According to Harold Camping, today (October 21^st) is to be the end of the world. This was part of the same prophecy that prompted the investment of millions of dollars campaigning to warn the public of the rapture that was to take place on May 21, 2011. As you are by now undoubtedly aware, neither of these prophecies have come to pass.

It’s tempting to simply dismiss people like this with a good laugh because their claims are absurd to the point of amusement, but to do this would be a disservice to those who have had their lives ruined in the aftermath of this nonsense. Those RVs had children on board that were convinced the world was going to end soon. To the people who live in thought reform groups like this, it isn’t just a goofy fantasy, to them it is very real.

Our brains run everything through a filter that abstracts the world we perceive into pre-processed concepts, much like computers do with caching. When we look at a tree we do not see individual leaves and branches, we see an abstraction of a tree and the brain fills in the rest with our preconceived notions. Our world is so full of information and complexity that we would never be able to function in real time without such a mechanism. As a byproduct of this we can perceive things that are not really there or observe a world that only exists within our own minds. With that in mind it should be perfectly clear that most of the people that hold beliefs like the May 21 rapture aren’t stupid, they were simply caught somehow in a state of vulnerability where their filter could be manipulated. For many this is at a time of tragedy, which is why Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists all famously target individuals who have just suffered loss.

So far it seems unlikely that we’ll ever be rid of self delusion. Areas of Europe that are largely atheistic have seen a rise of homeopathy, horoscopes, “alternative medicine” and similar magical nonsense. I may reject all of these but clearly I am no less vulnerable to some sort of delusion since at the end of the day my thoughts are still being formed on the same hardware as everyone else’s. The takeaway from Camping’s mess is to never hold onto any idea so tightly that it can’t be challenged lest we suffer a similar fate.

Years ago when the winter Olympics were in Salt Lake City a news reporter went around to public places in Utah and interviewed as many Mormons as he could to try and get an idea of what Mormons “really believe.” I distinctly recall how surprised I was when everyone he interviewed, despite all being Mormon, described beliefs that were very different from my own and even different from each other. My mom, sister and I stood around the TV frustrated. How could these people get it so wrong? Didn’t any of them pay attention in church?

This was a lesson I wouldn’t internalize until years later. Like many ex-Mormons, I’m guilty as charged when it comes to digging up amusing, factually wrong or plain absurd things that Mormon leaders have said or comment on absurd or destructive teachings. Even so, just because the church teaches something doesn’t mean all Mormons believe a certain way. A really poignant example is the godmakers cartoon, which I should point out is not and never was “banned.” The cartoon suffers from two problems. First, it’s old, and reflects teachings of the church from the 1960s and 70s. It was released in 1982, and of course the exact date that any given teaching was abandoned is rather fuzzy since the leaders don’t exactly go to the pulpit and say “we no longer believe this.” They just stop talking about it.

The second problem with that cartoon is that while the church did legitimately teach everything they mention, even Mormons that are old enough to remember being taught the abandoned beliefs and might remember hearing the crazy stuff (God and Mary having literal sex or Jesus being polygamist just to name a few, the video has a lot of them) remember that everyone has their own brand of the religion. I’ve found that many rational people just filter that kind of stuff out and don’t remember it. Some even get uncomfortable if you bring it up or find some excuse to dismiss it.

When dealing with fiction it’s possible to reconcile anything as long as you can be flexible enough to add or remove arbitrary details. A classic example was in Star Wars when Han boasted that his ship could complete the Kessel run in twelve parsecs. But a parsec doesn’t measure speed, it’s a unit of distance equal to approximately 3.2 lightyears. (if you’re curious, it’s the distance a star must be from earth for the parallax to be one second of right ascension in the sky, hence the name. Parallax Second, or parsec) I’m uncertain who actually reconciled the error, but the story now goes that the Kessel Run is an obstacle course that runs you close to a black hole. Because Hans ship was so fast he could fly really close and shave off a good portion of his distance. Of course none of these extra details about the black hole were mentioned or even thought of in the source material, but that doesn’t matter. As long as the reconciliation sounds plausible then it works.

When you can understand how they reconcile errors like this in fiction then you will understand not just how apologetics works but the reason why every member has their own brand of the religion. Your beliefs are shaped by which parts of the teachings you internalized, which you ignored, which you had to reconcile and finally how you reconciled them.

Now that I don’t have to reconcile everything as truth, I often see things come out of the mouths of the church leadership in its raw unfiltered form. Because we can view the teachings this way there seems to be a general agreement among most ex-Mormons about what the church teaches, and we often criticize this version of Mormonism. The trouble is, when a believing Mormon sees our criticism, what we’re attacking usually won’t resemble that individual’s beliefs, and this can lead to the assumption that we don’t know what we’re talking about. I know this because I assumed the same about all the Mormons in that news report years ago that believed differently than I did. This is why “Anti-Mormon” literature had little effect on me.

For public forums that cater to ex-Mormons I don’t really have a solution for this, but in a private one-on-one conversation I’ve found that the best thing to do is find out what the person you’re debating actually believes then go from there. The less assumptions you make the more effective you’ll be. It’s often surprising how unique each individual’s version is.

There are some arguments that, while unconvincing to me, sound reasonable enough that I can see where others might accept them. The timing when I first heard the argument that the church does more good than harm couldn’t have been more impeccable, as I was in the middle of grasping for straws searching for any redeeming quality that the church had. It was brought up that the church has church welfare, humanitarian programs, the bishop’s storehouse etc. Reality is that these entities are charities that the church uses as tax shelters for their business arms. Among other things, the church is one of the largest land owners in the United States with industries in farming, and are building a giant shopping center in downtown Salt Lake City. Their “charity” will ensure that they don’t have to pay taxes on these things. Now to be fair, the fact that they have tax shelters is not evil in and of itself. Unethical maybe but most American corporations that size have them. What’s more, not all tax shelters actually do any “good” in the world, and theirs does.

My first reaction to this argument is that, because they’re a church, much of their activities are tax exempt anyway, and they’re giving close to the minimum that they actually have to. What’s more, they’re getting the contributions from their members, meaning it costs them nothing. This means Wal-Mart gives far more per dollar earned in charity and they have to pay for said charity out of their own pockets. It seems realistic to me that most of the members that donate to the church would have donated anyway to a secular organization, not just the charitable contributions but at least a portion of what they paid in tithing as well. By paying tithing many members feel that they have already “contributed” and choose not to donate further.

If it is true that the good they do would be done anyway—and people’s attitudes seem to suggest that this is the case—then they are contributing nothing at best and at worst depriving our community of tax revenue and charitable donations that could be used helping the needy rather than building chapels, temples and shopping centers. If we ignore the fact that their charity would happen either way, and make the unlikely assumption that hygiene kits and blankets could reach the needy in no other way, then it boils down to cost versus rewards. The cost here is the damage the church does (legislation and bullying of the LGBT community, inducing guilt and diminished self worth, anti-intellectualism, etc) and the rewards are of course the humanitarian aid. This one is a bit harder to weigh in on in an unbiased way because I’m not a recipient of said aid yet I have been at the receiving end of the harm caused by the church. I know, or rather knew, people personally who committed suicide; and the evidence for at least one of these points to their diminished self worth as a result of their beliefs as the cause of depression. (the suicide itself being the lack of sufficient help) So with the full admission of my bias out of the way, I think the benefit is negligible compared to the harm.

Destructive organizations doing “good works” to improve their pr is nothing new. During the depression Al Capone opened up soup kitchens in Chicago (pictured below) and in the recent earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan the Yakuza, a mafia in Japan, passed out blankets and supplies to victims of the disaster.

If you’re going to use the argument that the church is a force for good because they do all this “charity” then you have to concede the same for criminal organizations that do the same.

Finally, if I am having this conversation with fellow ex-mormons, then I think this analogy speaks volumes:

I am compelled to share with you an experience I once had with my dear mother. She baked our family the most wonderful and delicious brownies and presented them to us. The whole house was filled with the smell, and we approached the kitchen drooling like Pavlov’s dogs. Then she informed us that baked into the brownies is a tiny morsel of dog poop. Only a little bit, you can hardly taste it. She then asked us if we still wanted to taste her brownies? (she assured us that the dog poop was not in any way a euphemism for weed)

I’m aware that argument from analogy proves nothing, but it’s always great for making Mormons squirm.