Neither this photo nor the modifications to it were created by me.

The most sad part about this situation is that the majority of the North Korean inhabitants are content with their lives, and do not realize how wonderful a place the world outside their country really is. Some do realize this and escape to neighboring countries, usually China, but many others seem to genuinely believe that they’re in heaven. In fact, North Korean weightlifter Om Yun Choi credited Kim Jung Il for his victories during the 2012 olympics. Whether he was sincere or simply feared retaliation for failing to do this is irrelevant to my point; they clearly have a system there where the people are expected to worship their government, and in an environment like this it’s natural to believe what everyone surrounding you believes, even if they only appear to do so.

Yet, as this same government who is so revered by its people says something silly the rest of us who have no such delusions can’t help but laugh.

Every time a general conference rolls around in the spring and fall ex-Mormon forums erupt with criticism of the teachings, and people posting in these threads often lament about how such teachings negatively affected them. Although I did have a good laugh when Holland said the following:

“Sometimes we act as if a declaration of doubt is more important or hard than an honest declaration of faith. It is not.”

Clearly, that man has never gone through the terrifying, difficult experience that is apostasy with a devout family and was faced with the choice of doing what’s right, maintaining our integrity and leaving; or going the safe, easy route and avoiding damage to friendships and family relationships by staying and pretending to believe. Everything turned out okay in my case but all too often people pay a heavy price for leaving.

Other teachings were not so amusing. L Whitney Clayton said that for a marriage to be successful you must share your passwords with your spouse, implying that married people should spy on and distrust each other. In reality this creates the same kind of relationship with your spouse that teenagers who have two Facebook accounts have with their parents. If you have one account with your spouse “friended” and another where the real action happens then you are asking for trouble, and this kind of thing is inevitable when resources such as emails are shared, even if it starts innocently in cases where a gift must be ordered online in secrecy.

One of the healthiest relationships I’ve ever seen was from the CEO of a small company who was approached in his office by a female worker who said that some people were accusing her of having an affair with him. His reaction was to thank her for her concern and escort her out of his office. He shared the incident with his wife, and she responded by saying that the woman was fishing. “Keep an eye on that one,” she said. After a few weeks it was discovered that several of the other executives had indeed been having affairs with her, which she was using to her advantage in the company. The CEO’s wife never once suspected that her husband may actually be guilty of this too, as they both trusted the other completely.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, it is a rare thing for a relationship to be successful—by which that I mean productive, long-lasting and happy—when there is jealousy, distrust or spying on one another. Endorsement of this advice is foolish to the point of absurdity even for the church, unless they found a way to profit from unsuccessful marriages.

Unsurprisingly, Boyd Packer shared some destructive advice by suggesting that too much tolerance can be a vice. While he is right in a certain sense, being tolerant of people mistreating others isn’t necessarily a good thing; in my opinion, you should instead stand up for the person who is oppressed. But his implication is that tolerance of our fellow human beings who happen to be LGBT is somehow bad.

Advice from the church that encourages bullying or damages marriages is nothing new for them, and hardly a conference session goes by without emphasis on at least some of these harmful teachings. But why pay attention to it at all, when we don’t believe? Why do only ex-Mormons and the absolute most pious members even listen to conference while everyone else just picks up on enough bits to make it sound like they listened; and indeed why do we care, especially when places like North Korea or even other, close-to-home religions are far worse? It’s not like the LDS church is shooting anybody.

The most superficial answer is because it’s easy. The problems with these talks are so obvious they scream at apostates and make the church look absolutely horrible, and every six months another batch of faithful members will reach a breaking point in their “spiritual armor” against the awful stuff general authorities say. I hesitate to criticize this practice however since it’s close to home. We don’t know anyone in North Korea, and I personally don’t know anyone who has committed suicide because of a sermon from Ted Haggard like I do with Boyd Packer. Just because a worse problem exists doesn’t mean the smaller problem should be ignored.

The good news is that we now live in the age of information. The strangely reckless remarks made last week will be remembered for some time, and as soon as 20 years from now faithful members will need to perform serious mental gymnastics to justify why a general authority would say such things. Soon believers will try to deny the church ever opposed equality, yet the facebook posts, blog posts, and archived articles from lds.org will be but a google search away.

On the surface this seems like very good advice. If I don’t want someone doing something to me, what right do I have to do it to them? This starts to get complicated when we consider that we are all individuals, and just because I wish to be treated a certain way does not mean that other people want to be treated that same way.

Consider same-sex marriage. Because I am heterosexual I may not ordinarily care what laws are passed in that regard. Nor would I flirt with or date another man, even though there are lots of men who are gay and would like to go out and date, and others still that are in relationships and would like support and validation from their peers; and still others who may wish to keep to themselves.

This is not just limited to sexuality. Some people have likes and dislikes that others may find repulsive or annoying. Some people enjoy certain sports but find others boring. Some may enjoy arguments or debates while others find these things confrontational.

The philosophy that you should treat others how you would be treated does not address this. Instead I feel a better philosophy would be to treat others the way they would want to be treated, to the best that your knowledge of that person allows and inasmuch as your treatment of them does not negatively affect or condone the harm of others or yourself. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well, but it does preclude ostracizing people because they’re different from you, taking away rights from others, and even less obvious stuff like sexism or racism; both of which are condoned in the bible.

The version of this philosophy taught in the Bible or Book of Mormon isn’t entirely bad, but since I had to reboot my belief system anyway, why not strive for something more. It is now well within my moral code to fight for equal rights for others even though those rights don’t apply to me. I now find it morally wrong to enforce gender roles or impose my preferences on others. And most of all, I would never condone something that is clearly harmful just because it is condoned in a book or by someone who claims to speak to a deity.

But they say I’m the one with no morals.

To confirm the truth of the church Mormons often turn to Moroni’s Promise found in Moroni 10:4 in the Book of Mormon. The verse 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.

This is generally interpreted to mean that if you want to know if the church is true, pray about it and you will receive a confirmation that it is true. The most superficial problem with this is that the mainstream LDS church is not the only church that believes in the Book of Mormon. Members of the FLDS church, Strangites and others read this same verse and pray just as sincerely only to find that their religion is confirmed to be true.

This isn’t surprising. Praying for an answer does not yield truth. Instead, it invariably gives you the answer you expected from the start. If you don’t get the answer the church wanted, they put on the pressure and tell you to keep praying until you get the desired result. To demonstrate this, last year I made a quiz to see how easy it would be to guess someone’s religion based on their testimony. How many did you get correct? Given what we know about this type of psychological manipulation we would expect most people experiencing social pressure in a church to come away from that prayer with a full confirmation that whichever church they prayed about was in fact true.

I call this phenomenon Moroni’s Dilemma: The same prayer that confirmed that your church has exclusive truth also confirms to other people that you’re wrong.

So clearly Moroni’s promise is no indicator of truth. Luckily, it turns out that the Book of Mormon gives us another (perhaps unintended) way of determining which church is true. In Jacob 7 we meet the character Sherem who challenges Jacob. Sherem is clearly not an atheist like Korihor, he believes in God and in the scriptures, he just doesn’t believe that Jacob is a prophet. From there his story and Korihor’s seem to converge when he asks for a sign and God gives him one by smiting him to the ground.

As indicated a few chapters later in Words of Mormon, Sherem asked a very relevant question; there were false prophets running around. How could you know that Jacob was the correct one? A false prophet would never admit to being such, and could claim any kind of miracle or chain of authority they want in order to gain followers. Clearly, we cannot take them at their word. The passing of authority would also be an unreliable method in Mormonism (and just about every extant religion nowdays) because of the Succession Crisis. Brigham Young wasn’t the obvious choice for the next prophet, Sidney Rigdon and Oliver Cowdery were both more logical choices and both started their own sect of the church.

It turns out, despite not giving a direct answer to Sherem’s question, Jacob does provide us with an unambiguous way to determine who is the real prophet and who isn’t. If one were to directly challenge an alleged prophet and ask him for a sign from God, then if he is a true prophet of God the questioner will get smitten by God. This occurred twice in the Book of Mormon with separate prophets, which shows that the method should be repeatable, and the same method was used by Elijah against the priests of Ba’al which demonstrates that God condones this method. If the questioner is not struck down, as Elijah wasn’t, then the prophet is confirmed as false; but if he is struck down then the inquirer has finally shown which prophet is true. Remember, the person asking the question does not need to be “wicked” or atheist as Sherem and Elijah both appeared to be neither. In fact given the risk such an action would be quite noble.

If the church is true then the Book of Mormon has to be true (though not necessarily the reverse) and the  above scenario was shown to be repeatable in that text; but as yet we haven’t seen any real-life examples of this occurring. For the sake of my friends and family it seems like a worthwhile thing to stick your neck out for, so I’ll go for it.

Thomas S Monson, if you are a true prophet, show me a sign.

I have edited this post now to demonstrate how the bot reacts to edited posts!

There are six degrees of burns, each increasing in severity from a first degree (minor rash) to sixth degree (cremation/charred bones and flesh). With a few rare exceptions a third degree burn is the highest degree that’s generally survivable depending on coverage, and that is the exact type of burn we see in the linked picture. This type of burn is not painful because the nerves are destroyed, but it will be surrounded by painful second degree burns, and will leave scars for life with an entire region that is incapable of feeling any sensation whatsoever.

Further, my description in my first paragraph, though encompassing what most news outlets were reporting, is grossly oversimplified. Liebeck only sought coverage of her expected medical expenses and opportunity costs resulting from the incident, which combined amounted to just under $18,000 ($13,000 medical, $5,000 lost wages during recovery). When McDonald’s refused, only then did she seek a lawyer, and the amount she sued for increased drastically to cover the expense of representation in addition to the originally sought damages.

What’s more, McDonald’s had a policy of keeping their coffee at a much higher temperature than is safe. Properly heated coffee would have created an inconvenience and possibly some first degree burns, but it certainly would not have created third degree burns. Their logic is that people drink most of their coffee when they get to work, not in the car, and hotter coffee is perceived as more fresh. By overheating it they could ensure that it is still nice and hot when customers reach their destination in their cars. But some would suffer severe injury. Coffee should be served at between 55°C and 60°C, but theirs was served between 85°C and 95°C. (they had other arguments for the temperature as well, for full details on the incident see the Wikipedia page)

All the while, the rest of the country assumed that this woman was nothing more than a litigious bitch trying to cash in on a minor mishap in a drive-through. It’s a reasonable assumption, we do live in an overly litigious society where people are all too eager to sue for some quick cash, but even in a case that seemed to so obviously fit the stereotype such as this the assumption would have been dead wrong.

If I wanted to create an argument about frivolous lawsuits I could easily bring up this court case and leave details out to make any point I want. In the fall 2012 General Conference Dallin Oaks did just this. He cited studies stating that broken homes put children at a disadvantage, then went on to state that we can assume children of same-sex couples are at a similar disadvantage.

What I find interesting is Oaks’ use of the word “assume.” This suggests to me that he is well aware of the fact that he is lying. Studies have repeatedly shown that children of same-sex parents are no worse off than children of heterosexual parents. But to a Mormon, this would seem like a reasonable assumption given what they think homosexuality is like. This assumption is bogus, but it fits their world view.

I can’t emphasize enough just how dangerous teachings like this are. Whether or not Oaks and his cohorts believe their short-sighted insight is prophetic is uncertain, but in either case their moral compasses aren’t pointing north. When you believe that “inspiration” is eternal truth, and this inspiration can provide a basis for your morals, then it should come as no surprise when your morals lead to harm and destruction to others, and in just twenty years or less will be seen as evil and misguided. We’ve seen that before with the church’s blatant racism during the 1960s and earlier.

That’s what happens when you assume.

By all counts, Nostradamus could be considered a prophet, seer and revelator. But he has also said some wacky things that are often ignored.

An unfortunate side-effect of claiming to have a prophet that speaks for God is that it’s hard to distance yourself from things they say. Prophets have said many things over the years that not only contradict science, but also later doctrine, such as Brigham Young’s assertion that Adam and God were the same person. Some prophets have even said things that are patently absurd, such as that people dressed as Quakers lived on the moon. (Some sources say Joseph Smith also claimed people lived on the sun, but these do not come from an official church publication as is the case with the moon)

I’ve seen Mormons claim that such false statements were examples of prophets expressing personal opinions that are not necessarily revelations from God. Or in other words, they were “speaking as a man.” The trouble is, the church published several talks contradicting this statement, namely the 14 fundamentals of following the prophet. The sixth item on Benson’s list is as follows:

The prophet does not have to say “Thus saith the Lord” to give us scripture.

They contradict this statement a lot, including in that same talk, but the point remains; you can’t have it both ways. Because of their claims anything that comes out of a prophet’s mouth is going to be interpreted as scripture unless explicitly stated otherwise. This includes Monson’s infamous “let’s go shopping!”

Zealous followers of Nostradamus love scouring the tomes of prophecies he has given, but to reach a single “accurate” prediction one must wade through hundreds of failed, inaccurate or “not yet happened” predictions. With as many prophecies as were given by Nostradamus, and as vague as they are, it’s no surprise that a number of them turned out to fit real world events that happened after his death. Despite remarks denouncing the notion that prophets may say anything at all that isn’t scripture, the “speaking as a man” tactic has created an easy justification for similar quote mining for anything past prophets may have said that turned out to be true. But, like Nostradamus, at least as many (if not more) of the predictions turn out to be duds.

If you remove prophecies for which the prophet in question would have prior knowledge, the track record becomes worse than what you would expect from mere chance. Sure, there are some accurate prophecies and prophetic statements mixed in, but just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn’t mean it’s useful.

And there’s the rub. If you have no way of knowing whether your prophet is expressing his opinion or speaking for God, and they can retroactively change which it was at any point in the future, then what is the difference between that and Nostradamus making stuff up? What use is it having a prophet at all? Does such a prophet have any value that Nostradamus doesn’t?

The modern LDS church has evolved into more a business than a religion, so it is no surprise that they don’t declare bold prophecies anymore. None of Joseph Smith’s successors have translated anything (unless you count James Strang, or perhaps Philip Gill or Christopher Nemelka; none of whom are affiliated with the mainstream LDS church) and the only thing bold enough in recent years that could be called a “revelation” is the reversal of their ban on blacks and the priesthood in 1978.

To recap, we can’t be certain if anything the church leadership says is revelation even when they say it is (Brigham Young boldly declared that any statement of his recorded in the Journal of Discourses—where his statements about the Moon Quakers can be found—is scripture), they have made no prophecies in years and their only recent revelation was a reversal on one of their own decisions. It could arguably be said that the LDS church has no prophets, seers or even revelators except in name only. And yet it is with no sense of irony that they express how lucky they are to have a living prophet.

Growing up I was taught that these were the ultimate questions that “truth seekers” are going around asking. Conveniently, the church supplies simple answers to these questions. Because I was “lucky” to have this truth in my life, I believed I had all the answers. Reality it seems is a rather harsh teacher.

When I had to reboot my world view and became a real truth seeker, these weren’t very high on my list of questions to answer. They are superficial to the point of being almost meaningless, and as such never occurred to me until they were  brought up again much later. Instead my questions sought the full depth of reality, and by understanding that I might have some understanding of my place in it.

Who am I?

According to the church, we started out as intelligences (with no explanation of where these intelligences came from) who were eventually farted out of one of many spiritual mothers as God’s offspring, then came down and got a body. We are still left with the question of how God got there. By saying that he was once a man like us, we are simply moving the goal posts, but the question remains the same: who was the original god and how did he get there? Is it just turtles all the way down, as in Terry Pratchett’s Disc World? Because this explanation leads to infinite regress, it ultimately answers nothing, and raises more questions; none of them falsifiable and therefore all of them leading to dead ends.

But if we examine the implications of the big bang then suddenly everything fits. We may not know what happened before the big bang, if the concept is even possible, but we do at least have an explanation whose raised questions don’t necessarily lead to dead ends. The universe had a beginning, earth had a beginning, an abiogenesis event took place, and I am at the end of an unbroken chain of generations leading all the way back to the beginning of life on this planet. While we can’t detect them, there is no reason to assume there couldn’t have been other abiogenesis events elsewhere. There could even have been other big bang events. Universes far older or younger than ours. This is the frontier of science, and we may yet discover the reality of these things. Not through prophets or revelation by a creator, but through the scientific process of building hypotheses from existing data then experimenting and falsifying any wrong turn made.

In the former explanation we are nothing, dependent on an invisible father figure that is notorious for failing us when we need him most. In the latter, we are the amazing ones, we have the stewardship over our world and the power to make it a better place; and it is our responsibility to do so.

Why am I here?

I was taught that we are here to gain a body and work towards exaltation. This of course means you are to pray, pay and obey. Reality is that asking why you are here is meaningless when you pull back and get a wider perspective on the reality of our existence. The universe exists to be certain, and we exist in it, but all the evidence points to this happening by natural means with no design or conscious goals behind it. The universe is so big that intelligent life was bound to happen somewhere, and since we are experiencing reality at all we can only do so in one of the places where this is possible. (there are trillions of galaxies in the visible universe alone, in each one there are trillions of stars, most seem to have planets, and any number of those planets could be earth-like. It is so improbable that Earth is unique that we can assume it isn’t.)

We are on a planet that can sustain life, and it does so very well. But was it designed for us or did we evolve to adapt to it? And here we are in a universe that is almost devoid of life everywhere else. If we are going to exist at all it has to be here, otherwise we wouldn’t be around to observe reality at all.

The more I became acquainted with reality, the more meaningless this question became. I’m not here for any specific purpose but the one I make for myself. This doesn’t mean I should devote my life to becoming something I’m not because that’s what I want my meaning to be, only a lucky few get to be astronauts or movie stars, but it does mean that my “meaning of life” should be whatever makes me happy within the boundaries of my circumstance. Not what someone else thinks it should be.

Where am I going?

An unfortunate byproduct of sentience is an awareness of our own mortality. We will eventually die and we know it. The thought of an afterlife is very comforting to a lot of people. Assuming that there is no uncertainty at least. And so the church tries to get you to land on this question so they can give their sales pitch. I personally don’t expect there to be anything after my death. While I can’t prove it or claim absolute certainty, any attempt at doing so is little more than conjecture and dismissible simply because it can’t be falsified.

And that’s why truth seekers aren’t flocking to the church asking those three questions. We’re seeking something much less superficial. Carl Sagan put it best:

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

Even as an ex-Mormon I often look at aspects of the church and ask myself, was it always this obvious?  And when we see Mormons doing foolish things it’s tempting to call them out as being fools themselves, forgetting that we once believed as they did.

Examining the often humorously absurd doctrine it’s easy to forget just how sophisticated the thought reform that the church uses really is. From the emotional manipulation, isolation (missions, church schools, summer camps, EFY), information control (you’re not allowed to look at non-church sources) and social pressure it’s no surprise that most Mormons simply don’t think about the evidence against their faith. Many may not even realize it’s there even as they stare at it in the face. Though there are many exceptions, intelligent Mormons tend to be more liberal rather than apostates. It’s only the lucky ones that hear just the right piece of information to make them aware that something is wrong, and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Our reaction to what we see as stupidity is natural, especially given the American culture. A 2002 study found that the funniest joke in the United States was as follows:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?”

Other countries have different jokes as their favorite, but for the United States this says something about our culture. According to the study, Americans (in general) love this joke because, in addition to the surprise ending, the stupidity of the character making the emergency call makes them feel superior to that character. Unfortunately this aspect of American culture tends to harm discourse between believers and non-believers.

While it’s true that not all Mormons are intelligent people, many of them are known to regurgitate floods of nonsense then turn around and have an intelligent conversation the moment the subject at hand no longer involves the church. They don’t realize they’re doing it. That’s their sense of normal.

The question came up several times during the “support Chick-fil-a day” why anyone would want to associate with “bigots.” If my departure from Mormonism has taught me anything, the answer is because they don’t realize they’re bigots. They’re simply doing what they’re told, as they had been trained to do. For the same reason they believe the doctrine of the church to begin with. It’s frustrating, it’s hurtful seeing them flock to restaurants when the common cause is hate and bigotry (even though I’m not gay myself, but you don’t have to be to support your fellow human beings) but being antagonistic will only help polarize them further and drive them to do things that are even more dangerous than what they are already doing. No one thinks of themselves as the bad guy, but if you can maintain credibility with your Mormon friends and help them see how harmful their actions really are then most Mormons would be quick to drop the bigotry. Because again, they’re not bad people, they just never thought to question. They don’t know what they’re doing.

So how do you respect someone that says such inane things while acting like they’re profound, waving around their bigotry and making a fool of themselves? Simple. Change the subject. There was a point shortly after I discovered the truth of the church when I might have had trouble not laughing or getting frustrated at some of the goofy things that come out of Mormon’s mouths, but in short order that became easy. And nothing but good can come from improving our discourse.

But even that will fail if we don’t remember the source of these remarks. Because more than likely the person making them is not, in fact, stupid.

The way I see it, the simplest explanation is that they are all wrong.