Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Month: January 2014

OT Lesson 4 (Adam and Eve)

25 January 2014 / / 7 Comments

“Because of My Transgression My Eyes Are Opened”

Moses 4; 5:1–15; 6:48–62

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

Background

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

Suggestion from the real manual:

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

Okay, I’ll have a go.

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

Sounds fair.

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

1. It accounts for evil.

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

1a. Blame humans.

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

1b. Blame the serpent.

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

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

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

1c. Blame Eve.

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

2. It creates the idea of sin

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

3. It creates the need for a saviour

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam and Eve are literal people

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

The Apostle Paul certainly thought Adam was a real person.

Adam and Eve are the ancestors of all humans

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

They lived 6,000 years ago

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

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

Here’s another version that ran in the Ensign.

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

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

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

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

There was no death before the Fall

Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2: 22–23:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No thinking person should believe this.

The Atonement is a weird idea.

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

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

The Garden of Eden has a positive message

Let’s end with something positive.

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

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

OT Lesson 3 (The Creation)

18 January 2014 / / 2 Comments

The Creation

Moses 1:27–42; 2–3

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main points from this lesson

The creation story does not match the scientific account.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the major elements of creation doesn’t exist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what Moses and Genesis are describing.

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

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

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

LDS Church leaders mock scientific theories about the earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is futile and unnecessary to harmonise science and religion.

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

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

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

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

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

Additional teaching ideas

Information control

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

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

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

Non-binding revelation

Here’s a website with statements from church leaders.

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

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

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

Before glancing at the URL, try to tell whether:

  • this is an anti-Mormon site trying to make LDS doctrine look ridiculous, or
  • it’s a serious page trying to educate Mormons as to the details of the creation.
The answer may surprise you. Or not really.

OT Lesson 2 (Pre-mortal life)

11 January 2014 / / 3 Comments

“Thou Wast Chosen Before Thou Wast Born”

Abraham 3; Moses 4:1–4

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

Background

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

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

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

Egyptologists now know it really looked like this:

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

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

More info at mormoninfographics.com

Main points for this lesson

The Pre-Mortal Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender identity

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

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

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

“And purpose.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War in Heaven

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

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

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

Read the whole thing on the Exmormon subreddit.

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

Race and pre-mortality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Teaching Ideas

Foreordination

Teaching idea from the real manual:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kolob and Kokaubeam

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

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

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

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

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

Rounding out the Egyptian theme:

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

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

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

Testify that religion poisons everything.

OT Lesson 1 (God)

4 January 2014 / / 4 Comments

“This Is My Work and My Glory”

Moses 1

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

Background

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

Main points for this lesson

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

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

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

Jesus is the god of the Old Testament.

From the real manual:

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

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

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

Moses 1:6

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

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

The manual explains it like this:

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

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

Object Lesson

Have a class member read the following paragraph:

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

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

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

Moses 1:7–11

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

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

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

 

Then, when God goes away, Moses collapses.

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

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

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

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

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

Lather, rinse, repeat.

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

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

Additional Teaching Ideas

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

  1. He pushes for quick involvement.
  2. There is jealousy.
  3. He is controlling.
  4. He has very unrealistic expectations.
  5. There is isolation.
  6. He blames others for his own mistakes.
  7. He makes everyone else responsibile for their feelings. 
  8. There is hypersensitivity.
  9. He is cruel to animals and children.
  10. His “playful” use of force during sex.
  11. There is verbal abuse.
  12. There are rigid gender roles.
  13. He has sudden mood swings.
  14. He has a past of battering.
  15. There are threats of violence.

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

Show the following graphic:

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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