Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Category: prophets (page 2 of 2)

OT Lesson 41 (Jeremiah 1)

“I Have Made Thee This Day… an Iron Pillar”

Jeremiah 1–2; 15; 20; 26; 36–38

LDS manual: here

Reading

Thank goodness we’re done with Isaiah. But no sooner do we get done with him then — oh, no — it’s Jeremiah. Jeremiah is just like Isaiah, except more depressing. This could be because, whereas Isaiah got to walk around naked a lot — some people find naturist culture very relaxing — Jeremiah spent a lot more time in dungeons. And little wonder: he scolds and harangues people, and then wonders why they can’t stand him. Jeremiah spent so much time haranguing people that he inspired a word for a long and tedious harangue against people: it’s a jeremiad.

And predictably, Jeremiah’s screed is full of blood and fire. There’s one thing we can say about the god of the Bible: he’s consistent. He tells people about the atrocious acts of murder he’s going to wage against them. For instance:

Jeremiah says that God is tired of holding back his fury, and wants to kill everyone.

6:11 Therefore I am full of the fury of the LORD; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.
6:12 And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields and wives together: for I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land, saith the LORD.

Their dead bodies will be eaten by birds and beasts.

7:33 And the carcases of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall fray them away.

God will punish them by killing their sons and daughters.

11:22 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, I will punish them: the young men shall die by the sword; their sons and their daughters shall die by famine:

And God will lift their skirts, non-consensually.

13:26 Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face, that thy shame may appear.

But why is God going to kill everyone? Because their fathers didn’t believe in him enough.

16:10 And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?
16:11 Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law;

Walked after other gods? Could you put this into a sexual metaphor for me?

3:1 They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? shall not that land be greatly polluted? but thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith the LORD.
3:2 Lift up thine eyes unto the high places, and see where thou hast not been lien with. In the ways hast thou sat for them, as the Arabian in the wilderness; and thou hast polluted the land with thy whoredoms and with thy wickedness.
3:3 Therefore the showers have been withholden, and there hath been no latter rain; and thou hadst a whore’s forehead, thou refusedst to be ashamed.

Keep going, but now incorporate primitive sex toys.

3:9 And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with stocks (trees).

I actually enjoy this imagery:

5:7 How shall I pardon thee for this? thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses.
5:8 They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.

But remember: God is warning people about all the evil he’s going to do, so that maybe he won’t have to do all the evil to them. So that’s good.

36:3 It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin.

But “Obey me, or I will have you killed” is not much of a choice, is it? Many times in church, I would hear speakers or teachers say something like the following: “God gives us commandments, and invites us to obey. If we obey, we get blessings, and if we don’t, then there will be consequences to our actions.” Which is all very well, but the picture that emerges from our reading of the Old Testament is that God gives commandments, and then threatens us with death if we don’t obey them (or if our fathers don’t).

At least at this stage in the OT, the threats only extend to death. Jesus will update that to include eternal punishment in hell.

Main points from this lesson

Is it good to be ‘an iron pillar’?

Jeremiah says God told him this:

1:18 For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land.

In case the class hasn’t seen anything made of iron before, the real lesson manual helpfully suggests:

Display a metal bar and invite a class member to try to break it. Then ask the following questions:
• If this object represented a person’s characteristics, what would it suggest about him or her?

I imagine they’re shooting for ‘strong’, which is very positive. But take a guess: is it positive in the following scripture?

Isaiah 48:4thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass;

Answer: Not here. Here, it’s symbolic of an inflexible nature. For Jehovah, it’s bad to be inflexible by not believing in him, but good to be inflexible in his service — just like with murder, genocide, and a lot of other nasty things.

One of the things I’ve been learning (post-religion) is the importance of being able to change my mind when the facts require. It’s one of science’s great strengths that it can update to accommodate new facts. And it’s good to be able to change one’s mind on an individual level, as everything we think is probably at least a little bit wrong.

Richards Dawkins tells this story:

I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal–unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

I respect Dawkins most when he admits his lack of knowledge in some area, as in this clip (question starts at 38:04, Dawkins’ comment at 47:50)

Chairman: I just want to hear from Richard Dawkins. The same debate essentially has been going on in the U.K. and in fact right across Europe. Your thoughts on hearing it repeated here?
Richard: I’ve been rather moved to hear the very humane statements that have been made. I don’t feel I should contribute to this debate. I know nothing about the Australian situation, but I was moved especially by what the Rabbi was saying.

And I respect him least when he’s dismissive of others, as in his recent Twitter squabbles.

As for me, I love being wrong. Well, not really — does anyone? But once I was talking to a listener of my podcast (Talk the Talk), and she said, “Have you ever gotten something wrong?” I thought for a second, and had to say, “No, I haven’t.” But then I realised, with some horror: I have gotten it wrong, and I just don’t know it!

Then on a later episode, someone pointed out that I’d made a mistake. And I thought, thank goodness! What a relief! For one thing, I didn’t have to think that wrong thing anymore, so I knew more than before. And for another, someone’s noticing my mistakes, so I’ve probably gotten most of the other things right, otherwise someone would have said something.

This willingness to change my mind is part of why I do this blog, and why I engage with believers. If I’m wrong about this religion thing, someone will tell me, and if they have the facts, I can be convinced. Based on the last million interactions, it’s not looking good, and I’m not holding my breath. It would take an awful lot to convince me that all the immoral things we’ve read are moral. If someone were able to convince me, it might have more to do with my moral failure than with their having a good argument. After all, what could make this god’s actions moral? But I have to, at least in theory, keep the door open, keep talking, and keep engaging. Not be iron.

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee”

Mormons use this scripture to support the notion of a pre-mortal life.

1:5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

I’ve mentioned before that the pre-mortal life was one of my favourite Mormon doctrines, mostly because of an epiphany I used to have when seeing tons of people at once in a public place. Oh, look, I’d think, all my brothers and sisters from the realms of glory, etc. It was a lovely thought, and after deconversion, one that I hated to lose. I didn’t think I’d ever have access to that again.

Of course, there are some aspects of the pre-mortal life that aren’t so lovely. It means that God made a whole lot of people, knowing in advance that they wouldn’t make it to the Celestial Kingdom, and that they’d therefore face eternal separation from their families / God / Ed McMahon and so forth. Why would his perfect system involve exclusion and isolation for so many? Not too cool, God. Why didn’t he use his all-knowingness to know who would make it back to his presence, and only create those people? Why wouldn’t he make a bar that everyone could clear? And the answer is that the system doesn’t have a way of controlling you if you don’t have something to lose.

A bit of an update: One bright, sunny day at the university where I teach, I was walking to my office, and noticing all the terrific students around the place. So many smart people! All a little different from each other; all carrying different DNA. And I started thinking about evolution, and how the genes of everyone that I was seeing had combined in partly random ways from parents to make gazillions of different people, walking around here on earth. I realised that was we call ‘humankind’ was nothing less than the sum total of all the humans who were alive today, and here we were, and it was all happening now! And we were all related! Wow!

It was the pre-mortal epiphany again. I was very pleased to find that, despite my lack of belief, I hadn’t lost access to it. But this time it was based in something real, and no less inspiring.

Additional lesson ideas

Of leopards and spots

You’ve probably heard people say “A leopard can’t change its spots” as a way of referring to the immutability of personality or motivation. Well, that saying comes from Jeremiah, except with a slight twist:

13:23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.

It’s probably good that we don’t say the first part anymore. Totally not cool, Bible.

Don’t have Christmas trees

Jeremiah appears to condemn Christmas trees.

10:1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
10:2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
10:3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
10:4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

Of course, Jeremiah — having no actual prophetic powers — wasn’t referring specifically to Christmas trees. People don’t nail Christmas trees to the floor, anyway, but that’s easy to overlook when you read this passage and think “Christmas tree”. But it’s fun to float this scripture in a real Gospel Doctrine class, and watch the gymnastics that follow.

What’s with deck, anyhow? When we talk about decorating things, there’s nothing we would say that we deck. The usefulness of this word would appear to have shrunk to halls and trees.

Here’s the story. The word comes from Middle Dutch dekken, “to cover”, so you deck a tree when you cover it. For that matter, the deck of a boat is the part that covers the boat, so that’s related, too. And when you deck someone, you lay them out on the deck. (Those sailors; always fighting.) It’s fun to see how the meaning of words coincide.

Closing hymn

Here’s one of the more desolate passages from Jeremiah.

8:15 We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble!
8:16 The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan: the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones; for they are come, and have devoured the land, and all that is in it; the city, and those that dwell therein.
8:20 The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
8:22 Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

That sounded pretty good, but it would sound better if it were set to music by… oh, say… Ralph Vaughan Williams. And look! it is. Here’s his Dona Nobis Pacem.

The whole thing is good, mostly thanks to the poetry of Walt Whitman, but for this lyric, start at 28:11.

OT Lesson 35 (Amos and Joel)

God Reveals His Secrets to His Prophets

Amos 3; 7–9; Joel 2–3

LDS manual: here

Reading

Now we’re into the minor prophets, Amos and Joel. Like other prophets, they predicted death and destruction for those who didn’t believe them.

Ask: According to these passages in Amos, how will Jehovah / Jesus kill those who don’t obey him?

Amos 1:3 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron:
1:4 But I will send a fire into the house of Hazael, which shall devour the palaces of Benhadad.

4:2 The Lord GOD hath sworn by his holiness, that, lo, the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks.

Answers: Fire and fishhooks.

By this time, God has had to resort to some pretty drastic measures to get Israel to worship him, including “cleanness of teeth” (or famine), drought, blasting, mildew, worms, pestilence, and the sword.

4:6 And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.
4:7 And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered.
4:8 So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.
4:9 I have smitten you with blasting and mildew: when your gardens and your vineyards and your fig trees and your olive trees increased, the palmerworm devoured them: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.
4:10 I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt: your young men have I slain with the sword, and have taken away your horses; and I have made the stink of your camps to come up unto your nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.
4:11 I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.

They didn’t love you after all that?

4:12 Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.

If God says he wants to meet you, tell him “no thanks”.

There is one interesting thing about Amos, though: Jehovah / Jesus is turning his talent for death and destruction toward social justice issues. In particular, Amos is riled about Israel’s treatment of the poor, and bribery.

5:11 Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.
5:12 For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

For those in a real Gospel Doctrine class: Does anyone mention the poor? If they do, does a class member immediately rush to qualify this with a comment about “the deserving poor”? Does the teacher encourage class members to do anything individually to combat poverty, or are the steps taken by the church (e.g. fast offerings, church welfare) generally seen as sufficient? I’d welcome your answers in comments.

This lesson also looks at Joel. But no one cares about Joel. Seriously.

Joel 1:15 Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

Oh, whatever, Joel. People might do better listening to these guys.

Prophet Three is my favourite.

Main points from this lesson

There’s one scripture that the entire lesson hangs on, and it’s about prophets.

3:7 Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.

Mormons love this scripture because it has the word ‘prophets’ in it, and it says that God is really into them. So let’s investigate prophets in the Mormon universe.

Mormon prophets do not prophesy

Here’s a quote from the real lesson manual.

“When I was a young wife and mother, my husband spent two years in the air force. We lived in military housing on Long Island, New York. While tending our young children, I often visited with neighbors who had come from all over the country. One day as a neighbor and I were talking about our beliefs, she became curious about what was different about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“I told her briefly about the Restoration, and I explained that the restored Church of Jesus Christ has a living prophet today. This really seemed to pique her interest, and she wanted to know what the prophet had said. As I started to tell her about the Doctrine and Covenants and modern revelation, she said, ‘But what has he said lately?’ I told her about general conference and that the Church had a monthly publication with a message from the prophet. Then she got really interested. I was so embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t read the current message. She concluded our conversation by saying, ‘You mean you have a living prophet and you don’t know what he said?’ ” ( Janette Hales Beckham, “Sustaining the Living Prophets,” Ensign, May 1996, 84).

This neighbour was onto it, but more to the point: You have a living prophet, and he doesn’t prophesy? When was the last time a Mormon prophet made a prophecy? Presumably that’s part of their job.

Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but the last time I can remember where an actual prediction was made was in the Proclamation on the Family.

…we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

I think that if they’re going to say this kind of thing, they should go “full Old Testament”. In particular, they should specify the kind of calamities. Flood? Fire? Famine? Fishhooks?

It’s fishhooks, isn’t it?

So great is this tendency to avoid saying anything official, that even books by the current president of the church carry a disclaimer! Check out the front of A Prophet’s Voice by Thomas Monson:

It’s called A Prophet’s Voice, but the views “do not necessarily represent the position of the Church”? Whose voice would be considered authoritative, if not the prophet’s? Talk about having it both ways.

If there really were prophets, they would have far more responsibility than they take.

Let’s say you’re one of the Twelve Apostles. That presumably means you have the Holy Ghost — a member of the Godhead — with you all the time. You are also “in constant touch with Him who created this earth and knows the world from beginning to end.”

Ask: What problems would you be capable of solving, with that kind of access to the creator of the universe?

  • Advance scientific knowledge
  • Use information about the human body to eliminate disease
  • Warn people about upcoming life-threatening events, like tsunamis, earthquakes, or hurricanes. People could use this information to save lives, carry out timely evacuation, and help with coordination of resources
  • Foresee the consequences of policy decisions, and communicate them

Ask: What do Mormon prophets actually do?

See, earthquake prediction is one thing, but that quote is really good, too. I like how it all begins with W.

If a god actually exists, and he speaks to people, then those people have some kind of responsibility to use that knowledge to do something besides promote their scammy religion-business. That they don’t do this speaks to either

  • their lack of prophetic knowledge, or
  • God’s lack of concern for the welfare of his children.

“We do not know.”

Okay, so for whatever reason, Mormon prophets don’t seem to be leap-frogging scientists in advancing human knowledge. But maybe this is unrealistic. Maybe prophets don’t involve themselves in temporal matters, just spiritual. But if that’s the case, they seem equally inept in answering spiritual questions.

Activity: Go to the corpus of General Conference talks and search for “do not know”

Ask: What kinds of things do LDS leaders say they “do not know” about? Here’s my list:

• Why do bad things happen to good people?

Why does a just God allow bad things to happen, especially to good people? Why are those who are righteous and in the Lord’s service not immune from such tragedies?

• Why did Eve’s sin result in sexism?

Now, Virginia, you call attention to the statement in the scriptures that Adam should rule over Eve. You ask why this is so. I do not know.

• What will be some of the effects of the Iraq War of 2003–2011? How will that affect the church?

Great forces have been mobilized and will continue to be. Political alliances are being forged. We do not know how long this conflict will last. We do not know what it will cost in lives and treasure. We do not know the manner in which it will be carried out. It could impact the work of the Church in various ways.

• When’s Jesus coming back?

We do not know the precise time of the Second Coming of the Savior.

• Can you tell us anything about science, Book of Mormon archeology, or anything about conflicts between religion and science?

I do not know the details of the organization of matter into the beautiful world we live in.
I do not understand the intricacies of the Atonement, how the Savior’s sacrifice can cleanse all repentant people, or how the Savior could suffer “the pain of all men”.
I do not know where the city of Zarahemla was, as referred to in the Book of Mormon.
I do not know why my beliefs sometimes conflict with assumed scientific or secular knowledge.

Gee, what a shame there’s no way you could find these things out. With a prophet or something.

Even more tellingly, a knowledge of the Atonement seems outside their grasp.

For fuck’s sake, guys, this is the foundational doctrine of Christianity. You guys are professional Christianity-explainers. This is the one thing you should be clear on. And yet, you simply “do not know” how this is supposed to work. Is sin a real thing, and you have to use a sin-transfer-omatron? Or does God see Jesus suffer, and say, “Okay, that makes me feel better about all this. I can stand to have a relationship with the humans again”? They simply don’t know. And they seem satisfied with not knowing.

Read this text from a PBS interview with Jeffrey Holland about race and the priesthood. How many times does he say “we don’t know” why African-American men were denied the priesthood?

“One clear-cut position is that the folklore must never be perpetuated. … I have to concede to my earlier colleagues. … They, I’m sure, in their own way, were doing the best they knew to give shape to [the policy], to give context for it, to give even history to it. All I can say is however well intended the explanations were, I think almost all of them were inadequate and/or wrong.
… It probably would have been advantageous to say nothing, to say we just don’t know, and, [as] with many religious matters, whatever was being done was done on the basis of faith at that time. But some explanations were given and had been given for a lot of years. … At the very least, there should be no effort to perpetuate those efforts to explain why that doctrine existed. I think, to the extent that I know anything about it, as one of the newer and younger ones to come along, … we simply do not know why that practice, that policy, that doctrine was in place…
[when asked to specify the folklore] Well, some of the folklore that you must be referring to are suggestions that there were decisions made in the pre-mortal councils where someone had not been as decisive in their loyalty to a Gospel plan or the procedures on earth or what was to unfold in mortality, and that therefore that opportunity and mortality was compromised. I really don’t know a lot of the details of those, because fortunately I’ve been able to live in the period where we’re not expressing or teaching them, but I think that’s the one I grew up hearing the most, was that it was something to do with the pre-mortal councils. …
But I think that’s the part that must never be taught until anybody knows a lot more than I know.We just don’t know, in the historical context of the time, why it was practiced. …That’s my principal [concern], is that we don’t perpetuate explanations about things we don’t know. …We don’t pretend that something wasn’t taught or practice wasn’t pursued for whatever reason. But I think we can be unequivocal and we can be declarative in our current literature, in books that we reproduce, in teachings that go forward, whatever, that from this time forward, from 1978 forward, we can make sure that nothing of that is declared. That may be where we still need to make sure that we’re absolutely dutiful, that we put [a] careful eye of scrutiny on anything from earlier writings and teachings, just [to] make sure that that’s not perpetuated in the present. That’s the least, I think, of our current responsibilities on that topic. … “

It’s good to admit when you don’t know something. However, it’s strange that the Lord who “doeth nothing but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” leaves those prophets with such embarrassing omissions.

Another: Why was God, who knew Joseph Smith was going to be killed, so fuzzy on who his successor should be? Isn’t that something that should have been revealed, so as to prevent the arising of splinter movements?

They want to promote themselves as sources of divine knowledge, but when it comes down to it, they peep, “We don’t know.” I want to repeat this: not only is religon no better than random chance at coming up with answers to temporal questions, it’s equally inept at coming up with answers for things in its own domain.

This leads us to an inexorable conclusion:

Having a prophet is a stupid and unreliable method of getting truth.

Let’s say you’re a god. You have a lot of spirit children (that’s us humans), and you want them to live with you for eternity. You’ve also decided that those who aren’t with you either have to live forever in Outer Darkness, or in varying degrees of separation from their eternal family. You know, for some reason. So this is serious stuff.

You’ve also decided, for some reason, that a key criterion for their salvation is whether they believe in you.

Let me just stop here and say that this is really odd. Why would belief be the key criterion? For an imaginary god, this would matter, since lack of belief kills imaginary gods. But for a real god, it wouldn’t matter whether people believed in her or not.

But anyway, you want to make sure that as many of your spirit children as possible believe in you. How would you go about this?

  • Appear to a large number of people, in some way that is easily verifiable.
  • Appear to one guy in one place, who no one is going to believe.

If you chose number two, you’ve chosen the least effective method, and the one also chosen by Jehovah / Jesus.

Why wouldn’t God try to communicate his existence as unambiguously as possible? Does he not want to be believed? Remember — the eternal salvation of his spirit children is on the line. Why is he being so cagey about verifying his existence? Why would he take the risk of making himself look like one man’s delusion?

The answer that Mormons typically give is faith. God doesn’t prove that he exists because he wants us to have faith in him (for some reason). Here’s LDS apologist Daniel Peterson with a representative quote:

Likewise, if God were to reveal himself directly and conclusively, he would destroy our freedom, so overwhelming would that revelation be.

Destroy our freedom! Gosh! That’s why he has to make his existence seem ambiguous. In fact, he could take it one step farther, and make himself as unbelievable as possible, in order to find those who have truly been able to bypass the rational mind and rely on faith 100%. (Which would explain several things about the LDS Church.)

But this is poppycock. When God was supposed to have appeared so unambiguously to Moses, did that destroy Moses’ agency? Did God appearing to Joseph Smith destroy his agency? Of course not. If God can appear to one person without destroying their agency, he can appear to multiple people in a verifiable way without destroying their agency. Or he could appear to everyone. Again, the salvation of billions is hanging in the balance.

Then believers try to have it two ways. On the one hand, they say, “God refuses to prove his existence because that would destroy agency.” On the other, they play up the resiliant nature of skepticism and doubt: “You could show people the Golden Plates, and they still wouldn’t believe you!” Which is it?

There is no reason for a god to work this way. There is, however, a very good reason for a person to work this way: pretending to be a prophet gives you a certain credibility among the credulous. Many people have made lucrative careers out of pretending to have God’s phone number.

Fortunately, the LDS Church is dropping the whole cumbersome prophet thing, and transitioning to using arguments from professional apologists, sending out PR flacks to deal with the media, and releasing carefully-worded statements via the First Quorum of the Newsroom.

Additional teaching ideas

No technology without the Restoration?

Mormons are happy to use technology when it benefits them. However, in this lesson the manual takes it a step farther, and claims that technological progress was explicitly designed to further the LDS Church.

You may want to read the following statement from Elder Joseph Fielding Smith to help class members understand the great benefit of these inventions in performing the work of the Lord:

“I maintain that had there been no restoration of the gospel, and no organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there would have been no radio; there would have been no airplane, and there would not have been the wonderful discoveries in medicine, chemistry, electricity, and the many other things wherein the world has been benefited by such discoveries. Under such conditions these blessings would have been withheld, for they belong to the Dispensation of the Fulness of Times of which the restoration of the gospel and the organization of the Church constitute the central point, from which radiates the Spirit of the Lord throughout the world. The inspiration of the Lord has gone out and takes hold of the minds of men, though they know it not, and they are directed by the Lord. In this manner he brings them into his service that his purposes and his righteousness, in due time, may be supreme on the earth.
“ . . . I do not believe for one moment that these discoveries have come by chance, or that they have come because of superior intelligence possessed by men today over those who lived in ages that are past. They have come and are coming because the time is ripe, because the Lord has willed it, and because he has poured out his Spirit on all flesh” (in Conference Report, Oct. 1926, 117).

In other words, technological advancements happen, not because people think, work, experiment, and struggle through the creative process, but because some Bronze-age Hebrew tribal deity twiddles their brains without them knowing, and — whaddaya know! — airplanes and Internets. This man — who never created anything but silly explanations — takes everything people have made, and attributes it to his myth. What a sad trivialisation of human achievement.

But then let’s remember that this is a guy who typically underestimated the power of human thinking.

We will never get a man into space. This Earth is man’s sphere and it was never intended that he should get away from it.
The moon is a superior planet to the Earth and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen.
Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith at Stake Conference in Honolulu, May 14, 1961

And this is why Mormons like to say that television, radio, and the Internet were actually invented by God to spread the Mormon gospel.

“…100 years ago, people still traveled by horse and buggy. The age of the telephone and electricity was just dawning. There was no air travel, no E-mail, no fax machines, no Internet. There has been an explosion of secular knowledge. I believe that God has opened up these treasures of intelligence to enhance His purposes on the earth.”

If God (and not Al Gore) really did invent the Internet, maybe he should have thought again. The Internet is a factor in the demise of religions worldwide.

Ask: How has the Internet helped you in your deconversion?
Possible answers:

  • By making information possible, especially information about the real history of the church
  • By helping to form alternative communities with different interests, making the church community less appealing
  • By connecting us with people who offer support when we’re faced with the loss of our families and social group as a result of deconversion
  • By facilitating scientific knowledge through allowing collaboration

We are living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. Tellingly, the church has not benefitted from it.

Are we as concerned about poverty as Amos is?

Many of us used to donate to the LDS Church through tithing and fast offerings. If you are no longer donating to the church, have you taken any compensatory steps to alleviate poverty through your own giving?

Atheists are sometimes criticised for donating less to charities. This may be skewed, if religions automatically qualify as charities just for promoting a religion, whether they actually help anyone or not (which is the case in Australia) . But we could all be doing more than we do.

Here are some lists of secular charities:

Atheist Foundation of Australia
FreeThoughtPedia

When I stopped paying the church, and dumped my World Vision kid, I decided that I wanted to contribute to secular charities instead. My list skews a bit Australian; yours can reflect where you live.

Do you have worthy causes others should know about? Put them in comments.

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