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NT Lesson 30 (Respecter of Persons)

16 August 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“God Is No Respecter of Persons”

Acts 10–14; 15:1–35

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show that the god of the Bible is unjust, and encourage readers to do better than God does.

Reading

Even as a believer, I was noticing doctrinal shifts in the Mormon Church. The 1978 change on race and the priesthood was the biggest example — that was an earthquake — but I’m thinking of the little shifts and tremors.

Like the idea that Blacks were neutral in the War in Heaven. This idea was taught to me in church, and the idea even popped up in LDS fiction of the time. Well, there was no way of proving it wrong, but it was distasteful, and that was reason enough for it to get shifted.

I found the 1990 changes to the Temple Endowment — well, quite welcome, actually! The miming of throat-slitting and disemboweling was really creepy. But why would the ceremony need to change? I could think of nothing but: The penalties were too weird and off-putting. Well, wouldn’t God have known that to start with?

Even as a believer, doctrinal creep bugged me. I made a sour joke once: “What’s the difference between true and false Mormon doctrine? About 40 years!”

Of course, Mormonism is well-equipped to shift its doctrines. The idea of “continuing revelation” means that the president can change what Mormon doctrine is. It doesn’t work that way, though — church leaders generally avoid revealing or clarifying anything. Instead, changes are brought about by an anonymous committee working out of the Newsroom. In the modern church, “continuing revelation” usually means that the church is continually (but gradually) revealing unsavoury details about its past to its members.

And herein lies the problem: if old doctrines were weird, unpalatable, or — in the case of race and the Priesthood, just plain racist and unjust — and they need to be changed, then the church should say that the old ways were wrong, and that they’ll try to do better.

Instead, according to the LDS Gospel Doctrine manual, the issue of race and the Priesthood is taken as evidence of God’s justice. Because he stopped being racist.

If any class members remember the day the revelation was announced, invite them to describe how they felt when they learned of it.
• Who made the priesthood available to all worthy male members of the Church? (The Lord.) How did the Lord make his will known to the Church? (He revealed it to the prophet, who then announced it to the Church members.) How did this revelation affect the Church?
Explain that this revelation is an example of how the Lord continues to direct
his Church through revelation. This lesson discusses a similar revelation that was given to the members of the Church shortly after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Better question: Who was it that prevented the priesthood from being available to all worthy male members of the Church in the first place?

It’s hugely ironic that this example of discrimination is taken by Latter-day Saints as a sign of how great God is.

Brother Jake has explained how this is totally not racist.

Anyhow, the lesson starts with a racist doctrine, as a way of tying it into an even more racist doctrine: only allowing Jews to have the gospel. Which apparently Jehovah was okay with at first. It seems that God has had some consciousness-raising experiences over the years.

I’m noticing some shifting in the pews, which means I’ve been monologuing for too long. Let’s get to the lesson.

Main ideas for this lesson

Background

At this point in our story, many Christians thought that only ex-Jews should be Christians.

Ask: Where would they have gotten that idea?
Answer: From Jesus, who never intended that his message should go to anyone but the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’.

Restricting your target audience is the worst idea for a business, and it must have been clear to someone (probably Peter) that tribal religions (like Judaism) were going nowhere, and that universalising religions were the way to go. So Peter got a vision.

Acts 10:9 On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour:
10:10 And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance,
10:11 And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth:
10:12 Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.
10:13 And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.
10:14 But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.
10:15 And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.

The early church members must have been pleased to find that circumcision was no longer necessary.

Acts 15:5 But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses.
15:6 And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter.
15:7 And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them, …
15:10 Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?

And that’s how Christianity managed to distinguish itself from other Jewish sects. (But they’re still Jews.)

Ask: What kind of Jew are you?

If you really want to take the broad view, have a look at this Evolutionary Tree of Religion. Can you spot your religion, or former religion?

God is a respecter of persons

Peter, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, says this:

Acts 10:34 Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:

Ask: What does this phrase mean?
Answer: It is usually taken to mean that God treats everyone the same.

I don’t think anything can be clearer than the fact that God does not treat everyone the same. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians, said:

Acts 17:26 And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;

That means that God has chosen where and when everyone will live, and that means that God has elevated some to lives of prosperity, peace, and plenty, and consigned others to lives of disease, poverty, and misery. How unequal!

From Sam Harris’ debate with William Lane Craig:

“Nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people—one of those every 10 days, killing children only under five: that’s twenty-four thousand children a day, a thousand an hour, seventeen or so a minute. That means before I get to the end of this sentence, some few children very likely will have died in terror and agony.
“Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared, and their prayers will not be answered. But according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of god’s plan.
“Any god who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr. Craig’s view, most of these people, many of these people certainly, will be going to hell because they’re praying to the wrong god. Just think about that: through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation. There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment; most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore polytheists. In Dr. Craig’s universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey God Hanuman, you are doomed—you’ll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9 and Matthew 13 and Revelation 14.
“So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus; he engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire.
…
“And please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate god from all this evil. We’re told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good. But when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we are told that god is mysterious. Who can understand god’s will? Yet this merely human understanding of God’s will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. If something good happens to a Christian—he feels some bliss while praying, or he sees some positive change his life—we’re told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we are told god is mysterious.”

Fortunately, the crushing poverty under which many people live getting better. Here’s a chart showing that fewer and fewer of us are living in abject poverty.

Ask: If you’re doing okay financially, are you sharing with others who have much less? There are lots of good secular organisations that are working to eradicate poverty and disease. By donating to them, you can help to do what God has failed to do for millennia of human history.

My favourites are Oxfam, MSF, water.org, and the Smith Family. Put yours in comments.

Additional lesson ideas

How church policy and practices are made

From the Gospel Doctrine manual:

• How do the events described in Acts 15:6–31 demonstrate the pattern by which decisions about Church policy and practices are made?
a. Church leaders meet to consider the matter (verse 6).
b. They discuss the matter thoroughly (verses 7–21).
c. They make a decision in accordance with the Lord’s will (verses 19–21).
d. The Holy Ghost confirms that the decision is correct (verse 28).
e. The decision is announced to the Saints for sustaining (verses 22–31).

I see a different pattern at work.

a. The morality of the world improves, or an unpleasant tidbit from church history emerges.
b. The Church feels pressure to change.
c. Church leaders resist the pressure, because that’s not how the church works!
d. The issue starts to affect the bottom line, as members leave.
e. President Newsroom releases an uncredited, unannounced essay on lds.org in the middle of the night.
f. Apologists, PR flacks, and surrogates defend the church
g. Church leaders say nothing to clarify church doctrine, so that everyone can keep believing what they like.

All right, it’s a lovely day, and some of you are looking longingly out the window, so let’s dismiss. I’ll see you next week.

NT Lesson 29 (Saul / Paul)

9 August 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“The Number of the Disciples Was Multiplied”

Acts 6–9

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage readers not to “leave it alone”.

Reading

This lesson is where we meet a young upstart by the name of Saul / Paul. (We’ll call him Spaul for convenience.) Spaul never met Jesus in person, but he would take over his racket. With his penchant for telling people how to live their lives, his hatred of women, and his boorish style of declamation, he would be the most influential Christian of all time (Jesus not excluded). He would also serve as a model for thousands of the asshole evangelists who plague college campuses in our day.

Main ideas for this lesson

The stoning of Stephen

We start this reading with a disciple named Stephen, who was doing stuff.

Acts 6:8 And Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles among the people.

See the Brick Testament version here.

But then he ran afoul of “certain of the synagogue”. Side note: it really looks like anti-Jewish sentiment was firmly entrenched by this time in Christianity’s history.

Acts 6:9 Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen.
6:10 And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake.

Stephen is hauled up before the council, and makes his defence. This takes up all of chapter 7 (it’s long, too), and is essentially an entry for a “Summarise the Old Testament” contest. In a synagogue. Where he says stuff like this:

Acts 7:51 Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.

“Not bad summarising, Stephen. But you could have tightened it up a bit by saying, ‘Moses did a bunch of stuff… and YOU SUCK!'”

By the way, it would have been difficult for them to have resisted the Holy Ghost; according to Jesus, the Holy Ghost hadn’t been sent yet.

And then Stephen gets stoned.

Acts 7:54 When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth.
7:55 But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God,
7:56 And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.
7:57 Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord,
7:58 And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul.
7:59 And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
7:60 And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

And this takes us up to where we meet Spaul.

Saul’s transition

Saul is traveling to Damascus, when the Big Guy puts the hurt on him.

Acts 9:3 And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:
9:4 And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
9:5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
9:6 And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.
9:7 And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.

Ask: Did the men who were with Spaul hear a voice or see anyone?
Answer: According to Acts 9:7, yes to the voice and no, respectively. But when Spaul tells the story again later, he’s forgotten some details because now the answers are “no to the voice, and yes to the light.”

Acts 22:7 And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
22:8 And I answered, Who art thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.
22:9 And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.

Stories can change in the retelling, especially if they’re fictional stories.

Should we fight error?

Let’s talk about “kicking against the pricks”.

When people leave the church, members have a range of strategies to minimise their credibility. Many of these could have been used against Spaul.

Ask: If you have left the church, how many of these have been used against you?

The “can’t leave it alone” idea is especially rank, coming as a criticism from Mormons. When you believe it, you’re supposed to shout it from the housetops, but if you no longer believe it, you’re supposed to… what… disappear? This is a way of silencing people who disagree.

And it’s not like the church leaves people alone. It doesn’t leave people alone when missionaries come around to knock on their door. It doesn’t leave member kids alone when they turn 19, and it’s time to serve a mission. (Did I say 19? Now it’s 18. Apparently they were losing too many kids during that first year of learning at uni.) And they haven’t left gay people alone — they’re still spreading their homophobic message, as ever. So this “can’t leave it alone” thing is just silly. Members need to knock it off.

Even in the post-Mormon community, there’s this idea that it’s not healthy to keep fighting the church, or to keep talking or writing about it. There’s some expectation that you leave the church, you start your blog, and then after a while, you’re supposed to “move on”.

Me, I hope I never get out of the scene. I got reasons.

Mormonism is interesting! And with the ongoing revelations of polygamy and magic rocks, it’s never been interestinger! So who wouldn’t want to keep talking and writing about this slow-motion trainwreck? (Hey, maybe that’s what ‘continuing revelation’ means — the church keeps revealing things about its history to its members.)
I need to remember that sometimes I can be wrong — really wrong! When you get a wrong idea, it’s possible to build up defences around it. I did that once, and I don’t want to do it again. My Mormon experience helps me to remember my human fallibility.
The church is a pernicious entity that harms people. Once it gets its hooks into someone — with all the attendant logical loops and thought-stopping clichés — it’s hard for them to get out. And they’ll be paying the church all the while. If you’re concerned about scam artists and bad reasoning, then the LDS Church (as with religion in general) is definitely something to be concerned about.

And besides, we used to belong to a faith that taught that it was important to keep old wrongs and injustices firmly in mind.

D&C 123:13 Therefore, that we should waste and wear out our lives in bringing to light all the hidden things of darkness, wherein we know them; and they are truly manifest from heaven—
14 These should then be attended to with great earnestness.

Additional lesson ideas

Simony

You never know who the church is going to attract. A lot of people who are poor thinkers in one area tend to be poor thinkers in another. (It may have a lot to do with intellectual character.)

Anyhow, one of the early converts was a magician named Simon.

Acts 8:18 And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money,
8:19 Saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.
8:20 But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.

Simon’s contribution to the language is that of simony, the sin of selling church offices, or taking money for spiritual things.

In the LDS Church, simony takes the form of requiring that tithing be paid in order to get a temple recommend so that one can maintain their temple covenants and attain salvation thereby.

If you decide to mention this in a real Gospel Doctrine class, please let us know how it went in comments. See you next week.

NT Lesson 28 (Eyewitnesses)

2 August 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“We Are Witnesses”

Acts 1–5

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and that God will kill you if you don’t gibe moni plox.

Reading

Have you ever noticed that the fame of a religion’s founder often grows after they’re dead? Joseph Smith, Sai Baba, Osho, and so on. By then, it’s too late for the leader to tarnish their image, and after a brief period of confusion, the followers flip into hagiography mode. They also start aggressively proselytising.

And so it is with early Christianity. We’re going to see how the spread began.

The LDS Church makes a big deal out of having witnesses to events — the witnesses for the gold plates, the witnesses to Brigham Young doing a really good Joseph Smith impersonation, and the Book of Mormon as a witness (of sorts) for the Bible.

Christians also make a big deal of having eyewitnesses; that’s why they think the New Testament is so special. It’s supposed to be the evidence for Jesus. Imagine: all these miraculous events are described, and there are eyewitnesses! The Bible says there are, and how is that not convincing.

Acts 1:1 The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach,
1:2 Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen:
1:3 To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:

Acts 5:32 And we are his witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him.

I don’t know why Christians think this is supposed to be some kind of knock-out evidence. A lot of things are written in books, and we don’t always count them as evidence. If that were the case, then this

would be evidence for the Yellow Brick Road.

There are a few things wrong with the ‘eyewitnesses’ idea.

As we’ve seen in previous lessons, the gospels were written down decades after the events were supposed to have happened. A lot can happen to change your memory of events in that time.
Even worse, the gospels are full of anachronisms, which means they couldn’t have been written by eyewitnesses in the first place.
And the earliest versions we have are copies of copies — again, not written by eyewitnesses either. At various points, verses and stories have been inserted — stories that have been believed for centuries, until scholars have come along and said, “Um, actually…”

So the whole idea of the Bible being an eyewitness account starts to look really flimsy.

Eyewitness accounts are unreliable

But let’s say that the gospels were written thirty or forty years later by eyewitnesses to the events (instead of being, as seems more likely, versions of stories that were circulating around the Christian community at the time). Even if we had that level of confidence — and we don’t — eyewitness accounts are unreliable.

Watch this TED talk with Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who has studied memory.

Ask: According to Dr Loftus, why are our memories of events unreliable, even for events we’ve witnessed?

Answers:

The wording of questions can influence our memory.
Talking to other people can influence our memory.
False memories can be implanted.

This is something that believers, in my experience, do not really have a way of explaining. Yet this doesn’t seem to dent their confidence in the veracity of the Bible with its emphasis on eyewitness accounts that aren’t really eyewitness accounts at all.

But this confidence is selective. Are they willing to accept the eyewitness evidence of people who claim to have seen Mary? You can find information about her apparition to some imaginative children in Medjugorje. Apparently their tours are very popular. Are they willing to believe the eyewitnesses who report supernatural phenomena?

Many phenomena have been reported at Medjugorje, such as the sun spinning, dancing in the sky, turning colours, or being surrounded by objects such as hearts or crosses. Many have reported that they have been able to look at the sun during those times without any damage to their eyes.

The reports are clearly imaginary — wouldn’t anyone else have noticed the sun dancing in the sky? or suddenly looked like a big bowl of Lucky Charms? — and yet there are eyewitnesses willing to testify.

Are they willing to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw Muhammad split the moon with his fingers? Of course not. So why would they be willing to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw Jesus alive again? Their dependence on eyewitness accounts is clearly selective.

Eyewitness accounts are not really credible without independent verification from multiple sources, which is absent from these stories.

Main ideas for this lesson

Still waiting

Jesus jetpacks up to heaven, but thank goodness there are some angels to explain it.

Acts 1:10 And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel;
1:11 Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.

And so began a legend that Jesus would return. Two thousand years later they’re still waiting.

Is glossolalia a real language?

This reading contains the first instance of glossolalia, or ‘speaking in tongues’.

Acts 2:1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
2:2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
2:3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
2:4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

So what is ‘speaking in tongues’? Is it a real language? Well, if it were a real language — maybe, the language of angels — we might expect it to have an inventory of sounds that was the same, no matter who on earth was speaking it. We might also expect it to have sounds that differ from those of, say, English or Spanish or whatever language the speaker was used to.

Do we find those things? Well, according to Dawn Heverley in her paper Phonological Aspects of Glossolalia, it seems that the glossolalia of English speakers only uses the sounds of English. The glossolalia of Dutch speakers has the same sounds as Dutch. Same for Spanish, and so on. This makes it sort of unlikely that people are speaking some other language, and they’re probably just babbling away in sounds they’re familiar with.

If you’d like to hear me talking about this with my friend Ben Ainslie, have a listen to this episode of Talk the Talk.

How well do missionaries learn languages?

Mormons aren’t big on speaking in tongues, and they tend to interpret the events in Acts as communicating in other languages for the purpose of teaching the gospel. This seems reasonable, given these verses.

Acts 2:5 And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.
2:6 Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
2:7 And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
2:8 And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

And the way they think this manifests is that missionaries are good at learning languages in the Mission Training Center. From Mormonwiki:

In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the gift of tongues is manifested every day among the thousands of missionaries serving around the world. Missionaries learn foreign languages and the interpretation thereof with astonishing ease, and words come to them that they have not mastered.

I’ve heard stories like this: LDS missionaries learn languages incredibly fast, and the FBI, the CIA, and the KGB are all trying to duplicate their methods, and they’ve all failed.

Okay, so how well do missionaries learn languages while on a mission? According to the research, not all that well. Redditor hoserb2k notes a few conclusions from the literature:

Conclusion 1) On average, returned missionaries are not proficient, much less fluent [in] their mission language.

Using the FSI test (the test used by the US government to ascertain the language ability of its diplomats), the average returned missionary ranks 2+ out of five.
[They] can handle with confidence but not with facility most social situations including introductions and casual conversations about current events, as well as work, family, and autobiographical information; [they] can [also] handle limited work requirements

Conclusion 2) Returned missionaries speak on a level only slightly better than a comparable two-year university study, the same reading and significantly worse writing skills
Conclusion 3) Compared to a US University, a mission is incredibly ineffective as a method of foreign language acquisition.

They were largely lacking in their ability to support opinions, speculate and produce speech without errors that disturb or distract.…
Missionaries typically have well rehearsed experiences and monologues they are able to present with great smoothness and fluency.

Conclusion 4) Cultural understanding

Schwartz (2001, 234) writes [of returned missionaries] that they have a “superficial understanding and sensitivity to the target culture”

In short, missionaries are able to use language in a manner consistent with the limited domain within which they operate. They don’t experience a Day-of-Pentecost outpouring of language skill.

When I find stuff like this, it makes me think that the church was wrong about everything. I mean, of course it was, but it’s amazing how every once in a while you stumble over something you had never questioned, and — oh, that was wrong, too? Damn.

“Was nothing real?”

Are believers justified in disobeying laws?

There’s a bit of conflict in LDS doctrine on the topic of obedience to secular authority. On the one hand, you’ve got the twelfth Article of Faith.

A of F 12 We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.

On the other hand, there are scriptures like these from Acts, in which the apostles refuse to obey authorities over their conscience.

Acts 4:18 And they called them, and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus.
4:19 But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.

Acts 5:28 Saying, Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.
5:29 Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.

I would like to say that this is the church trying to have it both ways, but it would probably be more accurate to say that this is a complex issue with good points on both sides! It is important to have a functioning and lawful social order. And if there’s a conflict between the law and one’s conscience, civil disobedience can be a justified and positive way of bringing problems to the fore.

On the other hand, it’s a worry when people try to use their religious belief as a way of picking and choosing which laws they get to obey. Mormons are very big on this now because gay marriage, but I wonder how much they’d like it if it were used against them.

Thing is, I taught a whole Sunday School lesson about this once, bringing up the scriptures on both sides. It generated a lot of good discussion, and got class members thinking. (I probably finished with some rubbish like “Take it to the Lord in prayer” or some such rubbish.) But it was good to finally have a nice meaty topic in church! It was a nice break from the vapidity and torpor that (I was beginning to notice) otherwise typified the Gospel Doctrine curriculum.

Then in April 2003, at the beginning of the second Iraq War, Gordon Hinckley gave a General Conference talk that touched on this. At last! I thought, a prophet who is in touch with the Lord, and can explain more about this.

I don’t know what I was expecting for a general LDS audience. But I was crushingly disappointed by what we got. He basically ignored any complexity and threw it over to authority.

The question arises, “Where does the Church stand in all of this?”

First, let it be understood that we have no quarrel with the Muslim people or with those of any other faith. We recognize and teach that all the people of the earth are of the family of God. And as He is our Father, so are we brothers and sisters with family obligations one to another.

But as citizens we are all under the direction of our respective national leaders. They have access to greater political and military intelligence than do the people generally. Those in the armed services are under obligation to their respective governments to execute the will of the sovereign. When they joined the military service, they entered into a contract by which they are presently bound and to which they have dutifully responded.

…

When all is said and done, we of this Church are people of peace. We are followers of our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the Prince of Peace. But even He said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34).

Again, I don’t know what I was expecting. But Hinckley-as-prophet didn’t seem to show any of the moral sophistication — or indeed, scriptural knowledge — that I had as a simple Gospel Doctrine teacher. It was a return to vapidity. If I was looking for a way to explore gospel issues, it wasn’t going to happen here. Even the leaders at the highest level weren’t going to help me out. It was a real load on my shelf, and I think I regarded him differently after that.

Ananias and Sapphira

In the early days, Christianity (as did Mormonism) flirted with living in a socialistic commune.

Acts 2:44 And all that believed were together, and had all things common;

I think I made class members nervous when I’d talk about socialism.

But what should have made me nervous was that God would sometimes kill people who didn’t pay up.

Acts 5:1 But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession,
5:2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.
5:3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
5:4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.
5:5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things.
5:6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.
5:7 And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in.
5:8 And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much.
5:9 Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.
5:10 Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.
5:11 And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things.

God killed a lot of believers in the Old Testament, but this is the first instance of God killing believers in the New (besides Jesus, of course). And what issue was so important for God to step in? It’s the money. Money money money. Because God has all power in the universe, but if people don’t pay up, then it starts to affect the bottom line, and that’s bad for business.

Seriously, what was this story but an attempt to frighten the early Christians into forking over everything they had to the apostles? (Laying it at their fucking feet, no less!) God is a mafia boss who shakes people down, and whacks them when they don’t comply.

Now here’s a fun idea. Have a Primary class, and you want to teach this lesson? Why not have them act it out? They’ll never shortchange the Lord again!

There are printables.

Here are some tombstones you can make. “Aren’t you glad that God doesn’t strike us down instantly now?”

Religion is just so much fucking child abuse. All of it, from start to finish.

God can take care of himself.

Let’s finish this lesson with a good story. Lawmakers are concerned about this group of Christians — and no wonder, since they’re using their religion as an excuse to write their own laws.

Acts 5:34 Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space;
5:35 And said unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men.
5:36 For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought.
5:37 After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed.
5:38 And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought:
5:39 But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.

Now from what we’ve read in our lessons, I’m very pleased to fight against the god of the Bible. He’s a petty, vicious, megalomaniacal, self-aggrandising jerk who routinely kills his way out of problems that he created. He’s homophobic, misogynistic, and racist, and I’m happy to fight against that kind of person.

But Gamaliel has a good point: If this God person has got such a big dick, then he can fight his own battles. Around the world, Muslims, Christians, and others are eager to take up the sword of divine vengeance and cut others down. Or to defend their God with death threats — when, as we’ve seen in this lesson, God can do his own killing, thank you very much.

That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll meet a young upstart named Paul, who would form the basis of much Christian doctrine — and he never even met Jesus. Until then.

NT Lesson 27 (Resurrection)

26 July 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“He Is Not Here, for He Is Risen”

Matthew 28; Luke 24; John 20–21

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show contradictions in the resurrection story, and to encourage readers to seek evidence for extraordinary claims.

Reading

This lesson is about the pivotal event of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus. I say it’s pivotal because if it didn’t happen, then there’s no point to Christianity at all. And Paul says as much.

1 Corinthians 15:14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

This really came home to me when my father passed on. I realised that I was the grown-up now, and I had to decide how I was going to live. And if there was a life after this, or no life after this, I wanted to know it. It’s amazing how much you can learn when you don’t care about defending the story you’ve always lived by, and you just want to know if you’re right or wrong. Well, at this point, I wanted to know if I was right or wrong.

So for me, the crucial question became: Did the resurrection of Jesus happen?

And my answer: Of course not. Why would it? Don’t be a credulous nincompoop. People don’t just get up from being totally dead. When has that ever happened in all of human experience? Never. So if someone wants to convince me that it really happened, thry’re going to need better evidence than copies of documents. And as Sam Harris points out, that’s all we got.

Bible scholars agree that the first gospels were written decades after the life of Jesus. Decades.

And of course, we don’t have the original manuscripts. We have copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts which have thousands — literally thousands — of descrepancies between them, many of which show signs of later interpolation, which is to say that people added passages that then became part of the canon. There are whole books of the canon, like the book of Revelation, which for hundreds of years were not included because they were deemed false gospel. There are other whole books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which you probably haven’t heard of, but for centuries it was considered part of the canon, and then was later jettisoned as false gospel.

Generations of Christians lived and died being guided by gospel that is now deemed both incomplete and mistaken. Think about that. This process, this all too human process of cobbling together the supposed authoritative word of god is a very precarious basis to assert the claims of Christianity. But the truth is, even if we had multiple contemporaneaus claims of the miracles of Jesus this would not be good enough. Because miracle stories abound even in the 21st century. The devotees of the South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba ascribe all of the miracles of Jesus to him. He reads minds, he fortells the future, he heals, he raises the dead, he was born of a virgin. Sathya Sai Baba is not a fringe figure. You may not have heard of him, but they had a birthday party for him a few years ago and a million people showed up. There are vast numbers of people that think he is a living god.

So Christianity is predicated on the claim that miracle stories — exactly of the kind that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba — become especially credible when you place them in a pre-scientific religious context of the first century roman empire, decades after their supposed occurance, as attested to by copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek and largely discrepant manuscripts. We have Sathya Sai Baba’s miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eye witnesses and they don’t even merit an hour on cable television. And, yet, you put a few miracle stories in an ancient book and half the people on Earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

Actually, yes, I do.

Speaking of “largely discrepant manuscripts”, we’re going to see how the stories in the gospels are hopelessly confused as to the details of the resurrection. Here’s a helpful infographic.

This was God’s opportunity to report the facts of the case, and it resembles nothing more than a mishmash of human fabrication.

So how does Christianity paper over this? The surprising answer: By expecting you not to demand any evidence for its claims, and by telling you that you’ll be blessed if you believe without evidence. How about that?

Main ideas for this lesson

Rolling away the stone?

Let’s start at the beginning: In the morning, two Marys (and a Salome, if you believe Mark) were heading to the tomb.

Matthew 28:1 In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.

Mark 16:1 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

Other Mary: Why do I have to be ‘other Mary’?
Mary: You’re not married to Jesus.
Other Mary: Well, you’re not married to Jesus!
Mary: (silence)

I don’t know what they thought they were going to do; there was supposed to be a huge stone there. But then Matthew reports a second huge earthquake that no one else noticed, and an angel rolls away the stone.

Matthew 28:2 And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.

Already we have a fail. Round tomb stones weren’t really a thing at the time. They wouldn’t be popular until about 70 CE, which supports the idea that this was a later addition. Richard Carrier notes:

There is another reason to doubt the tomb burial that has come to my attention since I first wrote this review: the tomb blocking stone is treated as round in the Gospels, but that would not have been the case in the time of Jesus, yet it was often the case after 70 C.E., just when the gospels were being written. Amos Kloner, in “Did a Rolling Stone Close Jesus’ Tomb?” (Biblical Archaeology Review 25:5, Sep/Oct 1999, pp. 23-29, 76), discusses the archaeological evidence of Jewish tomb burial practices in antiquity. He observes that “more than 98 percent of the Jewish tombs from this period, called the Second Temple period (c. first century B.C.E. to 70 C.E.), were closed with square blocking stones” (p. 23), and only four round stones are known prior to the Jewish War, all of them blocking entrances to elaborate tomb complexes of the extremely rich (such as the tomb complex of Herod the Great and his ancestors and descendants). However, “the Second Temple period…ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. In later periods the situation changed, and round blocking stones became much more common” (p. 25).

Appearances

Jesus then appears to different people in contradictory and mutually exclusive ways. Rather than recount it, I refer to this portion of our infographic.

If that’s not enough for you, I have this PDF file from my good friend David Austin. (He should get a blog.) Click the image to download a copy for yourself.

Thomas and doubt

Jesus appears to the rest of the apostles. And since it’s John, notice the “fear of teh Jooz”. He’s always on about the Jews.

John 20:19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

Good so far, except Thomas wasn’t there. And he won’t believe it until he sees it.

John 20:24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
20:25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

Good on him. He’s demanding the kind of evidence that’s required to support a claim. That’s what a person should do.

John 20:26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
20:27 Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
20:28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.

Thomas believes, but at least he’s doing it right. He wants evidence, he gets it, and he changes his mind.

But now here’s Jesus with the kicker.

John 20:29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

Here we have it, folks. This is the one that I count as the worst verse in scripture. Jesus is saying that evidence is fine, but no evidence is just as good. Maybe even better.

By insisting that believing without evidence is somehow on a par with believing with evidence, Jesus takes the metric that rational people use to evaluate claims, and turns it on its head. If we all did this, there’s no limit to the mutually exclusive and contradictory claims we could believe. To accept this way of thinking is to abandon reason.

Imagine how irresponsible it is for a god to demand this. Here we are in our short lives, having to choose the right religion or philosophy or story among tens of thousands, and if you get it wrong, it’s no salvation for you. Those are serious consequences (which God has set out). A responsible parent would spell out the evidence for his gospel fairly clearly. God doesn’t do that. Instead, he expects you to pick one without adequate reasons, and hope you got it right. To be fair, he also is supposed to give out feelings, the nature of which can easily be misunderstood, and which are experienced by followers of all religions. Otherwise, good luck.

This theme of not needing evidence is often taken up by believers I’ve met. When I ask for evidence, they never provide it. Instead, they make excuses for why I shouldn’t expect evidence, or they tell me why I should accept substitutes for evidence (like feelings). Strangely, they don’t seem to see how this is an evasion of the responsibility to back up what they say.

Read this excerpt from The Ethics of Belief, written by William K. Clifford in 1877

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it — the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

Ask: How does the LDS Church encourage people to “avoid the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss” church doctrines?
Answers: By avoiding material that is not “inspiring”, and by labelling books and people who tell the truth about the church as “anti-Mormon”.

Ask: How is the refusing to confront doubts “one long sin against mankind”?
Answer: One of the most important things we can do in life is to advance our collective knowledge. Doing this helps create technologies that can cure illness, sustain life, and improve the quality of living. But this only works if we make reality the metric against which we compare other ideas. Accepting false beliefs means that we stop advancing, and start retreating, and this helps humankind not at all.

I’d like to take a moment and bear my testimony of doubt. Doubt is amazing! Doubt has helped me figure out what’s true and what’s false far better than faith can. Having faith just confirms what you believe, whether it’s right or not. It’s like a compass that always points in the way you’re going. What good is that? It might be okay if you’re trying to feel good about your beliefs, but if you’re trying to find out what’s true, it’s no use at all.

By contrast, doubt won’t hurt true claims (as long as you understand the kind of evidence required to establish a claim). However, it’s lethal to false ones.

Why’s it have to be snakes?

Jesus eventually jet-packed back up to heaven, but before he did, he left this instruction:

Mark 16:15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
16:17 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;
16:18 They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Poison aside, let’s talk about the snakes. This scripture has resulted in generations of pastors dying in snake-handling churches of the American South.

Snake-handling preacher Cody Coots got scared when the 6-foot long rattler bit his right hand early Monday.

Just three months ago, his father, Jamie Coots, died within minutes of being bitten by a rattlesnake during a service at his Middlesboro church.

The loss was still fresh for his family and friends, and Cody Coots, who took over for his father, had just been bitten by an even bigger rattler.

At first, “All I could think about — am I going to make it?” Coots said.

…

Jamie Coots, 42, was handling three rattlesnakes during a Saturday-night service at the church when one bit him on the right hand. Jamie Coots had survived more than half a dozen previous bites, but that night the venom quickly overwhelmed him.

His legs buckled in the bathroom at the church after he murmured “Sweet Jesus,” said Andrew Hamblin, a snake-handling minister from Tennessee who was with him.

People at the church rushed Coots home. He had made clear earlier that he did not want medical attention for a bite; his family sent an ambulance crew away as believers prayed over him.

A deputy coroner pronounced Coots dead about 90 minutes after he was bitten.

This raises all kinds of questions for me.

When someone dies from a snake bite in these churches, why don’t they take it as a sign of the victim’s lack of faith?
Why do they pray for the person to get better? Is that supposed to be some kind of Plan B, in case of lack of faith?
And where are all the poison-drinking churches? Did they used to exist, but poison worked more reliably than snakes?

Then there’s this quote:

“If you don’t understand it, don’t knock it,” said Hamblin, who was close to Coots. “We adhere to the literal interpretation of the Gospel.”

I think I do understand it. They believe the Bible, and that is a terrible and costly mistake. However, unlike most believers, they take the claims of the Bible seriously. Well, one of them.

NT Lesson 26 (Trial, crucifixion, etc.)

19 July 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“To This End Was I Born”

Matthew 26:47–27:66; Mark 14:43–15:39; Luke 22:47–23:56; John 18–19

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show contradictions and inconsistencies in the crucifixion story.

Reading

It’s just about curtains for Jesus. This lesson focuses on some of the back-and-forth bureaucracy of Jesus’ arrest and torture — all approved by God because you’ve got to torture someone. God’s unyielding sense of justice means that he can’t look upon sin with the least degree of allowance, and that means — by golly — someone’s got to get tortured. Unless torture is also a sin, which would muddy the waters a bit. However, I just checked, and according to the Bible, torture is just fine (especially if God is doing it). Isn’t that lucky.

Unlike in other lessons, where only one or two gospel writers comment on the same part of the story, here we get all four writers chiming in. And that means more contradictions, which we’ll cover in today’s lesson.

Contradictions should weaken a person’s confidence in the Bible. After all, if the people best-equipped to tell us what happened can’t get the story straight, then what chance do we have of finding out the details of the story? Which writer should we believe, or should we go with ‘none’? This was God’s opportunity to get his message to humankind, so how could it be that his writers muffed it? Shouldn’t this put paid to the veracity of the Bible?

According to many Christians I’ve spoken with, the answer is no — contradictions actually enhance the credibility of the Bible. The argument goes like this: even eyewitnesses see different parts of the same story, so some differences would be expected, and that’s what we’re seeing in the Bible. The real problem would be if all the versions of the gospels were written the same, because that would mean all the writers were copying over each others’ shoulders. But the accounts differ, so that makes the Bible more credible. Isn’t that something? The more contradiction, the more credibility. Which means that the Bible would be most credible if the four gospels contradicted each other completely.

Naturally, this is not how it works. When I rob banks with my friends and get rounded up by the police, we often tell them that we were out together at the time of the crime. But then when I say we were shooting pool, Lefty says we were eating at a diner, and Shorty says we were over at his place, this does not increase their confidence that we are telling the truth. (Please note: I have never robbed a bank, and this is a fictional example.) The more contradictions we find in a story, the greater the likelihood that we’re hearing a fictional story that grew in the retelling. Multiple versions of the Jesus stories wove their way through the early Christian communities, and ended up being compiled in the books we have now.

Main ideas for this lesson

Why would Judas have needed to identify Jesus?

This is odd: Judas has promised to reveal Jesus’ identity to the chief priests, Pharisees, and soldiers.

Matthew 26:48 Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.
26:49 And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and kissed him.
26:50 And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus and took him.

“You know that guy you’ve been talking to and arguing with day after day? The guy that you’ve tried to kill on numerous occasions? I know you suddenly have no idea what he looks like, so I’ll point him out to you.”

Seriously, it’s very odd. One week ago, Jesus was coming through the gates of the city with everyone celebrating him by waving palm fronds. Now, no one can recognise him.

And what was the deal with kissing? You don’t have to kiss him!

Robe colour

Did the soldiers put a purple robe on Jesus?

John 19:2 And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe,

or was it scarlet?

Matthew 27:28 And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.

Judas’ death

In the book of Matthew, Judas hanged himself.

Matthew 27:5 And he [Judas] cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

But in Acts, he died from falling down and bursting, which is a revolting problem that thankfully doesn’t happen very often these days.

Acts 1:18 Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.

Thief banter

What did the thieves say to Jesus on the cross? Matthew and Mark say they both reviled him.

Matthew 27:44 The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.

Mark 15:32 And they that were crucified with him reviled him.

But Luke rewrote one of the thieves as a sympathetic character who got his own turn-around arc.

Luke 23:42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.

I could go on about the contradictions involved in shuttling Jesus back and forth between Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate, but instead I’ll just refer you here for this and many other contradictions.

No custom of releasing a prisoner

Pilate is trying to get Jesus released, so he falls back on the old ‘release one prisoner at Passover’ custom.

John 18:39 But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews?
18:40 Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.

The problem here is that there’s no record of the Romans releasing prisoners at Passover (some discussion here). Or could it be that this is a Hebrew custom? If so, it’s not recorded anywhere in the Old Testament.

But there is absolutely no evidence that the pardoning or release of a prisoner had ever occurred, even once, before the time of Pilate. Certainly it would have been mentioned somewhere in the Old Testament if it had been a rite connected with the celebration of the Passover.

The function of this verse appears to be to shift the blame for Jesus’ death from the chief priests and onto the Jewish people generally. And that’s unfortunate, as we’re about to see.

Blaming the Jews

We’ve mentioned John’s anti-semitism, but the real prize goes to Matthew.

Matthew 27:24 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
27:25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

This one verse has been instrumental in the persecution of the Jewish people for centuries. If they’re the ones responsible, then persecution begins to look less like bigotry and hatred, and more like God’s judgment. Convenient, isn’t it?

Kyroot comments:

Over the centuries, the blame for Jesus’s death grew from the people who were present at the sentencing and their children, to all of the Jews alive on earth at that time, to all Jews who have ever lived. It paved the way for antisemitism, discrimination, ostracism, and ultimately to the Holocaust. And all of this, or at least a very large share of it, because the author of Matthew saw fit to add this obviously fictional statement.

The writer of Heretication adds an interesting angle to this: Have you ever wondered why Jesus is always portrayed as a white dude? Probably because Jews had been vilified for so long that portraying Jesus as “one of those Jews” was unthinkable.

The justification for Jewish persecutions through the centuries has been a passage from the Matthew gospel. After Pilate has denied responsibility for sentencing Jesus to death, the Jewish people are quoted as saying “…His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). A similar theme may be found at 1 Thessalonians 2:15. In Christian eyes this meant that the Jews as a race were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. In time, the principle of collective guilt would open the way to the assignment of other imaginary forms of guilt. The fact that Jesus had been a Jew, as his parents and his followers had been, was overlooked. In Christian art the Jews were depicted as ugly and deformed, while Jesus was a handsome European.
In Western European art Jesus’ family were often depicted with blond hair and blue eyes. The suggestion that Jesus might have looked anything like a typical Mediterranean Jew was tantamount to blasphemy. He was invariably depicted wearing at least a loincloth, not only to protect emerging concepts of Christian modesty, but also to hide the uncomfortable fact that he had been circumcised, as all Jewish boys were (and still are), at the age of 8 days (Luke 2:21).

And that’s how a guy who probably looked like this:

ended up looking like this.

No, seriously, I actually know someone who’s selling the above image as a picture of Sexy Jesus.

Hmm — not so many funny memes in this lesson. Unleash the floodgates!

Here’s one that’s topical:

You know, it’s not just Jesus. Santa’s a white guy, too.

Of course, this really speaks to how our conception of God (Jesus, religious heroes, etc.) is really just a projection of how we perceive ourselves. Michele Bachmann didn’t say this, but it’s the next stop on the train.

Adoptionism

What’s behind this cry from the cross?

Matthew 27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Was he feeling down? Was he quoting Psalm 22, in an effort to be literary?

My friend David Austin (personal communication) has pointed out something I hadn’t known about before.

There was a concept concerning Jesus known as “Adoptionism“. In this scenario, Jesus was “chosen” to be “adopted” as god’s son because he was a “sinless” person. God somehow “entered” Jesus at his baptism, and allowed him to perform amazing miracles etc. However when dying on the cross, god had to leave Jesus (because gods are immortal, and cannot die) and let Jesus die as a normal human. This accounts for Jesus’ final words “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?”, as god left his mortal body.

An intriguing twist.

Earthquake and zombies

Ah, Matthew. The things he comes up with. When Jesus dies, he writes in a huge earthquake, and people coming out of their graves — events not reported by anyone else, either in the Bible or out of it.

Matthew 27:51 And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;
27:52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,
27:53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

Don’t you think that if this had really happened, it would be kind of a big deal? Wouldn’t someone have noticed, and reported it somewhere outside of the Bible?

Additional lesson ideas

Thy speech bewrayeth thee

There’s a little piece of English language history in Peter’s denial of Jesus.

Matthew 26:73 And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee.

Bewrayeth? Surely that’s betrayeth, ¿no?

No. The two words seem kind of similar in sound and meaning, but bewray is a bit different. It’s archaic, and it meant “to reveal, expose,” as with a secret.

That’s something that happens in language: when words are passing out of fashion, other similar words can step up and take over. Or a healthy word can push another word out of the way.

Well, I think that’s all the time we have for this week. Let’s have a hymn. This was one of the Thompson Twins’ best songs — see if you can spot the relevance to this lesson.

See you next week.

NT Lesson 25 (Gethsemane)

4 July 2015 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

“Not My Will, But Thine, Be Done”

Matthew 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42; Luke 22:39–46

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To explain that the concept of the Atonement makes no sense and is immoral.

Reading

Jesus is about to be captured, so he heads to the Garden of Gethsemane with his disciples. They fall asleep, but Jesus can’t bear to wake them because they’re so cute when they’re sleeping like that! But it’s Atonement time, so Jesus knows it’s time to…

Apparently, in a way that’s so amazing that we humans can’t possibly understand it, Jesus suffered for a while, and this meant that everyone’s sin was paid for. It was an infinite atonement and an infinite sacrifice; it stretched forward and backwards in time to pay for all the sins of — not just every human who ever lived or will live — but it also paid for the sins of everyone on all the planets in all the solar systems in all the galaxies in the universe.

It sounds like the whole process took about an hour.

Main ideas for this lesson

Jesus tries to pike out

Jesus falls on his face and prays, asking if the whole torture-and-death thing is really necessary.

Matthew 26:39 And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.

This one’s for all the trinitarians.

Actually, Jesus’ question was a pretty good one. Why was Jesus’ torture and death necessary?

Let’s take that up in a minute. But first, blood.

Blood from every pore?

There’s a rather ambiguous simile here in Luke. Sweat, or blood?

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.

Mormons have taken the blood idea and run with it. In particular, the D&C takes the “blood from every pore” idea very seriously.

D&C 19:18 Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—

Well, this verse seems to have been a later addition. It doesn’t appear in early versions of Luke. Kyroot explains the implications in reason 171.

These verses do not appear in the oldest manuscripts of Luke and are clearly a later addition. This presents two problems. First, it is another example of tampering with the scriptures, one that was detected only because it occurred later than the dates of the earliest manuscripts. Keep in mind that there is a sizable time gap between the original manuscripts and the oldest ones that have been recovered, so many other examples of scripture tampering may exist but cannot be identified at this time.

Second, it presents an unlikely scenario, for if Jesus was fully divine, he would have known all that was about to happen, would be prepared for it, and would therefore not be in a mental state of agony requiring assistance from an angel.

Problems with the Atonement

The story of Jesus having to suffer and die so everyone could be forgiven of sins has been around for a long time. We’ve all heard about it so often that we hardly think about it.

Once you do think about it, however, the incoherence becomes obvious. And there are so many ways that this story fails to hold together that I’ve made a rather long list.

There are other lists out there — a similar one is at Patheos — but here’s mine.

The suffering was unnecessary

Why didn’t God just forgive everyone? He could have.

The idea comes up in this early episode of Mr Deity:

Instead, he decided to have his son tortured and murdered so he could feel okay about having a relationship with us again. Isn’t that a bit strange?

There have been some attempts to answer this, and the responses center around God’s fairness and sense of justice. Simply forgiving everyone would have short-circuited God’s sense of justice — and yet, strangely, punishing some other guy and then forgiving everyone was totes okay.

These responses can be dealt with very simply. Just keep asking this question: Was it possible for God to find a way to forgive everyone in a way that

didn’t violate God’s sense of justice?
didn’t upset God’s sense of equilibrium?
didn’t involve Jesus’ torture and death?

If so, why didn’t he? And if not, then he’s not all-powerful.

Another line of explanation says that God had to have Jesus tortured and killed because doing so fulfilled some greater “principle”, and this principle could not have been fulfilled in any other way.
If that’s the case, then why worship God? Again, he’s not all powerful, since there are principles that are more all-mighty than he is. Why not just worship the “principles”, since God is clearly subordinate to them?

The nature of the “debt” is never explained

What exactly is this debt? People keep describing this in terms of “Jesus paying the debt for sin” or “paying the price for sin”.

From the LDS manual:

Elder Marion G. Romney: He paid the debt for your personal sins and for the personal sins of every living soul that ever dwelt upon the earth or that ever will dwell in mortality upon the earth.

And so it’s very common for Mormons to use a monetary metaphor. Here’s the one suggested by the LDS manual.

Boyd Packer’s story: “The Mediator”
Elder Boyd K. Packer used a parable to teach about how the Atonement of Jesus Christ frees us from sin as we repent and obey the commandments. You may want to share this parable to help class members understand the need for the Atonement.

A bit of background: The late Boyd Packer was the church’s foremost homophobe. He inveighed against threats to the church, notably feminists, homosexuals, and “so-called scholars or intellectuals”. He was in church leadership for 50 years, and during that time fostered the kind of anti-gay climate that doubtless led to the suicides of numerous LGBT Mormon kids. He decried “Satan and his substitute counterfeits for marriage”, and denied that homosexuality was preset, saying, “Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our father.”

Upon his death, the world instantly became a better place.

Anyway, if somehow you’re unfamiliar with the “mediator” analogy, here’s the video.

Or you don’t like being bored and lied to, here’s the short version.

Person A incurs a debt to Person B, and can’t repay it.
Person B threatens to throw person A into prison.
Person C steps in, pays the debt, and allows Person A to repay on more manageable terms.

Ask: In this metaphor, who are Persons A, B, and C?
Answer: A and C are a snap. Person A is all of us, and Person C is Jesus.

But what often gets glossed over is the identity of Person B. Who is it?

It can’t reasonably be anyone other than God. So now we have a situation where God wants to throw you in prison, and Jesus intervenes. But Jesus and God are supposed to be on the same side. Instead, they’re playing good cop / bad cop. Why the games? This situation, which we all seem to have been railroaded into at birth, is a set-up.

Ransom

Jesus’ sacrifice is described as a “ransom”. From Joseph Smith, via President Newsroom:

The glorious news, the glad tidings is that Christ our Lord has come to earth, offered Himself as a ransom from sin and made available deliverance from death and hell.

A ransom to whom? Who is demanding this sacrifice? Again, if God is in control here and set up this system, as believers claim, then God is in the role of a kidnapper. I don’t want to worship a kidnapper.

And another similar point: when you pay a ransom, you don’t get the money back. The kidnapper keeps it. Kyroot again (point 63):

The central concept of Christianity is that Jesus died on the cross as a final sacrifice to allow his followers to receive it vicariously and thus be washed of sin for entry into heaven.

But whereas a sacrifice means losing something permanently, Jesus lost nothing. He came back three days later good as new. So, in effect, there was no sacrifice.

The foreknowledge of Jesus is another problem. There he was, telling everyone how his body would be destroyed, and he would rise again in three days. If he knew that he was going to suffer for a few hours, be dead for a weekend, and then become a god and sit at the right hand of the father for eternity, then the whole proposition begins to look less like a sacrifice and more of a career move.

Many people suffer intense pain for a lot longer than Jesus reportedly did. Pseople with cancer or AIDS suffer for months and months; Jesus just had a rough couple of days.

Nothing more should be required

If God demanded a sacrifice and got it, then why should anything more be required of me, like belief or obedience? God’s got the sacrifice he wanted, and we’re done.

When I pay off a debt (say, a mortgage), then my obligation to the bank is over when the money is paid, and there’s nothing more for me to do. The bank doesn’t demand that I “believe” in it or “accept” it into my heart.

In short, the sin-debt metaphor maks no sense. It makes me wonder if people who use this metaphor even understand the idea of ‘money’.

We “can’t understand”

When I point out these inconsistencies, believers respond that the workings of this are somehow “incomprehensible”. They respond that we can’t “understand” it.

Elder James E. Talmage taught: “Christ’s agony in the garden is unfathomable by the finite mind, both as to intensity and cause. . . . He struggled and groaned under a burden such as no other being who has lived on earth might even conceive as possible. It was not physical pain, nor mental anguish alone, that caused him to suffer such torture as to produce an extrusion of blood from every pore; but a spiritual agony of soul such as only God was capable of experiencing. . . . In that hour of anguish Christ met and overcame all the horrors that Satan, ‘the prince of this world,’ could inflict. . . . In some manner, actual and terribly real though to man incomprehensible, the Savior took upon Himself the burden of the sins of mankind from Adam to the end of the world” ( Jesus the Christ, 3rd ed. [1916], 613).

Now this is not quite right. This is the central tenet of Christianity, so if any element of Christian doctrine should be well-understood, this should be it. Yet even professional Christianity explainers can’t explain it satisfactorily, often kicking the can down the road and saying that we’ll understand it “someday”.

If it can’t be understood, fine. It can’t be understood. So don’t keep telling it to others like you do understand it.

These are the kinds of things that believers never seem to think through. It makes no sense, but they don’t seem to notice.

Vicarious suffering for sin is immoral

Sacrificing oneself for someone else is a very common theme in literature. It shows up in everything from A Tale of Two Cities to Frozen.

That’s one thing. But in Christianity, this idea of making an innocent scapegoat pay for the consequences of your actions is a massive evasion of responsibility.

What must go through a believer’s mind? “I can avoid the consequences of my actions by having some innocent guy get tortured? Sign me up!”

As Christopher Hitchens said:

I’ll take your place on the scaffold, but I can’t take away your responsibilities. I can’t forgive what you did, I can’t say you didn’t do it, I can’t make you washed clean. The name for that in primitive middle eastern society was “scapegoating.” You pile the sins of the tribe on a goat, you drive that goat into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. And you think you’ve taken away the sins of the tribe. This is a positively immoral doctrine that abolishes the concept of personal responsibility on which all ethics and all morality must depend.

For that matter, when in the world has human sacrifice ever been a solution for anything? Hitchens again:

You said in a debate with Richard Dawkins, I have it down, you said that the great thing about God is He knows what it’s like to lose a son. Now I want you ladies and gentlemen to ponder that expression for just a moment. First, it’s self-evidently—if the story is true, which I don’t think it is—it’s self-evidently not the case, even in the narrative. He doesn’t lose a son, He lends one. He doesn’t offer one because no one’s demanded it. There’s no problem that has so far been identified in the human species that demands a human sacrifice. For what problem, for what ill is this a cure? There’s no argument, there’s no evidence that there is. No, it’s imposed upon you. I’m doing this because the prophets said I would and I’m going to have the boy tortured to death in public to fulfill ancient screeds of Bronze Age Judaism. But wait, I don’t want it. I don’t need it. I don’t feel better for it. I feel very uneasy about it. Well that’s a pity, because then you’re going to be cast into eternal fire. This is no way to talk. I don’t like to be addressed in that tone of voice.

The idea of the Atonement — putting our sins onto a scapegoat — makes absolutely no sense, even on its own terms. The story doesn’t hold together on any level. It does, however, make a lot of sense in terms of cultural evolution. For someone who’s in a culture that accepts the idea of animal sacrifice, the sacrifice of God’s son would be a natural extension of the idea.

Thankfully, we do not live in such a culture. I do not accept that human sacrifice is moral, and I don’t accept that I must become complicit in the torture and death of an innocent person to become cleansed of my imperfections.

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

Holy the Ghost

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 23 (Last Supper)

21 June 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“Love One Another, As I Have Loved You”

Luke 22:1–38; John 13–15

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show readers that Jesus is neither the way, the truth, nor the life.

Reading

Things are starting to come apart for Jesus and the Disciples. One member of the group is thinking of going solo, due to creative differences. The rest of the disciples are hiding out with Jesus during Passover, which — as you’ll remember — is a celebration of the time Jehovah killed a bunch of children because he disagreed with Egypt’s immigration policy.

While there, Jesus starts a tradition called the sacrament, which was originally Jesus’ flesh and blood, but thanks to latter-day revelation is now white bread and room-temperature tap water.

The centrepiece of this reading is a rambling, incoherent discourse in which Jesus lies to his followers about the power of prayer, says some nice things about love, and opens up about his relationship with his dad. So let’s get to that.

Main ideas for this lesson

Sacrament

Here’s where Jesus encourages ritual cannibalism.

Luke 22:17 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves:
22:18 For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.
22:19 And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.
22:20 Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.

You might remember that Jesus explained this earlier, in more blood-curdling terms.

John 6:53 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
6:54 Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
6:55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
6:56 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

Mormons quite sensibly refrain from interpreting this literally.

Unlike our Catholic friends, who think it’s very literal. Some Catholics threatened noted atheist PZ Myers with violence when he floated the idea of desecrating a cracker.

That’s right. Crazy Christian fanatics right here in our own country have been threatening to kill a young man over a cracker.

…

I find this all utterly unbelievable. It’s like Dark Age superstition and malice, all thriving with the endorsement of secular institutions here in 21st century America. It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart.

The episode became known as Crackergate, and the resulting brouhaha surrounding the disrespect of a cracker is indicative of the fervour that believers are able to generate, and the madness of supernatural belief.

Washing of feet and the Second Anointing

Washing someone’s feet seems like a strange thing to do, though it could be symbolic of an act of service. Jesus strips down, and makes with the towel.

John 13:4 He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself.
13:5 After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.
13:6 Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet?
13:7 Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.
13:8 Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.
13:9 Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.
13:10 Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.

The JST erroneously claims that this was a Mosaic ritual, but no record of this exists.

Some Latter-day Saints may not realise this, but foot-washing is part of a semi-secret (sorry, sacred) and recently rebooted ritual called the Second Anointing. One man who has undergone this ritual, Tom Phillips, has spoken out about it. His interview with John Dehlin is long, but worth the listen.

Love

Modern Christians agree: If there’s one thing Jesus was all about, it was the lerv.

John 13:34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
13:35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

Love, love, love. (Except when Jesus is condemning people to eternal punishment for not believing in him.)

I like love, and I’m glad there’s something in the Bible about loving people. But in the end, it doesn’t matter to believers. Whenever you have a common belief or practice that contradicts scripture, the common belief or practice wins every time.

There’s a function to these ‘love’ verses. I liken it to poison. If you want to poison an animal, you can’t just throw it the poison and hope it eats it. You have to hide the poison in some kind of food the animal will like. In the same way, these ‘love’ scriptures provide cover for the nastier bits — of which there are plenty — so that people will gulp them down while they’re gulping down the good bits.

Anything?

Ask: Were there any restrictions or conditions on what Jesus would let people do if they believed in him?
Answer: Nope.

John 14:12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
14:13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
14:14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

And:

John 15:6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
15:7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.

It would only be later, when people realised that it wasn’t working, that they would lard Jesus’ promise up with conditions and out-clauses. We’ll see those in future lessons.

Friendship and obedience

Jesus continues:

John 15:13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

I think this might be true, and we can search for lots of heartbreaking examples of heroic people who have paid with their lives to try to rescue others. Click this link for a Google search of all the latest examples of human courage in action.

What’s different is that, unlike Jesus, many of these people died without a belief that they would live again, and they did it anyway. It makes Jesus, with a knowledge of his immortality, seem cheap by comparison. (We’ll see in a following lesson how Jesus’ sacrifice would not have been a sacrifice at all.)

But then Jesus cheapens the moment further with this gem:

John 15:14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.

“If you want to be my friend, you have to do everything I command you.” Seriously, what kind of friendship depends on one-sided obedience? That’s not a friendship; that’s a master-and-servant relationship.

Persecution complex

Many people belong to organisations or movements they consider to be “true”. That leads to a conflict: If the movement is so obviously true, why don’t more people accept it? For conspiracy theorists, the answer usually has something to do with sheeple being stupid and so on. But Jesus has an answer: they hate you because they hated me.

John 15:18 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.
15:19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

And if they hate Jesus, then they hate God.

John 15:23 He that hateth me hateth my Father also.

So that means that by the transitive property: if they hate you, they hate God. Get the picture? And so Christians comfort themselves by thinking, “They don’t hate us; they hate God.”

Unless you’re a very special kind of stupid, in which case you take it to the next level: Rejection of God = hatred of God = evidence that it’s true!

I don’t hate concepts, but if I did, it would be because they’re noxious and harmful. Gods are a lot more harmful than leprechauns — partially due to the fact that more people believe in them — and that’s why I single out theism for special treatment.

Actually, I do hate leprechauns.

Additional lesson ideas

Then why did you tell me?

If someone hears the word and rejects it, then they’re condemned.

John 15:22 If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin.

That means missionaries — by their own logic — are doing little more than walking around condemning everyone they communicate with. What kind of irresponsible jerk does that?

Contradictions: Cock

Jesus said that the cock would crow once before Peter denied him.

John 13:37 Peter said unto him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake.
13:38 Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice.

Unless you’re in Mark, in which case the cock would crow twice.

Mark 14:30 And Jesus saith unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.

There have been attempts to explain this, but this is just papering over the contradiction.

I do not care whether ancient readers would have considered the cock crowing stories contradictory; I care whether we can regard all four as consistent with reality.

Contradictions: Demonic possession

Funny thing about John: he never mentions Satanic possession. In the other three gospels and Acts, you’ve got evil spirits infesting people all the time — it was how they explained mental illness. Not in John. No exorcisms there.

But there is one story with a good old-fashioned possession: when Satan “enters into” Judas. The only problem is when this happened. In Luke, it happens early on, when Judas first meets with the chief priests.

Luke 22:3 Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve.
22:4 And he went his way, and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray him unto them.
22:5 And they were glad, and covenanted to give him money.
22:6 And he promised, and sought opportunity to betray him unto them in the absence of the multitude.

But in John, it happens at the Last Supper.

John 13:23 Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.
13:24 Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake.
13:25 He then lying on Jesus’ breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it?
13:26 Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.
13:27 And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.

WHICH IS IT CHRISTIANITY

The story of Judas raises the question of theological determinism, which asks: If God knows what’s going to happen, do we still have agency?

God’s willing that Allison take the dog for a walk is thus necessary and sufficient for Allison taking the dog for a walk. But if this is true, it is hard to see how Allison could have free will.

So is Judas responsible for betraying Jesus, when that event was foretold by a god who can’t be wrong? Foreknowledge precludes agency.

People sometimes tell me: No, it doesn’t. Just because God knows what’s going to happen doesn’t mean that he’s making it happen. It could just be that God knows our tendencies perfectly well, and so can predict with perfect accuracy what we’re going to do, without causing us to do it.

To which I would respond: It doesn’t matter how he knows it. If he knows for any reason that Allison will walk her dog, and he is never wrong, then Allison will be unable to not walk her dog. Agency is curtailed by foreknowledge.

In Judas’s case, the problem is especially vexing because not only was it (supposedly) predicted that someone would betray Jesus, the entire plan more or less depended on Jesus being betrayed. Judas was helping the whole plan come off.

As for this latter point, the Bible has it covered. It seems that even if you do what was prophesied — something which someone had to do — you’ll still get punished if it’s you.

Luke 22:22 And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!

What we have, then, is a god who punishes people for enabling a plan which the god himself put into motion. This is unjust.

That being the case, it seems that Judas’s image is undergoing a renovation.

As a result of this, many within the Church (and a significant number within the Roman Catholic Church) are now calling for Judas to be finally made a saint. Of course, there is still great controversy over this but one day this may well happen. However, whether or not Judas is made a saint on earth, there are a significant number of Christians who believe that, along with the rest of the disciples, he is now in God’s nearer presence as a result of God’s grace and forgiveness, and as a result of his doing God’s will, at great cost to himself – and his reputation – over the last 2000 years.

Let’s finish with a closing hymn. There’s a very sweet image in this reading, depicting the relationship between Jesus and John.

John 13:23 Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.

So it seems fitting to listen to “John My Beloved” by Sufjan Stevens. Not that it’s that topical, but it’s a really beautiful and sad album, and I happen to be listening to it with my son as I’m typing this. Happy Sunday.

NT Lesson 22 (More parables)

13 June 2015 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“Inherit the Kingdom Prepared for You”

Matthew 25

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage readers to develop their gifts of critical thinking, and avoid prejudice.

Reading

The reading this time is from Matthew, and Matthew alone. Usually there are some repeats in the other gospels, but not this time; Matthew’s the only one who records these things. Given Matthew’s propensity to make stuff up, this probably means that it’s a collection of stories that were around at the time, and not anything that Jesus might have said.

This lesson is brought to you by the number 10, because we’re treating these parables in this lesson:

Parable of the ten virgins
Parable of the ten talents
Parable of the sheep and the goats (possibly ten of each)

Main ideas for this lesson

Parable of the ten virgins

This one doesn’t make a lot of sense at first.

Matthew 25:1 Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
25:2 And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.
25:3 They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:
25:4 But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

So what’s this story about? A bunch of slippery virgins? Are they all for the groom?

Not exactly. When you were part of the wedding party, you waited with a torch. If you didn’t have a torch, you might have been a wedding crasher. And those torches needed to be topped up with oil, or else they’d go out.

By the way, if you’re teaching this class in an actual Gospel Doctrine class, you’re meant to bring a container of oil, and when someone gives a suggestion, you’re supposed to add a droplet of oil to the container.

If you are using the jar and the oil or colored water (see the attention activity), explain that the jar represents the lamps in the parable. Put a drop of oil or water into the jar each time a class member suggests what we can do to prepare.

This is meant to teach class members that everything they do contributes only an insignificant amount to the oil level.

Alternatively, you can squirt class members with oil, and tell them it will heal them of their infirmities.

Matthew 25:5 While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.
25:6 And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
25:7 Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.
25:8 And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.
25:9 But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.

I suppose sharing was out of the question.

Matthew 25:10 And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.
25:11 Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
25:12 But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.
25:13 Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.

While I was on my mission, I had an investigator ask, “Does everyone who gets baptised stay active?” I told him, no, some don’t.

“Well, what percentage stays active?” he asked.

At the time, it seemed to me to run about half and half, so that’s what I said. And for justification, I made a rather deft (I thought at the time) link to the Parable of the Ten Virgins. Five out of the ten were ready, five weren’t; there you go, fifty percent. Isn’t it great how you can find a scriptural justification for a figure you just pulled out of your ass?

What I didn’t know was that the facts were much worse: As mentioned in an earlier lesson, only about a third of Latter-day Saints are active, according to the church’s information expert.

What if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were a congregation of just 100 people? This is what Blaine Maxfield, chief information officer of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and managing director of the church’s IT department, invited attendees of the LDSTech Conference to imagine Thursday morning at the University of Utah.

Other notable statistics included:

35 are adult males

42 are adult females

13 are in Primary

10 are youths

36 attend sacrament meeting on a weekly basis

five can’t read or write

Wait, what?

We’re not supposed to know this, of course. The information was quickly redacted in the Deseret News article, but saved on the Net.

Isn’t this a bit of a giveaway that even members don’t really find meetings worthwhile? Members frequently talk about all the good things the church does for them, but it doesn’t look like it here. If the church really improved people’s lives, you wouldn’t be able to keep people out! Instead, you have to patiently coax them into baptism, and then you have to run around after them to keep them active. If the church were true or practical or useful, it would be more obviously so.

Of course, just like in the parable, the virgins get the blame; they don’t make it because they’re not prepared. But in real life, people don’t keep going to church because it’s a rather tedious and unpleasant waste of time where you’re made to feel bad about yourself. And you’re supporting a hate group that works tirelessly to deny rights to people. Plus the fact that it isn’t actually… you know… true. There are some very good reasons to stop participating in the LDS Church, and they have nothing to do with oil.

Parable of the talents

So, just a bit of context. Jesus is expanding on his earlier parable, where he explains that he gives to give more to people who have done well for themselves — and by the way, if someone doesn’t want him to be king, then he’s going to kill them.

Luke 19:26 For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.
19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.

Jesus hasn’t changed. He’s still the maniac he was in the Old Testament.

Matthew 25:14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.
25:15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.
25:16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.
25:17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.
25:18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.
25:19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.
25:20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.
25:21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
25:22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.
25:23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

Capitalism FTW!

Side note: One of my Russian professors at BYU was making a defence of socialism in class — hypothetical, mind you! — and told us that none of the parables of Jesus ever advanced capitalism. I responded with the Parable of the Ten Talents. He reflected, and retracted the claim. Fun at BYU.

Matthew 25:24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:
25:25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.
Maybe he was afraid of getting killed, because he’d heard about the previous version of this parable. Just saying.
25:26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:
25:27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.
25:28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
25:29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
25:30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The LDS manual has a teaching idea.

Give each class member a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. Ask them to write down one or two of their talents or gifts along with at least one specific thing they will do in the next few weeks to use them in the service of others.

Ask: What will God do to you if you do not increase your talents?
Answer: Cast you into outer darkness, apparently.

Maybe it’s worth asking, though. What talents do you have? Which ones kept you in the church for so long, and which ones got you out? For me, my patience, tolerance for ambiguity, and my sense of social cohesion kept me in for far longer than they should have.

It’s fairly common for ex-Mormons to beat themselves up a bit, post-deconversion. How could I have been fooled for so long? How did I not see the con? Why did I stay in for so long? But we all had our reasons, and in some cases, these reasons were brought on by the good things about us. We should value them. They made us what we are today, even if they once had less-than-salubrious effects. And we should also value the things that got us out, including critical thinking, skepticism, willingness to laugh at those who take themselves too seriously, and regard for our own way of thinking over what others will think. (We might have learned some of these things in church, too.)

Parable of the sheep and the goats

I admit that goats are weird and creepy.

But are they so terrible that Jesus had to make a parable with them as a villain?

Matthew 25:31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
25:32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
25:33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Wow. What happens to the goats?

Matthew 25:41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

This is just another reference Jesus made to sending people into everlasting fire.

Let’s just take a moment and reflect on a group of people who have been the targets of prejudice in times past. While things have improved for them, they are still sometimes misunderstood even today. I’m talking about… the left-handed.

The Bible pretty consistently favours right-handers over left.

Ecclesastes 10:2 (King James Version)
A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.

When does the Bible talk about how great someone’s left hand is? Never. Left-handers were considered “sinister” — the word sinister even means ‘left-handed’. Just one more form of prejudice that the Bible writers found acceptable.

Ye have done it unto me

Okay, now for a change of pace. You know that I spend a lot of effort bashing away at the Standard Works. I do this because, frankly, they’re terrible and they teach bad things. They don’t deserve their reputation for teaching kindness and decency.

On the other hand, I have to give credit where credit is due, and here’s one of the best scriptures in the lot.

Matthew 25:34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
25:35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
25:36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
25:37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
25:38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
25:39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
25:40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

A message missed by those who worship Republican Jesus.

Condescending Wonka

Lucy and Linus

Stephen Colbert perhaps said it best.

It’s great that Jesus encouraged love and generosity. On the other hand, it seems hypocritical of Jesus to teach love and generosity, and then in the very next verse threaten people with eternal torture in fire. (I might say: If Jesus tortures even one of the least of my brethren in fire for eternity, he has done it unto me.) But then this inconsistency is to be expected in a completely made-up story cobbled together over hundreds of years. Thank goodness it’s all a myth.

Let’s finish with a closing hymn. See you next week.

NT Lesson 21 (Second Coming)

7 June 2015 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

“What Is the Sign of Thy Coming?”

Joseph Smith—Matthew [Matthew 24]

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To explain why Jesus’ return is a failed prophecy, and to show the foolishness of waiting and hoping for the end of the world

Reading

This lesson is about the end of the world. As we all know, Jesus is coming back to kill billions of people (but more of this in the lesson on the Revelation) and usher in his earthly kingdom. Everyone’s been waiting for it for quite a while.

Of course, as we’ve already seen, Jesus taught that he was coming back during the lifetimes of people who were still alive then. And later on, we’ll see how Paul had to hose down the end-of-the-world stuff. “Oh, boy! He’s coming soon!” they said. Two thousand years later, and they’re still saying “Oh, boy! He’s coming soon!”

Still, people wait for the end of the world — in some cases, with an eagerness that any normal person would find unseemly. I guess a lot of people are waiting for Jesus to come back and tell everybody that they had the right religion and everyone else was wrong. Kind of like in this South Park clip.

As for me and my generation, we got told that we were the final generation, held in reserve for the end times, and how valiant we must have been!

Little did we know, we were actually a group of mammals who were born like groups of mammals before us. Which is still pretty great, you know, because mammals.

Still, we thought the end was going to come any day! When you don’t expect it! (Surely someone is expecting it every day.) If God was saying back in Joseph Smith’s time that the day was at the doors, then surely by now we must be in the latter days! It’s even in the name of the church, right? Latter-day Saints?

Then Boyd Packer came and said, “Actually…”

The end is not near, senior LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer said Saturday.

Today’s youths can look forward to “getting married, having a family, seeing your children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren,” Packer told more than 20,000 Mormons gathered in the giant LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City.

Well, now what do I do with all this food storage?

On the other hand, maybe Jesus has already returned.

Teaching tip of the day

A helpful tip from the LDS Gospel Doctrine manual: Don’t just make up a crap answer when you get a question about the made-up crap in the Bible!

Suggestion for teaching: A call to teach does not require that you know everything about the gospel, so you should not feel embarrassed if a class member asks a question that you cannot answer. Instead of making up an answer, admit that you do not know and offer to try to find an answer.

…that someone else has made up. But it will be a correlated someone. Leave it to the professional apologists, kid.

Try to find an answer? There isn’t just one answer to lots of gospel questions because the whole thing is made up from top to bottom.

Why shouldn’t you make up an answer? When has that not been what everyone does? That’s all Joseph Smith did. That’s all any prophet or apologist does — come up with some kind of answer that will satisfy the believing and save the story.

Seriously, when you bring up a discrepancy with a believer, what’s the first thing they try to do? Quick, come up with an answer — whether it’s scriptural or not! Anything that comes to hand will do, and if it sounds right, then it must be right, because the gospel is right. Right?

Look, it’s all very well that the Church try to rein in the impulse to conduct on-the-spot apologetics, but they’re fighting a very strong and well-trained urge — and one that for many people is the quickest way they have of resolving the conflict and putting cognitive dissonance back to sleep.

Main ideas for this lesson

Are the number of earthquakes increasing?

For signs of the end times, Jesus names things that are going on more or less constantly. Smart move, Jesus.

Matthew 24:7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

In church, I sometimes heard about how earthquakes were increasing exponentially as we approached the Last Days. Are they? Not really.

No, the number of earthquakes is not increasing compared with the recorded history, according to data from the US Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center.
The USGS estimates that several million earthquakes occur in the world each year. Many go undetected because they hit remote areas or have very small magnitudes. There are more seismographs installed worldwide every year, so more earthquakes can be detected. However, the number of large earthquakes (magnitude 6.0 and greater) has stayed relatively constant.

Cecil Adams, in this Straight Dope column, points out that natural disasters — earthquakes aside — may be increasing because of climate change, and because we count the ones that affect humans. Urbanisation means more of those.

You see where it gets tricky — the definition of natural disaster is unavoidably tied to the number of people affected and/or the value of the damage done, both of which will naturally increase as the earth’s population and wealth do, and of course wealth and population aren’t evenly distributed worldwide. And that brings us to the other big part of our growing vulnerability to disasters: urban migration in developing countries means denser populations, which often goes hand in hand with quickly-assembled, not overly sturdy housing. The parts of the world where this is most common tend to have largely informal economies, in which the enforcement of building-code regulations may not be a top priority. All this makes it much more likely that a serious meteorological or seismic event will meet the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance’s criteria for a disaster: ten or more people killed and at least 100 injured, evacuated, displaced, or left homeless. By that organization’s count we now have twice the number of disasters per year that we did 20 years ago.

False prophets

Matthew 24:11 And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.

Well, just don’t believe any prophets. That was easy.

Stars falling from heaven?

Matthew 24:29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:

Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson points out the obvious flaw in this prophecy.

“You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

This generation

Again, Jesus says that the end of the world is coming within his generation.

Matthew 24:34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.

I’ve had Christians tell me that this statement is only meant to apply to the destruction of Jerusalem, which happened in 70 CE. Could that explanation work?

No, not really. It’s true that Jesus talks a lot about the destruction of the temple — and I take this as evidence that it had already happened by the time this was written. But let’s go back a few verses.

Matthew 24:30 And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
24:31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
24:32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh:
24:33 So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.

Jesus talks about a lot of amazing public events: everyone seeing him in the clouds, angels and trumpets — things that haven’t happened. Then note that he says that “all these things” will be fulfilled in this generation — not just the one thing. Good try, Christians, but I don’t see any reason to limit the scope like that.

Function of this belief

From time to time, it’s good to ask: What’s the function of a belief like this one?

Matthew 24:21 For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

I can see a couple of reasons why this works for Christianity.

When things go wrong, it provides a handy reason: the world is getting worse!
It provides a “scary external world” narrative that keeps people frightened. Frightened people aren’t good critical thinkers. So this meme keeps them in the group, for the perceived safety it gives.

But this “hell in a handbasket” meme is unhelpful. People with the attitude that the world is in an irretrievable and divinely-predicted decline aren’t good at trying to find solutions to the world’s problems. They ooze a kind of cynicism and contempt regarding the “world”. This is what I’ve found when I’ve run across them.

But as I explain to these Jehovah’s Witnesses — who have been wrong many times on this issue — things aren’t actually getting worse. They’re getting better. Steven Pinker explains.

Failed prophecy — and thank goodness

After all these years, one thing should be clear: Jesus is not coming back. This is a failed prophecy, but people don’t realise it’s a failed prophecy because of the rolling deadline.

All those Adventists were wasting their time. So was Bill Maupin, an evangelist who was really the first one to freak me out.

So was Harold Camping.

Harold Camping told us the date on which the world would end. Of course, the date passed without incident. Camping was wrong. According to the Christian bible, the Jesus character told his contemporaries that the world would end during their lifetimes. Jesus was wrong too. Like Camping, the Jesus character was a failed prophet.

So were all these people who made failed end-of-the-world predictions, dating from 2800 BCE to today.

So is everybody in the Church of John Frum. Some Pacific Islanders tell stories of the legendary John Frum, probably a US serviceman who promised to return.

Anthropologists who study the Melanesian tribes speculate that Frum might have actually been a real person – most likely a generous sentry, engineer or aircraft mechanic who handed out goods, Hershey bars or medicine to the locals during the occupation. Perhaps he even identified himself as “John, from America”. Others speculate that Frum may instead be a composite of several personnel from the airbase or even a hodge-podge of American icons and archetypes including Uncle Sam, Popeye and Santa Claus. Some suggest that the Melanesian veneration of John Frum actually pre-dates the Second World War and may be based on some unknown charitable westerner that visited the island by ship in the decades before World War Two.

Regardless, Frum-worshipers still herald their god as the almighty “King of America”. Each year on Feb. 15, devotees mark their bodies with the letters U.S.A. and march in hopes that Frum will return. The entire religion, which is now more of a kitschy tourist attraction than anything else, also formed the basis of a homegrown nationalist political party that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2007.

At this point, it begins to look like the “hero’s return” is a bit of a theme in human belief.

Here’s a really sad story: These parents were so freaked out by the End of Days that they killed themselves and their kids.

Springville • In the Springville home where Benjamin and Kristi Strack and three of their children were found dead on Sept. 27, no note was found to explain the murder-suicide.

In a notebook, a “to-do list” had been scribbled on the pages, Springville police revealed at a press conference Tuesday. The list looked as if the parents were readying to go on vacation — items such as “feed the pets” and “find someone to watch after the house” were written.

But there was no clear explanation for why on that September day, the five family members ingested a fatal mixture of drugs.

In the weeks and months after the family’s deaths, Police Chief J. Scott Finlayson said investigators talked with their family and friends, who told them that Benjamin and Kristi Strack spoke frequently of “leaving this world.” Friends said the couple believed there was a looming apocalypse and that they desired to escape from the evil in the world.

We can see that this is a tragic waste of life, but it’s just as true that putting your life on hold for an imaginary saviour’s return is a waste of your life.

People who work in science already have a pretty good idea of how the world will end. Richard Dawkins tells more.

In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen, which will upset its self-regulating equilibrium; in its death-throes it will swell, and this planet will vaporise. Before that, we can expect, at unpredictable intervals measured in tens of millions of years, bombardment by dangerously large meteors or comets. Any one of these impacts could be catastrophic enough to destroy all life, as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago nearly did. In the nearer future, it is pretty likely that human life will become extinct – the fate of almost all species that have ever lived.

In our case, as the distinguished astronomer and former president of the Royal Society Martin Rees has conjectured, extinction is likely to be self-inflicted. Destructive technology becomes more powerful by the decade, and there is an ever-increasing danger that it will fall into the hands of some holy fool (Ian McEwan’s memorable phrase) whose ‘tradition’ glorifies death and longs for the hereafter: a ‘tradition’ which, not content with forecasting the end of the world, actively seeks to bring it about.

On that theme, Christopher Hitchens explains more ably than most — and off-the-cuff, as well — how this hope for an apocalypse really evinces a kind of contempt for life.

I think maybe I will take a few moments to say something I find repulsive about especially Monotheistic, Messianic religion, with a large part of itself it quite clearly wants us all to die, it wants this world to come to an end you can tell the yearning for things to be over, whenever you read any of its real texts, or listen to any of its real authentic spokesman, not the pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it. Those who talk, there was a famous spokesman for this in Virginia until recently, about the Rapture, saying that those of us who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind: if we’re in a car it’s your lookout, that car won’t have a driver anymore; if we’re a pilot that’s your lookout, that plane will crash; we will be with Jesus and the rest of you can go straight to Hell.

The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity, if you don’t believe that there is going to be an Apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnation, a final one, then you’re not really a Believer and the contempt for the things of this world shows through all of them. It’s well put in an old rhyme from an English exclusive Brethren sect: “We are the pure and chosen few, and all the rest are damned. There’s room enough in hell for you, we don’t want Heaven crammed!” You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk, they cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the World, they can’t wait for what I would call without ambiguity a Final Solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers — paid for often by American tax dollars — deciding if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land and all the non-Jews out of it then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of the Messiah, and there are Christians in this country who consider it their job to help this happen so that Armageddon can occur, so that the painful business of living as humans, and studying civilization, and trying to acquire learning, and knowledge, and health, and medicine, and to push back the frontiers can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over.

That to me is a hideous thing in eschatological terms, in End Times terms. On its own a hateful idea, a hateful practice, and a hateful theory but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it, who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes, ethnicities; who openly say they love death more than we love life and who are betting that with God on their side that they’re right about that.

So when I say as a subtitle of my book that “Religion poisons everything”, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity, it says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission, it means we can’t be good to one other, it means we can’t think without this, we must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear – the essence of sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship – and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say that this is evil.

So what do we do with our lives, if things will continue as they are until the Big Blast?

Enjoy it. We are born without asking. We are helplessly alive. And we are doomed to die.

Even so, it seems to me that doing something is a higher-quality decision than doing nothing. Here are some ideas.

Enjoy life responsibly. You only get one.
Help make things better for others. They only get one life, too
Learn as much as you can about the world and the universe, since the sharing of knowledge is a very good way to help make things better for everyone.
Try to leave something good for the next generation.

And I might add: Interplanetary travel seems like a good idea, if we want to get off this rock.

Now for a closing hymn.

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Category: Uncategorized (page 3 of 10)

“God Is No Respecter of Persons”

Acts 10–14; 15:1–35

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Background

God is a respecter of persons

Additional lesson ideas

How church policy and practices are made

“The Number of the Disciples Was Multiplied”

Acts 6–9

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

The stoning of Stephen

Saul’s transition

Should we fight error?

Additional lesson ideas

Simony

“We Are Witnesses”

Acts 1–5

Purpose

Reading

Eyewitness accounts are unreliable

Main ideas for this lesson

Still waiting

Is glossolalia a real language?

How well do missionaries learn languages?

Are believers justified in disobeying laws?

Ananias and Sapphira

God can take care of himself.

“He Is Not Here, for He Is Risen”

Matthew 28; Luke 24; John 20–21

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Rolling away the stone?

Appearances

Thomas and doubt

Why’s it have to be snakes?

“To This End Was I Born”

Matthew 26:47–27:66; Mark 14:43–15:39; Luke 22:47–23:56; John 18–19

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Why would Judas have needed to identify Jesus?

Robe colour

Judas’ death

Thief banter

No custom of releasing a prisoner

Blaming the Jews

Adoptionism

Earthquake and zombies

Additional lesson ideas

Thy speech bewrayeth thee

“Not My Will, But Thine, Be Done”

Matthew 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42; Luke 22:39–46

Purpose

Reading

Main ideas for this lesson

Jesus tries to pike out

Blood from every pore?

Problems with the Atonement

The suffering was unnecessary

The nature of the “debt” is never explained

Ransom

Nothing more should be required

We “can’t understand”

Vicarious suffering for sin is immoral

“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