistines, and tells him that his wife Rebekah is his sister. Abimalech believes him, even though father Abraham told him the exact same lie. Won’t he ever learn?

Ch. 27: When Isaac is old, Jacob manages to trick his father into giving him the blessing intended for his older brother. Jehovah approves because he loves a good prank.

Ch. 29: Laban sells his daughter Rachel to Jacob for seven years of indentured servitude. But Laban pulls the ol’ switcheroo on the wedding night, and it’s the older daughter Leah in the sack instead. If Jacob wants Rachel, he’ll have to work another seven years. Since honesty isn’t really Jacob’s thing, I think he’s going to fit right into this family.

Again as with Abraham, there’s polygamous conflict when Rachel turns out barren. The whole thing turns into a baby-making competition, as housemaids are pulled into the action. Hilarity ensues.

What’s the theme for this lesson? I would have thought ‘honesty in your dealings’ was a good candidate, but no; everyone in this story lies like a rug, and they’re all doing fine. Instead, it’s ‘the importance of marrying people who think like you do’. Which for Jacob is… actually very fitting, yes.

Main points from this lesson

Marriage ‘in the covenant’ is intended to create ‘ideological bubbles’.

From the real lesson manual:

• Both Isaac and Jacob were instructed by their fathers to marry women of their own faith. Esau brought sorrow to his parents by marrying wives who did not believe in the God of Abraham. Why is it important to marry a person of our own faith?

Ask: Good question, manual. Why would the church think it’s important for Mormons to marry each other?

Short answer: When Mormons marry each other, it affords the opportunity to create ideological bubbles.

I remember being in the Mormon Bubble. It was great. It consisted of my family, the people at church, and pretty much everyone I knew. Inside the Bubble, it was soft and gentle. Everyone affirmed the group’s beliefs, told you how wonderful the Church was, and how wonderful your life was — but only if you were Inside the Bubble.

Sometimes ideas would get in from Outside the Bubble, but there were ways to cope with that. We were encouraged to evaluate external information against the principles we’d learned in the Bubble, which were considered the only reliable principles.

Then I went on a mission, and that was a real bubble. After the mission, I went to BYU, and that was an even bigger bubble! BYU exists to get young Latter-day Saints together so they’ll marry each other, and form their own bubbles. Eventually, you settle into a ward and join your bubble into a bigger church bubble. The church hopes that by doing so, you’ll be in that bubble for the rest of your life.

Purveyors of delusion have found it very useful to construct ideological bubbles. Religious communities rely on them. It’s why we see fundamentalist religions out in rural areas. Sometimes a religious leader will even move the entire group to a foreign country where it’s easier to control the information.

Here’s a primer on religious bubbles, but with a special focus on the Mormon Bubble.

Bubbles are fragile. Believing in things that aren’t real puts you in a tenuous position. To believe in a delusion is to construct an alternative to reality.

In order to seem plausible, delusional beliefs must be handled specially, in communities that are trained to treat the beliefs deferentially and uncritically. Those in the community may also take offence as a way of protecting the belief, or refusing to examine it themselves.

Essentially, religions are support groups for reality deniers.

True beliefs do not need bubbles to exist. Truth isn’t harmed by reality, but delusions sure are. And because reality is available to everyone all the time, it’s easy for delusions to get knocked down. Which is why religion hasn’t done well on the Internet, with its free flow of information.

Here’s a Facebook post by a bubble advocate. It’s Kim Clark, the president of BYU-Idaho, and he thinks ideological bubbles are a fine thing. This post is an elaborate justification for living in a bubble, and I think this is highly instructive.

Here’s the text from the post.

I often have heard students talk about the “bubble”… referring to BYU-Idaho, the campus, and maybe even Rexburg. They have in mind the fact that there is a different feeling on this campus than they find in what they call “the real world”, a different Spirit, and that they feel protected here, surrounded by people who share their faith. Let me share with you a couple of thoughts about what I have heard:

1) The nickname “bubble” has a negative connotation and seems to indicate that what is inside of it is not real. As President John Groberg taught us about the temple, the real world — the world that will endure forever when everything in the mortal world is gone — is actually what you feel and experience inside the “bubble” — Zion, the Holy Ghost, the Kingdom of God.

Ask: How does he justify living in a bubble?
Answer: He has flipped the situation, and now believes that the universe we live in is not real, and the Mormon universe is. His acceptance of the alternate reality is complete.

2) You are a big part of what you feel inside the “bubble”. It really is the faith and devotion and goodness of the people who study and work here that makes the difference.

3) You can take it with you — you can make your own powerful, protective, enduring, eternal “bubble” in your own home and you should. You can build your own little Zion, first in your heart and then in your home, and then in your wards and stakes.

Ask: Why would it be useful to the Church to have its members in a bubble of their own creation?
Answer: You don’t have to monitor your members if the members monitor themselves, and the family can be utilised for this purpose.

Ask: When you find someone who is an advocate of ideological bubbles, what are they telling you?
Answer: They know their beliefs can’t compete with reality.

Ask: How can we stay out of ideological bubbles?
Possible answers:

By being willing to update and change our minds when new knowledge and evidence comes along.
By engaging honestly and openly with sincere and intelligent people who hold different views.

I’ve formed a book club with Christians, atheists, and a few undecideds. We’re working our way through one Christian book and one atheist book. If I’m wrong about my ideas, I know I’ll hear about it from them. So far, a lot of arguments, but nothing conclusive.

The doctrine of eternal families means the LDS Church owns your family

If someone were to ask me what the most evil LDS doctrine was, I wouldn’t hesitate a second in saying, “Eternal families”.

The church pretends to have to power to reunite families after death. That sounds like a great promise, but it didn’t sound so good to Stephen Fry on his trip through Temple Square.

Ask: How does Fry explain the appeal of this doctrine? Who is it especially meant to appeal to, and why?

The idea of “being with” one’s family for eternity falls apart for anyone who thinks about it for five minutes. How exactly is this meant to work? I love my family, and we always have a great time on our extended visits, but after a couple of weeks, we’re all glad to go away again and return to our own ways and routines. Being available for eternity seems grindingly tedious, even for family members who get along. What if there’s conflict? What if there’s a family member who loves you, but whom you detest? It wouldn’t be very heavenly for you if they’re always around, so would there be some way to block them? That might not be very heavenly for them. The whole idea raises so many problems, I can scarcely believe no one seems to mention them.

But there’s a much more sinister side.

Read this quote from the real Gospel Doctrine manual.

President Gordon B. Hinckley told of a family who joined the Church in Australia and then sold all their possessions so they could travel to New Zealand and be sealed as a family. The father of this family said: “We could not afford to come [to the temple]. Our worldly possessions consisted of an old car, our furniture, and our dishes. I said to my family, ‘We cannot afford not to go. If the Lord will give me strength, I can work and earn enough for another car and furniture and dishes, but if I should lose these my loved ones, I would be poor indeed in both life and in eternity’ ”.

Ask: What did this man think would happen if he didn’t engage in farcical temple ceremonies, a prerequisite of which is paying ten percent of his income to the church?
Answer: He thought he would lose his family. Consider this.

Ask: What do we call it when someone threatens you with the loss of your family if you don’t do what they say (including paying them)?
Possible answers: Kidnapping, extortion, holding to ransom.

This doctrine is vile. It is emotional hostage taking. A normal person should be disgusted by it.

This doctrine plays out in ways that are destructive to the working of a healthy married relationship, and to the development of a person.

From the real lesson manual:

• After two people have been married in the temple, what must they do to ensure they have a truly eternal marriage?

What, indeed.

They both have to stay in the church and keep all the church’s rules (again, including paying buckets of money for the rest of their lives). But if one partner stops believing in the Mormon religion — or in other words, recognises they’ve been conned — then they’re the bad one. Supposedly, they’re the one throwing the relationship into disarray, jeopardising their eternal future together, and so forth.

A Mormon friend of mine once confided in me. He’d thought thoughts that couldn’t be unthought, and now he was uncertain that there was a god. I congratulated him, offered support, and suggested some online communities where he could talk to people in the same situation.

Finally, desperate to get his struggle off his chest — out of a very human wish to be known by those we’re closest to — he told his wife about what he was going through. She didn’t take the news well.

Over the next year or so, he was hauled in for meetings with the bishop, chided for his lack of belief, and systematically bullied back into the Church, because that was the cost of his relationship with his family.

The former Mormon in me can empathise with his wife. Here you think you know someone, you have the same goals, and then your partner explains that they don’t share your heretofore shared values. That must throw you into a tailspin.

Or at least, it would, if your relationship were based on the church, and not on each other. It would, if your relationship is predicated on always believing the same things.

I still don’t know what’s going on for my friend; he doesn’t write me anymore. If he’s happy participating in and enriching that — here’s a loaded word, but I promise I’ll only use it when I think it’s deserved — cult, then that’s fine. It’s his life, not mine. But I hope that he and his wife can finally get to a place where he’s accepted and valued as himself, and not just as a role.

How can a couple make it? There are a few ways this can play out.

The believing partner might follow the deconverted one out.

These are the happiest stories.

The deconverted partner can stay in the church, but under deep cover.

You can participate in church, and keep going to keep the peace. (Hello, reader.)

I don’t blame anyone for taking this course, but it seems to me the least desirable option, and the one most destructive to one’s integrity. Is this the kind of relationship where your views can be respected? Or will your disbelief in nonsense be taken as evidence that you’re in league with Satan? Believers can have a hard time with negotiation and compromise when they see it as giving in to the Evil One.

One stays in, one stays out, and they work it out in an atmosphere of respect.

This one is a tough row to hoe. The LDS Church doesn’t make it easy for disbelieving spouses. Because of its emphasis on having a ‘righteous priesthood holder’ at the head of the family, it’s difficult not to feel like damaged goods. There are a thousand unintended insults. “Yeah, they’re a great person even though they’re not a member.”

There’s a photo of me at my son’s baptism, before I was out publicly. There’s my son, dressed in white. There’s a friend my age, also dressed in white. And then there’s me in a dark suit (obviously not doing any baptising that day), trying to smile. I’m sure that suit was the talk of the ward.

Free advice to those who have deconverted

Place the relationship before deconverting your partner.
Both partners have to recognise in themselves the tendency for evangelism.

I happen to think this is less of a problem for ex-Mos. Yes, there are some preachy ex-Mos out there, but I think this tendency is mitigated by a few factors:

Latent guilt
An aggressive church culture that thinks nothing of treating a non-believing spouse as second-best
A recognition that your partner won’t be punished in the eternities for believing the wrong thing.

Resist the tendency to feel like you’re damaged or diminished.
You got the right answer. You are now able be moral in a way you never could be when you were getting your moral choices handed to you — and frankly, that morality was often terribly immoral.

Develop boundaries and differentiation
You don’t have to believe the same things or have the same goals. You married a person, and not a role. Or if you did marry a role, now’s your chance to forge a new deal with your partner as a person. See if you meant it the first time, when you said you’d stick it out. You get a second chance to choose your partner.

Divorce is not the worst thing, and keeping it together may have too high a price.

Live a good moral life as an unbeliever, as you define it.

What’s been your experience, and how is it going? What advice would you give? Please leave a comment; I’d love to hear what you think.

Additional ideas for teaching

The church still teaches against interracial marriage.

Since we’re talking about dubious morality, here’s a quote that appears in the LDS Church’s Aaronic Priesthood Manual, both in print and online.

“We recommend that people marry those who are of the same racial background generally, and of somewhat the same economic and social and educational background (some of those are not an absolute necessity, but preferred), and above all, the same religious background, without question” (“Marriage and Divorce,” in 1976 Devotional Speeches of the Year [Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1977], p. 144).

Is this an organisation that has any business telling anyone who to marry?

No camels.

It appears that there were no camels in the eastern Mediterranean during the time of Abraham.

Camels as a means of transportation abound in the Old Testament. When Abraham sends a servant to look for a bride for his son Isaac, that servant chooses Rebecca. And why? Because of her kindness in offering to water the camels. That’s just one of dozens of camel cameos in the Bible, mostly in the book of Genesis, but scholars have long suspected that those camel caravans are a literary anachronism. And now more evidence from two Israeli archaeologists. Their radio carbon technology dated the earliest known remains of domesticated camels. And yes, they came along after the time of Abraham.

Camels? Oh, well, clearly they meant tapirs.

This is new research, and it may be overturned by more information. But isn’t it nice to know that it’s not just the Book of Mormon that has anachronism issues?

The Bible gets genetics wrong

It also has genetics issues. Laban promises Jacob all the striped and spotted goats, so how does Jacob make as many of them as possible? By having the goats look at striped sticks while mating. Yep, that will do it.

OT Lesson 9 (Killing Isaac)

1 March 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

“God Will Provide Himself a Lamb”

Abraham 1; Genesis 15–17; 21–22

Links to the reading in the SAB: Abraham 1, Genesis 15, 16, 17, 21, 22
LDS manual: here

Background

We’re back to Abraham, and a big story that everyone remembers: the attempted murder of Isaac. But a lot of other markers of tribal identity are also making their first appearance in this lesson. Let’s get right into it.

Main points from this lesson

There would have been no attempt on young Abraham’s life.

The lesson manual makes a quick stop at the Book of Abraham. They want to draw a parallel between Abraham nearly getting sacrificed by Egyptian priests as a boy, and then being asked to sacrifice his own son in turn. Wow, parallelism. Abraham having flashbacks and moments of self-doubt. It’s a neat literary twist.

The problem is that it couldn’t have happened.

First up, it’s disputable that human sacrifice was ever practiced in ancient Egypt.

Second, if human sacrifice was practiced in ancient Egypt, it would have been at one specific time and place: Abydos in 2950–2775 BCE. This may have been a case of ‘retainer sacrifice’, or killing all the servants so they could serve the king in the underworld.

Ask: Doesn’t the idea of the afterlife have the most delightful implications?

Okay, so when would that have been on our fanciful Old Testament timeline? Not in Abraham’s time, that’s for sure. Abraham would have been 1,000 years too late.

Click the graphic for a big PDF, straight from the LDS website.

It would have been at about the time of Noah’s birth, before the Flood, and way before Noah’s grand-daughter Egyptus would have discovered Egypt.

Abraham: “Wait — you can’t kill me! All the available evidence shows that the Egyptians didn’t practice human sacrifice during this period!”
Priest: “Can it, white-and-delightsome boy! I killed Fred Flintstone for his clothing, and I can kill you!”
Angel: “Cease this anachronistic ceremony!”

This is just one more manifestation of how mixed-up the LDS timeline is. The bodies from Abydos date from the 1st Egyptian dynasty around 2900 BCE, but according to the LDS timeline, Egypt wouldn’t have a pharaoh until the alleged Egyptus put her son on the throne — some time after the Flood, some 500 years later. Funny how the Flood didn’t wipe all the Abydos evidence out.

Polygamy rears its head

Abraham isn’t the first polygamist in the Bible — that would be Lamech in Genesis 4 — but you begin to get an idea of the problems that could arise.

Abraham and Sarah are ‘barren’ — her fault, natch — so Sarah suggests ‘going in unto’ her maid Hagar. Apparently Abraham didn’t find Hagar too horrible, because it doesn’t even take him a verse to think about it.

16:2 And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.

Click for the whole story on The Brick Testament.

Conflict arises when Hagar conceives, and Sarah forces her to flee into the wilderness.

Here’s a bit from the real manual:

What can the revelation that Abraham and Sarah would have a son teach us about how God fulfills his promises? (God will fulfill his promises, though not necessarily in the way or at the time we might expect.)

LOL. Right, you might need a concubine to help you with that.

The attempted murder of Isaac embodies the worst idea in religion: “Always obey God.”

It’s a parent’s job to protect their children. No decent deity would try and short-circuit that, but Jehovah does, when he commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

22:2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

And any decent parent would ignore any such request, but Abraham doesn’t.

Ask: Why did God command Isaac to be killed?

Some have speculated that Jehovah and Isaac didn’t get on.

Click through for some good analysis.

Others say that God was off his nut.

At one point, I imagined (and mentioned in my Gospel Doctrine class) that God wanted someone to know what it felt like to have to sacrifice his son. Which is crap; God didn’t have to kill his son. An all-powerful god could have created a different way — hey, maybe just forgiving people — but instead chose human sacrifice. What a wacky god, eh?

So now I’m not sure what the rationale is supposed to be, and I’m left with the impression that God really just likes killing children. (The rest of the Old Testament will do little to dispel this, I’m afraid.)

In Tim Minchin’s words, the God of the Bible has a ‘fetish for dead baby blood’.

In considering the Abraham-and-Isaac story for this lesson, it’s taken me a while to come to grips with what it’s about and what it’s meant to teach. And I’ve come to realise that what we’re seeing here is the foundational belief — and the worst belief — of Abrahamic religion: Always obey God.

In the upside-down world of Abrahamic religion, this loyalty test — in which a father is commanded (and willing) to murder his child — is held up to be the ultimate moral act, the thing that proves Abraham’s righteousness.

22:16 And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son:
22:17 That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;
22:18 And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.

In other words, the most moral thing to do in an Abrahamic religion is whatever you think the voices in your head are telling you to do, no matter how immoral that is.

It’s an idea that comes up a few times in the scriptures, so this isn’t a one-off:

Matthew 6:33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Ask: What’s wrong with obeying a god above all else?

Possible answers:

It short-circuits reason and discourages questioning.
It’s an abnegation of the responsibility to think for oneself and make moral decisions.
It invokes a trust that hasn’t been earned.
It makes immoral actions seem moral. All it takes is for someone to think that God has commanded an immoral action, and poof! it’s magically moral.
It brings about a sheep-like mentality that can be readily exploited by leaders.

And speaking of leaders, here’s one who thinks that by ignoring the commandments of a god, non-believers are ignoring morality, and destroying society.

Cheapened civilisation? I think he’s cheapened civilisation by unloading his dogma onto his followers, and taking their 10% for the pleasure. How wrong that those of us who choose to live by the light of reason should get sniped at and hectored by those who make their living from superstition and control.

Oaks is wrong about this, just as he’s wrong about so much else. For me, using human reasoning to supersede divine influence has been the key to understanding, education, and escape from the muck of religion. And why do they rubbish human reasoning, anyway? If logic and reason were on their side, you can bet they’d appeal to it. But they don’t, and that’s enough to tell you where they stand. Human reasoning has brought all the intellectual progress that we have. Oaks is a guy who’s trying to hold all that back.

Obedience to a god above all else is a terrible idea, and it starts here in this chapter of Genesis. The rot of Abrahamic religion starts with its founder. This gets people flown into skyscrapers, gets children killed from lack of medical attention, and sees poor people give their money away to wealthy mall-builders.

Ask: If obedience to a god is the wrong thing to do, what’s the right thing?

The one word answer is: Think.

Use your mind and your moral instincts to decide what’s right or wrong.
Think about the consequences of your actions, and take responsibility for them.

A good guide for this is Dan Barker’s book for kids: Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong. It focuses on well-thought out principles instead of rules, and the need to decide what’s right in terms of people, not gods.

Click here for a preview on Imgur, or go to all the usual places to buy.

Additional ideas for teaching

What else was in the reading?

God doesn’t care for foreskins, even though he created them

17:10 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.
17:11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.

Slavery, on the other hand, is okey-dokey

17:13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.

Casting a mother and child out into the desert to die? A-okay!

21:9 And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking.
21:10 Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.
21:11 And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight because of his son.
21:12 And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called.
21:13 And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed.
21:14 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.

Off you go, darlin’. Lotsa luck.

OT Lesson 8 (Sodom)

22 February 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

Living Righteously in a Wicked World

Genesis 13–14; 18–19

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 13, Genesis 14, Genesis 18, Genesis 19
LDS manual: here

Background

We’ll get back to Abraham in the next lesson, but first we’re going to follow a side plot involving Abraham’s nephew Lot.

We will now turn the time over to Brother Professor, who will favour us with what must be the greatest Sunday School lesson ever. (Would that I could teach with such inspiration.) It’s all you need to know about Lot.

Now I’m wondering if Brad Neely once attended my Sunday School class. Embarrassingly, I think I once actually taught that bit about angels being terrifying.

I do love the bit about Abraham haggling god down to ten righteous people. He should have done it like this, though.

Click to go to SMBC.

Main points of this lesson

The god of the Bible is a homophobic and destructive asshole.

Lot’s wife (she didn’t even get a name in the OT) was turned into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking. This will be just one in a series of murders Jehovah commits due to his arbitrary commands.

Read this poem by Karen Finneyfrock.

What Lot’s Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t A Pillar of Salt)

Do you remember when we met
in Gomorrah? When you were still beardless,
and I would oil my hair in the lamp light before seeing
you, when we were young, and blushed with youth
like bruised fruit. Did we care then
what our neighbors did
in the dark?

Go read the whole thing and come back.

There are two great points to be made in the poem. One is a question about Jehovah’s act of destroying the city: Is any form of loving this indecent?

Ask: Which is more immoral: loving who you want, or raining down fire and destruction on people?
Answer: That’s a rhetorical question, people.

Gods are a reflection of the people who believe in them

The other great point from this poem is in this line:

Because any man weak enough to hide his eyes while his neighbors are punished for the way they love deserves a vengeful god.

Ask: In what sense do we get the kind of god we deserve?

If gods don’t exist, then theism is an exercise in invention, and it’s often been said that people invent gods in their own image. Compassionate people invent compassionate gods. Horrible people invent horrible gods. Tribal people invent tribal gods. People who are obsessed with other people’s sexual behaviour have gods who are obsessed with other people’s sexual behaviour. And of course, deeply homophobic people have a deeply homophobic god. The character of God varies wildly between believers, but the god of a group of people always seems to reflect their values at the time, in precise detail. What more evidence do we need to show that god-belief is an exercise in projection, and not the reliable description of a real and externally verifiable being?

Even so, it’s nice to see it verified experimentally. Here’s the work of psychologist Nicholas Epley.

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

Epley found that by manipulating people’s opinions, he could also manipulate their ideas about what God is into.

He showed some 145 volunteers a strong argument in favour of affirmative action (it counters workplace biases) and a weak argument opposing it (it raises uncomfortable issues). Others heard a strong argument against (reverse discrimination) and a weak argument for (Britney and Paris agree!). The recruits did concur that the allegedly stronger argument was indeed stronger. Those who read the overall positive propaganda were not only more supportive of affirmative action but more likely to think that God would be in the pro-camp too.

And when Epley got people into an fMRI machine to see what parts of their brain were active when they were thinking about what God would do, he found that they were using the same part of their brain that they used when were thinking about what they would do.

Link to full paper.

Jesus was probably not a gay-friendly guy

There’s another point to be made about projection. This is not to plunder future lessons, but let’s just take a moment to remember that, according to LDS doctrine, the god who destroyed Sodom was the pre-mortal Jehovah, soon to become Jesus. As such, claims that Jesus never said anything against homosexuality fall somewhat flat. True, he did go sort of quiet on this issue during his ministry — embodiment must have chilled him out some — but the guy was a first-century rabbi who had no problem with the Levitical law; why would he have been a progressive 21st century liberal?

The blog post ‘Jesus was not a queer ally‘ from Godlessness in Theory makes some great points:

On every continent on earth (except Antarctica), Christianity has othered and outlawed queer sexuality. Whatever Jesus thought about it, assuming he lived at all, this is the movement he inspired.
…
He says nothing about gay sex, we’re told as if this proves he had no objection. (Curiously, the same doesn’t apply to slavery or rape.) He doesn’t even mention queer people. I’m afraid when I hear someone takes my side, acknowledging I exist is the least I expect from them.
…

It is absurdly generous to call someone a queer ally whose name we only know because they spurred a movement that overwhelmingly harmed us for thousands of years.

It is absurdly generous to call someone a queer ally because they never said a word about us, particularly to a violently homophobic audience.

It is absurdly generous to call someone a queer ally for preaching nonspecific love and kindness. That never stopped anyone, let alone preachers, persecuting us.

It’s encouraging that some Christians are using their own good moral conscience to project their compassion onto Jesus, but there’s little basis for it, and it would be better for them to own their better impulses instead of trying to bank-shot it off Jesus.

We have a responsibility not to be hateful bigots

Ask: Returning to the poem, how might someone “hide his eyes while his neighbors are punished for the way they love”?

A personal story: Some years ago in 2008, Richard Raddon caused a stir. He was the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, but resigned when it came out that — in accordance with his Mormon views — he’d donated to help Proposition 8 in California. People were baffled. How could he work alongside actors (one of the gayest professions), and then contribute to tearing down their rights and their families? What was he thinking?

I knew Raddon, briefly. When we were at BYU way back in 1986, we acted together in a production of West Side Story. He was a Shark, and I was one of the adults because I couldn’t dance. We also both lived on the same dorm floor: Deseret Towers, W Hall, 6th floor. We even used to chat about the topic of this lesson — how to maintain one’s standards in an immoral profession.

Rich was a cool guy. He didn’t strike me as someone who would promote a homophobic agenda. And yet he did. But that’s the kind of thing that religion can do to cool people: make them ignore their compassionate impulses to promote a terrible out-dated ideology.

As Steven Weinberg puts it:

Additional ideas for teaching

Mormons imagine that by simply living among us, they are the reason that God hasn’t killed us all

Read this bit from the real lesson manual:

What does Genesis 19:29 suggest was the reason Lot was spared when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed? (The Lord remembered the righteousness of Abraham.) How can our righteous behavior benefit others?

This leads to a quote from S.W. Kimball:

Of course, there are many many upright and faithful who live all the commandments and whose lives and prayers keep the world from destruction.

Ask: What might be the psychological effect of imagining that by being a Mormon, you are preventing God from destroying the world?
Answers: A view that you (by living the gospel) are taking the hero’s role, while your neighbours (by not living the gospel) are recklessly endangering the world by tempting the god you worship to destroy everyone. This is reinforced by comparisons throughout the lesson between our society and that of Sodom.

Other effects may include quixotic attempts to save the world by going on a hunger strike to protest gay marriage, or buying up a raft of immoral tops so no one else can.

Dear Mormons who think this: Thanks for your efforts, and we really appreciate your attempts to be decent people. But we don’t need you to save us, and if you all disappeared, we’d be fine. Society is an adaptable self-organising network. Yes, we have our issues and problems, but we don’t need to be told that your god is coming to destroy us. We’re normal people getting on with the work of living, figuring things out, and learning how to get along. Feel free to join us, but spare us your hectoring and hand-wringing.

The sin of Sodom is not homosexuality

It’s true that Jehovah is no fan of gay people, as we’ll see when we get to Deuteronomy, but when Ezekiel gave his description of Sodom’s sins, buttsecks was way down the list.

16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

16:50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

If homosexuality is the abomination described in verse 50, it barely made the cut. More serious are sins like greed and not helping the poor.

God ensures perpetual political strife

God, in his foreknowledge, promises the land of Canaan to Abram…

13:14 And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward:
13:15 For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.

…thus ensuring that the Middle East would be a political mess and a churning cycle of violence forever. Good one, Jehovah.

The Bible is not appropriate for children

OT Lesson 7 (Abrahamic religions)

15 February 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

“The Abrahamic Covenant”

Abraham 1:1–4; 2:1–11; Genesis 12:1–8; 17:1–9

Links to the reading in the SAB: Abraham 1, Abraham 2, Genesis 12, Genesis 17
LDS manual: here

Background

For this lesson, we’re looking at Abraham, a nomadic herdsman with a tendency to hear voices in his head. Schizophrenia is a serious condition, and fortunately in our day people can get the help they need. But at the time of the alleged Abraham, you were much more likely to either harm yourself or start a religion, or both. That Abraham gave rise to three major world religions speaks to the severity of his condition.

The three Abrahamic religions are:

Judaism, essentially an ethnic/tribal religion whose foundational doctrine is that God likes them a lot
Christianity, which as a universalising religion is open to everyone, and so is the world’s most commercially successful death cult
Islam, which for historical reasons has been tightly aligned with law and government, and for this reason it has a record of oppressing women, gay people, apostates, and religious minorities that Judaism and Christianity can only dream about.

Ask: What’s the difference between the Abrahamic religions?

Bill Maher puts it like this:

Or you could think of it like a movie:

Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament is the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out, and it retcons the last one like it never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn’t shown up yet.

Jews like the first movie but ignored the sequels, Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count, Moslems think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second one so much, they started writing fanfiction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.

The Abrahamic religions share some notable characteristics:

worship of an all-powerful god, with stories of how he has harmed, or will harm, people who didn’t follow his commands
sharp cultural distinctions between in-group and out-group
an end-of-the-world scenario that they long for

Ask: How would these characteristics influence the thinking of a believer in an Abrahamic religion?
Answers: fundamentalism, clannishness and parochialism, a desire for an end to this world, accompanied by a failure to appreciate this life.

More seriously, I think, is that the desire for a new world saps the will and the commitment to make this world better now.

Main points from the lesson

Mormons like to pretend they are Jews

Mormons like to borrow Israel metaphors from people of Hebrew extraction, and this metaphorical borrowing goes back a long way. Here’s kind of a fun article from the news agency JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), looking at Salt Lake City in 1927.

In Utah Mormons Call Themselves Jews and Jews Are Considered “gentiles”
…
The Mormon people regard them-selves as of Israel, too, if you please, and the term “Israel” as applying to themselves is frequently heard in their congregations. They believe themselves to be of Ephraim, and cousins of the Jews, who are of Judah. To a Mormon those not of their faith are regarded as “Gentiles.” Gentiles in Utah often say, in a bantering way, that everybody in Utah outside of the Mormons is a Gentile, even the Jews!

Not a lot has changed since then; Mormons still sing hymns with titles like “Hope of Israel”, refer to missionaries as “elders of Israel”, and even assign each other to tribes of Israel in patriarchal blessings.

Ask: How does this meme benefit the religion?
Answer: Studying the peculiarities of an ancient tribe would seem pretty remote to a congregation, unless there were some way of making it meaningful. The way the LDS Church makes it meaningful is to say, “This is really all about you, because you’re Israel. Somehow.”

Ask: How do actual Jews feel about this kind of cultural appropriation?
Answer: Strangely, as a Latter-day Saint, I never thought to ask. So recently I asked the good people on the Judaism subreddit what they thought about this. You can read the entire thread here, but here are some of the answers.

– The general consensus where I am is that they are an annoying but ultimately harmless group that we should basically just ignore. Stuff like baptizing Anne Frank posthumously is obviously obnoxious, but since we ascribe no meaning to baptism it has no real effect on us.
So we don’t care enough to do anything about it, but yeah, it’s creepy and annoying.

– Meh – No different than Christians claiming to be the true Jews with the New Testament or Muslims saying they are the true torch bearers of the Abrahamic faith.

– I find it entertaining, to be honest. Kind of like the Black Israelites. But to be frank, it’s just one of the many things I find quite humorous about Mormon beliefs.
Sorry for the condescension, but realize that from a Jewish perspective, Mormonism is yet another religion that claims to inherit and replace ours, and my reaction can only be “Oh, well this time I believe you.”

– I think creepy might be a good way to describe it.

– Gross.

– What’s one more group claiming to be the real us? It’s a little annoying, but whatever.

There you have it, folks: annoying and creepy.

Patriarchal blessings

An interesting ritual in the Mormon Church is the patriarchal blessing, usually received in one’s late teen years. In this ritual, an older man called a stake patriarch places his clammy hands on the recipient’s head, and free-associates some stock phrases intended to be pertinent in their life.

As with any oracle, the pronouncements are usually vague and broadly applicable. A good deal of latitude is encouraged in their interpretation. Check out this bit from the church website:

Similarly, the recipient of the blessing should not assume that everything mentioned in it will be fulfilled in this life. A patriarchal blessing is eternal, and its promises may extend into the eternities. If one is worthy, all promises will be fulfilled in the Lord’s due time. Those promises and blessings that are not realized in this life will be fulfilled in the next.

What an enormous rationalisation. What couldn’t be explained away using this logic? “Your blessing said you’d become a giraffe? Obvs in the next life.”

Patriarchal blessings bear some resemblance to psychic readings. Psychics typically use a technique called cold reading, in which the psychic fishes for information by making general statements (guided by observations about the person), and then following up the ones that get confirmed. For a patriarch, it’s a little more challenging because the subject doesn’t speak or move during the blessing, but the patriarch has the advantage of being acquainted with the subject or the subject’s family, and usually chats beforehand about goals or plans. As such, the patriarch will probably be doing more of a warm reading — a reading with the benefit of prior knowledge of the individual. Either way, for both psychic readings and patriarchal blessings, the subject will say that the oracle knew things they “couldn’t have known”.

A feature of the patriarchal blessings is the lineage, where the subject is told which actual tribe of Israel they’re from. Even though the patriarch could name any lineage, a curious number come up Ephraim, but there are outliers. Again, from the church website:

Because each of us has many bloodlines running in us, two members of the same family may be declared as being of different tribes in Israel.

I imagine this is a hedge in case a patriarch, unaware of the lineage of other family members, stuffs up and announces a different lineage for someone. Next:

Patriarchal blessings are sacred and personal. They may be shared with immediate family members, but should not be read aloud in public or read or interpreted by others. Not even the patriarch or bishop or branch president should interpret it.

Ask: Why would it be to the church’s advantage that we not talk about patriarchal blessings?
Answer: Communicating about blessings would mean that more people would know about possible disconfirming details. Of course, it’s sometimes all right to talk about the details that are ‘faith-promoting’. This is a good example of confirmation bias: members count the hits, and don’t talk about the misses.

Long ago, my friend Liz once told me something surprising about her PB: it contained a statement that, to her understanding, meant that she would only live for a short time. Well, I’m glad to say she’s still around. But what an unnecessary burden. And what a strange way of getting information about your life. To give someone a set of vague pronouncements which are supposed to be Very Important Messages from a god, and then send them out the door saying, “Good luck interpreting that!” — how could you blame someone for whatever they came up with? It seems like spiritual malpractice.

I asked her if she’d write her experience for this lesson, and I was very grateful when she accepted. What I didn’t realise was that there was an added dimension to her story. Here’s what she wrote.

The short story is that I interpreted something that was said in my PB as meaning that I would live a short life. This hung over me for many years and made me sad. What a waste of energy.

I was 17 yrs old. Female. My whole life ahead of me, much ambition. I reread my PB today for the first time in many years recalling the impact it had on me in my youth. In retrospect and with the clarity of experience and one might be bold enough to say wisdom, I see the influence it had. At first this was about the implications my PB made about the length of my life. Which stunned me at 17. However I realise there was actually a more subversive message I carried with me….

I realise that my whole life I had been receiving a message that was about my powerlessness as a female in the LDS church and my PB reinforces that by implying that my whole life, however short, is already determined and as long as I do as instructed I will be rewarded when I’m dead. I hate that. Don’t get me wrong; my PB has many motivating and inspirational words, but clearly instructs me to do A B C whilst obeying whatever else the priesthood says.

I believe that anyone and anything you choose to have in your life should help you to fulfill your hopes and dreams, not limit them. If any religion requires you to give those up for God I question why? Why do religions in particular do that? My answer is control. Control of actions, thoughts, intent. When I got married and didn’t have children right away I was asked by my bishop why? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. After that it was all over for me. I couldn’t bear one more minute of the powerlessness and inability to choose for myself within their walls.

Thanks to Liz for her story.

Additional ideas for teaching

The creation of a “scary external world” narrative

From the real manual:

Explain that the ancient Israelites were surrounded by many nations whose people did not believe in the true God. These nations included the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and others.

And for a short time, the Ammonites and the Midianites.

• Why do you think the Lord put his covenant people in the middle of the ancient world instead of where they could be left alone?

He wanted them to set an example for others and to fulfill the Abrahamic covenant to bless all nations.
As he did with ancient Israel, the Lord has placed us, his latter-day covenant people, in the middle of the world. Our challenge is to influence the world in righteous ways rather than allowing the world to influence us in unrighteous ways.

We’ll see later on how the Israelites tried to “influence the world in righteous ways” through genocide, when we get into the books of Joshua and Judges.

But for now, let’s just take note of a special term: the world. For Latter-day Saints, the world represents everything evil and scary.

Ask: How does the idea of the world benefit the church?
Answer: The Church constructs a “scary external world” narrative to keep members tucked safely inside its ideological bubble. Members reinforce this among themselves by telling each other,

“I just don’t know where I’d be without the church.”

Well, of course you don’t know. You’re terrified to even imagine it. Or:

“If I didn’t have the church, I’d be dead / drug-addicted / a prostitute / lost.”

The purpose is to make the outside world seem insecure and turbulent, and the world inside the church-bubble safe by comparison.

Watch “Mother Knows Best” from Tangled.

Ask: What tactics does Mother use to weaken Rapunzel’s desire to escape her prison?
Answers: Emphasises the dangers of the outside world, offers herself as a loving and safe alternative, tells Rapunzel she’ll regret leaving the tower, emphasises her weakness by telling her she’s not strong enough to survive without her.

Let’s be clear: the world can be a scary place where bad things happen. But it can also be a beautiful place where great things happen, Ignoring this is unhelpful, and is intended to make members dependent on the church for their sense of security. It’s true that one could avoid most of the bad in the world by never venturing out, but this is not a good way to live a happy life. As well, fitting one’s mind into the church’s ideological box will probably keep members from finding out details that the church doesn’t like, but limiting the input in this way will prevent someone from finding the best ideas available.

As for me, I like finding out things and interacting with people all over this amazing world of ours, and I reject anyone who tries to make me feel afraid of “the world” as an entity. Such a meme could only ever work to benefit those who try to frighten us.

Sing along with the class.

OT Lesson 6 (Noah)

8 February 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 8 Comments

“Noah… Prepared an Ark to the Saving of His House”

Moses 8:19–30; Genesis 6–9; 11:1–9

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 6, Genesis 7, Genesis 8, Genesis 9, Genesis 11
LDS manual: here

Background

This lesson is about two of God’s worst atrocities: drowning almost all the people and animals in the world in a flood when they got out of his control, and scrambling humanity’s languages when they committed the sin of cooperating on a building project.

I’m a bit stuck as to how to present this lesson. Do I make it a straight takedown of biblical literalism? That’s easy and fun. And not only that, the literal approach is the one that’s taken by the LDS Church in its official instruction manuals, so it’s pertinent besides. On the other hand, do I take the view of Very Sophisticated Theologians and Apologists, and go for a figurative view? That has the benefit of being true, but has the unfortunate effect of negating the entire basis for the Gospel, as we saw in a previous lesson.

We’re at a weird point in LDS doctrine as of last week. That’s when the First Quorum of the Anonymous released its ‘Book of Mormon and DNA Studies‘ essay, which uses sources that acknowledge that people immigrated to the American continent 10,000 years ago, which is a few thousand years before Adam and Eve. So what’s the story here; thousands of years, or millions?

What’s happened is that, because of the Church’s failure to clarify its own doctrine, two parallel streams of doctrine have grown up in the last several decades: a literal one that’s taught in Sunday School, and a figurative/metaphorical one that’s accepted in apologetic circles and on the Internet. The parallel approach has worked out well for the Church; they don’t have to go out on a limb officially, and everyone gets to believe what they want. It works for them, as long as — like we learned in Ghostbusters — you never cross the streams. Because crossing the streams is Bad. But in the DNA essay, what we saw is the Church crossing the streams.

It was inevitable that they’d have to do this, as science has been putting pressure on the literal story for a couple of centuries. Something was going to crack. But it does reveal the Mormon Church’s doctrinal incoherence, and this causes headaches for a diligent Gospel Doctrine teacher.

Not for me, though. In this lesson, I’m taking an axe to the literal view because it’s not the dead horse it’s made out to be. We live in a world where a sizeable number of adult humans are willing to say that they believe the story of Noah’s Ark to be “literally true” — 61 percent, according to a 2004 Gallup poll of American adults. That’s right; three out of five.

Even just last week, we saw a debate between Bill Nye, a guy of science, and Ken Ham, looking lost with only the Bible for support — poor sap. Not only does Ham cherry-pick the evidence that leads to his worldview, he admitted that he would never change his mind about the Bible.

The fact is, many religious organisations are promoting the idea that Noah’s Ark was a true, literal, non-allegorical, and (importantly) global event that took place about 2350 BCE. And one of them is the LDS Church, which as of today continues to teach — in its official lesson manuals, on its website, in its official magazine, and in General Conferences — that God once committed the most complete act of genocide ever recorded upon humankind.

We would now like to turn the time over to Brother Gervais for the story of Noah.

Main points from this lesson

A global flood is implausible.

Many others have done detailed takedowns of the Flood, so I’ll just link to them here, in the order that I like them:

Talk Origins: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
Rational Wiki: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_flood
Biblical Nonsense: http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter6.html
National Center for Science Education: http://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark/
Skepdic: http://www.skepdic.com/noahsark.html

And of course, the Brick Testament.

Here’s a quick run-through of my favourite points:

• The Ark, as described, is way too small

Show the class this graphic from the manual, which even as a TBM I couldn’t believe they printed.

Ask: Would you be able to fit millions of animal species in there? Including millions yet unclassified? In a ship half the size of an ocean liner? (Unless you think they speciated wildly after the flood, but wait, no, that would be evolution.)

Show the class this video by the always-wonderful NonStampCollector, detailing the gargantuan (but not very realistic) labours of Noah.

• Parasites!

You can’t just save all the nice animals; you also have to rescue the parasites. That means Noah and family would have had to be infected with every parasite that humans are prone to.

How many parasites are we talking about? Well, according to the Wikipedia page, about 73! Yep, they’d have been crawling with liver worms, tapeworms, flukes, bedbugs, pubic lice, and fleas. They would scarcely have a healthy eye, ear, urinary tract, or crotch among them! And this would be at the same time that they had to be at the peak of their reproductive fitness, in order to repopulate the earth.

• Other problems

A tiny crew of eight people would have had to do the work of many zoos, and do it all with zero animal deaths.

What about plants? Keeping them underwater for a year would have killed them. It’s a bit moot, though — there are trees just under 10,000 years old, and they show no signs of a flood.

After the flood, the animals would have had to make their way from (apparently) Turkey, the ark’s landing site, to wherever they would eventually live. Cold-weather animals wouldn’t have done well migrating from Turkey. And apparently they didn’t have to, since bones of every animal on earth don’t appear along the way.

Perhaps God teleported them to their new abodes magically. In fact, magic could explain a lot in this story. Whenever I discuss this with creationists, they always fall back on magic eventually. In which case, wouldn’t it be better to go with the magic from the start? Why try to make it sound sciencey, and then revert to magic? Just start with magic! It would save a lot of time!

A local flood doesn’t fit the requirements of the text.

Could we circumvent the plausibility problem by assuming the Flood was a local event, as LDS apologists try to? Unfortunately for them, no. That would mean that the Flood no longer fits the script.

Gen 7:19: All the mountains under heaven were covered with water.

Gen 7:21: All flesh died that moved upon the earth. (Watch as apologists attempt to redefine the word earth. Good one.)

Gen 9:13–16: After the flood, God sent a rainbow as a promise that he would not make another flood like that. But there have been plenty of localised floods since.

There’s a hand up. Yes, Brother Hickenlooper?

Brother Hickenlooper: I was always taught that the whole earth had to be under water because the Flood was the earth’s baptism. Did the church ever really teach that?

Indeed they did, Brother Hickenlooper. From the church essay on “Noah”.

What is the symbolism of Noah and the flood?
God uses symbols to teach gospel truths. In the New Testament, Peter explained that the flood was a “like figure” or symbol of baptism (1 Peter 3:20–21). Just as the earth was immersed in water, so we must be baptized by water and by the Spirit before we can enter the celestial kingdom.

The Flood is at the wrong time.

There were contemporary cultures who didn’t notice the global flood.

A Flood would be the action of an immoral being.

Okay, so the Flood is fictional. No need to get worked up over it. It’s supposed to be an allegory of God’s love, although not from the perspective of everyone who drowned, including children and babies (born and unborn). But all this tells us is that, even as portrayed by his followers, the god of the Bible is a murderous bully who kills men, women, and children in order to fix problems that he created.

Worse, after committing this atrocity, he makes no effort to prevent it from happening again.

Ask: What kind of parent would decide that the correct way to deal with his errant children is to drown them? This is what we should be thinking when we hear “Parenting the Lord’s Way”.

Ask: Why would anyone worship such a being?
Answer: Under duress, Stockholm syndrome.

The Tower of Babel is a myth.

Ah, now we’re in my area. At one point, I was a young linguist, and a true believing Mormon (or TBM). How did I reconcile the two? By not thinking about it very carefully!

No serious linguist would accept the story of the Tower of Babel. You’d have to believe that all humans were speaking the same language after the Flood (so around 2300 BCE).

In fact, the Bible contradicts itself — Genesis 10 says that there were multiple languages, but in the next chapter, there was only one.

In reality, there’s no evidence of any kind of language bottleneck, where everyone is speaking the same language around 2300 BCE. Human languages have been diversifying since people started speaking.

At one point, there may have been one human language, but this would have been maybe 60,000 years ago, when early humans first left Africa.

We know quite a bit about one language family in particular: Proto-Indo-European. This is the language that led to many languages spoken today, like English, Greek, Russian, and even Persian and Sanskrit.

Even though it’s hard to tell exactly when things happened so long ago, we do know that Proto-Indo-European had already split off from its sister languages somewhere between the 4th millennium and the 7th millennium BCE — about 2 to 5 thousand years before Babel. In other words, there was no language bottleneck at the time of Babel.

It’s pretty clear that Babel is a myth that’s intended to explain the diversity of languages in the world, but it’s not the only one.

In African tales, a famine causes the people to wander the earth jabbering nonsense.
In the Dreamtime legend of the Gunwinggu of Australia, a goddess gives each of her children a language to play with.
And for the most plausible explanation of language diversity, a Native American legend has it that disagreement between people caused them to move apart and speak differently.

By comparison, the Abrahamic God just looks petty and insecure, condemning people for working together. One of the best things for advancing our knowledge is collaboration.
Ask: Why might working together help to increase knowledge?
Answers:

Groups of people working together can do more work than one person can do alone.
One person can be subject to bias, but getting more people to review the results helps to control for that; not everyone will have the same biases.
If one person uses deception, other people can try to replicate their results, and they’ll likely be caught. This is a powerful motivator to stay honest.

Working together in science sometimes takes the form of peer review. Peer review helps to correct for error, bias, and deception. This is why biased and mistaken people (like creationists and pseudo-scientists) despise peer review, claiming it represents a conspiracy against them.

Mormons have to take the Tower of Babel story at face value.

I mentioned that, as a young linguist, I didn’t think too much about the Babel story. I took it as largely allegorical, or as a primitive explanation.

That was to change on one of my readings through the Book of Mormon, which relates the story of the brother of Jared. He’s meant to have been at Babel in a very non-allegorical sense. Like many Mormons (and Christians), I habitually dismissed the parts of the Bible that seemed fantastical, but dismissing the Book of Mormon as non-literal is much more difficult. It’s not intended to be read as allegory, at least according to the standard line you get from church. (Then again, neither is the OT, so what did I know?)

So here I had two facts that couldn’t be reconciled:

The Book of Mormon told a story that was intended as factual.
The story was clearly wrong.

This was quite jarring, and I think it was the first real earthquake that led to my deconversion. After the fall of Babel, it became much easier to see how the Church got things wrong, including history, dinosaurs, geology, linguistics, and Mesoamerican archaeology. But more on those later.

Additional ideas for study

Man, I’m glad the creationist crazies haven’t launched into linguistics with the same fervour with which they’ve besieged biology. Otherwise, we’d have the theory of Wrathful Dispersion.

OT Lesson 5 (Cain)

1 February 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

“If Thou Doest Well, Thou Shalt Be Accepted”

Moses 5–7; (Genesis 4–6)

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 4, Genesis 5, Genesis 6
LDS manual: here

Background

Okay, so for this lesson, we’re kind of taking a deep breath before we move on to the Flood, which is going to be a really full-on lesson. But this one sets up Cain (evil murdering skeptic) against Enoch (righteous city builder who mysteriously disappears). It’s the kind of lesson where you look at the manual, and you think, how am I going to get an interesting lesson out of that? Which is too bad, because there’s actually some interesting stuff here if we do some digging. Ready?

Main points for this lesson

It’s bad to have a skeptical attitude about God

From the real lesson manual:

Adam and Eve hoped their son Cain would follow the Lord as they did. But Cain “hearkened not” to his parents and the Lord and asked, “Who is the Lord that I should know him?” (Moses 5:16). What does this question show about Cain’s attitude toward God?

It shows that he had a healthy sense of skepticism. If you must worship someone, you should ask what they’re like, and find out what you’re getting into. But apparently the God of the Bible demands uncritical worship. That makes more sense when we find out more about his murders later on in the Old Testament; this is not the kind of being you’d worship out of admiration, though perhaps out of fear.

Beliefs about Cain

Cain is supposed to have committed the first murder when he killed his brother Abel. It’s charmingly retold with Legos in The Brick Testament.

Click to see the whole story.

Cain is still alive

Cain, as a mythic evil dude, has naturally inspired a lot of folklore. In the Mormon imagination, he’s become something like Bigfoot. An early apostle, David Patten, claimed to have seen him.

“As I was riding along the road on my mule I suddenly noticed a very strange personage walking beside me. He walked along beside me for about two miles. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair … I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer in the earth and traveled to and fro. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. About the time he expressed himself thus, I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, and commanded him to go hence, and he immediately departed out of my sight.”

Other more modern Cain stories are detailed here, some as late as 1998. Come on, folks, there must be some more recent ones.

Also: journal article on this topic.

Ask: What can we learn about the story of Cain?
Answer: We humans seem to like building myths about big hairy guys that don’t exist.

The whole Cain story reminds me of anomalous big cats (ABCs). Even in places where big cats aren’t native, people seem to have grown these stories of ABCs roaming around. There’s the Nottingham lion, the Fen Tiger, the Lincolnshire Lynx, and scores of others. People claim to have seen them — and yet there’s never a body, no scat, and no clear photographic evidence, even with camera phones in everyone’s pockets. It’s one of the things about human brains: we sometimes see patterns where none exist, especially if we’re expecting to see them.

This is just as true for religious experience as it is for big cats or Bigfoots. Think what happens in the LDS discussions: missionaries prime the subjects to have a subjective “spiritual experience”, and they read a long list of feelings that someone might have. The appearance of any of those feelings will then be taken as evidence that a magical spirit being is confirming whatever the missionaries are saying. It’s hokey, but as suggestible as our brains are, it’s not surprising that it works well enough and often enough to keep the LDS Church in new members.

Ask: Are stories about Cain kind of like the opposite of Three Nephite stories?
Answer: Yeah, kinda. Next question.

Ask: How did Cain survive the flood?
Answer: Oh, that? He managed to survive by clinging onto the Ark, like a big hairy barnacle.

But a lot more on the Flood next week.

What’s the deal with people living 800 years?

The Book of Moses (as well as Genesis) gives a list of improbable lifespans, including Adam (930 years), Seth (912 years), and Enos (905 years). What’s the deal?

Well, this one is fairly straightforward: it’s a longevity myth. People used to make kings’ ages up.

“My favourite king was so awesome, he ruled for 10,000 years!”
“Oh, yeah? Well my favourite king was twice as awesome, and he reigned for 20,000 years!”

Read selections from Wikipedia’s page on longevity myths. Here are some good ones:

The Sumerian king Alalngar was supposed to have ruled for 36,000 years
The Persian emperor Zahhak apparently ruled for 1000 years
The Taoist saint Peng Zu lived for 800 years
And there are more examples from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.

It’s not just people in antiquity who believe this stuff; it seems some New Agers today believe in the existence of Babaji, who is centuries old.

Longevity myths are another recurring theme in human belief and hero worship.

Activity for people trapped in real Gospel Doctrine classes: Tell the class about other longevity myths. Time how long it takes for them to commit the special pleading fallacy (“but that’s different!”).

The “seed of Cain” were black.

The Church’s statement on ‘Race and the Priesthood‘ is something of a landmark. Thankfully, it repudiates racism among its members.

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse…. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.

It also lists a few things members have believed in the past. Here’s one:

According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s, blacks descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain, who slew his brother Abel. Those who accepted this view believed that God’s “curse” on Cain was the mark of a dark skin.

Ask: Where might Latter-day Saints have gotten this idea?
Read: Moses 7:22

22 And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them.

So the Book of Moses, one of the Standard Works, promulgates the idea that people of colour are descended from Cain. And because they “had not place among them”, it might have provided support for segregation.

The LDS Church has been busy trying to clean up its record and get some distance from its worst folk doctrines. But one of the most surprising things I’ve found out since taking on this blog is that the source of these ‘folk doctrines’ is actually the Standard Works themselves. It’s all in there.

In other words, if they’re throwing things under the bus, they’re going to need a bigger bus.

Additional ideas for study

Sons of God, daughters of men

Read: Genesis 6:1–4

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

In some religious traditions, the ‘sons of God‘ are supposed to be angels that went to earth and had sex with women, who subsequently gave birth to giants. If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are pygmies and dwarfs?

Yup — this is a real creationist cartoon showing a 15-foot-tall Adam. (Humans can’t get that big; if they did, they’d be very weak and slow. If you were twice as tall, you’d have eight times the mass, but only four times the strength.)

But in Mormon scripture? Joseph Smith wrote the ‘sons of God’ into the narrative as normal people. This is one of the great missed opportunities in scripture. He should have written giants. It wouldn’t have been the most implausible thing he came up with.

Read: Moses 8:21 for Smith’s normal boring explanation of this scripture.
Ask: How crap is that? Could have been freaking giants, man.

OT Lesson 4 (Adam and Eve)

25 January 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 7 Comments

“Because of My Transgression My Eyes Are Opened”

Moses 4; 5:1–15; 6:48–62

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 1, Genesis 2
LDS manual: here

Background

This lesson’s about Adam and Eve, a talking snake, and the Fall.

Suggestion from the real manual:

You may want to ask a class member to prepare to summarize the account of the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Okay, I’ll have a go.

Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil.
God allowed them to choose anyway.
With no knowledge of good and evil, they chose the wrong thing.
God then punished them for it.
This punishment extended to everyone who will ever live.

Sounds fair.

I like to examine religious tenets by what function they bring to the religion. Think of it: every religion that exists today has made the right moves — done enough to keep enough people believing so far. And just as an individual perpetuates itself through its genes, a belief system perpetuates itself through its memes — the individual beliefs that make it believable. So let’s look at what the Fall meme brings to the religion.

1. It accounts for evil.

For polytheists, the existence of evil (for want of a better term) is easy to explain: There are competing, capricious, or downright evil gods. But for monotheists who believe in a good god, it’s a tough problem. Does your god create and/or allow the evil? Then he’s not good. How does Mormonism (and Christianity) explain this? There are three solutions, and they’re all right here in the garden.

1a. Blame humans.

The doctrine of the Fall takes the blame off of God — he introduced humans into a perfect world, which they then screwed up. So, as always, it’s the humans’ fault.

1b. Blame the serpent.

The serpent, for his part, would eventually find himself retooled as Satan, the adversary. Early Judaism didn’t have a Satan, at least not as we know him today. A satan was an opposer or an accuser — not even a specific person. Satan himself wouldn’t show up until after the Hebrews had run into the Zoroastrians, with their Manichean belief of good gods and bad gods. Even then, Satan was pretty chummy with God, dropping in whenever he felt like it, and making bets (see Job).

Only in the New Testament would the Devil find his fullest expression, infesting herds of swine, tormenting demoniacs, and so on. The more people looked for a devil, the more they found. Let’s just say he grew into his role.

But there’s a third party who’d be copping some blame…

1c. Blame Eve.

The Fall legend has Eve taking the forbidden fruit first, so she (and her daughters) would be getting a larger share of the punishment. Everything’s been put on Eve, from childbirth to lack of priesthood. This doctrine justifies the misogyny that Mormonism (and just about every other religion) has in spades.

2. It creates the idea of sin

Before you can sell the cure, you have to sell the disease. The disease Christianity wants to sell you is sin — or rather, the idea that you’ve already sinned. This induces a sense of obligation. The best part: you can’t opt out — Adam’s fall means you’re born into original sin. Soften that up however you like: a condition of sinfulness, a tendency for sin; it’s all the same thing. You’re on the back foot now, and you’ve only just been born. Poor kid.

3. It creates the need for a saviour

Gavin de Becker in his book The Gift of Fear has some warning signs to help recognise dangerous or abusive people. One of them is loan sharking. A loan shark exploits his victim’s sense of fairness by giving some unwanted and unasked-for assistance — and then expecting to be paid back.

Loan sharking operates in Christianity by
– telling you you’ve sinned and making you feel guilty, and what’s more,
– telling you that a perfect person suffered and died for your sins. You’re not going to throw that wonderful gift away, are you? Only a terrible person would do that.
This is loan sharking. It’s designed to get you in line. Your sense of obligation keeps you there. The way to respond to a loan shark is to say, “I didn’t ask for your help. I don’t want it. Go away.”

Mormons are intended to take the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall literally.

There’s a great range of belief among Latter-day Saints on the reality of the Fall of Adam. Some Mormons are theistic evolutionists — they think evolution’s true, but that Godiddit — and some argue that Adam and Eve weren’t real people, but just types. I’ve heard it claimed that humans evolved, but then Adam was just the one that God decided to talk to. In short, there’s a range of belief among Mormons.

What a surprise, then, to do the research for this lesson and find that this range doesn’t exist in approved Church materials. According to the Church, the whole thing is as unambiguously literal as can be.

The late President Paternoster (how I miss him) pointed out that according to LDS-approved materials,

Adam and Eve are literal people

Joseph Smith claimed to see Adam in Doctrine and Covenants 137:5

The Apostle Paul certainly thought Adam was a real person.

Adam and Eve are the ancestors of all humans

Some great sources on the MormonThink.com page — but beware: time vortex.

They lived 6,000 years ago

Hey, anyone remember this bookmark from Seminary? Click for a big PDF version, straight from the Church’s website.

Link on the Church’s website. Thanks, hoserb2k!

Here’s another version that ran in the Ensign.

Link on the church’s website.

It’s well-organised, and very chronologically specific, wouldn’t you say? There’s Adam, starting off right around 4,000 BCE.

And in fact, D&C Section 77 says that the Earth’s temporal existence has a 7,000 year run.

6 Q. What are we to understand by the book which John saw, which was sealed on the back with seven seals?

A. We are to understand that it contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence.

There was no death before the Fall

Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2: 22–23:

2:22 And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.

2:23 And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.

And most surprising of all, the LDS website entry on Death

Latter-day revelation teaches that there was no death on this earth before the Fall of Adam. Indeed, death entered the world as a direct result of the Fall.

Assignment for those trapped in a real Gospel Doctrine class: Read the statement from the Church website, claiming that nothing died before about 6,000 years ago.

Latter-day Saints who accept evolution (and there are many) would be surprised to find that a major mechanism for evolution — population pressure — did not exist for millions of years before Adam and Eve did their thing. Evolution just would not work if Church teachings are true. The two are simply incompatible.

No doubt there are a lot of Latter-day Saints who understand that all of the above cannot possibly be true. It’s very strange, then, to browse the lesson manual and all the available Church materials and find that they take the story completely at face value. No mention of the possibly metaphorical nature of the story is ever touched on. I’ve never seen anything semi-official from the Church that takes the non-literal view of Adam and Eve.

And there’s a very good reason for this: If the Adam and Eve isn’t literally true, the gospel story falls apart. If Adam and Eve didn’t fall, then no one brought sin and death into the world. No sin and no death means no need for Jesus to bring about forgiveness and the Resurrection. Simple as that. So the doctrine of the Fall puts Mormon doctrine in kind of a weird bind: the gospel only works if the story is literally true, but the story cannot possibly be literally true. One could relax the literalism and go metaphorical, but what happens then? Would you accept metaphorical forgiveness? How does metaphorical resurrection sound? Mormons who take the metaphorical view are ignoring vast amounts of their own scripture.

The Church doesn’t sell any of this as a metaphor; it’s intended to be straight-down-the-line literal. LDS missionaries do not say “We have a great metaphor that we’d like to share with you today!”

No thinking person should believe this.

The Atonement is a weird idea.

God could have forgiven everyone — because he can do anything. Instead he chose to kill his son, so that he could stand to have a relationship with us again. Isn’t that kind of weird?

Video: Dan Barker of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and a former preacher, explains the atonement:

The Garden of Eden has a positive message

Let’s end with something positive.

The metaphor of leaving the Garden of Eden is a great one. We grow up in a state of innocence — well, some of us do, if we’re lucky. I had very loving and very sheltering parents. But at some point, we have to make a decision to step out and gain knowledge. Once you do, you can never go back. That’s how some of our life’s choices are. Going to uni or getting a job, getting married, deconverting from your religion of origin — all of life’s major crossroads entail a choice: are you going to partake and have your eyes opened? Or will you continue as you are? Leaving the Garden and entering the lone and dreary world is difficult; you get knocked around. Stuff happens out there.

But one thing I do value from my Mormon background is the idea that leaving the Garden — like taking the red pill in The Matrix — is a positive step. Leaving the religion of my youth was the most difficult and disruptive thing I’ve ever done, and by far the most worthwhile.

OT Lesson 3 (The Creation)

18 January 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

The Creation

Moses 1:27–42; 2–3

Links to the reading in the SAB: Moses 1
LDS manual: here

Background

This lesson treats the Hebrew creation myth, in which a god creates the universe by speaking words. The ‘creation from words’ idea is just one of the many methods that people have believed over time. Others are creation from an egg, creation from bodily fluids, and creation from dismemberment. (You can check out a lot of the other methods from this book, A Dictionary of Creation Myths by David Adams Leeming.)

But these creation stories aren’t as good as what science can offer. Here’s a creation story from a humanist perspective:

This earth, our home, is a small blue-green planet, orbiting a minor star on one arm of a galaxy called the Milky Way. A galaxy is composed of gas, dust and many millions of stars and there are some hundred thousand galaxies in the known Universe. Recent observations show that clusters of galaxies are moving apart from one another as the space between them expands and this must mean that long ago they were closer together, It is now believed that, at a certain time in the past, which can be calculated as roughly 15000 million years ago, all the matter and energy in the Universe was concentrated in a mathematical point with zero volume from which it burst out in one ‘Big Bang’ to create the Universe…

God could have revealed that. It’s nice, and it has the obvious advantage of being true. There’s also a skeptical creation story by Michael Shermer, which is quite funny.

The LDS lesson manual takes the creation story from the Book of Moses, which is Joseph Smith’s adaptation of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

Genesis 1 and 2 are interesting because they contain two parallel creation accounts. It would appear that there were two versions floating around, and the bible editors decided to include them both. This makes things a little awkward when Smith dutifully copies both down in Moses; God creates woman in Moses 2:27, and then again in Moses 3:20.

Main points from this lesson

The creation story does not match the scientific account.

The LDS lesson manual advances the idea that the creation account in Genesis matches what actually happened at some kind of coarse-grained level.

Ask class members to consider how much information they would give if they were trying to answer one of the following questions for a preschool child: How does an airplane stay in the air? How does a television set work? How do plants grow? Most of us would consider the understanding of a preschool child and give only general concepts, leaving the details until a child becomes more mature.

In other words, the story appears the way it does because people were morons then, so God had to explain things very simply. But there’s a difference between explaining things simply, and getting it just plain wrong — wrong in a way that God knew would become obvious in a few centuries. The creation story is not a good fit for what the scientific evidence shows.

Here’s the basic timeline for creation presented in Genesis (and Moses):

Day 1: Light, including day and night. But the light is coming from somewhere other than the sun and the moon, because they won’t be created until Day 4. God, doing a crackerjack job so far.
Day 2: The firmament. What’s a firmament? More on this later.
Day 3: Earth and sea. There are plants, but strangely, still no sun. How does that work? Magic.
Day 4: Finally, the sun and the moon. (The temple version swaps Days 3 and 4. Did you notice?)
Day 5: Animals, and then
Day 6: People

Unless you go on to read Genesis 2, where it’s Adam, then the animals, and then Eve.

I won’t belabour the contradictions between scripture and reality here, but if you want to read more about this, here are a couple of links. Link 1 | Link 2

One of the major elements of creation doesn’t exist

Ask: What’s a firmament?
Likely answer: A thing. A thing that is up. Up there. Pointing and hand-waving.

Seriously, I taught this lesson a few times, and I never thought to get into what exactly the firmament was. There was supposed to be this firmament thing on Day 2 that was meant to ‘divide the waters from the waters’, but beyond that, there was never a good explanation. Was it land, like a continent or something? No one knew.

Okay, so here’s the answer you never heard in Sunday School: The firmament was supposed to be this enormous roof type of thing over the earth, with water on top of it. That’s why it divided the waters from the waters. Water down here, water up there. That’s the firmament.

That’s not all. When it rained, the rain would come through the ‘windows of heaven’, as in Genesis 7:11. See how that works?

It gets better: the sun, moon, and stars are not light years away — they’re ‘set’ in the firmament. Yep, they’re on the inside of this roof thing. Where the rain comes from.

Ask: Are you going to get cosmological information from people who didn’t have telescopes and couldn’t even figure out why it rained?

Here’s a great chart that makes things more clear: the ancient Hebrew conception of the universe.

That’s what Moses and Genesis are describing.

I know that some people are reading this blog from church, more or less having to attend. (Oh, and the wifi password is probably ‘pioneer47‘.) So I’m giving you an assignment.

Assignment: If you’re in a real Gospel Doctrine class right now, and someone asks about the firmament, explain it to your class. Draw them a picture. It’ll be perfectly biblical, but so obviously wrong to anyone from the 21st century. Then tell how it went down in comments.

But when met with scientific explanations, surely smart successful people will accept them and abandon the religious explanations, right? Not always, and that’s our next point…

LDS Church leaders mock scientific theories about the earth

Elder Russell M. Nelson said this in a General Conference in the year 2012.

At 7:05 — Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. (audience laughter) Ask yourself, “Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?” The likelihood is most remote. (emphasis in original)

Wow — I knew Mormons weren’t big on evolution, but I hadn’t realised that they were ‘big bang denialists’! That’s kicking it up a notch right there.

The ‘Big Bang’ is one of the best-attested scientific results of all time.
Short version: http://www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/astro/cosmos/bb_evid
Long version: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html

Ask: If Nelson gets this so very wrong, how reliable is he as a source of information? What else is he getting wrong? What are his chances of getting complicated issues right?

As you might infer from the audience laughter, this institutional ignorance has flow-on effects. General authorities have opposed or been ambivalent toward evolution, and Mormons have nearly the lowest acceptance of evolution among all the religious groups in the US. They’re about half as likely to accept evolution as even other Americans.

And that’s a shame, because evolution has mountains of evidence to support it, and it’s pretty cool.

It is futile and unnecessary to harmonise science and religion.

Science has made tremendous advances, aiding our understanding of the world, the universe, medicine, and technology. At the same time, it has swept aside many religious notions. Religion used to provide a model of the earth’s history, but they are having to cede that ground and provide ’emotional comfort’ instead. However, many religious people try to shoehorn scientific discovery into their religious worldview.

Here’s Mohammed from ‘Jesus and Mo’ doing that very thing.

(Click to see the whole comic on the Jesus and Mo website. Worth it!)

I found this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson quite sensible. He’s not exactly one to rush to conflict, but here he points out that all attempts to synthesise the two have failed. Religion must cede the scientific ground, and retreat to ’emotional comfort’ (which I think it does a terrible job at anyway).

Trying to wedge religion into science is unnecessary and futile. Religion and science are opposite and irreconcilable ways of understanding the world. Religions get their data from tradition, anecdote, and conjecture. Science offers a more reliable version of the history of the universe because it updates to match reality.

Additional teaching ideas

Information control

The real LDS lesson manual states that God withheld information about creation that was difficult to understand or not very important:

The Lord has revealed only that portion of eternal truth that our mortal minds can understand and that we need to know to gain salvation.

Ask: If a church promotes the idea that some information needs to be withheld for the good of its membership, how might that idea play out in other ways? How does the LDS Church withhold certain kinds of information from members and prospective members? What kinds of organisations engage in information control?

Non-binding revelation

Here’s a website with statements from church leaders.

Joseph Smith: “This earth was organized or formed out of other planets which were broken up and remodeled and made into the one on which we live.” (January 5, 1841)

Brigham Young: “Shall I say that … the seeds of every plant composing the vegetable kingdom were brought from another world? This would be news to many of you…. When you tell me that father Adam was made as we make adobies from the earth, you tell me what I deem an idle tale. … There is no such thing in all the eternities where the Gods dwell. Mankind are because they are offspring of parents who were first brought here from another planet, and power was given them to propagate their species, and they are commanded to multiply and replenish the earth.”

“… Sister Eliza R. Snow … told … that she heard the Prophet say that when the ten tribes were taken away, the Lord cut the earth in two, Joseph striking his left hand in the center with the edge of his right to illustrate the idea, and that they were on an orb or planet by themselves, and when they returned with the portion of this earth that was taken away with them, the coming together of these two bodies or orbs, would cause a shock and make the earth ‘reel to and fro like a drunken man.’
“She also stated that he said the earth was now ninety times smaller than when first created or organized.” (Diary of Charles Walker, p. 691, March 10, 1881)

Before glancing at the URL, try to tell whether:

this is an anti-Mormon site trying to make LDS doctrine look ridiculous, or
it’s a serious page trying to educate Mormons as to the details of the creation.

The answer may surprise you. Or not really.

OT Lesson 2 (Pre-mortal life)

11 January 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

“Thou Wast Chosen Before Thou Wast Born”

Abraham 3; Moses 4:1–4

Links to the reading in the SAB: Abraham 3, Moses 4
LDS manual: here

Background

The Book of Abraham is arguably the most transparent confabulation in LDS scripture. In 1835, Joseph Smith bought some Egyptian papyri from a traveling mummy exhibition, and claimed to translate them into what is now the Book of Abraham. Even at the time, Egyptologists recognised that the papyri were ordinary funerary documents, having nothing to do with Abraham. Mormon apologists have invented many explanations in which the papyri could be the BoA: maybe the real Egyptologists missed something. Maybe Joseph Smith gave a special magical translation of what the papyri were supposed to say. Maybe what Abraham wrote was on a different part of the papyri that we don’t have. Maybe maybe maybe.

Even for the parts we have, it’s not hard to show that Joseph Smith got it wrong. Here’s what Smith’s copy of Facsimile 1 looked like.

But some bits are missing. What was originally in those gaps? Joseph Smith thought it should go like this:

Egyptologists now know it really looked like this:

That’s the jackal god Anubis, and not a priest.

What’s more embarrassing, Smith gives oodles of explanation of what all the facsimile items mean, and they’re all painfully wrong. From hindsight, we can see that Joseph Smith was B.S.ing as hard as he could. Yet believing Mormons still buy it.

More info at mormoninfographics.com

Main points for this lesson

The Pre-Mortal Life

The pre-mortal life (confession time) is actually one of my favourite bits of Mormon doctrine. I really used to enjoy thinking that we all came from realms of glory. I’d be in a big city and see lots of people, and think, “Gee, how amazing it is that we’re all related.” Fortunately, this is a feeling that I still have access to, thanks to biology. I can still enjoy the idea that we’re part of a big human family, without having to imagine that we were once all together in middle-class potpourri pre-mortality. (Our family also includes other animals, and biology can tell us how related we are. Amazing!)

I also don’t have to think, “Gee, all these people used to believe in Heavenly Father, but they’ve forgotten. Now I have to help get them back on track!” That’s a bit self-flattering.

Also self-flattering is foreordination, the idea that you were set up in the life before this one to accomplish great churchy things. Congratulations, you’ve kept your ‘first estate’ — made it through the first round — and now all you have to do is stay active in the church until you die to get the goodies! It makes you feel like you’ve already accomplished something, and it raises the stakes: you don’t want to throw away all that progress, do you?

The appeal of the pre-mortal life is that no matter what you do, you’re still a perfect person underneath all the bad that’s happened. That can be a powerful motivator. But you can imagine a better version of yourself — and work towards it — without buying into self-congratulatory fiction.

Ask: What age were we in the pre-mortal life? (Answer: In our ‘prime of life’. But what does that mean? Explain that it’s not important to your salvation.)

Video: Watch this more-complete explanation of our Heavenly Father’s plan with the class. Boogie down to the funky beats.

Gender identity

Gender is kind of a complicated area. Our gender identity arises from our bodies, social norms and expectations, and our own sense of self. For some people, gender identity aligns with their biological sex, but other people identify as male, female, both, or neither.

Compare this to the rather simplistic view offered by the LDS Proclamation on the Family:

Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

“And purpose.”

Wow — talk about a sweeping and unsupported claim. If you’re a dude, you’ve been a dude since pre-eternity, and you’ll be one forever. This view is sometimes called gender essentialism.

There are a lot of problems here. What about intersex people? What about people with androgen insensitivity? You might have heard of this, but if not: Some of us have a Y chromosome, and some of us don’t, but we’re all girls in the womb. After about 60 days, if you’re an XY, you get a shot of testosterone and it’s genetic boyhood for you. But a few of us have bodies that aren’t sensitive to testosterone. That means that they stay girls in the womb, they’re born as girls, and they grow up as girls, but they’re walking around with a Y chromosome.

Video: Show the class this video of Christy North, a woman with androgen insensitivity.

With a belief in premortal gender essentialism, we have to ask silly and unnecessary questions like:

Was Christy a man in premortality?
Will she be a man in the hereafter?
Is it a fair test for her to have a life experience so different from her supposed pre-mortal gender?

Having this belief could make it difficult to accept her gender identity, and that of trans* and intersex people. And there’s enough suspicion and prejudice against them without reasons for adding more.

Gender essentialism has other nasty effects, like limiting women’s choices by keeping them out of the professional world and in the home, and of course denying them access to ecclesiastical authority and having a real voice in their own church.

Gender is far more complicated than the facile pronouncements of elderly men would allow, and reducing the whole thing to two genders — determined since eternity — is unhelpful and unsupported by evidence.

The War in Heaven

According to the myth, Satan wanted to force people to be good and take the glory for himself, while Jesus was more of a pro-choice kind of guy. He wanted the glory to go to the Father, but it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Reading: Assign class members to read parts of this hilarious scene by The Rnegade.

God: Listen up everyone; I have an announcement to make.
Everyone: What is it, God?
God: I have a plan to turn all of you into a god, just like me. I call it The Plan of Salvation.
Crowd erupts in applause
God: Ahem. Ok, so here’s how the plan is going down, yo. Before you can be God’s you’ll need bodies. So, we’re going to create a planet for you to live on, where you’ll be born, raised and die. You’ll also have to choose the right.
Nephi: That’ll be easy. I always choose the right.
God: It won’t be easy. Satan will be there to tempt you.
Adam: Who’s Satan?
God: It’s Lucifer.
Lucifer: Me? What did I do?
God: It’s not what you did but what you will do. You’re going to rebel against my plan.
Lucifer: I am?
God: Yep. It’s ok, though because my plan requires you to rebel against my plan so that you can tempt the others and help them grow.
Lucifer: What the fuck? Do I get some kind of compensation?
God: No. In fact, the exact opposite, you get eternal damnation in Outer Darkness
Lucifer: Jesus Christ!
Jesus: Sup homes.
…
God: Anyway, my plan will require a sacrifice because everyone is going to sin and, for some odd reason, you’re not allowed to pay for your own sins. However, I want a sacrifice who won’t take any credit for his actions.
Jesus: I’ll do it. I’ll tell the humans to give you all the glory. I’m sure they won’t worship me at all, singing praises to my name, dedicating their lives to me and even calling themselves Christians and what not, essentially negating one of the big reasons why you opposed Lucifer’s plan.
God: Awesome.

Read the whole thing on the Exmormon subreddit.

Ask: What was the War in Heaven like, with no physical bodies to fight with?
Answer: We had to fight with opinions, kind of like the Internet. The War in Heaven basically resembled one big web forum, with the GodMod finally bringing down the ban-hammer on 1/3 of everyone. They became sort of like 4chan or the Dark Web.

Race and pre-mortality

Ask: Were people of African descent less valiant in the pre-mortal life?
Answer: Absolutely not. According to the Church’s recent statement “Race and the Priesthood“:

Around the turn of the century, another explanation gained currency: blacks were said to have been less than fully valiant in the premortal battle against Lucifer and, as a consequence, were restricted from priesthood and temple blessings.

It gained currency, did it? How did it do that? I can’t imagine where people got this idea, except that it was taught by LDS leaders.

Reading: Have a class member read this excerpt of a letter from Joseph Fielding Smith to Joseph Henderson.

“According to the doctrine of the church, the negro because of some condition of unfaithfulness in the spirit — or pre-existence, was not valiant and hence was not denied the mortal probation, but was denied the blessing of the priesthood.”

Be sure to point out that at this time, Smith was not the president of the Church, so really, how could he have known anything about its doctrine? He’d only been President of the Quorum of the Twelve for 12 years; you might as well ask the cat. An important part of the Church is continuing revelation, which means that statements from church leaders — but only important ones — must be taken extremely seriously, until the moment they’re retroactively disclaimed because they’re distasteful or embarrassing.

And in fact, Smith was going against Brigham Young, who earlier said, “No, they were not [neutral], there were no neutral [spirits] in Heaven at the time of the rebellion, all took sides …. All spirits are pure that came from the presence of God.”

Reflect on what a weird and unreliable method of getting knowledge this is. As we saw in the last lesson, this would be easy for a prophet to clear up, but instead we get centuries of contradictory statements.

Additional Teaching Ideas

Foreordination

Teaching idea from the real manual:

Draw 14 blank spaces on the chalkboard to represent the 14 letters in the word foreordination. Explain that the word represented by these spaces relates to the premortal life.
Give class members 14 chances to guess which letters form the word.

It’s Hangman! Are they not allowed to say hangman? Anyway, here’s how this goes in class:

Everyone: It’s foreordination!
Gospel Doctrine Teacher: But you didn’t guess any letters! How did you know?
Everyone: We remember it from four years ago! And four years before that!

Ask: What were you foreordained to do? Perhaps be sexually abused? In 1986, the Ensign magazine ran this item in their “I Have a Question” series, explaining that God may have purposely placed children in abusive families, so that they could break some putative but now-discredited ‘cycle of abuse’. Try this on for size:

So many children are abused, offended, and abandoned. If little children are precious to God, what justification can there be for permitting some to be born into such circumstances?

…Indeed, my experience in various church callings and in my profession as a family therapist has convinced me that God actively intervenes in some destructive lineages, assigning a valiant spirit to break the chain of destructiveness in such families. Although these children may suffer innocently as victims of violence, neglect, and exploitation, through the grace of God some find the strength to “metabolize” the poison within themselves, refusing to pass it on to future generations. Before them were generations of destructive pain; after them the line flows clear and pure. Their children and children’s children will call them blessed.
…
In a former era, the Lord sent a flood to destroy unworthy lineages. In this generation, it is my faith that he has sent numerous choice individuals to help purify them.

Allow members of the class to give their own explanations for the failure of a loving god to prevent abuse, each one more morally callous than the last. Be astonished at the ease with which they can do this.

Kolob and Kokaubeam

There’s some proto-sci-fi in here, where God (or Jesus) mentions the names of stars (or perhaps planets) such as Kolob, Shinehah, Kokob, Olea, Kokaubeam. This chart by u/narcberry (Reddit thread) explains everything.

Activity: Try to say the names of these stars (or perhaps planets) with a straight face.

Occasionally someone will actually try to figure out where Kolob is (often Sagittarius A), and I always think “Bless their hearts,” as one would with someone who’s slightly ‘touched’.

It also kind of pisses me off. That’s the problem with religious scams: the con artist makes enough off of it to last for their lifetime, but they waste other people’s time for generations. Think of all the human time and effort that’s been dedicated to baloney. Entire lifetimes.

It’s why I say that bad answers are worse than no answers at all. At least when you have no answers, you might look for — and find — a good one. When you have bad answers, you don’t.

Rounding out the Egyptian theme:

Activity: Listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ wonderful “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus”. This tune was borrowed for the LDS hymn, “If You Could Hie to Kolob”.

While listening, try not to think of Kolob and those dorky invented names. Fail.

Ponder how terrible it is that this great music will be forever linked in your mind to some maniac’s bad fiction.

Testify that religion poisons everything.

OT Lesson 1 (God)

4 January 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

“This Is My Work and My Glory”

Moses 1

Link to the reading in the SAB: Moses 1
LDS manual: here

Background

The Old Testament is the longest and most involved of the four volumes of LDS scripture, so we’re going to get started this week by not reading any of it. Instead, we’re going to start with some OT fanfic, the Book of Moses. In Joseph Smith’s time, it was widely thought that Moses had written the first five books of the OT, which made him a natural choice for a protagonist. That turned out wrong, but at least this is a less-obvious blunder than the Book of Abraham, which we’ll tear into in the next lesson.

Main points for this lesson

The Old Testament: Wow, it really is that bad.

The Old Testament is a work of cruelty, discrimination, misogyny, and homophobia. Its protagonist, a primitive Hebrew deity, is largely concerned with cementing his own reputation as a major player in the world pantheon, while caring surprisingly little for human well-being. Despite being (allegedly) all-powerful and all-good, he allows (and in some cases, encourages) a shocking array of atrocities, including rape, child-murder, and genocide. If the Bible were any other book, it would carry a warning sticker.

The fact that the events of the Old Testament are largely fictional hardly mitigates its barbarism, since Christians all over the world routinely defend its contents, and are shocked, angered, or disappointed to be informed that they have no factual basis in reality.

Jesus is the god of the Old Testament.

From the real manual:

Note: Class members should understand that Jehovah, not Heavenly Father, appeared to Moses in this vision. Jehovah was the premortal Jesus Christ and the God of the Old Testament.

That’s something to keep in mind as we trawl through the carnage of the Old Testament this year — it’s actually Jesus doing it.

One popular dodge that Christians (including Mormons) use to excuse this cruelty is “But that was the Old Testament!” While this does explain away the archaic and unpleasant Mosaic rules, it doesn’t do much to excuse the inexcusable conduct of Jehovah, and the fact that Mormons think these atrocities were authored by Jesus himself makes explaining them away even more problematic. Christianity has set up a good cop/bad cop duality in the form of God/Jesus (even though they think the two are the same person), but with Jesus and Jehovah being the exact same person, Latter-day Saints cannot reasonably avail themselves of it.

Moses 1:6

And I have a work for thee, Moses my son; and thou art in the similitude of mine Only Begotten; and mine Only Begotten is and shall be the Savior, for he is full of grace and truth

In this scripture, Jehovah has apparently forgotten that he’s Jesus. Perhaps the Mormon view of the pre-mortal Jesus was still evolving at the time the Book of Moses was written, or perhaps God was having some trouble grasping the whole Godhead concept.

The manual explains it like this:

His words are those of the Father, and sometimes, as in Moses 1:6, he speaks in the first person for the Father.

Why would Jesus sometimes say that he’s the Father? Why would he not communicate clearly who he is? This is confusing, and God is not supposed to be the author of confusion. This is simply a clumsy dodge to explain away an inconsistency.

Object Lesson

Have a class member read the following paragraph:

Hi, I’m Steve! Well, I’m really Dave, but me and Steve are really close. In fact, we’re so close that sometimes I don’t realise I’m Dave, and I call myself Steve! But I’m really Steve! Whoops, I did it again! Dave! No, wait, Steve! Wait…

Ask: How would you respond to someone whose identity was so poorly defined or possibly compromised?

Possible answers: Gaze upon them with pity, back away slowly, don’t give them any money.

Moses 1:7–11

In these scriptures, God visits Moses, and tells him he is a son of God.

Ask: How does it make you feel to be told you are a child of God?

Possible answer: It appeals to my sense of vanity and need to feel significant.

Then, when God goes away, Moses collapses.

And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.

Ask: Is a person a child of God, or are they nothing? Which is it?

Answer: Whichever the Church needs to emphasise at any given time. It wouldn’t do to rip people down all the time; they’d get sick of it. It would be a better idea to build them up sometimes, so they feel like you’re the source of their good feelings. Then they’re ready for you to yank the rug out from under them when needed.

Make sure you saddle them with arbitrary moral rules that they’ll be unable to observe. This will keep them locked into an orbit of failure and redemption, with you at its centre.

They feel great because of their relationship with you
They inevitably fail to maintain your impossibly high standards, and feel like they’ve betrayed you
They come to you for forgiveness, and feel great again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here’s another problem with the whole ‘child of God’ idea: it’s meant to give you self-esteem, not because of who you are, but because of your relationship to someone else. Your worth doesn’t come from anything related to you; it’s because of who your father is. As this scripture says, you’re nothing. Your worth always ties back to someone else. This is not the way to build a lasting sense of self-worth; it builds dependency.

Some believers might read this post and think, “well, that’s actually right: I am nothing, God is everything, and I am dependent on him.” If this is the case, ponder how amazingly well this strategy has worked on you. You are hooked.

Additional Teaching Ideas

Do a Google search for “signs of an abusive relationship”. This list is like many others. Take a look at these warning signs.

He pushes for quick involvement.
There is jealousy.
He is controlling.
He has very unrealistic expectations.
There is isolation.
He blames others for his own mistakes.
He makes everyone else responsibile for their feelings.
There is hypersensitivity.
He is cruel to animals and children.
His “playful” use of force during sex.
There is verbal abuse.
There are rigid gender roles.
He has sudden mood swings.
He has a past of battering.
There are threats of violence.

How many of these warning signs does God show? (We’ll be revisiting this list throughout the year.)

Show the following graphic:

Ask: If your friend was in a relationship where their partner told them these things, what advice would you give to your friend?

Answer: If you were any kind of friend at all, you’d be encouraging them to dump the jerk, if not offer to go and get their things for them.

If your relationship with your god does not resemble this description, good. Your concept of god is probably healthier than the one presented in the Book of Moses.

Conclusion

The relationship described in Moses 1 is a bad deal. Relationships are difficult when there’s a significant power imbalance, and this would be the ultimate power imbalance. We should wish to have nothing to do with a being who can read our thoughts, demands our loyalty, and who can impose eternal consequences for our compliance (or non-compliance) to their wishes. As Christopher Hitchens points out, we should be grateful that this is not true.

from 2:13
The reasons why I’m glad that this is not true, would I suppose be the gravamen of my case. Some people I know, who are atheists, will say the wish they could believe it. Some people I know who are former believers say they wish they could have their old faith back. They miss it.
I don’t understand this at all. I think it is an excellent thing there is no reason to believe in the absurd propositions I just… admittedly rather briefly rehearsed to you.
The main reason for this I think is that it is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority, who can convict you of thoughtcrime, while you are asleep.
Who can subject you — who must indeed subject you — to a total surveillance, around the clock, every waking and sleeping minute of your life, — I say: of your life — before you were born, and even worse, and where the real fun begins: after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea.
Who wants this to be true?! Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Author: Daniel Midgley (page 15 of 15)

Birthright Blessings; Marriage in the Covenant

Genesis 24–29

Background

Main points from this lesson

Marriage ‘in the covenant’ is intended to create ‘ideological bubbles’.

The doctrine of eternal families means the LDS Church owns your family

Additional ideas for teaching

The church still teaches against interracial marriage.

No camels.

The Bible gets genetics wrong

“God Will Provide Himself a Lamb”

Abraham 1; Genesis 15–17; 21–22

Background

Main points from this lesson

There would have been no attempt on young Abraham’s life.

Click the graphic for a big PDF, straight from the LDS website.

Polygamy rears its head

The attempted murder of Isaac embodies the worst idea in religion: “Always obey God.”

Additional ideas for teaching

What else was in the reading?

Living Righteously in a Wicked World

Genesis 13–14; 18–19

Background

Main points of this lesson

The god of the Bible is a homophobic and destructive asshole.

Gods are a reflection of the people who believe in them

Jesus was probably not a gay-friendly guy

We have a responsibility not to be hateful bigots

Additional ideas for teaching

Mormons imagine that by simply living among us, they are the reason that God hasn’t killed us all

The sin of Sodom is not homosexuality

God ensures perpetual political strife

The Bible is not appropriate for children

“The Abrahamic Covenant”

Abraham 1:1–4; 2:1–11; Genesis 12:1–8; 17:1–9

Background

Main points from the lesson

Mormons like to pretend they are Jews

Patriarchal blessings

Additional ideas for teaching

The creation of a “scary external world” narrative

“Noah… Prepared an Ark to the Saving of His House”

Moses 8:19–30; Genesis 6–9; 11:1–9

Background

Main points from this lesson

A global flood is implausible.

A local flood doesn’t fit the requirements of the text.

The Flood is at the wrong time.

A Flood would be the action of an immoral being.

The Tower of Babel is a myth.

Mormons have to take the Tower of Babel story at face value.

Additional ideas for study

“If Thou Doest Well, Thou Shalt Be Accepted”

Moses 5–7; (Genesis 4–6)

Background

Main points for this lesson

It’s bad to have a skeptical attitude about God

Beliefs about Cain

Cain is still alive

What’s the deal with people living 800 years?

The “seed of Cain” were black.

Additional ideas for study

Sons of God, daughters of men

“Because of My Transgression My Eyes Are Opened”

Moses 4; 5:1–15; 6:48–62

Background

1. It accounts for evil.

1a. Blame humans.

1b. Blame the serpent.

1c. Blame Eve.

2. It creates the idea of sin

3. It creates the need for a saviour

Mormons are intended to take the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall literally.

Adam and Eve are literal people

Adam and Eve are the ancestors of all humans

They lived 6,000 years ago

There was no death before the Fall

The Atonement is a weird idea.