Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Category: scary external world (page 2 of 2)

OT Lesson 8 (Sodom)

Living Righteously in a Wicked World

Genesis 13–14; 18–19

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

Background

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

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

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

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

Main points of this lesson

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

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

Read this poem by Karen Finneyfrock.

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

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

Go read the whole thing and come back.

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

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

Gods are a reflection of the people who believe in them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to full paper.

Jesus was probably not a gay-friendly guy

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

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

On every continent on earth (except Antarctica), Christianity has othered and outlawed queer sexuality. Whatever Jesus thought about it, assuming he lived at all, this is the movement he inspired.

He says nothing about gay sex, we’re told as if this proves he had no objection. (Curiously, the same doesn’t apply to slavery or rape.) He doesn’t even mention queer people. I’m afraid when I hear someone takes my side, acknowledging I exist is the least I expect from them.

  • It is absurdly generous to call someone a queer ally whose name we only know because they spurred a movement that overwhelmingly harmed us for thousands of years.
  • It is absurdly generous to call someone a queer ally because they never said a word about us, particularly to a violently homophobic audience.
  • It is absurdly generous to call someone a queer ally for preaching nonspecific love and kindness. That never stopped anyone, let alone preachers, persecuting us.

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

We have a responsibility not to be hateful bigots

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

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

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

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

As Steven Weinberg puts it:

Additional ideas for teaching

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

Read this bit from the real lesson manual:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sin of Sodom is not homosexuality

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

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

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

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

God ensures perpetual political strife

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

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

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

The Bible is not appropriate for children

OT Lesson 7 (Abrahamic religions)

“The Abrahamic Covenant”

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

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

Background

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

The three Abrahamic religions are:

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

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

Bill Maher puts it like this:

Or you could think of it like a movie:

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

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

The Abrahamic religions share some notable characteristics:

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

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

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

Main points from the lesson

Mormons like to pretend they are Jews

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

In Utah Mormons Call Themselves Jews and Jews Are Considered “gentiles”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Gross.

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

There you have it, folks: annoying and creepy.

Patriarchal blessings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Liz for her story.

Additional ideas for teaching

The creation of a “scary external world” narrative

From the real manual:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch “Mother Knows Best” from Tangled.

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

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

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

Sing along with the class.

Newer posts