Green Oasis

I just watched The People vs. Larry Flynt. I don’t have a lengthy review. I just wanted to express my happiness that I can watch and enjoy a film like this.

A couple years ago I would never have watched this movie, at least not while anyone was looking. If I had watched it, I would have been fixated on its sexual content and felt overcome with guilt for having given in to my carnal appetites. I would have agreed that Larry Flynt worked for Satan to entrap the souls of mankind. Now, I can watch it and find goodness in the life of Larry Flynt. I have removed the barriers between me and the beauty inside other people. Ironically, I’m a better follower of Jesus now that I don’t believe in him. I’m willing to lovingly embrace those who are judged the sinners of society. For that, I am grateful.

I’ve been mulling over Sam Harris’ talk at the Atheist Alliance International Convention (video: part 1 and part 2). I avoided commenting on it while the debate crested in the atheist community because I wanted to think it over.

Up to that point, I’d begun to think Sam Harris a bit overzealous. This talk changed my opinion. The response from the leaders of the atheist community seemed largely to misunderstand what I thought Harris had said. I took away from his talk that by labeling ourselves as Atheist (or Bright, Humanist, etc.) we become incapable of seeing nuance in complex situations and finding common cause with our religious brothers and sisters.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.…

Atheism is too blunt an instrument to use at moments like this. It’s as though we have a landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment—with peaks and valleys and local attractors—and the concept of atheism causes us to fixate one part of this landscape, the part related to theistic religion, and then just flattens it. Because to be consistent as atheists we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally. This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues.

I’m still considering dropping the atheist label and speaking out against ideas that I disagree with as nothing but myself.

Recently, I experienced the business end of the blunt instrument of atheism that Harris had observed. The Eloquent Atheist recently ran a four part memoir of growing up in a small Idaho town. Included in this memoir are some assertions about Mormon beliefs and history, many of which were in error. The inaccuracies disappointed me because I naïvely expected better from fellow atheists. I submitted the following comment.

Warning: A lot of petty back-and-forth follows, but if a blog isn’t good for getting pettiness out of my system once in a while, then I don’t know why I bother. Please skip to the end if you have better things to do.

As a former Mormon, I found your perspective as an outsider interesting, but as a former Mormon, I noticed that the historical and doctrinal information presented was riddled with inaccuracies. I’m as critical as the next guy of Mormon history and doctrine, but it’s a better education tool when it is presented as it really is. Otherwise, Mormons can justifiably charge that their critics are ignorant of the truth. Please fact check your memories and impressions before presenting a seemingly authoritative essay.

I admit that was quite blunt and confrontational. I had just finished reading Nonviolent Communication, so I knew a better way to dialog, but I was lazy and went the more familiar violent approach.

Somehow, I was mistaken for a Mormon apologist and challenged to provide proof of God and to produce the Golden Plates. Color me nonplussed. I then submitted the following comment (which has been removed from their website):

I regret that my comment didn’t make my position more clear. I’m not arguing that Mormonism is verifiable, but that the history and doctrine presented here are inaccurate. A believing Mormon (which I am not) could legitimately object to the inaccuracies of this series which aims to be an exposé. Allow me to give two examples from part 3:

they are white cotton underwear, somewhat similar to long johns, except that they are in two pieces, a “blouse” and pantaloons, which both men and women wear continually, after baptism, for the remainder of their lives.

This can be falsified by reading the Wikipedia article on temple garments. There seems to be some confusion in part 3 over whether the garment is worn after the receiving the ordinance of the Endowment in a temple or after receiving baptism which is received outside the temple. The garment is only worn after the Endowment.

Needless to say, only Mormons can enter any of three levels of Mormon Heaven.

This is an inaccurate and unfair statement of Mormon belief. Mormons are exclusive, but not quite that exclusive. The Celestial Kingdom is reserved for baptized Mormons, but the other two degrees of glory are open to all depending on their virute. In fact, vanishingly few people (no more than a dozen some have speculated) end up in Hell in Mormon eschatology. Even murderers end up in the lowest degree of heaven.

I worry that with inaccurate portrayals like these cropping up on the internet, believing Mormons will stop listening to the critics who do know what they’re talking about. I want them to hear the truth, but they might start to form the opinion that all critics are ignorant of the facts. I hope that all critics will inform themselves before taking up the pen.

Again, I confess to being in attack mode, and it had the ungratifying result of gaining me a place of dishonor: they took the trouble to devote an entire post to denouncing my theism, my Mormonism, caricaturing my statements, and refusing to allow any further comments until I could produce proof of God.

Mr. Blake, however, insists upon arguing about a few points of religious “history” and Mormon “philosophy” ad infinitum, apparently not understanding that we should not and do not care about the small points until the broad issues have been settled. As an example of a broad point I submit the following for Mr. Blake’s consideration: “There is no god.”

Yet Mr. Blake insists that we concern ourselves with the material out of which the magical Mormon royal undergarments are made. Now, Mr. Blake has sufficient unmitigated gall to tell me that I do not understand his point.

Well… that’s what I’m saying, yes. He misunderstood on a very fundamental level and then proceeded to argue against my nonexistent belief in God. I imagined him with his fingers in his ears saying “La La La La. I can’t hear you. There is no God. La La La La.”

Seeking to clear up this persistent misunderstanding (and being quite frustrated and disappointed at this point), I submitted the following comment which was never allowed to be seen on their website:

I am afraid that I haven’t made my position known clearly. Please let me be clear on this point: God is not great and Joseph Smith was not his prophet. No, perhaps I’m trying to be too clever. Let me try again to be direct: I believe that there is no God. If you read my comments again, carefully, you’ll see that I made that clear from the beginning. So requests for me to justify Mormonism or theism are equally misplaced.

The criticism that I offered came not from a Mormon apologist, but from a former Mormon/current atheist asking for more accuracy in the criticism of Mormonism. If you want to check my godless credentials, please feel welcome visit my personal blog, or take my word for it.

I realize that those posts were mostly in the spirit of memoir. That part was fine and interesting. The posts often however stepped beyond that role into exposition of what Mormons purportedly believe in an authoritative voice along the lines of “Mormons believe thus and such”. Mormons believe lots of crazy stuff, so there’s no shortage of silly things to highlight. This makes it not only irresponsible and unfair to publish falsehoods, but kind of lazy. And memoir doesn’t cover a multitude of sins, as James Frey discovered.

I regret that my comments have provoked such vehemently defensive posts, ad hominem attacks, caricaturization of my position, and censorship.

I don’t expect The Eloquent Atheist to be a debate club; that would run counter to its apparent purpose. I’m only asking for better editorial oversight. If I want to direct my Mormon friends to this site to show them how passionate and alive atheists can be (which I hoped to be able to do), I don’t want them to find half-hearted exposés in the guise of memoir.

Let me give you more of a flavor of the kind of misinformation that I object to. Here are the first passages of part 2 titled The History of the LDS Church:

Let’s begin with a capsule history of the Church. The founder, Joseph Smith, was born on a farm in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. [Joseph Smith was born in Vermont.] That area later became known as The Burned-Over District, a nickname alluding to the many fire-and-brimstone preachers who roamed the area delivering jeremiads to the local residents in tent shows and so-called camp meetings, urging them to repent their sinful ways lest they burn eternally in Hell. In a time of great religious fervor, now called the Second Great Awakening, Smith allegedly searched for a system of religious belief that he could justify in his own mind as legitimate, and investigated a number of the Protestant denominations that existed in the region-Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and so on. None satisfied him as being The True Religion. [According to Smith's most widely known account (the 1838 account of the First Vision), he didn't go to the grove of trees to pray having made up his mind than no extant religion was God's true religion. He claims that he prayed to know which religion was true.] Then according to his account, in 1830, [The first vision is purported to have occurred in 1820.] while walking in a grove of trees on the Hill Cumorah, [The grove of trees reported to have been the site of the First Vision was not on the Hill Cumorah.] near the town of Elmira, [Both the grove and the Hill Cumorah are near Palmyra, New York which is over 50 miles north of Elmira.] he had a vision, in which an angel named Moroni (pronounced “mo-rōn-eye”) allegedly appeared, [While the purported vision of Moroni allegedly happened in 1830, an angel named Moroni plays no part in any account of the First Vision that I'm aware of. Perhaps I'm ignorant of one?] informed Smith that he came as a direct emissary from God, confirmed Smith’s opinion that none of the extant denominations or sects was The True Religion, [As noted above, Joseph claimed to have learned the falsehood of all religions in the First Vision rather than having a foregone conclusion.] and pronounced that Jehovah Himself had selected him (Smith) to found a church that would deliver the True Word of God to those who elected to follow him.

Smith later reputedly reported that he, like Moses, protested that he was unworthy of such a lofty and arduous task, but the angel insisted that he was to be the Prophet and that it was futile to deny the commands of the Almighty. Smith eventually acquiesced to his destiny, and Moroni instructed him where in the Sacred Gove to dig, [Another confusion of the First Vision and the vision of Moroni and also of the Hill Cumorah where Smith claimed to have unearthed the plates, and the Sacred Grove where he claimed to have seen God.] in order to recover the Golden Plates, on which Moroni’s father, Mormon, also an angel, had written, [Moroni is also the nominal author of significant portions of the Book of Mormon. Mormon didn't appear to Joseph as an angel, nor did he purportedly write the plates as an angel.] in an ancient and sacred tongue, the history of two of the Lost Tribes of Israel.…

It got much better after that, but this sloppiness was enough to appall me. Can someone give the man a Wikipedia search?

Once it was mistakenly determined that I was a theist, they didn’t care to read what I said, not carefully at least. Once they presumably realized their mistake, they seemed to cover their tracks by deleting the comments that made their mistake obvious. They weren’t open to nuanced discussion. I had expected better than censorship, dishonesty, and intellectual laziness from my supposedly enlightened fellow atheists.

Is this how some atheists treat theists? Alas, I think Sam Harris was right that labels like “atheist” are useless and probably harmful if they can cause people to turn off their critical thinking and circle the wagons like that.

Masturbation (and more) is on my mind again.

I just read a comment by “struggling” about his struggles with masturbation. I can feel echoes of my own life in his story.

The other issue here is that while on my mission there could have been no time in my life where I was more dedicated to abstaining or avoiding sexual thoughts or activities. Furthermore my days were always completely planned and scheduled so it is not like I was not busy and being idle. I had never masturbated until the near end of my mission and that seems really quite odd to me. It nearly destroyed me. I thought I would be sent home from my mission cuz I had read the statement that no young man should go on a mission who engages in such an activity. I fell on my knees in some disgusting foreign country bathroom and weeped excessively while expressing the most intimate of feelings with my Father in Heaven and promising never to do it again. After that I tortured myself mentally and emotionally…maybe even physically. I constantly fasted for strength(once for 48 hours), prayed, confessed, memorized scriptures, wore tight clothing, went without sleep to avoid being in bed where the “temptation” was strongest and all the while trying to serve as the EQ president in my singles unit while battling thoughts of failure, inadequacy, and at times suicide.…

I was just trying to do what the church leaders kept telling me to do. I looked for relief. I read a lot and I read from Miracle of Forgiveness, To the Young men only, talks by Featherstone, some article which may or may not have been from Elder Petersen, my scriptures, skousen books and many more that were not directly correlated to the topic on tab; to what end I am not sure. All I wanted was relief not anxiety. That is what I was searching for. One could argue that I was anxious because I continued in the practice, maybe so, but I fought with everything I had. Every ounce of energy was dedicated to winning this battle every night and after weeks of battling, struggling, enduring, the battle would extend to two fronts as “tension” would infiltrate my daily activities. The funny thing is that I would not even consider myself a “Peter Priesthood” type of guy. Most of my friends were not even LDS but I cant help but feel bad for what those “pristine” mormon children feel when they cannot overcome masturbation or anything that one could logically call an even more grave mistake.

Then there’s Sister Mary Lisa with her painful, touching story of being pregnant out of wedlock and later married to a non-Mormon. She speaks of the pain and humiliation she endured for 13 years.

A couple months later, I realized I was pregnant. All I could think about was my high priest dad’s words from my childhood: “Any daughter of mine who comes home pregnant out of wedlock is no longer my daughter.”…

Being in the primary presidency for years, I was expected to teach all those diverse children about eternal families and what they should strive for in their own lives, because anything less is not what righteous people do. I remember teaching about how families can be together forever while looking into the hurt and wounded eyes of Brother Z., the teacher whose impending divorce had just been announced the week before, and whose daughter was crying in the back row. I hid my own pain well, I thought. Until later that night when my son asked me, “How come WE’RE not sealed together forever?” How do you explain such a nasty concept to a child? Your father doesn’t believe the church is true, honey, and if we don’t go to the temple, then we aren’t sealed together forever. “But why not? He loves me, and I love him!” I know. I know. It’s God’s plan. “But where will we GO when we die? Who will I be with??” If you are really righteous, and marry your own sweetheart in the temple someday, you’ll be with her and your children! “But what about you and Dad?” Oh, don’t worry about us. It’ll all work out in the next life. I’ll be OK. “But will I see you there?” Pain like that eviscerates and is impossible to hid from your children.…

Imagine my horror in finding out that the beloved prophet Joseph Smith (whom I had admired enough to name my son after, along with Joseph in Egypt) had married over 30 women, some of whom were still married to men he had sent on missions! Imagine my horror in reading the accounts of how he convinced Heber C. Kimball to give his 14 year old daughter to him in plural marriage by promising her entire family eternal salvation if they said yes! Imagine my horror when I found out that he did his plural wife thing behind Emma’s back, and denied it publicly when someone called him on it!!

I had been made to feel low and dirty and worthless for my two weeks of sex and my lifetime of keeping an “illegitimate” baby out of wedlock, all by the very church that had been founded by a guy like Joseph Smith???

You know, I can think of only one way to express how I feel about teaching children to be ashamed of their sexuality:

Fuck… That… Shit!

Don’t even come near my daughters with that poison. You seem like a nice person. I don’t want to have to beat you down.

I’m fed up. The shame implicit in the way the Law of Chastity is typically taught is mental and emotional child abuse. I know you’re trying to keep them clean and pure (nobody wants to be a chewed up piece of used bubble gum), but your delusional good intentions would pave the way to a hell full of self-loathing for my daughters. I can’t let that happen.

If one of my daughters comes home pregnant outside of marriage or—heaven forbid!—she masturbates, she will be received as always with open arms and heartfelt kisses. She will never be less than my beautiful, my priceless, my incomparable daughter.

You can call me a sinner if you want. You can blame my non-belief on my not-so-secret sins if that makes you feel justified in your beliefs. But leave me and mine alone. I’m happy to be rid of you and your hateful ideas.

So put down your copy of The Miracle of Forgiveness and nobody gets hurt. Close the door on your way out.

At some point as I grew up I learned that God hates homosexuals. I don’t know exactly how I learned it. Probably the same way I learned that sex is dirty. I absorbed small things that people said and the way they reacted to homosexuality. Later I learned about the scriptural sanction for hating homosexuals. Everything and everyone important to me taught me to be disgusted by homosexuality and to hate those who practiced it. To be fair, my impressions from my childhood may have been the black and white thinking of a child. I might have taken everything too literally.

But my prejudice extended beyond my childhood. As an adult member of the LDS church, I canvased for an amendment to the Constitution of the State of Nevada which bans any marriage other than that between a man and woman. The effort was organized by the local university ward. We met at the church building and organized therein.

As an adult, I despaired at the first airing of Will & Grace, a sitcom with an openly gay main character. I noticed the worrying trend of famous people like Ellen Degeneres coming out. Society was becoming more tolerant of wickedness. My Mormon faith consoled me that Jesus would be coming again to wipe this wickedness from the face of the Earth. I wasn’t alone in my attitudes. Other members of the Mormon church supported my attitude. Some members of the church still hold these values. The LDS culture supports this bigotry.

I excused my bigotry by saying that I loved the sinner but hated the sin. I don’t know whether anyone is genetically gay, but I do know that people intimately connect their homosexuality with their sense of self, just like heterosexuals. Causing homosexual people to hate homosexuality is no different than causing them to hate themselves. Seeking to draw the line between sin and sinner is naïve.

My Young Men’s President planted the seed of my eventual change of heart. When I was a teenager, he told the young men in my class that homosexuality was no worse than adultery. That blew my mind! How could he think such an absurd thing? After all, homosexuality was a crime against nature. I thought about that for a long time.

I finally let go of my bigotry when I lost my faith in God. I had no God to justify the righteousness of my hatred. I saw how ugly my attitudes had been.

Attitudes toward homosexuality have changed tremendously since I was a child, even within the LDS church. I hope that the bigotry of the past will go away just like old Mormon attitudes about miscegenation and birth control.

It shames me that the video God Hates the World (via Pharyngula) represents my attitudes of the past. As a Mormon, I thought most of those same things, but I was too politically correct to say them out loud to the wrong people. At least these people are honest, even if their gleeful hatred disturbs me.

The toddler’s solo at the end breaks my heart. Is that not child abuse? I hope she can free herself from their indoctrination.

Please forgive me for my part in spreading bigotry in the world.

I remember pitying him. His wife seemed embarrassed by him, just like the wife of the man who dressed in women’s underwear. He avoided looking directly in our eyes, and she didn’t hurry to introduce him to us. He had left the LDS church and was wandering in strange paths. The other missionaries informed me before we visited their home about his dabbling in Buddhism. I shook my head in disbelief that he could have left the truth, and for something as silly as Buddhism.

We sat down and ate dinner together, but I had no respect for my host. He was a fool and a traitor. I remember the pain-stricken look on his wife’s face as we discussed her husband when he wasn’t in the room. How could he do this to his wife and children?

I met a former leader in the Mormon church later in my missionary service. He had been an Elders Quorum President, but he and his wife had left the church. He seemed confident and unashamed. How could he doubt the truth? What could lead someone so strong to be so weak? He didn’t even have the good sense to be ashamed of his faithlessness. The missionaries discussed how we could bring him back into the fold as we left his home.

Now that I am an atheist who enjoys Buddhism, now that I have left behind leadership positions in the church, will others see me and judge me the same way that I judged these men? Will an awkward wall separate us when we don’t know what to say to each other? Will they see the strength of my convictions as a weakness and a delusion? Will they shake their head in disbelief that I could leave the truth? Will they paternally plot to save my soul? Will they try to make my wife and children ashamed of me? Do they pity me?

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:1–2)