Holy the Ghost

Category: Holy the Ghost

BoM Lesson 15 (King Benjamin 1)

17 April 2016 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

“Eternally Indebted to Your Heavenly Father”

Mosiah 1–3

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show how the gospel sets up impossible, confusing, and damaging expectations for people

Reading

From all my years of teaching Gospel Doctrine (either here or in church), there’s a principle I’ve learned about prophecy:

It’s crap.

Wait, that wasn’t the principle! The principle is this:

All prophecies either

turn out false (but become plausible if reinterpreted creatively enough)
turn out true, but in ways that anyone could have known at the time
turn out true, because they were written after the thing happened.

All the stuff about Jesus in the Book of Mormon is in the latter category. The Old Testament (contra Jacob) doesn’t mention Jesus at all. It’s so vague about him that the people who knew the scriptures best resisted him the most. But how about the Book of Mormon, which was written after people had heard of Jesus? Suddenly it’s all about teh Jesus! They can’t stop talking about Jesus. How about that?

Mosiah 3:5 For behold, the time cometh, and is not far distant, that with power, the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from heaven among the children of men, and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay, and shall go forth amongst men, working mighty miracles, such as healing the sick, raising the dead, causing the lame to walk, the blind to receive their sight, and the deaf to hear, and curing all manner of diseases.
3:6 And he shall cast out devils, or the evil spirits which dwell in the hearts of the children of men.
3:7 And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and the abominations of his people.
3:8 And he shall be called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary.

I mean, check that out — the Book of Mormon writers practically had his damn mobile number. They’re calling him by name, they’re calling themselves Christians — and strangely, they’re still living the Law of Moses, so that must have been confusing.

“Why are we sacrificing animals again?”
“Just do it; don’t worry about it.”
“But this won’t matter in a few years.”
“That’s why we’re not writing any details down in the Gold Plates.”

What’s more likely: that Book of Mormon prophets were so amazing that they knew stuff that other Bible prophets didn’t know — or that someone in the 1820s sat down and wrote it?

It’s not just the knowledge of Jesus that marks the Book of Mormon as a 19th century document. It’s the subject matter that the Book of Mormon presents. Check out this odd reference to the status of infants, which preoccupied theologians in the 1800s, and precisely no one in Biblical times:

Mosiah 3:17 And moreover, I say unto you, that there shall be no other name given nor any other way nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men, only in and through the name of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.
3:18 For behold he judgeth, and his judgment is just; and the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy; but men drink damnation to their own souls except they humble themselves and become as little children, and believe that salvation was, and is, and is to come, in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.

Isn’t that kind of a 1830s thing?

When I was at the dear old Brigham Young U, I found that you could read forbidden documents at the library. Well, they weren’t forbidden; you could give your student ID to someone in the Special Documents collection, and while they were sending your details to the Strengthing the Members Committee in Salt Lake, you could read the documents there.

I decided to check out the “Position Papers”, a set of documents generated by the Reorganised Church of JCoLDS when they were making their break from traditional Mormon theology in the 1960s. For some reason, I was interested in Chapter 11, about their reasons from shifting away from the Book of Mormon.

As we examine the Book of Mormon, shorn of any intention solely to amass data in support of preconceived notions about it, we must honestly admit that there arises an awareness of certain problems concerning traditional understandings of the Book. The problems include:
…
3. Its propensity for reflecting in detail the religious concerns of the American frontier. Alexander Campbell in 1832 pointed out that every major theological question of the frontier was covered in the Book of Mormon, including infant baptism, ordination and ministerial authority, the Trinity, regeneration, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, and even the burning questions of Freemasonry, republican government and the rights of man.

It certainly did seem to me as though the Book of Mormon did have a preoccupation with issues as they were in the 1800s. It seems that what they say in General Conference is true: the Book of Mormon is “written for our day” — but this is because it was written in our day.

Main ideas for this lesson

Unprofitable servants

King Benjamin is giving his great address to an improbably large crowd.

Mosiah 2:19 And behold also, if I, whom ye call your king, who has spent his days in your service, and yet has been in the service of God, do merit any thanks from you, O how you ought to thank your heavenly King!
2:20 I say unto you, my brethren, that if you should render all the thanks and praise which your whole soul has power to possess, to that God who has created you, and has kept and preserved you, and has caused that ye should rejoice, and has granted that ye should live in peace one with another —
2:21 I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another — I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.

I’m remembering back to my LDS days, and thinking about all the effort the church took. Three hours every Sunday is just a start. For many, there are extra meetings during the week, including ward and stake leadership meetings and Seminary. Then there’s temple attendance. Oh, and cleaning the buildings.

Not to mention going on a two-year mission, and giving 10% of your income for the whole of your life. There’s more, but it all works toward the same point: The LDS Church has a really high bar to be considered basically active.

But even after all of this, what this scripture tells us is that no matter what you do, you’re still unprofitable.

Ask: How does this make someone feel, if they’re trying to do their best in the church?

It’s such a glaring scripture, and I think it calls for some kind of explanation. What is it doing here? What kind of function does this idea serve?

You could argue that it’s designed to motivate people who aren’t doing all they can. But what about people who are knocking themselves out, and get so little in return?

I think it goes beyond the motivational. I see this as an out-clause. Here’s how:

Religion is a con. It makes phoney promises that fail. And when those promises fail, there has to be a way of getting the mark (the person being conned) from blaming the religion. How to divert their disappointment? By setting up impossible conditions for success.

“Oh, you’re not feeling fulfilled? Bad things happening anyway? Well, have you been you coming to church? You have?

“Have you been praying? Oh.

“How about reading the scriptures? Attending the temple? Having Family Home Evening…?

“How’s your home teaching? Aha… home teaching a little spotty? That was probably it. Bring those stats up, and I’ll bet you’ll be in line for some blessings pret…ty soon.”

It’s a fantastic way of explaining away failures — it’s not the church’s fault; it’s yours, you unprofitable servant, you.

And of course there’s the usual benefit: if the church asks for more, it gets more. And the investment fallacy means that members who have given their all will be less likely to question their belief — you must believe it, or you wouldn’t have given so much, right? And if you walk away, you’ll lose everything you’ve invested!

Mosiah 2:22 And behold, all that he requires of you is to keep his commandments; and he has promised you that if ye would keep his commandments ye should prosper in the land; and he never doth vary from that which he hath said; therefore, if ye do keep his commandments he doth bless you and prosper you.
2:23 And now, in the first place, he hath created you, and granted unto you your lives, for which ye are indebted unto him.
2:24 And secondly, he doth require that ye should do as he hath commanded you; for which if ye do, he doth immediately bless you; and therefore he hath paid you. And ye are still indebted unto him, and are, and will be, forever and ever; therefore, of what have ye to boast?

Again, the church doesn’t want just some of your time and attention. It claims the right to have it all. Forever and ever.

Mosiah 2:25 And now I ask, can ye say aught of yourselves? I answer you, Nay. Ye cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the earth; yet ye were created of the dust of the earth; but behold, it belongeth to him who created you.

No matter what you do, you’ll never be worthwhile under this system. You are less than the dust of the earth.

But of course, if you’re running a church, you can’t just heap this kind of abuse on people all the time. That’s why there’s a parallel narrative: I am a child of God. You’re a chosen people, a special generation held in reserve, etc. The church can pull out this story when it needs to, and this makes people feel bonded to the organisation. But if people feel too special, the church can remind them of the “dangers of pride” (which is only really dangerous to the church itself), and it can hit them with the “less than the dust of the earth” story. It can switch between these two stories whenever it needs to.

Seen this way, the church resembles nothing more than an abusive and narcissistic partner, for whom this hot-and-cold tactic is typical (see point 3 on that link). The abuser builds you up if you do what they tell you, but they also remind you that you’ll never be good enough.

Benjamin continues by talking about the “natural man”. Repeat it with me, if you remember it.

Mosiah 3:19 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

Ask:

What has the Lord inflicted upon you?
Why does Benjamin think it’s okay for the Lord to “inflict” things upon us?
Why is it important for us to feel helpless like a child in this situation?

Have a read of this commentary from the LDS Lesson Manual:

Elder Bruce R. McConkie said: “After the fall of Adam, man became carnal, sensual, and devilish by nature; he became fallen man. . . . All accountable persons on earth inherit this fallen state, this probationary state, this state in which worldly things seem desirable to the carnal nature. Being in this state, ‘the natural man is an enemy to God,’ until he conforms to the great plan of redemption and is born again to righteousness. (Mosiah 3:19.) Thus all mankind would remain lost and fallen forever were it not for the atonement of our Lord. (Alma 42:4–14.)” (Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. [1966], 267–68).
• How can we “[put] off the natural man”? (See Mosiah 3:19. Discuss answers as shown below.)
a. Yield to “the enticings of the Holy Spirit.” How does this help us “[put] off the natural man”? (See 2 Nephi 32:5; Mosiah 5:2; 3 Nephi 28:11.)

What Benjamin is telling us is that the way you are is wrong, and if you want to be saved, you have to act other than the way you are.

Now I agree that sometimes, I am a bag of slop. Like everyone, I can gravitate to a level that isn’t the best for me. I eat too many Doritos, I can be self-absorbed, and if I want to be my best self, I have to exert some energy and overcome some of my slouchy bad habits.

But there’s a difference between saying, “Sometimes I’m a bit lazy or uncaring, and I need to work on that,” and saying “The way that I am is essentially broken, and I need someone else to make me whole.” The first one points to, and enables, self-improvement. The second one instills a sense of permanent inferiority that offers the church as a solution. It is not a way to build self-reliant people. It’s a way to build broken people.

Why the Gospel is terrible

Now we’ve seen enough of the gospel’s program to understand why the gospel does not work. Just for a reminder, according to the church’s “plan of salvation”, we are here on earth in a kind of probationary state. Our ability to return to God depends on the choices we make here.

But this plan is stacked against us at every turn.

1. We have been created with an inbuilt tendency to sin.

As King Benjamin says, “the natural man is an enemy to God.” God inexplicably made us want to sin.

But God could have made it so that we wouldn’t want to do anything wrong. This wouldn’t have involved a curtailment of our agency. He had to make us some way or another, and it would have been just as simple to make us in a way that didn’t involve a preoccupation with things he doesn’t like. For example, I have never been curious about alcohol or drugs — not that I think those are wrong anymore, but trying those things out has never been a part of my nature. I still have agency; I’m just not interested in them.

It would have been possible for a super-smart God to think of a way to make humans that aren’t interested in sin, without curtailing their agency. Why didn’t he? Why did he make a decision to stack the deck against us?

2. We can’t trust our own moral compass.

Having given us a tendency to want to sin, God also created us with faulty moral intuition. Not only is the “natural man” an enemy to God, but he tells us that we can’t trust the answers we get from our own moral reasoning.

Isaiah 55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

Let’s think through this, because this one thing unhinges the entire contraption.

My ability to return to God relies on me making good choices. But God gave me a brain that provides faulty moral intuitions. If I can’t trust my own ideas of what’s right and wrong, then I have no way of knowing what “good choices” are.

You could say, “That’s the point. You’re not supposed to trust your own moral instincts. You’re supposed to obey God and ‘yield to the enticings of the Holy Spirit.'”

But if I can’t trust my own moral compass, then I can’t even be sure if that’s the right thing to do. If God gives us a faulty ethical lens and says “Go to it”, then the whole thing stops right there. How could I even tell the difference between good and bad choices if I can’t trust my own ethical filter? Unless I have a reliable moral compass, the whole task becomes impossible.

3. Satan

On top of all this, God allows a perfectly evil being to tempt us. If I knew of an evil being, I would keep them far away from my kids, but God’s like “Go for it,” which is another way that he’s a terrible parent. To help us, the Holy Spirit gives us signals that are indistinguishable from emotions, impressions, or dyspepsia. (That’s if we don’t offend him, in which case, he buggers off.)

Even prophets get it wrong in this process, so what chance do the rest of us have?

Ask: Could you convict even the worst criminal under this system?

4. Self-esteem sniping

And after all this — a sinful nature, a broken compass, and access to bad influences — our self-efficacy is constantly being undermined and belittled by the gospel itself. We’re reminded that we’re less than the dust of the earth, that we owe God everything, and that there’s nothing we can do to be considered worthy.

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone: the gospel is a terrible system. It’s a set up. God could have made it any way he wanted, but he chose to put us in a situation with impossible, contradictory, confusing, and demeaning expectations. This contemptible god belittles us, and expects us to praise him in return.

The appropriate response is the same as it should be for any abuser: we must cut him off entirely, and work within a loving and supportive community to build our own lasting self-respect. Our morality isn’t perfect, but we can work to improve it without the petty sniping of a demanding and jealous father figure.

Additional lesson ideas

Every pore?

Now here’s a linguistic curiosity. When Jesus (allegedly) prayed in Gesthemane,

Luke 22:44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

Was there really any blood? The wording is “as it were”, which usually signals a turn of phrase, not a fact.

But fast-forward a couple thousand years, and Mormons will tell you that Jesus bled “from every pore”. This wording appears in our reading.

Mosiah 3:7 And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and the abominations of his people.

I seem to remember many church talks where the speaker solemnly asserted that if you were in extreme agony, you might bleed from one pore, but Jesus bled from all of them.

I guess there’s a condition where people bleed from their pores, but I got curious as to whether this might be a linguistic artefact. What I mean is that the wording “he bled from every pore” seems to roll off the tongue very easily. Could it be that it was just a phrase that people were accustomed to saying, and Joseph Smith (or whoever) simply wrote the well-known idiom into his book, which Mormons then took as gospel?

If the phrase “bleed * every pore” were in common usage around Smith’s time, this would explain how it worked it way into the Book of Mormon, and why Mormons now think Jesus had a particularly gory night of it in a garden.

In fact, this is exactly what we see if we look up “bleed * every pore” in Google’s Ngram Viewer.

Follow the link at the bottom to ‘bleed at every pore’ from 1768 – 1832, and you’ll find lots of examples, some of which I’ve copied and pasted here. Note that these examples use the idiom ‘bleed at every pore’ even when no actual bleeding is going on, which confirms that this was an idiom that people were accustomed to using in various situations.

1821: And, when they sicken and die, the hearts of their parents bleed at every pore.

1796: still there are circumstances in his situation wHich cause the heart of humanity to bleed at every pore.

1820: Thus this unhappy nation, by a miserable and mistaken policy, is doomed to bleed at every pore

1812: whether we stand by them, or whether we forsake them, those gallant nations will still continue to bleed at every pore.

1815: without reviving the ferocious and appalling doctrine of constructive treason, which once made England bleed at every pore

And that’s how (I suspect) a common expression worked its way into Mormon doctrine. A metaphorical statement graduated into a literal belief.

This is something of a one-off in my experience. We already know that believers re-interpret literal statements as metaphorical ones when they’re deemed implausible. This is the only case I can think of where a belief went the other way.

EDIT: Redditor Elijah_Unabel made a point that was too good not to share: there simply isn’t enough blood in a human body to bleed from every pore.

Yesterday my young son asked me how many pores are in the human body. I wasn’t sure off-hand, but the most common answers on Google are 2 billion or 3 trillion (although 3 trillion pores seems pretty high given that there are 37.2 trillion cells in the entire body). I asked my son why he was interested, and he referred to Jesus bleeding from every pore. From that aspect, we might just include sweat glands, of which there are about 2 million. My son and I then ran the math and came up with the following.

We can assume there are about 90,000 drops are in a gallon (about 20 drops per ml). At the extreme of 3 trillion pores, this gives us over 33 million gallons of blood. That’s going to be a bit messy. If we go with 2 billion pores, we get about 22,000 gallons, still enough to fill a couple backyard swimming pools.

Finally, if we just count sweat glands, we get 22 gallons. Not nearly as impressive as the numbers above. However, the average person only has about 1.5 gallons of blood, so bleeding out 22 gallons is still a pretty impressive trick.

BoM Lesson 13 (Interminable Olive Allegory)

10 April 2016 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

The Allegory of the Olive Trees

Jacob 5–7

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show that religious discourse slanders Jewish people and unbelievers alike.

Reading

My relationship with olives is complicated.

The first time I tried olives, it was at a family gathering. All the other kids had stuck pitted olives on all of their fingers. It looked like fun, so I got two handfuls. Then I ate one of the olives. It did not agree with my young taste buds. So now I had olives on all my fingers (but one), and no desire to eat any of them. What to do? Flicking them at family members was, in retrospect, not a great idea, and brought swift remonstration. History does not record what happened to the olives.

I once lived at a place that had an olive tree. It was a fairly spindly affair, but it made olives with annual regularity. I didn’t know what to do with them. I heard that you could pick them and soak them in brine for a long time, and they would become edible. But if even one of the olives had a bad spot, you’d have a whole jar of bad olives. It seemed like an awful lot of work for something that, as I say, you wouldn’t want on your fingers. The boys used them for olive fights. Olives can sting.

Anyway, this one time I got home, and there was a rotund Italian lady up in the tree, picking olives. Wearing an apron, a house dress, the whole bit. I don’t know how she got up there because it really wasn’t a big tree, and it didn’t look like it could support her considerable bulk. She must have been really keen to get at those olives. Apparently she’d asked my housemate if she could harvest them, and my housemate said yes. The same house had a grape arbor, and the grapes were nice sometimes, but mostly the rats would eat them. So I had rats scrambling around in the arbor and old Italian women up in the olive trees. I didn’t know what to do about it all. I mean, the rats you could poison.

I always pick olives off of pizzas.

I was going somewhere with this. Oh, yeah.

I hate olives. Olives are bullshit.

And so is this reading. The centrepiece of this lesson is an allegory by a prophet named (as the LDS manual says) “Zenos, a Hebrew prophet mentioned several times in the Book of Mormon”.

Ask: If you had to make up some kind of name for a fictional prophet, and you weren’t very good at it, doesn’t “Zenos” totally sound like something you would make up? No wonder Joseph Smith eventually grabbed a map in exasperation, and starting pulling names from it. But more on this in another lesson.

Main ideas for this lesson

God grows, scatters Israel

So here’s the allegory. Israel is an olive tree.

Jacob 5:3 For behold, thus saith the Lord, I will liken thee, O house of Israel, like unto a tame olive-tree, which a man took and nourished in his vineyard; and it grew, and waxed old, and began to decay.

Can I just stop here and pose a question. This is about olives. But it keeps saying that this takes place in a vineyard.

I’m no viticulturalist, but I had the idea that a vineyard is where you grow grapes, not olives. Isn’t that right? I don’t want to make a big deal out of this if it’s nothing, but I would have said you grow olives in a grove.

“olive grove”: About 618,000 raw Google hits
“olive vineyard”: About 7,520 raw Google hits

I could be wrong, and this usage could have changed from Joseph Smith’s time, but this sounds like a slip-up you’d make if you’d never had anything to do with olives or grapes in your life.

Anyway, the master of the “vineyard” has a severely misbehaving olive tree (symbolic of Israel). By “misbehaving”, I don’t mean that it started growing grapes, although that would be understandable if you’re in a vineyard, FFS. No, this tree is rotting away, symbolic of Jewish people who didn’t install the upgrade to Judaism 2.0: Christianity.

Ask: If you have broken free of religion, would you describe your current state as “decay”?
Why do believers characterise unbelievers in terms of dwindling, perishing, or decaying?

Good thing Jacob didn’t say it wasn’t an orchard; his olive tree would start growing peaches or something.

I clearly need to get over this.

UPDATE: Thanks to redditor LecturesOnDoubt who posted an answer:

Great post although I will give the answer I always heard for the “orchard/vineyard” mix up. The Hebrew word for vineyard (kerem) is the same as the word for orchard. The word karmel means both as well. Hugh Nibley suggested this justifies Joseph’s mishap, which I agree is a clever point. Although I also think it’s just a coincidence. A good answer for one error out of thousands is not only possible, but very probable. Still doesn’t mean it’s true.

That is interesting, and I agree — a clever explanation. Then the problem is this: God is a bad translator who picks the wrong words.

<eyes the clock> I want to get into a discussion of loose v. tight translation, but I think I’m going to have to do that in a future lesson. Coming up soon!

Thanks, LecturesOnDoubt.

Jacob 5:4 And it came to pass that the master of the vineyard went forth, and he saw that his olive-tree began to decay; and he said: I will prune it, and dig about it, and nourish it, that perhaps it may shoot forth young and tender branches, and it perish not.
5:5 And it came to pass that he pruned it, and digged about it, and nourished it according to his word.
5:6 And it came to pass that after many days it began to put forth somewhat a little, young and tender branches; but behold, the main top thereof began to perish.
5:7 And it came to pass that the master of the vineyard saw it, and he said unto his servant: It grieveth me that I should lose this tree; wherefore, go and pluck the branches from a wild olive-tree, and bring them hither unto me; and we will pluck off those main branches which are beginning to wither away, and we will cast them into the fire that they may be burned.
5:8 And behold, saith the Lord of the vineyard, I take away many of these young and tender branches, and I will graft them whithersoever I will; and it mattereth not that if it so be that the root of this tree will perish, I may preserve the fruit thereof unto myself; wherefore, I will take these young and tender branches, and I will graft them whithersoever I will.

Summary: The man with the olive vineyard doesn’t like the fact that his olives don’t believe in him, so he plans to burn the bad branches, and bring in other branches instead. Much digging, dunging, and cumbering ensues.

Stage 1: The olive tree (Israel) is decaying, so the Vineyard Master scatters its branches everywhere (which as we know, is the best way to fix a sick tree). This is a metaphor for how the Jewish people were driven and scattered for centuries. The Master also grafts in wild olive branches (lets Gentiles join the church).

Stage 2: Results are mixed. The tree is doing well, but some of the remote branches are not.

Stage 3: Now every tree is doing terribly. The fruit is still corrupt, and God is going to burn the whole plantation down and give it up as a bad job.

Jacob 5:49 And it came to pass that the Lord of the vineyard said unto the servant: Let us go to and hew down the trees of the vineyard and cast them into the fire, that they shall not cumber the ground of my vineyard, for I have done all. What could I have done more for my vineyard?
5:50 But, behold, the servant said unto the Lord of the vineyard: Spare it a little longer.
5:51 And the Lord said: Yea, I will spare it a little longer, for it grieveth me that I should lose the trees of my vineyard.

According to the LDS lesson manual,

What do the many kinds of corrupt fruit symbolize? (Universal apostasy.)

Let’s make a note of that.

Stage 4: Finally, many verses later, the master of the vineyard manages to get some decent olives — like he had at the beginning of the story.

Jacob 5:75 And it came to pass that when the Lord of the vineyard saw that his fruit was good, and that his vineyard was no more corrupt, he called up his servants, and said unto them: Behold, for this last time have we nourished my vineyard; and thou beholdest that I have done according to my will; and I have preserved the natural fruit, that it is good, even like as it was in the beginning. And blessed art thou; for because ye have been diligent in laboring with me in my vineyard, and have kept my commandments, and have brought unto me again the natural fruit, that my vineyard is no more corrupted, and the bad is cast away, behold ye shall have joy with me because of the fruit of my vineyard.

Let’s say this allegory is all true, and this is God’s big chance to get his message out there, and establish his church for the salvation of all humankind. So he starts with a group of chosen people (who need to kill everyone else in their area), but he explains his plan to them so poorly that they completely fail to recognise Part Two of the plan when it comes along, in the form of Jesus.

Jesus, for his part, appears to a small group of humans, but pretty much allows them to write down whatever they want about him decades later, contradictions and all. He never says, “Mark, Luke, write this down, because I need you to get this absolutely right.”

Then, hundreds of years later, God allows his organisation to fall into ruin and apostasy. He restores it through a tiny idiosyncratic organisation headed by a pedophile with a criminal record. This organisation forms a tiny — and currently shrinking — percentage of the population.

What does it say about God that he has to go through all this rigamarole for so little good, and can’t seem to think of a way to overcome his own problems in a way that doesn’t involve the loss of generations of people?

Ask: What can we take from Zenos’s allegory?

If you are a Mormon, you must believe that the Jewish diaspora, including the persecutions endured by the Jewish people

are ordained by the Abrahamic god, and are therefore just
happened because the Jewish people didn’t believe in Jesus

which is especially unjust when the scriptural accounts for Jesus’ actions are ambiguous and contradictory, and the evidence for Jesus’ divinity is non-existent.

I want to thank redditor scrotumbrau for putting this so clearly:

As a parent, one of the most immoral acts I can think of is saving one child over another based on their obedience to me.

Threatens unbelievers

Jacob isn’t done. He continues his old-school threats against unbelievers.

Jacob 6:7 For behold, after ye have been nourished by the good word of God all the day long, will ye bring forth evil fruit, that ye must be hewn down and cast into the fire?

Jacob 6:10 And according to the power of justice, for justice cannot be denied, ye must go away into that lake of fire and brimstone, whose flames are unquenchable, and whose smoke ascendeth up forever and ever, which lake of fire and brimstone is endless torment.

Ask: Is it just for someone to be tormented/punished/isolated for eternity, for sins of finite duration?

My response to people like Jacob is: I don’t like being threatened.

And their answer is always the same: I’m not threatening you; I’m just telling you what my invisible friend is going to do to you if you don’t admit I’m right and worship him.

Sherem

One of the evidences that the Book of Mormon is a recent — not an ancient — document is its views on atheists.

You never see any atheist characters in the Bible. Back then, they were kind of hard to find. Yet in the Book of Mormon, we have three atheists/agnostics. It’s as though when the book was being written, people were starting to take a skeptical view of religious horse crap. And so whoever wrote the Book of Mormon felt the need to address this by staging confrontations with them. But the BoM doesn’t do this honestly. It turns its atheist characters into straw men — either stupid or dishonest — who don’t say the things that atheists say,and who are pretty much unlike actual atheists. And then it gets God to end the argument by doing violence to them, which is also something that never happens in real life.

We’re going to take a look at the debating tactics encouraged by the Book of Mormon.

Jacob 7:1 And now it came to pass after some years had passed away, there came a man among the people of Nephi, whose name was Sherem.

This seems odd. A guy just appears out of nowhere? This is only one generation removed from Nephi, but Jacob doesn’t mention where Sherem comes from, or who he’s related to. Wouldn’t everybody in the group still be known to everyone? Why doesn’t anyone say, “Hey, aren’t you Joseph’s kid?”

Apologists cover this by surmising that Lehi’s family quickly ran into other people on the American continent — Jaredite or otherwise — and joined up with them. But no Book-of-Mormon writer ever mentions the existence of other people. It would have been simple for Jacob to have written one verse, saying, “And it came to pass that we did discover an exceeding multitude of people, and we did unite ourselves unto them.” One verse! That’s all it would have taken. But this never happens.

Jacob 7:2 And it came to pass that he began to preach among the people, and to declare unto them that there should be no Christ. And he preached many things which were flattering unto the people; and this he did that he might overthrow the doctrine of Christ.
7:3 And he labored diligently that he might lead away the hearts of the people, insomuch that he did lead away many hearts; and he knowing that I, Jacob, had faith in Christ who should come, he sought much opportunity that he might come unto me.

Hey, that’s great — he’s engaging with someone who disagrees with him. That’s a good thing to do.

Jacob 7:4 And he was learned, that he had a perfect knowledge of the language of the people; wherefore, he could use much flattery, and much power of speech, according to the power of the devil.

Ask: In what way does the LDS Church flatter people, or appeal to their sense of importance?

Have you ever heard any of the following?

You have been held in reserve as a chosen generation
The creator of the universe knows your name
You are a child of God
You can become a god and have your own planet(s)
The work and the glory of God is to bring to pass your own personal immortality and eternal life
Your moral system was given to you by the creator of the universe

The entire “plan of salvation” is one gigantic ego stroke.

So much so, that they have to bring you down by telling you you’re less than the dust of the earth. But more on that later.

Jacob 7:5 And he had hope to shake me from the faith, notwithstanding the many revelations and the many things which I had seen concerning these things; for I truly had seen angels, and they had ministered unto me. And also, I had heard the voice of the Lord speaking unto me in very word, from time to time; wherefore, I could not be shaken.

Oh, good for him.

Isn’t it funny how angels only appear to people who already believe in them? You know, if angels were appearing to people — even disbelievers — routinely, it would shake up this whole atheist thing, and make it a lot less plausible. I’m just saying.

Jacob 7:6 And it came to pass that he came unto me, and on this wise did he speak unto me, saying: Brother Jacob, I have sought much opportunity that I might speak unto you; for I have heard and also know that thou goest about much, preaching that which ye call the gospel, or the doctrine of Christ.
7:7 And ye have led away much of this people that they pervert the right way of God, and keep not the law of Moses which is the right way; and convert the law of Moses into the worship of a being which ye say shall come many hundred years hence. And now behold, I, Sherem, declare unto you that this is blasphemy; for no man knoweth of such things; for he cannot tell of things to come. And after this manner did Sherem contend against me.

It’s hard to know what’s going to happen. As Niels Bohr said,

But I do know a good way to predict the future: use the scientific method. By observing what’s happened in the past, we can make testable hypotheses that do predict what’s going to happen in the future.

Jacob 7:8 But behold, the Lord God poured in his Spirit into my soul, insomuch that I did confound him in all his words.

Care to elaborate?

Jacob: “I totally put him in his place with all my great arguments. Yep. Shut him down, I can tell you.”

It’s like that scene in a movie where someone gives a great speech, but the script writers don’t actually write the speech; they just do a montage of the audience nodding thoughtfully.

If Jacob really burned Sherem with so many zingers, why didn’t he write them down? I would have! In fact, I already do that in Facebook posts, and then I read them all to my wife!

Come on, Jacob, you owe us something.

Jacob 7:9 And I said unto him: Deniest thou the Christ who shall come? And he said: If there should be a Christ, I would not deny him; but I know that there is no Christ, neither has been, nor ever will be.

This is an oversimplification; I think most atheists today wouldn’t say they could know that.

Jacob 7:10 And I said unto him: Believest thou the scriptures? And he said, Yea.
7:11 And I said unto him: Then ye do not understand them; for they truly testify of Christ. Behold, I say unto you that none of the prophets have written, nor prophesied, save they have spoken concerning this Christ.

This is revisionism. Certainly Christians have been good at plowing through the Old Testament looking for anything that might possibly apply to Jesus, but this could be done retroactively for Elvis (Presley or Costello, take your pick).

If you disagree, consider that a guy in Canada thinks that Morrissey foretold the death of Princess Diana, through song lyrics. He’s written pages and pages of analysis. I’m not kidding.

When you have a text in front of you, it’s easy to draw imaginary connections that match nothing but what’s in your head.

Jacob 7:12 And this is not all — it has been made manifest unto me, for I have heard and seen; and it also has been made manifest unto me by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, I know if there should be no atonement made all mankind must be lost.

And here, Jacob falls back on testimony. Sherem should believe it’s true because the Holy Ghost told Jacob. Sorry, Jacob, but your special feels are not publicly verifiable evidence. Bearing testimony is a tactic for shutting down the conversation. Can’t argue with that, as they say.

Jacob 7:13 And it came to pass that he said unto me: Show me a sign by this power of the Holy Ghost, in the which ye know so much.

Okay, so now Sherem has touched the third rail. He’s asked Jacob for evidence for his claims.

Apparently you are never supposed to do this, even though this is how we establish facts in literally every other area of epistemology.

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So then God puts the Big Hurt on Sherem. Seem like a bit of overkill, doesn’t it? Really, all that was needed was some kind of evidence, or a convincing explanation. Not to kill him, which after all is not really evidence of anything. People die all the time. Anyway.

Jacob 7:14 And I said unto him: What am I that I should tempt God to show unto thee a sign in the thing which thou knowest to be true? Yet thou wilt deny it, because thou art of the devil. Nevertheless, not my will be done; but if God shall smite thee, let that be a sign unto thee that he has power, both in heaven and in earth; and also, that Christ shall come. And thy will, O Lord, be done, and not mine.
7:15 And it came to pass that when I, Jacob, had spoken these words, the power of the Lord came upon him, insomuch that he fell to the earth. And it came to pass that he was nourished for the space of many days.
7:16 And it came to pass that he said unto the people: Gather together on the morrow, for I shall die; wherefore, I desire to speak unto the people before I shall die.
7:17 And it came to pass that on the morrow the multitude were gathered together; and he spake plainly unto them and denied the things which he had taught them, and confessed the Christ, and the power of the Holy Ghost, and the ministering of angels.
7:18 And he spake plainly unto them, that he had been deceived by the power of the devil. And he spake of hell, and of eternity, and of eternal punishment.
7:19 And he said: I fear lest I have committed the unpardonable sin, for I have lied unto God; for I denied the Christ, and said that I believed the scriptures; and they truly testify of him. And because I have thus lied unto God I greatly fear lest my case shall be awful; but I confess unto God.
7:20 And it came to pass that when he had said these words he could say no more, and he gave up the ghost.

Ever notice how all the really interesting things happened in the distant past? I deny the Christ all the time, and I’m still walking around like God’s imaginary or something.

Ask: What do we learn from the story of Sherem?

1. Believers should just bear their testimonies to critics, and pray for God to strike them down.

and

2. Doubters secretly do know it’s all true, but they’re being deceived by Satan.

Whoops, there’s a flag down on the play.

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Well, I’m going to be sad to see Sherem go, even though he was a bit of a Judaism apologist. It’s just that the Book of Mormon villains are the most fun. We’ll see the same pattern in our other two villains (Nehor and Korihor): the Book of Mormon writer can’t deal with the arguments of unbelievers honestly; he has to present outrageous caricatures of their views, and subject them to dismal ends.

Additional lesson ideas

Adieu

Jacob signs off with these words:

Jacob 7:27 And I, Jacob, saw that I must soon go down to my grave; wherefore, I said unto my son Enos: Take these plates. And I told him the things which my brother Nephi had commanded me, and he promised obedience unto the commands. And I make an end of my writing upon these plates, which writing has been small; and to the reader I bid farewell, hoping that many of my brethren may read my words. Brethren, adieu.

People have made much of the word adieu here, but is it really a big deal? Yes, the word is French, which didn’t exist in this time period — and all the other words are in English, which also didn’t exist in this time period.

Even though the French word adieu seems odd in this context, I’m putting this one down as “not a big deal”. Although it does mean God’s a bit of a crap translator, along with everything else he’s not great at.

BoM Lesson 4 (Nephi’s Vision)

24 January 2016 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

“The Things Which I Saw While I Was Carried Away in the Spirit”

1 Nephi 12–14

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage readers to question the morality of the material in the Book of Mormon.

Reading

In our last reading, Nephi saw his father’s vision of the Tree of Life. But would you believe it, Nephi one-ups his father by getting special bonus content! (It’s almost like Nephi was trying to make himself look good in this narrative.)

This director’s-cut version of Nephi’s vision contains prophecies of future events that, by sheer coincidence, had already happened by Joseph Smith’s time. And nothing that happened after. And that’s the big lesson of prophecy:

Prophecies fail
If they succeed, either they were’
- extremely vague, or
- written after the fact.

Not only that, but isn’t it curious that prophecies given by God — a being so trancendental that he’s outside of space and time — reflect in precise detail the kind of knowledge, opinions, and prejudices held by people of the time? We’ll see an example of this in this lesson.

Seed

The Book of Mormon is the story of people who (allegedly) came from the Middle East, started a civilisation, clashed in a series of wars — and left no physical traces.

They didn’t even leave any DNA — Native Americans are the descendents of Asians, and not Middle Easterners.

Mormon apologists surmise that the DNA of Lehi’s family was “swamped”.

But in Nephi’s vision, the angel tells him that his ‘seed’ — his physical progeny — will be numerous.

1 Nephi 12:1 And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Look, and behold thy seed, and also the seed of thy brethren. And I looked and beheld the land of promise; and I beheld multitudes of people, yea, even as it were in number as many as the sand of the sea.
12:2 And it came to pass that I beheld multitudes gathered together to battle, one against the other; and I beheld wars, and rumors of wars, and great slaughters with the sword among my people.
12:3 And it came to pass that I beheld many generations pass away, after the manner of wars and contentions in the land; and I beheld many cities, yea, even that I did not number them.

So why can’t we find anyone in the Americas with Middle Eastern DNA?

This is a huge issue in Mormonism, and I’m only going to touch lightly on it here. But we’re going to be delving into it more deeply in future lessons.

Dark and filthy vs. white and beautiful

Nephi sees that Laman and Lemuel’s progeny are dark, loathsome, and filthy…

1 Nephi 12:23 And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.

whereas white people are beautiful.

1 Nephi 13:15 And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles, and they did prosper and obtain the land for their inheritance; and I beheld that they were white, and exceedingly fair and beautiful, like unto my people before they were slain.

Brian Dalton — aka Mr Deity — rightly calls out Mormonism for this racist doctrine.

In recent years, the LDS Church has tried to tamp down this idea, but they’ll never be able to completely disavow the racism in its foundational document. The idea that dark skin could be a punishment for sin is at the heart of the Book of Mormon. The only way to purge racism from the church is for it to disavow the Book of Mormon completely. And that’s not going to happen.

Main ideas for this lesson

The Great and Abominable Church

Nephi sees something curious — the formation of the G&A.

1 Nephi 13:4 And it came to pass that I saw among the nations of the Gentiles the formation of a great church,
13:5 And the angel said unto me: Behold the formation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity.
13:6 And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it.

Its founder is the devil.

1 Nephi 14:9 And it came to pass that he said unto me: Look, and behold that great and abominable church, which is the mother of abominations, whose founder is the devil.
14:10 And he said unto me: Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations; and she is the whore of all the earth.

As a Mormon, I tried to make sense of what exactly the G&A was, but I was confused by the hopelessly contradictory descriptions. Was it a specific church? or just some kind of generalised ‘evil church’?

In the early days, Orson Pratt has it all figured out: It’s all of Protestantism and Catholicism.

“The Roman Catholic, Greek, and Protestant church is the great corrupt ecclesiastic power, represented by great Babylon which has made all nations drunk with her wickedness, and she must fall, after she has been warned with the sound of the everlasting gospel. Her overthrow will be by a series of the most terrible judgments which will quickly succeed each other, and sweep over the nations where she has her dominion, and at last she will be utterly burned by fire, for thus hath the Lord spoken. Great, and fearful, and most terrible judgments are decreed upon these corrupt powers, the nations of modern Christendom; for strong is the Lord God who shall execute His fierce wrath upon them, and He will not cease until He has made a full end, and until their names be blotted out from under heaven.”
– Apostle Orson Pratt, Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon, p.84 – p.85

But later, Bruce R. McConkie, the unofficial church doctrinarian gave his view: It’s the Catholic Church.

“It is also to the Book of Mormon to which we turn for the plainest description of the Catholic Church as the great and abominable church. Nephi saw this ‘church which is the most abominable above all other churches’ in vision. He ‘saw the devil that he was the foundation of it’ and also the murders, wealth, harlotry, persecutions, and evil desires that historically have been a part of this satanic organization. (1 Nephi 13:1-10)”
– Mormon Doctrine, p. 130 (1958)

and:

“Harlots. See Church of the Devil, Sex Immorality.
Literally a harlot is a prostitute; figuratively it is any apostate church. Nephi, speaking of harlots in the literal sense and while giving a prophetic description of the Catholic Church, recorded that he ‘saw the devil that he was the foundation of it.‘ … Then speaking of harlots in the figurative sense, he designated the Catholic Church as ‘the mother of harlots’ (1 Nephi 13:34; 14:15-17), a title which means that the protestant churches, the harlot daughters which broke off from the great and abominable church, would themselves be apostate churches.”
– Mormon Doctrine, pp. 314-315 (1958)

Fancy calling some other religion a whore.

McConkie had to walk that back, but when a young Steve Benson asked McConkie about it, he said his statement was right, but unpopular.

I asked McConkie why, in fact, his reference to the Roman Catholic Church as the “Church of the Devil” had been removed from the 2nd edition of his book, Mormon Doctrine.

McConkie insisted to me that it was excised not because it was not doctrinally sound but because it was too difficult for people to accept.

Which brings us up to the present definition of the Church of the Devil: It’s everything

Elder Bruce R. McConkie said, “The titles church of the devil and great and abominable church are used to identify all churches or organizations of what- ever name or nature—whether political, philosophical, educational, economic, social, fraternal, civic, or religious—which are designed to take men on a course that leads away from God and his laws and thus from salvation in the kingdom of God” (Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. [1966], 137–38).

It’s Protestantism, it’s Catholicism, it’s Communism, it’s secularism — everything that isn’t Mormon is the church of the devil. Which stretches the definition of church, wouldn’t you say? By including everything, Mormons make this scripture meaningless.

The colonization of the Americas

If the last part of this reading is disturbing, this part of the Book of Mormon should have alarm bells ringing for anyone with a social conscience.

1 Nephi 13:10 And it came to pass that I looked and beheld many waters; and they divided the Gentiles from the seed of my brethren.
13:11 And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Behold the wrath of God is upon the seed of thy brethren.
13:12 And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land.

The spirit of God wrought upon Columbus? Let’s see about the kind of people that the Holy Ghost liks to hang out with.

The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman checks in.

Native Americans have their view:

And here’s the history:

Columbus’ rule in Hispaniola was tyrannical and cruel. Unruly colonists were summarily executed and natives were either sold into slavery or worked to death. The death rate for natives under his rule was 80-90%, punishments including cutting off of hands, nose, tongue and ears. Dismembered bodies were regularly paraded about the colony to deter the rebellious. In 1500 he was sent back to Spain in chains for trial under allegations of genocide and cruelty. He was widely hated by both the natives and the natives, however today he is celebrated.

Columbus was a religious maniac and used to justify a litany of cruel and savage practices. He saw conversion to Christianity as the main purpose for his mission, yet freely denied natives baptism so as to sell them into slavery. Towards the end of his life he wrote the ‘Book of Prophecies’ in which he claimed his own role in the discovery of the new world had bee prophesied by the Bible. He also outlined some events that would occur, such as the whole world being converted to Christianity, the last Crusade to the Holy Land to finally defeat Muslim rule, that King Ferdinand of Spain would become the Last World Emperor. In the end, Columbus was a corrupted, disease-ridden and more than a little deluded.

Mormons think that the Holy Ghost is offended if you say “damn” and “hell”, but Columbus gets a pass.

And h still gets a pass from Mormons. Check out how the Ensign references this Book of Mormon scripture on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery.

What, then, do we know of the real Columbus? What were his motives in pursuing his world-changing enterprise? Perhaps the greatest motivating feature of his life was his faith. His writings and the records kept by his contemporaries indicate that Columbus had unshakable faith that he was an instrument in God’s hands.

And, indeed, the Book of Mormon affirms that he was.

The erstwhile prophet Gordon Hinckley refers to this scripture as well.

We interpret that to refer to Columbus. It is interesting to note that the Spirit of God wrought upon him. After reading that long biography, a Pulitzer winner of forty years ago, titled Admiral of the Ocean Sea—I have no doubt that Christopher Columbus was a man of faith, as well as a man of indomitable determination.

I recognize that in this anniversary year a host of critics have spoken out against him. I do not dispute that there were others who came to this Western Hemisphere before him. But it was he who in faith lighted a lamp to look for a new way to China and who in the process discovered America. His was an awesome undertaking—to sail west across the unknown seas farther than any before him of his generation. He it was who, in spite of the terror of the unknown and the complaints and near mutiny of his crew, sailed on with frequent prayers to the Almighty for guidance. In his reports to the sovereigns of Spain, Columbus repeatedly asserted that his voyage was for the glory of God and the spread of the Christian faith. Properly do we honor him for his unyielding strength in the face of uncertainty and danger.

Let’s face it: the LDS Church doesn’t hesitate to stand up for one of the worst and most cruel people that Europe has produced.

Revolutionary War

Nephi sees the American Revolutionary War.

1 Nephi 13:16 And it came to pass that I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles who had gone forth out of captivity did humble themselves before the Lord; and the power of the Lord was with them.
13:17 And I beheld that their mother Gentiles were gathered together upon the waters, and upon the land also, to battle against them.
13:18 And I beheld that the power of God was with them, and also that the wrath of God was upon all those that were gathered together against them to battle.
13:19 And I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles that had gone out of captivity were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations.

This seems as good a place as any to mention one of the probable sources of inspiration for whoever wrote the Book of Mormon: The Late War.

The Late War is a history of the USA, written in a high-flown scriptural style. (Sound familiar?) It contains — dare I say — a number of 4-grams (4 words in a row) that match the Book of Mormon (though see here for some criticism).

The interesting thing about the Late War is that telling stories in biblical style was a thing. Try reading some, and see if it doesn’t match the Book of Mormon for tone.

Again, notice that Nephi’s prophecy runs right up to Joseph Smith’s time, and stops. It seems prophets can only see the past.

Additional lesson ideas

Apostasy

True to the Faith, a currently used “correlated” booklet, summarizes the Great Apostasy this way:

“After the deaths of the Savior and His Apostles, men corrupted the principles of the gospel and made unauthorized changes in Church organization and priesthood ordinances. Because of this widespread wickedness, the Lord withdrew the authority of the priesthood from the earth. During the Great Apostasy, people were without divine direction from living prophets.

This would be a weird way for a god to do something. After working to build his church, god decided to give a big middle finger to humanity and sit around for a few centuries.

As one redditor put it,

Heavenly Father was apparently content to let generation after generation pass away without access to true knowledge regarding himself or the authority and rituals his alleged children require to return to him. Now he is super concerned with trying to get the word out?

Disbelief is not dwindling.

To finish out this lesson, I’d like to address a theme we’ve seen a few times already, even in the short readings we’ve done. I’d like to point out the word dwindle, and how believers use it to describe the unbelieving.

1 Nephi 4:13 Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.

1 Nephi 12:23 And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.

What’s all this about dwindling in unbelief?

I had an LDS friend ask me about this once. She knew I didn’t believe, and she was concerned. After all, if you’ve ben told over and over again that disbelief is a prerequisite to dwindling, you might be scoping out the unbelievers you know for signs of dwindling!

So she asked me hesitantly, “Are you okay? and happy in your life and your beliefs?”

I responded, “Yes. I’m fine.

“I’m living a good, happy, ethical life as an unbeliever.”

It’s true. I’m someone who has left the church, and is doing better than ever. I’m flourishing in unbelief. Sure, I know some people who haven’t done so well, and the church was barely enough to keep them (unhappily) in check. But there’s no reason why a reasonably smart person with an internalised moral code needs a cage.

My poor friend, who’d been conditioned by the church to worry about me. How unnecessary. What a burden for our Mormon friends.

I want to say that we should show our LDS friends how well we’re doing after Mormonism, but that isn’t quite right either. I don’t want to put on a display and become an ad for my ideology — that was for then. Some of us aren’t doing well. And some of us avoid saying so to our LDS friends and family because we don’t want to prove them right. Aha! — we told you you’d dwindle.

What’s the answer?

I think the best thing is to be how you are. If you’re flourishing in unbelief, then it could be instructive for members. And if you’re dwindling, don’t go to great lengths to not show it, and be sure to ask for help from understanding people when needed. All of us can dwindle from time to time, belief or no belief.

BoM Lesson 2 (Killing Laban)

10 January 2016 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

“All Things According to His Will”

1 Nephi 1–7

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage intellectual independence, and discourage the intellectual docility and immorality that results from a focus on obedience to “what God wants”

Reading

Here we go, into the Book of Mormon, starting with 1 Nephi 1.

This first part is the best part of the whole book. It’s a rollicking adventure tale that really moves. I think the reason that it works so well is that the author (let’s say it was Joseph Smith) had two goes at it. The first draft was probably burnt by Lucy Harris (Martin’s wife), and — mechanical reproduction not being an option in this age — Joseph had to write the whole thing again. The second draft is always better, isn’t it?

• Lehi has a vision that Jerusalem is to be destroyed and he has to leave.

1 Nephi 1:13 And he read, saying: Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations! Yea, and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem — that it should be destroyed, and the inhabitants thereof; many should perish by the sword, and many should be carried away captive into Babylon.

• He tries to warn the people, but they try to kill him, because Jews. Nice to see some consistency between the anti-Semitism of the New Testament and the anti-Semitism of the Book of Mormon.

1 Nephi 1:19 And it came to pass that the Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them; for he truly testified of their wickedness and their abominations; and he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of the Messiah, and also the redemption of the world.
1:20 And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yea, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out, and stoned, and slain; and they also sought his life, that they might take it away. But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.

• The family — Lehi and Sariah, Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, and an undetermined number of sisters, not worth mentioning — head into the wilderness.

1 Nephi 2:4 And it came to pass that he departed into the wilderness. And he left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents, and departed into the wilderness.
2:5 And he came down by the borders near the shore of the Red Sea; and he traveled in the wilderness in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea; and he did travel in the wilderness with his family, which consisted of my mother, Sariah, and my elder brothers, who were Laman, Lemuel, and Sam.

• Lehi sends Nephi and his rebellious brothers back to Jerusalem, to get some brass plates containing their scriptures and history.

1 Nephi 3:2 And it came to pass that he spake unto me, saying: Behold I have dreamed a dream, in the which the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brethren shall return to Jerusalem.
3:3 For behold, Laban hath the record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass.

• After making some long boring speeches to his brothers, Nephi kills Laban and steals the plates. Zoram, a servant, joins the party.

1 Nephi 4:18 Therefore I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.
4:38 And it came to pass that we took the plates of brass and the servant of Laban, and departed into the wilderness, and journeyed unto the tent of our father.

• Lehi tells Nephi to return to Jerusalem for a third time, and bring Ishmael, and his daughters for breeding. Whether the daughters had any say in the matter is unknown. Already it’s not looking great for women in this book.

1 Nephi 7:2 And it came to pass that the Lord commanded him that I, Nephi, and my brethren, should again return unto the land of Jerusalem, and bring down Ishmael and his family into the wilderness.

Main ideas for this lesson

Mormon role models

Nephi is probably the Book of Mormon’s greatest hero and spiritual role model.

And he’s a pain in the ass.

It’s hard to say this without sounding like Laman or Lemuel — which I suppose is the point of having these two characters in the story — but it’s true. Nephi goes on at length about his own righteousness, and responds to any opposition with sanctimonious hectoring and long religious speeches.

Ask: What unpleasant effects could Nephi-as-role-model have on Mormons?
Answers: Poor boundaries, calls to repentance, lack of respect for other people’s life choices, insufferability

To see this story from another angle, try reading the Book of Lemuel.

DEAR DIARY,
It looks like dad is serious about this leaving thing. He says that he had “a dream in which God told him to leave Jerusalem. I guess it couldn’t have had anything to do with the mostaccioli he ate before he went to bed. I always have dreams like that if I eat pizza before I sleep.

Laman and I are resisting, but it looks like we’re going too. We don’t really have to, I guess, but if we don’t, how will we eat? Despair. I have a girlfriend and my own horse. Dad is loaded with gold, which we can’t take into the wilderness because it’s too heavy. of course, that momma’s boy Nephi is eager to go. He makes me sick I think I’ll hurl my lunch if I see him again today.
LEM.

Nephi kills Laban

I want to focus on the most morally problematic action in this reading: the killing of Laban. That’s because I find it especially revealing of a lot of things I find troubling about the intellectual and moral climate of Mormonism, and theism in general.

As a young missionary, I handed out a lot of copies of the Book of Mormon. Sometimes investigators would actually read the damn thing. And sometimes the conversion process would come to screeching halt when they got to the part where Nephi kills Laban and takes the brass plates.

I’m embarrassed about this now, but at the time I never understood the objection! If God commands something, then you do it, right?

This is what I grew up with. My bishop used to say, “If the Prophet told me to go up to the top of a mountain, stand on my head and peel grapes with my toes, I would do it.” And he was supposed to be some kind of spiritual role model.

Like this guy.

And that’s part of the problem. When “doing what God says” is the most important thing, we have to ask, “How do we know what God says”?

There are two answers. One is “Leaders will tell you”.

But when LDS leaders tell members to obey God, and that they speak for God, they’re really just telling people to obey them.

This sets up a system ripe for abuse and exploitation.

The other answer is even more problematic. According to LDS theology, revelations from God can come in the form of “promptings” — thoughts or impressions.

Ask: How does Nephi know that God wants him to cut off Laban’s head?
Answer: He hears a voice in his head.

1 Nephi 4:10 And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.
4:11 And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our property.
4:12 And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands;

So with this lesson, the LDS Church is essentially teaching millions of people that if you have an spiritual impression to do something (like cut off someone’s head), and you feel okay about this, and it seems like there are some good reasons for doing so, you should go ahead and behead.

(Or not. Church leaders sometimes give contradictory advice about this.)

The whole idea that “doing God’s will” comes first seems calculated to engender a kind of intellectual docility, at best.

At worst, it can give believers a motivation to do any atrocity with divine sanction.

The really frightening thing is that Mormons are being taught this kind of fake morality, and then are released into the public, among the rest of us! Why aren’t there more problems?

Oh, wait.

Let me reshare Greta Christina’s great post on why religious faith is such a problem.

Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.

It therefore has no reality check.

And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.
…
There’s no reality check saying that their actions are having a terrible effect in the world around them. The world around them is, quite literally, irrelevant. The next world is what matters. And since there’s no way to conclusively demonstrate what will and won’t get you a good place in that world, or whether that world even exists… the sky’s the limit. There’s no way to test the assertion that God wants women to wear burqas and have clitoridectomies… or that God wants us to ban same-sex marriage and teach children dangerous lies about sex. The reality check is absent. The brake lines of morality have been cut.

In light of all this, take another look at the title of this lesson: “All Things According to His Will”.

It has sinister overtones, doesn’t it?

Plot holes

1. Wasn’t there some other way that this could have been accomplished?

2. After the murder, Nephi puts on Laban’s clothes. How much blood would there be in a routine beheading? I imagine Nephi appearing to his brothers in Laban’s gory clothes.

1 Nephi 4:28 And it came to pass that when Laman saw me he was exceedingly frightened, and also Lemuel and Sam. And they fled from before my presence; for they supposed it was Laban, and that he had slain me and had sought to take away their lives also.

Yeah, I’ll bet they fled. “Look, it’s our psychotic delusional brother! What the fuck has he done now?”

3. (And this is the big one.)

Why did Nephi need the plates at all? Couldn’t the Lord just reveal the information again?

This argument becomes hard to refute in the light of the Church’s release of this photo of a rock that Joseph Smith used to translate the book of Mormon.

One of the implications was that the plates — that were so important to preserve — weren’t actually used in the translation process, and needn’t have been recovered at all.

Naturally, Nephi was pretty ticked about this.

Zedekiah is an anachronism

I’m not a historian, but others have pointed out that the Book of Mormon events wouldn’t have happened as written. The king that Nephi says was a king wouldn’t have been king.

As per 1 Nephi 1:4 which states:

For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.

Zedekiah was set up as ruler over Judah by Nebuchadnezzar II after Babylonian capture. Jeconiah should have been the king of Judah in the Book of Mormon.

Whoops. Guess that’s what happens when you’re fictional.

NT Lesson 24 (The Holy Ghost)

27 June 2015 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

“This Is Life Eternal”

John 16–17

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To help readers avoid emotional reasoning.

Reading

In the reading for this lesson, Jesus talks about the Holy Ghost. Since speaking against the Holy Ghost is inexplicably the worst, most unpardonable sin you can commit, I’ll be doing lots of it in this lesson.

Main ideas for this lesson

Some people say that religion fills a need, and I suppose that’s true in a rather sad way: it tries to give people things that life doesn’t. One Christian evangelist revealed one of his angles to me: when he meets people without a strong father figure in their life, he pushes the angle of “God is your father”. Voilá; insta-dad.

Ask: Is that comforting, or just manipulative and awful?

In the same way, people who don’t have a lot of friends might be drawn to the idea of having a “constant companion”, which is how Mormons often describe the Holy Ghost.

Here’s a swag of times where the phrase constant companion has turned up in General Conference. The phrase has been coming up more and more lately. (Try your own searches here.)

And in John, Jesus calls the Holy Ghost “the comforter”. But he mentions another function:

John 14:26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

The Holy Ghost will teach you all things? Like as in: all things?

John 16:13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.

Note that there are no caveats as to the kind of truth one can learn from the Holy Ghost. It’s not just spiritual things you can learn by the Spirit; it’s all truth and all things.

We can submit this claim to some skeptical analysis.

Object lesson for class
Here’s a test you can use for comparing the efficacy of the Spirit as a revealer of truth: Have two class members work out the digits of π to some level of precision. One class member gets to use science and technology — math books, web sites, and an ordinary computer — and the other has to use the Spirit. How accurate was each method? I predict the second class member will be right no more than random chance. And it’s no use trying to fudge it and say that the digits of π “aren’t important to your salvation”. Jesus makes no such qualifications in the scripture.

(If this test is not suitable for your class, feel free to substitute any other sort of fact that can be easily verified, and for which answers can be unambiguously right or wrong. Another suggestion is blood type. How accurately can a very spiritual person tell the blood type of various individuals, using revelation? Be sure to have several testing kits on hand.)

There really are no “other ways of knowing”. Science is the only way of knowing. Observing carefully, making predictions, testing them, observing some more — this is the only way we have of knowing something, and even then it’s darn hard. Everything we think is at least a little bit wrong. How could anyone think that communicating with a spirit can do better than science? If it’s hard to get it right with all that careful work, what chance does anyone have mumbling to a ghost?

If you think you know “another way of knowing”, please tell me, because science is hard.

Not only is the Holy Ghost not great at the “revealing truth” part of his job, he’s also terrible at offering companionship. Ask someone their definition of a true friend, and you’re likely to hear that it’s someone who sticks with you through thick and thin, through good times and bad.

Well, the Holy Ghost isn’t that kind of companion. Apparently the Holy Ghost takes off the second you have a lapse in behaviour, or even temperament.

This is not really a dependable companion. Which is why I say: Piss off, little ghost. I have human friends that are more dependable, and a whole lot better at teaching me things.

How to feel the Holy Ghost

Here’s what the LDS manual says about how to feel the Holy Ghost:

To help class members feel and recognize the influence of the Holy Ghost, speak with a few of them in advance, inviting each of them to choose one of the following presentations to do as part of the lesson:

a. Read a favorite scripture passage.
b. Bear testimony.
c. Sing a hymn or Primary song about the Savior.
d. Express love for Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.
e. Share a spiritual experience (as appropriate).

In class, invite class members to describe how they felt during the presentations. Read the statement by President Boyd K. Packer on pages 99–100, and help class members recognize feelings that come from the Holy Ghost. Talk about how you feel when you receive guidance from the Holy Ghost.

What a show: the Gospel Doctrine teacher is supposed to get people to do soppy vulnerable things in front of everyone, and then hope that a collective soppy vulnerable mood ensues. What’s amazing is that it works so often.

After all the things I’ve done in church and all the experiences I’ve had, people still invite me to church hoping that I’ll have some kind of creepy, weepy “spiritual experience”. If I did feel something, that wouldn’t prove the veracity of the church. It would prove that I was capable of emotional reasoning. It would also show that my body can produce oxytocin and other chemicals, which is nice, but hardly evidence for supernatural claims.

Again, from the LDS manual.

President Boyd K. Packer taught: “The Holy Ghost speaks with a voice that you feel more than you hear. It is described as a ‘still small voice.’ And while we speak of ‘listening’ to the whisperings of the Spirit, most often one describes a spiritual prompting by saying, ‘I had a feeling . . .’ . . . Revelation comes as words we feel more than hear” (in Conference Report, Oct. 1994, 77; or Ensign, Nov. 1994, 60).

Emotional reasoning is a bad way of reasoning, but in the LDS Church, ideas verified only by emotion are considered to be the highest form of evidence that there is.

Show the class this video featuring LDS apostle Jeffrey Holland.

“Noting that the sun was going down, we decided that we’d better get back. But we came back to a particular fork in the road, really the only one that at that point was absolutely unrecognizable. I asked my son to pray about which road to take, and he felt strongly that we should go to the right, and I did as well. And we went to the right, and it was a dead end. We went four or five or six hundred yards and it was an absolute dead end, clearly the wrong road.

“Turned around, came back out, took the other road. And clearly the road to the left was the correct road.

“Somewhere along the way, Matt said, ‘Dad, why did we feel, after praying about it, that the right road was the proper one to take, the correct one to take, and it wasn’t?’”

Ask: When the Holy Ghost failed to lead him and his son in the right direction, despite them being sure that they had a confirmation, what should Holland have done if he’d had any intellectual honesty?
Answer: He should have admitted that this method failed in this instance.

Holland continues:

And I said, ‘I think that the Lord, His wish for us there and His answer to our prayer was to get us on the right road as quickly as possible with some reassurance, with some understanding that we were on the right road and we didn’t have to worry about it. And in this case, the easiest way to do that was to let us go 400 yards or 500 yards on the wrong road and very quickly know without a doubt that it was the wrong road and, therefore, with equal certainty, with equal conviction that the other one was the right road.’

Ask: What did Holland do instead to rationalise this failure?
Answer: Claim that the failure was a success! The Lord led them the wrong way to a dead end, so they could be more certain that the right way was indeed right.

This story with its explanation is, quite frankly, astounding. Before Holland gave this talk, if you had a spiritual revelation, you could be pretty sure that what you were told to do was the right thing. Now, post-Holland, you have no idea. Now, a spiritual prompting could be taking you the wrong way, and you won’t know it until you hit a dead end. Is a spiritual prompting to, say, join the Mormon Church leading you to a dead end, and the Lord is helping you be more certain of the right way when you eventually leave?

If you get a hit, your faith is confirmed. if you get a miss, your faith is confirmed more. This is the definition of blind faith. Someone on r/exmormon (can’t find at the moment) said it well: An eye that responds the same to light and darkness is a blind eye. A faith that responds the same way to both confirmation and disconfirmation is blind faith. It is a terrible method. It is just asking to be fooled. We need to make life decisions using good methods and good information.

In the world but not of the world

It’s very common to hear this little aphorism in church, and it’s based more or less on this scripture.

John 17:14 I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

From the LDS manual:

How can we, like Jesus and his Apostles, live in the world and be “not of the world”? (John 17:14; see also verses 15–16).
Elder M. Russell Ballard said:

“In the Church, we often state the couplet, ‘Be in the world but not of the world.’ As we observe television shows that make profanity, violence, and infidelity commonplace and even glamorous, we often wish we could lock out the world in some way and isolate our families from it all. . . .”

With so much violence in the world, isn’t it kind of sweet and touching that he’s concerned about fictional representations of violence? Anyway.

Ask: What function could this idea serve?

This idea works to create a “scary external world” narrative that will ensure that members get their information, their values, and their positive feels only from church. Not only does this foster a “bunker mentality” that keeps members worried about “the world” and therefore likely to remain in the church orbit, it makes it very difficult for Latter-day Saints to appreciate or even recognise the morality of people in the broader community. And this is important for keeping the brand afloat. If people in “the world” are not uniformly lost and wounded, but have morals similar to — and in some cases, superior to — the rather narrow tribalistic morality taught in the LDS Church, this challenges the idea that Mormon morality is superior and divine.

Additional lesson ideas

I’m Jesus: AMFA

Again, Jesus says that whatever you ask for he’ll give you.

John 16:23 And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you.

It has occurred to me that perhaps this referred to the disciples only. In that case, it seems kind of strange that they didn’t ask Jesus for some very sensible things, like not being crucified upside-down or not being shot through with arrows. But then the disciples were not the sharpest people ever.

NT Lesson 10 (The Yoke)

15 March 2015 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

“Take My Yoke upon You, and Learn of Me”

Matthew 11:28–30; 12:1–13; Luke 7:36–50; 13:10–17

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To instill readers with a sense of gratitude that they no longer have to engage in time-wasting and self-destructive shenanigans, such as those offered by the church.

Reading

In this lesson, Jesus is still in the Galilean phase of his ministry. He’s cruising around, doing miracles, and picking fights with rival religionists. He seems to have outgrown his discipleship with John the Baptist, realising that he’s quite popular in his own right. And when John gets thrown into prison, Jesus realises it’s time for him to step up and take over John’s racket.

John’s not too sure about this. From prison, he sends two of his disciples to Jesus to check him out.

Matthew 11:2 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples,
11:3 And said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?

It’s a bit odd that John seems uncertain about Jesus. He was supposedly present for the baptism and the dove and the voice from heaven, so you think he’d have made his mind up somehow… oops, unless those things were later insertions like so much of the New Testament.

Not much else to say about John, except that Jesus says some nice things about him.

Matthew 11:11 Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

You think Jesus / Jehovah mellowed out and got nice after getting a body? Nope. Here, Jesus condemns several cities, Old-Testament style, because they didn’t believe in him enough:

Matthew 11:20 Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not:
11:21 Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.
11:22 But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you.
11:23 And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.
11:24 But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.

Main ideas for this lesson

The Sabbath

Then there’s some pointless wrangling about the Sabbath.

I would indeed be ungrateful if I did not take of a moment and say that not obeying the Sabbath is teh best. It’s fantastic not taking up your time with tedious meetings or sitting in Sunday School. You get an entire extra day! It’s like doubling your weekend.

And somehow, even though the consequences of Sabbath-breaking are supposed to be so dire, they ultimately fail to eventuate.

And what was I doing last Sunday? I’m glad you asked. I was helping to break the world record for biggest skinny dip! Nearly 800 people here in Perth smashed the record, and I talked about it on the radio.

Listen on RTRFM

Going to the beach, meeting up with great people, and going swimming in the buff was so much better than going to church. It was infinity times better. There’s no comparison. Being an ex-Mormon opens up a new world of possibilities.

The yoke of Mormonism

Jesus, by contrast, invites us to put on one of these things.

Matthew 11:29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
11:30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Looks fun, doesn’t it? Usually, yokes are for beasts of burden, but Jesus says you can wear one, too. It looks entirely necessary, and not like something intended to suck the enjoyment out of your life. And Jesus even says how easy it is, so how does that not sound great.

Object lesson for class: Bring a yoke to class. Ask for a pair of volunteers to stick their necks in it.

Ask: If someone suggested that you wear a farm implement like this so you could do his work for him, what would you say? (Invite responses.)

I know, I know: members will say, “The world claims to offer us fun that is ultimately unfulfilling. Taking on the yoke of Christ may seem like a bad deal, but discipleship is much better.”

Having done both, I can tell you it’s just the opposite. The church wants to absorb your life in a series of time-wasting activities that serve only to advance its own aims at your expense. Being able to direct your own life without superstition is not the same as amoral hedonism. Many people, once they take the yoke off their backs, learn to make better decisions with better information, and as a result live better and more fulfilling lives. (And a few people are total disasters. But frightening people into obedience does not give you a better person.)

Ask: What kinds of responsibilities do church members routinely accept?
Possible answers: Church meetings, leadership positions, missions, callings, home and visiting teaching, temple attendance, zzzzzzz…

And now there’s cleaning the church buildings. After I left the church, I was astounded to hear that they’d laid off their professional janitors and custodians, and were inducing members to clean the buildings! This accomplishes three goals simultaneously:

establishes dominance over members,
cashes in on free labour, and
gets ward meetinghouses to smell faintly of wee.

Watch this inspiring video about how great it is to clean the toilets of a church that you’re already paying 10% toward.

It certainly does put a new spin on an old slogan:

Ask: What could possibly make someone accept such a wide and unnecessary set of burdens and constraints?
One possible answer is the investment fallacy, as discussed in this lesson. People born in the church become used to spending a great deal of time supporting it — see these commitment cards aimed at kids, as one rank example — and converts are treated to an ever-escalating set of commitments. When someone spends a great deal of time on a system, it becomes harder and harder to unplug from it, since doing so would be an admission that they’re wasted their time, and no one likes to admit that they’ve wasted their time.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett gave a TED talk called “Dangerous Memes” that explains this.

Watch the video describing a bizarre behaviour that ants engage in when their brains are infected by a virus.

Partial transcript:

So you’re out in the woods, or you’re out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass. It climbs up to the top, and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs — trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass. What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of? What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass? What’s in it for the ant? And the answer is: nothing. There’s nothing in it for the ant. Well then, why is it doing this? Is it just a fluke? Yeah, it’s just a fluke. It’s a lancet fluke. It’s a little brain worm. It’s a parasitic brain worm that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. Salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle. So there’s nothing in it for the ant. The ant’s brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior. Pretty scary.
Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course. Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means “surrender,” or “submission of self-interest to the will of Allah.” Well, it’s ideas — not worms — that hijack our brains.
…
Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.

Ask: Why do these ants work so hard in a behaviour that is of no benefit to them, but of immense benefit to the brain virus that has infected them?

Ask: If one such ant could talk, and you asked it why it was climbing that blade of grass, what explanation do you think it might offer for its behaviour?
Possible answer: It might say that it was doing so of its own free will.

Ask: What behaviours do you see Latter-day Saints engaging in that serve to benefit the church, and not themselves?
Possible answers: Missionary work, apologetics, offering their time, talents, and all that they have to the “building up of Zion”.

In addition to these burdens, the church offers some artificial ones. We yoke ourselves with artificial guilt, even when we do normal things or have normal desires.

A lot of the friction between my parents and me was caused by me not doing or saying or thinking the things they thought I should, in order to be a good Latter-day Saint. My enjoyment of popular music worried them horribly, and it shouldn’t have. They worried about what I read, who I knew, what I watched. The church caused a lot of unnecessary conflict in our relationship.

For me now, I can help my sons by appealing to rational reasons to avoid real trouble (drugs, crime, and so on), while realising that there are many ways to live, and I don’t have all the answers. Rather than imagining that they’ll do well if they follow in my footsteps, I can encourage them to grow in ways I didn’t predict — to find things out about our world and our society, and then come back and tell me about them.

And then there’s a post-deconversion aspect: The artificial concept of the afterlife means that our family members are concerned for our “eternal souls”. I have to tell you: I ain’t got one. None of us do. I’m sure that my dear sister is overly anxious for me to return to the church so I don’t suffer an eternity of isolation, inflicted on me by a cruel and sadistic god. Sadly, she’s spending time in her limited life fretting about my non-existent soul, as we both hurry to the grave. This is unnecessary suffering caused directly by her religious beliefs.

As a missionary, one of the toughest audiences I had was a trio of LDS girls who were sisters. We were giving the family a member presentation about the blessings of church involvement, and it was clear that these girls were fucking done. They’d had a lifetime of it, and they tried to explain that the “blessings” were few and the constraints were many. As a fellow lifelong constrainee, I tried to drum up some enthusiasm, but they weren’t having it. Their answers were monosyllabic and flat.

I wonder what happened to those girls. I hope they managed to escape and be happy, instead of spending a lifetime in the empty church, waiting for a better life to begin. We all have the opportunity to throw off the yoke, and begin a new secular life without gods. Our individual circumstances differ. Some of us feel the need to go along with the church to make peace in our personal relationships, but this freedom is still possible, if not in our behaviour, in our minds.

Additional teaching ideas

Sin against the Holy Ghost

What are the worst sins in the world? In the Book of Mormon, having sex is called the sin next to murder, so sex and murder are likely up the top of the list.

But Jesus teaches that even worse than murder (for which, after all, there may be forgiveness under certain circumstances) is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

Matthew 12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.
12:32 And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

Here’s the entry for “unpardonable sin” in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism:

The gravest of all sins is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. One may speak even against Jesus Christ in ignorance and, upon repentance, be forgiven, but knowingly to sin against the Holy Ghost by denying its influence after having received it is unpardonable (Matt. 12:31-32; Jacob 7:19; Alma 39:6), and the consequences are inescapable. Such denial dooms the perpetrator to the hell of the second spiritual death (TPJS, p. 361). This extreme judgment comes because the person sins knowingly against the light, thereby severing himself from the redeeming grace of Christ. He is numbered with the sons of perdition (D&C 76:43).

It may seem strange — to a normal person — that a crime of unbelief would be more serious than murdering someone, but in a religious context, this makes perfect sense. Unbelief is what kills gods, and so it’s natural for a robust and healthy god-meme to develop an immune system to protect itself. Otherwise, deicide is on the menu.

What’s even stranger is that, as dangerous as this sin would appear to be, there’s very little specificity on just what constitutes the commission of it. I recall a belief in the church that it was well-nigh impossible to commit for a garden-variety member. Aside from that, opinions seem to vary widely on what you have to say or do to merit Outer Darkness. What do you have to do? Trash-talk the Spirit? Kill an innocent person? Find Jesus and crucify him again? It’s not clear. And — what can I say — this resembles what happens when a despotic system levies severe punishments for crimes, but doesn’t make public what the crimes are.

So let me take the opportunity to do the worst thing EVAR. Most of my LDS sources say that you have to know the HG before you can deny it. Well, I’ve felt what I once thought to be the influence of Holy the Ghost, but which I now think was a psychological effect that is easily reproducible across world religions. So let me say this:

I deny the Holy Ghost.

I deny that I was ever under the influence of any such ghost, as ghosts are non-existent figments of human imagination and wonky pattern recognition. Any such influence can be more easily explained as a desire to believe, and as social pressure to uphold the norms and beliefs of a group.

I say essentially the same thing in a recent promo for my language podcast. Listen:

Your browser does not support this audio

Also, I approve of this cartoon showing a Godhead threesome. Suck it, ghost.

Some Mormons might say that in writing and saying the above, I haven’t actually denied the Holy Ghost or committed the Great Unpardonable. Perhaps they’d say I don’t have the requisite knowledge, or the Unpardonable Sin requires me to murder someone, or crucify Jesus again, or some such nonsense. My response would be that I’ve denied the Holy Ghost as much as I can, and if anyone has any ideas for how I can deny the Holy Ghost more completely, please send them in and I can do them, perhaps in a YouTube video.

But not if they involve killing anyone. I don’t want to kill anyone because I’m actually a good person, and it’s the rules of Christianity and Mormonism that are twisted.

Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Category: Holy the Ghost

BoM Lesson 15 (King Benjamin 1)

“Eternally Indebted to Your Heavenly Father”

Mosiah 1–3

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Unprofitable servants

Why the Gospel is terrible

1. We have been created with an inbuilt tendency to sin.

2. We can’t trust our own moral compass.

3. Satan

4. Self-esteem sniping

Additional lesson ideas

Every pore?

BoM Lesson 13 (Interminable Olive Allegory)

The Allegory of the Olive Trees

Jacob 5–7

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

God grows, scatters Israel

Threatens unbelievers

Sherem

Additional lesson ideas

Adieu

BoM Lesson 4 (Nephi’s Vision)

“The Things Which I Saw While I Was Carried Away in the Spirit”

1 Nephi 12–14

Purpose

Reading

Seed

Dark and filthy vs. white and beautiful

Main ideas for this lesson

The Great and Abominable Church

The colonization of the Americas

Revolutionary War

Additional lesson ideas

Apostasy

Disbelief is not dwindling.

BoM Lesson 2 (Killing Laban)

“All Things According to His Will”

1 Nephi 1–7

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Mormon role models

Nephi kills Laban

Plot holes

Zedekiah is an anachronism

NT Lesson 24 (The Holy Ghost)

“This Is Life Eternal”

John 16–17

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Holy the Ghost

How to feel the Holy Ghost

In the world but not of the world

Additional lesson ideas

I’m Jesus: AMFA

NT Lesson 10 (The Yoke)

“Take My Yoke upon You, and Learn of Me”

Matthew 11:28–30; 12:1–13; Luke 7:36–50; 13:10–17

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

The Sabbath

The yoke of Mormonism

Additional teaching ideas

Sin against the Holy Ghost

I deny the Holy Ghost.

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