Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Month: February 2014

OT Lesson 8 (Sodom)

22 February 2014 / / 2 Comments

Living Righteously in a Wicked World

Genesis 13–14; 18–19

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

Background

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

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

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

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

Click to go to SMBC.

Main points of this lesson

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

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

Read this poem by Karen Finneyfrock.

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

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

Go read the whole thing and come back.

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

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

Gods are a reflection of the people who believe in them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to full paper.

Jesus was probably not a gay-friendly guy

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

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

On every continent on earth (except Antarctica), Christianity has othered and outlawed queer sexuality. Whatever Jesus thought about it, assuming he lived at all, this is the movement he inspired.
…
He says nothing about gay sex, we’re told as if this proves he had no objection. (Curiously, the same doesn’t apply to slavery or rape.) He doesn’t even mention queer people. I’m afraid when I hear someone takes my side, acknowledging I exist is the least I expect from them.
…

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

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

We have a responsibility not to be hateful bigots

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

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

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

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

As Steven Weinberg puts it:

Additional ideas for teaching

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

Read this bit from the real lesson manual:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sin of Sodom is not homosexuality

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

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

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

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

God ensures perpetual political strife

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

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

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

The Bible is not appropriate for children

OT Lesson 7 (Abrahamic religions)

15 February 2014 / / 2 Comments

“The Abrahamic Covenant”

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

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

Background

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

The three Abrahamic religions are:

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

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

Bill Maher puts it like this:

Or you could think of it like a movie:

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

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

The Abrahamic religions share some notable characteristics:

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

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

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

Main points from the lesson

Mormons like to pretend they are Jews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Gross.

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

There you have it, folks: annoying and creepy.

Patriarchal blessings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Liz for her story.

Additional ideas for teaching

The creation of a “scary external world” narrative

From the real manual:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch “Mother Knows Best” from Tangled.

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

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

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

Sing along with the class.

OT Lesson 6 (Noah)

8 February 2014 / / 8 Comments

“Noah… Prepared an Ark to the Saving of His House”

Moses 8:19–30; Genesis 6–9; 11:1–9

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 6, Genesis 7, Genesis 8, Genesis 9, Genesis 11
LDS manual: here

Background

This lesson is about two of God’s worst atrocities: drowning almost all the people and animals in the world in a flood when they got out of his control, and scrambling humanity’s languages when they committed the sin of cooperating on a building project.

I’m a bit stuck as to how to present this lesson. Do I make it a straight takedown of biblical literalism? That’s easy and fun. And not only that, the literal approach is the one that’s taken by the LDS Church in its official instruction manuals, so it’s pertinent besides. On the other hand, do I take the view of Very Sophisticated Theologians and Apologists, and go for a figurative view? That has the benefit of being true, but has the unfortunate effect of negating the entire basis for the Gospel, as we saw in a previous lesson.

We’re at a weird point in LDS doctrine as of last week. That’s when the First Quorum of the Anonymous released its ‘Book of Mormon and DNA Studies‘ essay, which uses sources that acknowledge that people immigrated to the American continent 10,000 years ago, which is a few thousand years before Adam and Eve. So what’s the story here; thousands of years, or millions?

What’s happened is that, because of the Church’s failure to clarify its own doctrine, two parallel streams of doctrine have grown up in the last several decades: a literal one that’s taught in Sunday School, and a figurative/metaphorical one that’s accepted in apologetic circles and on the Internet. The parallel approach has worked out well for the Church; they don’t have to go out on a limb officially, and everyone gets to believe what they want. It works for them, as long as — like we learned in Ghostbusters — you never cross the streams. Because crossing the streams is Bad. But in the DNA essay, what we saw is the Church crossing the streams.

It was inevitable that they’d have to do this, as science has been putting pressure on the literal story for a couple of centuries. Something was going to crack. But it does reveal the Mormon Church’s doctrinal incoherence, and this causes headaches for a diligent Gospel Doctrine teacher.

Not for me, though. In this lesson, I’m taking an axe to the literal view because it’s not the dead horse it’s made out to be. We live in a world where a sizeable number of adult humans are willing to say that they believe the story of Noah’s Ark to be “literally true” — 61 percent, according to a 2004 Gallup poll of American adults. That’s right; three out of five.

Even just last week, we saw a debate between Bill Nye, a guy of science, and Ken Ham, looking lost with only the Bible for support — poor sap. Not only does Ham cherry-pick the evidence that leads to his worldview, he admitted that he would never change his mind about the Bible.

The fact is, many religious organisations are promoting the idea that Noah’s Ark was a true, literal, non-allegorical, and (importantly) global event that took place about 2350 BCE. And one of them is the LDS Church, which as of today continues to teach — in its official lesson manuals, on its website,  in its official magazine, and in General Conferences — that God once committed the most complete act of genocide ever recorded upon humankind.

We would now like to turn the time over to Brother Gervais for the story of Noah.

Main points from this lesson

A global flood is implausible.

Many others have done detailed takedowns of the Flood, so I’ll just link to them here, in the order that I like them:

And of course, the Brick Testament.

Here’s a quick run-through of my favourite points:

• The Ark, as described, is way too small

 Show the class this graphic from the manual, which even as a TBM I couldn’t believe they printed.

Ask: Would you be able to fit millions of animal species in there? Including millions yet unclassified? In a ship half the size of an ocean liner? (Unless you think they speciated wildly after the flood, but wait, no, that would be evolution.)

Show the class this video by the always-wonderful NonStampCollector, detailing the gargantuan (but not very realistic) labours of Noah.

• Parasites!

You can’t just save all the nice animals; you also have to rescue the parasites. That means Noah and family would have had to be infected with every parasite that humans are prone to.

How many parasites are we talking about? Well, according to the Wikipedia page, about 73! Yep, they’d have been crawling with liver worms, tapeworms, flukes, bedbugs, pubic lice, and fleas. They would scarcely have a healthy eye, ear, urinary tract, or crotch among them! And this would be at the same time that they had to be at the peak of their reproductive fitness, in order to repopulate the earth.

• Other problems

A tiny crew of eight people would have had to do the work of many zoos, and do it all with zero animal deaths.

What about plants? Keeping them underwater for a year would have killed them. It’s a bit moot, though — there are trees just under 10,000 years old, and they show no signs of a flood.

After the flood, the animals would have had to make their way from (apparently) Turkey, the ark’s landing site, to wherever they would eventually live. Cold-weather animals wouldn’t have done well migrating from Turkey. And apparently they didn’t have to, since bones of every animal on earth don’t appear along the way.

Perhaps God teleported them to their new abodes magically. In fact, magic could explain a lot in this story. Whenever I discuss this with creationists, they always fall back on magic eventually. In which case, wouldn’t it be better to go with the magic from the start? Why try to make it sound sciencey, and then revert to magic? Just start with magic! It would save a lot of time!

A local flood doesn’t fit the requirements of the text.

Could we circumvent the plausibility problem by assuming the Flood was a local event, as LDS apologists try to? Unfortunately for them, no. That would mean that the Flood no longer fits the script.

Gen 7:19: All the mountains under heaven were covered with water.

Gen 7:21: All flesh died that moved upon the earth. (Watch as apologists attempt to redefine the word earth. Good one.)

Gen 9:13–16: After the flood, God sent a rainbow as a promise that he would not make another flood like that. But there have been plenty of localised floods since.

There’s a hand up. Yes, Brother Hickenlooper?

Brother Hickenlooper: I was always taught that the whole earth had to be under water because the Flood was the earth’s baptism. Did the church ever really teach that?

Indeed they did, Brother Hickenlooper. From the church essay on “Noah”.

What is the symbolism of Noah and the flood?
God uses symbols to teach gospel truths. In the New Testament, Peter explained that the flood was a “like figure” or symbol of baptism (1 Peter 3:20–21). Just as the earth was immersed in water, so we must be baptized by water and by the Spirit before we can enter the celestial kingdom.

The Flood is at the wrong time.

There were contemporary cultures who didn’t notice the global flood.

A Flood would be the action of an immoral being.

Okay, so the Flood is fictional. No need to get worked up over it. It’s supposed to be an allegory of God’s love, although not from the perspective of everyone who drowned, including children and babies (born and unborn). But all this tells us is that, even as portrayed by his followers, the god of the Bible is a murderous bully who kills men, women, and children in order to fix problems that he created.

Worse, after committing this atrocity, he makes no effort to prevent it from happening again.

Ask: What kind of parent would decide that the correct way to deal with his errant children is to drown them? This is what we should be thinking when we hear “Parenting the Lord’s Way”.

Ask: Why would anyone worship such a being?
Answer: Under duress, Stockholm syndrome.

The Tower of Babel is a myth.

Ah, now we’re in my area. At one point, I was a young linguist, and a true believing Mormon (or TBM). How did I reconcile the two? By not thinking about it very carefully!

No serious linguist would accept the story of the Tower of Babel. You’d have to believe that all humans were speaking the same language after the Flood (so around 2300 BCE).

In fact, the Bible contradicts itself — Genesis 10 says that there were multiple languages, but in the next chapter, there was only one.

In reality, there’s no evidence of any kind of language bottleneck, where everyone is speaking the same language around 2300 BCE. Human languages have been diversifying since people started speaking.

At one point, there may have been one human language, but this would have been maybe 60,000 years ago, when early humans first left Africa.

We know quite a bit about one language family in particular: Proto-Indo-European. This is the language that led to many languages spoken today, like English, Greek, Russian, and even Persian and Sanskrit.

Even though it’s hard to tell exactly when things happened so long ago, we do know that Proto-Indo-European had already split off from its sister languages somewhere between the 4th millennium and the 7th millennium BCE — about 2 to 5 thousand years before Babel. In other words, there was no language bottleneck at the time of Babel.

It’s pretty clear that Babel is a myth that’s intended to explain the diversity of languages in the world, but it’s not the only one.

  • In African tales, a famine causes the people to wander the earth jabbering nonsense.
  • In the Dreamtime legend of the Gunwinggu of Australia, a goddess gives each of her children a language to play with.
  • And for the most plausible explanation of language diversity, a Native American legend has it that disagreement between people caused them to move apart and speak differently.

By comparison, the Abrahamic God just looks petty and insecure, condemning people for working together. One of the best things for advancing our knowledge is collaboration.
Ask: Why might working together help to increase knowledge?
Answers:

  • Groups of people working together can do more work than one person can do alone.
  • One person can be subject to bias, but getting more people to review the results helps to control for that; not everyone will have the same biases.
  • If one person uses deception, other people can try to replicate their results, and they’ll likely be caught. This is a powerful motivator to stay honest.

Working together in science sometimes takes the form of peer review. Peer review helps to correct for error, bias, and deception. This is why biased and mistaken people (like creationists and pseudo-scientists) despise peer review, claiming it represents a conspiracy against them.

Mormons have to take the Tower of Babel story at face value.

I mentioned that, as a young linguist, I didn’t think too much about the Babel story. I took it as largely allegorical, or as a primitive explanation.

That was to change on one of my readings through the Book of Mormon, which relates the story of the brother of Jared. He’s meant to have been at Babel in a very non-allegorical sense. Like many Mormons (and Christians), I habitually dismissed the parts of the Bible that seemed fantastical, but dismissing the Book of Mormon as non-literal is much more difficult. It’s not intended to be read as allegory, at least according to the standard line you get from church. (Then again, neither is the OT, so what did I know?)

So here I had two facts that couldn’t be reconciled:

  • The Book of Mormon told a story that was intended as factual.
  • The story was clearly wrong.

This was quite jarring, and I think it was the first real earthquake that led to my deconversion. After the fall of Babel, it became much easier to see how the Church got things wrong, including history, dinosaurs, geology, linguistics, and Mesoamerican archaeology. But more on those later.

Additional ideas for study

Man, I’m glad the creationist crazies haven’t launched into linguistics with the same fervour with which they’ve besieged biology. Otherwise, we’d have the theory of Wrathful Dispersion.

OT Lesson 5 (Cain)

1 February 2014 / / 2 Comments

“If Thou Doest Well, Thou Shalt Be Accepted”

Moses 5–7; (Genesis 4–6)

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 4, Genesis 5, Genesis 6
LDS manual: here

Background

Okay, so for this lesson, we’re kind of taking a deep breath before we move on to the Flood, which is going to be a really full-on lesson. But this one sets up Cain (evil murdering skeptic) against Enoch (righteous city builder who mysteriously disappears). It’s the kind of lesson where you look at the manual, and you think, how am I going to get an interesting lesson out of that? Which is too bad, because there’s actually some interesting stuff here if we do some digging. Ready?

Main points for this lesson

It’s bad to have a skeptical attitude about God

From the real lesson manual:

Adam and Eve hoped their son Cain would follow the Lord as they did. But Cain “hearkened not” to his parents and the Lord and asked, “Who is the Lord that I should know him?” (Moses 5:16). What does this question show about Cain’s attitude toward God?

It shows that he had a healthy sense of skepticism. If you must worship someone, you should ask what they’re like, and find out what you’re getting into. But apparently the God of the Bible demands uncritical worship. That makes more sense when we find out more about his murders later on in the Old Testament; this is not the kind of being you’d worship out of admiration, though perhaps out of fear.

Beliefs about Cain

Cain is supposed to have committed the first murder when he killed his brother Abel. It’s charmingly retold with Legos in The Brick Testament.

Cain is still alive

Cain, as a mythic evil dude, has naturally inspired a lot of folklore. In the Mormon imagination, he’s become something like Bigfoot. An early apostle, David Patten, claimed to have seen him.

“As I was riding along the road on my mule I suddenly noticed a very strange personage walking beside me. He walked along beside me for about two miles. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair … I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer in the earth and traveled to and fro. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. About the time he expressed himself thus, I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, and commanded him to go hence, and he immediately departed out of my sight.”

Other more modern Cain stories are detailed here, some as late as 1998. Come on, folks, there must be some more recent ones.

Also: journal article on this topic.

Ask: What can we learn about the story of Cain?
Answer: We humans seem to like building myths about big hairy guys that don’t exist.

The whole Cain story reminds me of anomalous big cats (ABCs). Even in places where big cats aren’t native, people seem to have grown these stories of ABCs roaming around. There’s the Nottingham lion, the Fen Tiger, the Lincolnshire Lynx, and scores of others. People claim to have seen them — and yet there’s never a body, no scat, and no clear photographic evidence, even with camera phones in everyone’s pockets. It’s one of the things about human brains: we sometimes see patterns where none exist, especially if we’re expecting to see them.

This is just as true for religious experience as it is for big cats or Bigfoots. Think what happens in the LDS discussions: missionaries prime the subjects to have a subjective “spiritual experience”, and they read a long list of feelings that someone might have. The appearance of any of those feelings will then be taken as evidence that a magical spirit being is confirming whatever the missionaries are saying. It’s hokey, but as suggestible as our brains are, it’s not surprising that it works well enough and often enough to keep the LDS Church in new members.

Ask: Are stories about Cain kind of like the opposite of Three Nephite stories?
Answer: Yeah, kinda. Next question.

Ask: How did Cain survive the flood?
Answer: Oh, that? He managed to survive by clinging onto the Ark, like a big hairy barnacle.

But a lot more on the Flood next week.

What’s the deal with people living 800 years?

The Book of Moses (as well as Genesis) gives a list of improbable lifespans, including Adam (930 years), Seth (912 years), and Enos (905 years). What’s the deal?

Well, this one is fairly straightforward: it’s a longevity myth. People used to make kings’ ages up.

“My favourite king was so awesome, he ruled for 10,000 years!”
“Oh, yeah? Well my favourite king was twice as awesome, and he reigned for 20,000 years!”

Read selections from Wikipedia’s page on longevity myths. Here are some good ones:

The Sumerian king Alalngar was supposed to have ruled for 36,000 years
The Persian emperor Zahhak apparently ruled for 1000 years
The Taoist saint Peng Zu lived for 800 years
And there are more examples from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.

It’s not just people in antiquity who believe this stuff; it seems some New Agers today believe in the existence of Babaji, who is centuries old.

Longevity myths are another recurring theme in human belief and hero worship.

Activity for people trapped in real Gospel Doctrine classes: Tell the class about other longevity myths. Time how long it takes for them to commit the special pleading fallacy (“but that’s different!”).

The “seed of Cain” were black.

The Church’s statement on ‘Race and the Priesthood‘ is something of a landmark. Thankfully, it repudiates racism among its members.

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse…. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.

It also lists a few things members have believed in the past. Here’s one:

According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s, blacks descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain, who slew his brother Abel. Those who accepted this view believed that God’s “curse” on Cain was the mark of a dark skin.

Ask: Where might Latter-day Saints have gotten this idea?
Read: Moses 7:22

22 And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them.

So the Book of Moses, one of the Standard Works, promulgates the idea that people of colour are descended from Cain. And because they “had not place among them”, it might have provided support for segregation.

The LDS Church has been busy trying to clean up its record and get some distance from its worst folk doctrines. But one of the most surprising things I’ve found out since taking on this blog is that the source of these ‘folk doctrines’ is actually the Standard Works themselves. It’s all in there.

In other words, if they’re throwing things under the bus, they’re going to need a bigger bus.

Additional ideas for study

Sons of God, daughters of men

Read: Genesis 6:1–4

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

In some religious traditions, the ‘sons of God‘ are supposed to be angels that went to earth and had sex with women, who subsequently gave birth to giants. If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are pygmies and dwarfs?

Yup — this is a real creationist cartoon showing a 15-foot-tall Adam. (Humans can’t get that big; if they did, they’d be very weak and slow. If you were twice as tall, you’d have eight times the mass, but only four times the strength.)

But in Mormon scripture? Joseph Smith wrote the ‘sons of God’ into the narrative as normal people. This is one of the great missed opportunities in scripture. He should have written giants. It wouldn’t have been the most implausible thing he came up with.

Read: Moses 8:21 for Smith’s normal boring explanation of this scripture.
Ask: How crap is that? Could have been freaking giants, man.

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