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Welp, I was going to make a comment on a post over at Tom Rees' blog, and I got so verbose it went over the 4k-per-comment limit. It's probably rude to post a comment that long anyway, so why don't I respond in the form of a blog post, hmmm?
Tom's post is in regards to the book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann. In it, Kaufmann provides disturbing statistics suggesting that religious fundamentalists may out-reproduce the non-religious and religious moderates alike, resulting in a future demographic breakdown that favors extreme patriarchy and oppression of women. I'll let you read Tom's original post for the details. What follows is my response:
First things first, I am extremely skeptical about Tom's contention that "ratcheting up the level of conflict serves to paradoxically increase the power of the religious patriarchs." It seems to me that these highly insular patriarchal groups do not require any external catalyst whatsoever to "ratchet things up". Note that the Ken Hamms of the world hate the Francis Collinses as much or more than they hate the PZes. I know that is Creationist fundamentalism rather than extreme patriarchal fundamentalism, but I suspect their respective responses to the outside world are similar. As was pointed out to me today, no amount of pandering will satisfy an extremist, and similarly I doubt that any amount of politeness is likely to prevent insular cult leaders from "ratcheting it up". They will feel equally under attack regardless of tone or content -- creating a persistent feeling of being under attack is what they do, otherwise they would not be able to achieve insularity.
Tom expresses hope that the problem may be solved by a rebound in liberal fertility, a possibility that is already showing early signs of plausibility. It could happen, but with AGW a looming and unresolved problem, that's going to be a tough sell for a lot of people. And even neglecting whether it could happen or not, combating the rise of fundamentalism by increasing global fertility rates -- while NOT solving the problem of out-of-control carbon emissions -- is a solution that could backfire quite badly for everyone. (Full disclosure: My wife and I are planning, for the moment, on eventually having three children altogether, despite some reservations I have that this may be grossly environmentally irresponsible)
On the other hand, I am highly skeptical that this scenario of unchecked growth of insular patriarchal fundamentalism is realistic after all. Insularity is difficult to maintain on a large scale. The Amish may have ballooned to a quarter million, but try keeping up those fertility and retention rates when it's five million or ten million. Almost by definition, insularity can only be maintained on a relatively small scale.
The Mormons, a group with which I unfortunately have intimate experience, are a relevant example here... They are spreading worldwide, but the pace of their expansion has slowed (don't let misleading statistics used in church propaganda convince you otherwise), and I can tell you from personal experience that the insularity is not well-maintained outside of Utah and parts of Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado -- and as we might predict, retention rates are quite poor outside of Mormon Country. And there's only so many Elder Youngs and Sister Smiths you can cram into 82,100 square miles. If most patriarchal cults go the way of Mormonism, it's quite possible that the trend identified by Kaufmann will turn out to be self-limiting.
Which is not to say the subject isn't worthy of concern, especially if the Mormon blueprint is/becomes atypical. It may turn out that in the Internet era, a bazillion insulated "cells" could form, connected by a common ideology spread via the 'tubes. I'm thinking Quiverfull here, which is not a singular insular cult, but rather is composed of thousands of scattered insular groups united only by their interest in explosive reproduction. The Duggars (of 19 Kids and Counting fame) could even represent the prototypical model for this kind of "cell"-like expansion: they aren't a member of any church per se, but rather they hold Sunday services in their own home, and occasional meet with like-minded families at conferences, camps, etc. The Duggars themselves probably won't have a particularly high retention rate, given that the omnipresent film crew severely disrupts their insularity, but the "cell"-like nature of how they practice their brand of patriarchy is disturbing to say the least, and contradicts my previous contention that the trend will be self-limiting.
It may be naive, but the biggest source of hope for me is that, given access to sufficient information, our side is quite clearly right while the other side is quite clearly wrong. I know it makes me sound absolutist, but I make no apologies when I say that there is no such thing as "cultural relativism" when it comes to the wrongness of oppressing women, for example. Those who are cognizant of the world at large and who still maintain these backward worldviews are anomalies; the vast majority are operating from a position of ignorance. As the pace of information flow increases, perhaps it will be harder and harder to maintain these pockets of willful ignorance... Or so I hope.
I just became aware of a talk given in 1960 by Spencer W. Kimball, future prophet of the LD$ church, in which he actually claims to have seen native Americans turning whiter ("becoming white and delightsome") as a result of activity within the Mormon church:
I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today.... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.
At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl--sixteen--sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents--on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather....These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.
Holy fucking shit, I mean, I knew these guys were despicable and retarded, but wow. Putting it in the cultural context of 1960 partially explains the racism, but the idea that taking children away from their parents and indoctrinating them with Mormon teachings could change their skin color... the mind boggles.
Via Jesus' General. And there's more where that came from. Sick...
The Maine anti-gay marriage campaign Yes On 1 released their most recent finance report, covering donations since October 1st. Does the $1.4 million they managed to raise reflect massive grassroots opposition to gay marriage? No, no it does not. It reflects the political and economic clout of two well-funded tax-exempt brainwashing hate groups: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the Catholic church.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland contributed $167,750, with various other churches contributing another $10,000 or so. This doesn't seem like a large amount until one considers that it is more than all of the legitimate private donors combined.
Wait, that math doesn't work out! How is $167k more than half of $1.4 million?
Well, that's because the National Organization of Marriage, which some (including myself) believe to be a Mormon front organization, contributed a whopping $1.1 million dollars, in three separate donations.
Worse yet, these Liars for Jesus have absolutely no reservations about telling flat-out lies in order to further their bigoted agenda. The falsehoods in the famous Gathering Storm commercial are well-documented. In the Yes On 1 campaign, they are claiming that priests who do not believe in gay marriage will not be allowed to refuse to perform a marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple, and could face a lawsuit or fines -- even though the bill explicitly states that such is not the case1. I mean, you know you've gone negative when there is an investigation by the Attorney General into whether you are telling dirty lies, and she comes back and confirms that you are.
But wait, the opposition (the Good Guys) have raised even more money. Surely, the majority of that money must have come from some sort of powerful special interest group on par with NOM?
Nope. Largest donor to No on 1: The Human Rights Campaign (a pro-LGBT lobbying group) with a total contribution of $155,000. Most of the money is coming from individual donors.
That the Catholic and Mormon churches extort tithe extort2 and then use this money -- concealing the fact to boot, in the case of LD$, Inc. -- to promote hatred, tax-free... the mind reels.
1From the bill:
Sec. 5. 19-A MRSA §655, sub-§3 is enacted to read:
3. Affirmation of religious freedom. This Part does not authorize any court or other state or local governmental body, entity, agency or commission to compel, prevent or interfere in any way with any religious institution's religious doctrine, policy, teaching or solemnization of marriage within that particular religious faith's tradition as guaranteed by the Maine Constitution, Article 1, Section 3 or the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. A person authorized to join persons in marriage and who fails or refuses to join persons in marriage is not subject to any fine or other penalty for such failure or refusal.
That's right, bigots, nobody is going to force you to stop treating other people like dirt. You still have your God-given First Amendment right as a righteous white Christian to shit all over the Fourteenth Amendment rights of everyone else. You just don't get to force other people to shit on those rights too.
But when has the truth ever gotten in the way of some good righteous religious hate speech?
2Yes, "extort" really is the right word. You cannot enter a Mormon temple unless you have a temple recommend, which requires that you are fully up-to-date on your tithing. Mormons aspire to get married in the temple. You might think they'd give an exemption to the temple recommend requirement for family attending a wedding, but then, you'd think that because, unlike the church elders, you have human feelings. So, if your son or daughter is getting married in the temple, if you want to actually be at their wedding, you must have paid the church ten percent of your gross income (Not net! They are very explicit about this...) for at least the past year, or else.
Yep. That's extortion.
Well, this is the most depressing story I've heard in a long time. One member of a gay couple vacationing in Florida suffers a brain aneurysm and is rushed to the hospital, where she sadly will not recover. Despite having all the legal documents in place, the hospital refused to admit the grieving partner or give her full information about what was going on.
So, when Mormons cry about how they are being hated on for interfering with the vote for Prop 8... Yeah. Don't get me started.
This comment inspired me to write an account of my own deconversion from Mormonism to atheism. It's not really a coherent narrative, because it was more of a gradual erosion than any sudden realization, or even a series of sudden realizations (though there were one or two of those). Anyway, here goes a whole bunch of rambling...
It sounds shallow, but the first and perhaps the most significant factor in my move away from theism is that from the time I reached adolescence, I didn't feel any kind of a bond with my fellow Mormons. I just didn't identify with them: I was too intellectually curious, I didn't care for conversational taboos, I never enjoyed church even when I was a True Believing Mormon (TBM) and really tried to enjoy it... Church was boring, long (Mormon sunday services are three hours, folks, not to mention another hour of young men/young women's meetings on Wednesday nights), I didn't like wearing a tie, I hated the music (I still don't care for most choral music), I hated the arbitrary authority afforded to Sunday school teachers and their ilk... In addition, the few peers inside the church that I did identify with were all moving away from TBM status during adolescence -- though some of them did come back in adulthood (maybe all but me? I'm not sure).
Honestly, I think if it weren't for my social/aesthetic incompatibility with Mormonism, it's conceivable I might have stayed a believer my whole life. Probably I would have ultimately been convinced by the evidential problem of evil, but I can't ever be sure.
The first rational argument against god that I accepted, and I'm sure I would have had to buy into this one even without the social/aesthetic issues, is the logical problem of evil. I mean, this one is painfully obvious once you really think about it. However, it only disproves the existence of a god that is simultaneously omnipotent and benevolent. Plantinga's free will defense and similar such apologies are impotent (heh) in justifying a truly omnipotent god, because if this being can do anything, then he could also do things that were logically contradictory, like eliminating evil without eliminating free will. (I find the more nuanced arguments against the free will defense to be interesting but superfluous... Either god can do anything or he can't. If he can, then he's malicious. If he can't, then whether it's logically possible for free will and evil to coexist is irrelevant.)
But you can be a theist without an omnipotent God, and that's just what I did for awhile. Well, actually, I was probably at least 40% agnostic by that point, but I felt that it was still possible there was a very powerful, but not quite omnipotent, god. I even pointed to a passage in the Book of Mormon which I felt justified this belief, though I just searched for it and couldn't find it. Maybe I just imagined it was there. heh...
It was also around this time -- I think in my sophomore or junior year of high school -- that I reasoned myself something along the lines of Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit. I think I was expressing some kind of vague doubts about the existence of God to a friend -- one who was not part of the Mormon church, and who, despite his parents being Bahá'í, I had never before taken for being particularly theistic -- and he suddenly spat, "Where do you think all this came from? Do you think it just fell here?" At that moment, the infinite regress invoked by this line of argumentation suddenly became illuminated, and it became clear that God as a "first cause" was no kind of answer to the "Big Questions" at all.
At least, that's how I remember it now... Perhaps I had been thinking about this for awhile, and his comment only crystallized it in my mind. Or maybe I'd already figured it all out before, and I only think I figured it out on the spot because the conversation was memorable. Meh, anyway, it went something like that.
Of course, dismissing the Cosmological argument, as I now know to call it, does not disprove the existence of god, but it was an important step nonetheless, because it meant the existence of a theistic universe was no more plausible than the existence of an atheistic universe. Or perhaps to put it more succinctly, I no longer felt that there were any existential advantages to theism. It could still be true or false, but it didn't need to be true on an existential basis.
At this point, although I still didn't really think about myself that way, I was firmly agnostic, leaning towards atheistic. What really sealed the deal was my increasing realization that the God of Abraham is a total fucking asshole. I vaguely alluded to this earlier, when I said that if I had somehow enjoyed the social and aesthetic aspects of Mormonism (ick...), the next best hope for my deconversion would have been the evidential problem of evil. Even when I was trying my hardest to be faithful, the hackneyed aphorism that "God works in mysterious ways" could only be swallowed for so long before it started acting as an emetic.
It's not even so much the existence of suffering that got me, because as I said, I can envision a not-quite-omnipotent God doing his best to be benevolent and yet the best he could do ended up being a rather cruel universe anyway. No, it is the absurdity of God's alleged commandments that really tears it. In particular, I found it impossible to accept the juvenile inanity of the sexual restrictions practiced by Mormonism and most other mainstream religions.
Heh, it's funny to say so, but I bet that whole prohibition on masturbation has deconverted more adolescents than one could ever imagine. I mean, it's abundantly clear to nearly any 15-year-old that you don't go blind or get hairy palms from excessively wacking it, in't it? But of course teens can still be made to feel guilty by authority figures. (I had forgotten until recently how terrible I felt about lying to the Bishop when in a temple recommend interview he asked if I ever "abused my body"... What a creep!) By the time one gets to be 19 or 20, though, I would think one would have the perspective to realize how silly it is to think you ought to, or even can, forbid people from masturbating.
Homosexuality and premarital sex were also no-brainers. Any mature adult ought to be able to see that there's nothing inherently wrong with either of those things. The arguments that seek to attack them on a practical level (e.g. premarital sex leading to teen pregnancy) do nothing but conflate an irresponsible behavior with an unrelated and perfectly innocuous behavior. Hell, premarital sex isn't just innocuous, it's a damn good idea! If someday my son tries to marry a woman (or man) who he hasn't been intimate with first, I'm gonna smack that boy upside the head and ask him what the hell he is thinking!
It was around this time, in mid-college, that I began half-jokingly referring to myself as a "non-practicing agnostic": In theory, I believed one could never really know -- but in practice, I could not bring myself to accept even the possibility of the existence of a god. It was too infuriating. Hence, the "non-practicing" aspect of my professed agnosticism.
As many people do in college, I flirted with some quasi-mystical beliefs, but I never really believed them more than metaphorically. Actually, ahem, my mystical experiences were pretty much inextricably tied to, uh, erm, certain other "experiences" that people often do "in college". Enough said about that...
I gradually moved away from this "non-practicing agnostic" position towards one that was, at least at a rational level, purely atheistic. It seemed rather silly to insist on the unknowability of God's existence, when I could make the same argument about the unknowability of, say, my car's existence. Sure, if you want to go and put too fine a point on it, one can never really say anything exists -- but that's an existential dead end. It's solipsism, and it's stupid. (Side note: For a brief period I referred to myself as a "psuedo-solipsist scientific methodist", but the less said about that awkward construction the better...)
But while I fully rejected the existence of God on a rational level, there was still a trace that remained on an emotional level. I used to say, "I don't believe in God, but I also believe He hates me." I was only half-joking when I said that, too. I guess on a subconscious level, the stories of my youth still had some influence over me, yet at the same time my adult knowledge of ethics and morality made those stories viscerally revolting. Or something like that, who knows.
So that takes me all the way until last year, when I saw Religulous and started being exposed to the writings of Hitchens, Dawkins, etc. You know, it's always really funny to me when people talk about how the so-called "New Atheists" are so bitter and are "obviously angry at God." I actually was an angry-at-God quasi-atheist for nearly a decade, and what made me not angry at God anymore was reading those dudes' books. I'm not quite sure exactly how to put it, but I guess that it made me view my atheism as not just the inevitable conclusion of a rational mind, but as a distinctly good thing.
Well, it was more than that even. It sort of turned my anti-theistic feelings upside down. Rather than being angry at the idea of God and religion, instead I became passionate about the idea of freedom from religion. Don't get me wrong, I still have plenty of righteous indignation (heh) reserved for theism. But I'm less focused on the badness of what is, and more on the goodness of what could be.
Maybe my blog doesn't always make it seem like that, but given the distrust and vitriol reserved for atheists in this country, I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that even when I'm trying to be positive I end up mostly complaining. The difference is, somehow, I feel good about it now.
At the risk of feeding the "atheism is just another religion" crowd, I guess I could say that being passionate about atheism makes me feel like I'm a part of something larger than myself. I know a lot of people fulfill that need through religion. I myself never got that from Mormonism (though you better damn well believe I tried) but even if I had, isn't it better to find fulfillment via something that is actually true?
The "New Atheists" are not bitter and angry. In my opinion, the ones who are the most bitter and angry are fundamentalists, disillusioned theists, and yes, the closeted atheists who know the truth but somehow view that as a negative. Coming out about one's atheism is a way of letting go of the damage done by religion. I only wish more people could see that.
So I was raised Latter-Day Saint, and I haven't blogged about that at all yet. I guess now is as good a time as ever.
Something that has always bothered me is the passage in the Book of Mormon that is always presented to potential new members (the church refers to them as "investigators") as a litmus test they can use to determine whether the things they are being told are true or not. The passage reads as follows:
And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
---Moroni 10:4
Okaaaaay.... so let me get this straight: I should ask the voice in my head whether these things are true or not, and if I approach the question already having faith in the teachings, with a real intent to have the voice in my head tell me it's true, and with a sincere heart hoping for it to be true.... then the voice in my head might tell me it's true? Shocking!
I'm pretty sure that if you try hard enough to believe in anything, you can make yourself believe it. This is not exactly an earth-shattering observation. And yet, it's supposed to be one of the most convincing "proofs" of the validity of the Book of Mormon.
If the BoM had been written a century later, this verse probably would have recommended clapping your hands too.
