Anti-Choice or Anti-Life?

Recently this question has been thrown around in some of the circles I frequent…although it’s usually phrased as “are you PRO-choice, or PRO-life?”  While I appreciate people’s attempts to ruin a perfectly cordial dinner-party, I have to say I object to the premise of the question entirely.

I’m looking at my blog…it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything.  I had been awaiting some action on my “what kind of religion won’t let you quit” post, so I could do a follow-up, and I have been looking at topics for this and upcoming posts.  Abortion keeps coming up.  I have to get it out of the way, and many people won’t want to hear it.  Perhaps they won’t even CARE, it has come up so often in the past few years of presidential campaigning, and recently in the Sotomayor inquisition.  But I think that my take may be a slightly novel approach to the topic, and I’m going to hit it from several angles (no sexual innuendo intended…or IS it?).  Hopefully, in between posts on the subject I’ll talk about stupid myths that Utahn’s and Mormons believe in, and why they are utterly false, or why I think smoking should stay legal but selling tobacco should be outlawed.  Perhaps I’ll discuss the disturbing trend of pedophiles living next door to every school in my town.  Hopefully that teaser will sucker some of you back later…

But for now, we’re talking abortion, and this is episode 1. 

Why do I puke in my mouth a little every time someone asks the abortion question?  I support abortions in at least some cases, and depending on how my thinking goes in the near future, I may make room to support abortion in all cases.  I’m piecing my arguments together.  But I’m not pro-choice.  In fact, I think taking on the title “pro-choice” is terrible PR.

I used to feel that anyone who opposed a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion was, necessarily, anti-choice, hence the first part of the title.  When you think in terms of choice versus right-to-life, you tend to see things in that light, and wonder how on Earth anyone could tell a woman in this day and age of enlightenment and civil rights what she can do with her body.  It seems absurd.  So absurd that all you do in a debate with an anti-choicer is tell them that they are wrong, let them rebut, and then tell them they are wrong again a little bit louder, ad nauseum.

What I want to do is issue a plea to the “pro-choice” croud to stop calling this an issue of choice.  WTF, right?  I know.  But if we want to make any headway, politically, and win the support of a larger demographic, we have GOT to understand the pro-life mindset, and adjust our position.  Pro-lifer’s very often see those who support abortion as “anti-life.”  This insenses us, but it makes absolute sense.

We want the law to protect abortion, or at the very least we want the law to NOT prohibit abortion.  They think abortion is murder – the unjust killing of a human being.  In other words, they think we want the law to protect, or at the very least NOT prohibit, murder.  And that just doesn’t make sense to them.  Sure, we allow legal exceptions or leniencies for some types of killing; executions by the state, war, crimes of passion, accidents.  But when it is unjust, we call it murder, and we don’t make exceptions.  We don’t protect a person’s right to choose to unjustly kill another human being at whim, and if we did protect that right we’d be dooming ourselves.  So when we claim to be pro “choice,” what they hear is “we want the choice to commit murder.”

It’s nice to attach a cute name to your position, but it’s actually hurting our efforts a great deal.  We need to abandon the “choice” language and begin to focus on destroying the idea that abortion is murder, and to do that we have to ask,

1) is a human being’s life being terminated, and/or

2) is it unjust?

I say no, but I’ll go into that another time.  Any of you pro-choicers out there reading this (both of you) please consider this.  We have to change the direction of the discussion, because currently there is no dialog, and without a dialog we cannot make any progress, and we CERTAINLY can’t make any converts.

Lost in Translation, or “Oh, the Mormanity!”

Arabic Book of Mormon

Utah has no shortage of mythology and folklore, and a great deal of it is tied to the LDS church organization.  A recent discussion on Postmormon.org , in which I participated, reveals the ubiquity of these dubious stories.  Among them are claims that a Mormon official encountered bigfoot while on horseback, and discovered the beast to be none other than Cain, the son of Adam.  And of course no suite of tall tales would be complete without a lake monster story.  Utah’s Bear Lake is said to be the home of one such monster, and local folklore has it that Bear Lake is connected to Loch Ness in Scotland by a long tunnel which serves as a a thoroughfare for Nessie as he travels, apparently through magma, between the two locations.  It has even been reported that Brigham Young himself went to great expense to catch the monster using 300 feet of rope and a large custom-crafted hook baited with a sheep.

Myths abound here in the wild country, but I wanted to focus on something that came up recently in my family.  My mother handed me an email recently, which was given to her by her mother, forwarded by her sister-in-law (that’s how these things apparently propagate in the digital age, even among octogenarians).  It was a four page “transcript” of a “speech” given by former apostle Russel M. Nelson.  She handed it to me saying “you’re a linguist,” (I’m not, although I am studying linguistics) “I think you might find this interesting.”  She then qualified this by saying that she was in no way attempting to “re-convert me,” although I think that this was precisely her intent.  Fortunately, I had come across this story some time before and was prepared to handle it.  I’ll only provide a link to the “talk” called “Reflections of Sami Hanna,” rather than post the entire contents here.  Here is a link which, in its preface disclaimer, alludes to the biggest problem in establishing the truth of the claims that lie within.  The author of the page states:

“Elder Nelson has mentioned Sami Hanna in several talks. All the information mentioned in this talk regarding what Mr. Hanna learned during his translation of the Book of Mormon into Arabic is accurate and verifiable. Why I have a disclaimer is because I have not been able to find where THIS PARTICULAR talk originated. I am not nor have I ever intimated that Elder Nelson or anyone else made up Sami Hanna or his story. I just don’t know if Elder Nelson gave this specific talk as it is written, or if it is just a compilation of other talks given by Elder Nelson on this subject. It could just be a copy of a sacrament meeting talk he gave in 1976 that was never published. The origin of this talk itself is not what’s important. What is important is that everything mentioned in it is true.“

Elder Nelson did, indeed, mention Dr. Hanna in several talks, however Elder Nelson’s office released an official statement denying that he wrote “Reflections of Sami Hanna.”  One might wonder then, is Elder Nelson lying about having written it, or did the author lie about being Elder Nelson?  Either way, the entire story is therefore discredited as a hoax.

Do I stop there?  Oh no.  Not on your life.  Because people still believe this!  To be fair, this has been rejected by most of the online Mormon apologetic community, but it is still circulating, so I feel I must treat it.  I’m going to look at the specific claims, and deconstruct them.

*This may not be of interest to all readers.  I have provided this information for anyone who has been duped by this fraud of a story, or for non-Mormons who have heard the tale and lack the inside info to tackle the technical aspects.  For those who are uninterested, rest assured that I will return soon with other, more tantalizing tidbits!

(cracks knuckles)

The story claims that Dr. Hanna was converted when he translated the Book of Mormon into Arabic.

Sami Hanna is an expert in Semitic languages, and legend has it that, upon being presented with a Book of Mormon, he began to translate it into Arabic.  He was stunned by the ease with which the book flowed back into a Semitic language, so much so that he became immediately convinced of its authenticity and converted to Mormonism.  This claim has been supported by Nelson elsewhere, and a certain Mark Hanna, who claims to be Sami’s son, affirms that this is true, but says that it was a momentary lapse of reason, and that now Dr. Hanna has reverted to some more ancient form of Christ worship.  So this checks out, but it is hardly helpful in supporting the major claim being made.

The story further claims that “this was to be a translation back to the original language of the book.”

As far as I can tell this would, indeed, have been the first Arabic translation, however to claim that this would convert it back into the “original language” is problematic, to say the least.  The book of Mormon is said by Mormons to have been started around 600 BCE.  But the earliest evidence of Arabic, the ABSOLUTE earliest thing that linguists can call Arabic, dates from 328 CE, over 900 years AFTER Nephi supposedly started writing in America after traveling from Jerusalem.  What’s more, the Book of Mormon directly states in Mormon 9:32-33 that the native tongue of the authors was Hebrew, but that they had to write in “Reformed Egyptian” characters, a writing system unknown to linguists, and not optimized for Hebrew.  The same verse goes on to state that due to their inability to write in Hebrew script, there were imperfections in the record, complicating any “easy translation.”

If Nephi’s people (Nephi being the supposed first author of the canonized Mormon text) were linguistically isolated from their original language community for nearly 1,000 years, and during that time another language popped up from the same source in a different location, it is HIGHLY unlikely that those two languages would have much in common, except for some word roots, the way English and Persian share some roots.  A language COMPLETELY replaces approximately 10% of its vocabulary every 1,000 years or so.  This may not sound impressive at first glance, so allow me to illustrate:

Britain is invaded by Germanic and Roman groups around 500 CE, and a language, Old English, forms as a composite of Germanic and Latin, and the local Britton languages.  500 years later, the Normans invade England and English takes on a Norman twist, then is later influenced heavily by French.  Thus English is related to German, and also to French, and to Spanish through Latin.  All of these languages share a common ancestor, Indo-European, as does Greek (and Persian.)  Let’s look at the word for HEART in each of these languages:

ENGLISH: Heart

OLD ENGLISH: Heorte

GERMAN: Herz

LATIN: Cor

FRENCH: Cœur

SPANISH: Corazón

GREEK: Kardia

Proto-INDO-EUROPEAN: Kerd

Some of these may seem unrelated.  You might say that over the years - the thousand and a half years since English split from Latin, the several thousand years since each of these split from Indo-European, that the vocabulary for heart has changed.  But it hasn’t.  These are merely morphologically different incarnations of the same original Indo-European root word.  Indo-European “Kerd” morphed into “khertan” in Proto-Germanic, into “kardia” in Greek, and “cor” in Latin.  Latin is responsible for both “cœur” in French and “corazón” in Spanish, as is plain to see.  “Kardia” is responsible for our term “cardio,” and “khertan” became “heorte” and by 1500 CE, HEART.  So the vocab of this word is considered the same, and would not be part of that 10% new vocab, despite the very different look between the Greek, German, and French.  The kinds of changes that represent a shift in vocabulary are even stronger than that.  What is meant when it is said that 10% of the vocabulary changes is that COMPLETELY NOVEL words are invented out of whole cloth, or are replaced by loan words from unrelated languages.  For instance, if an Englishman moved to Utah, he might see mountainous rock formations that were completely alien to his English mountains, and would have to either invent a new word to describe them, or borrow an Indian word, thus changing the vocabulary of the language.

We would expect such changes to vocabulary from 600 BCE, when Nephi began writing his American adventure, to 328 CE, when Arabic was in its infancy.  Not to mention the regular morphological changes and vowel shifting, dialectical anomalies, and spelling changes that would have taken place during that time.  Not to mention the fact that the Nephites would have invented TONS of new words when they came to a completely NEW WORLD.   The Arabs, too, would have had their own unique words, because they would have had completely different technology at the time the language came about, requiring novel vocabulary.  The two languages, even at that point 1700 years ago, would have been mutually unintelligible, to say nothing of the difficulties Sami Hanna would have run into 30 years ago.  There is NO WAY that there would be a flow between the languages, ESPECIALLY if translating from a writing system that is not optimized for the given language!  The LAST thing you could expect here would be ease in translation.

…the Prophet Joseph did not merely render an interpretation, but a word for word translation from the Egyptian type of hieroglyphic into the English language.

There is no 1-1 exchange for word meanings between ANY 2 languages, but this is ESPECIALLY true for languages from completely different linguistic families, like Indo-European (English) and Semitic or Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew).

My copy of the Qur’an is in English AND Arabic.  In my copy of the Qur’an the first five verses are dissected in full-page detail by multiple scholars.  The first verse of the Qur’an, and probably the most common phrase in Arabic caligraphy and art, and Muslim worship, is

“Bismillah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim…”

or roughly,

“In the name of Allah, the merciful, the benevolent…”

The first page shows the verse in Arabic, the second page shows the translation from EACH of 32 different scholars.  NOT ONE of the 32 translations is identical.  NOT ONE.  This is ONE verse, 3 words, 32 distinct translations out of 32 attempted translations.  Granted the differeneces are subtle, but they would be compounded if you then attempted to translate those translations BACK into Arabic!

A HILARIOUS illustration of this is in the DVD version of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, in the special features.  There is a feature where they take the Japanese version of the film, and translate the Japanese dubbed dialog back into English.  Not only is it remarkably different from the original…it is nearly unintelligible.  LOL.  That is the kind of thing you can expect when trying to translate from language A to language B, and then back to A again, and this is something that will crop up independent of the other factors I mentioned above.  The whole notion of this “easy flow of translation” is utterly recockulous!

 

His conversion came purely from the linguistics of the book which he found could not have been composed by an American, no matter how gifted.

Probably one of the favorite apologies for the Book of Mormon goes a little something like this:

 “there is no way that an uneducated farm-boy like Joseph Smith could have written a masterpiece like the Book of Mormon.” 

We shall see, going forward, that this is far from the case, but here are some examples given:

1. Jarom 2: “It must needs be . . .” This expression, odd and awkward in English, is excellent Arabic grammar. Elsewhere in the book the use of the compound verbs “did eat,” “did go,” “did smile,” etc., again awkward and rarely used in English, are classical and correct grammar in the Semitic languages.

Must needs be appears in both the Old Testament (ex. “must needs be circumcised,” Gen 17:13) AND in the New Testament (ex. “scripture must needs have been fulfilled,” Acts 1:16) of the King James Bible, which is, incidentally, the version of the Bible that Joseph Smith himself purported to have read over and over long before translating the Book of Mormon.  Furthermore, I’d hardly call the phrase odd and awkward, given its liberal use by the likes of Shakespeare (Hamlet, All’s Well that Ends Well, Henry VI, and many other plays and poems), Johnathan Swift, and Charles Dickens. http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010817

“Did eat”, “did go,” etc, is used throughout the KJV, like King James thought it was going out of style.

Not only did the old farm boy have ACCESS to the KJV, he admitted freely to having poured over it prior to any divine work as God’s translator.

2. Omni 18: “Zarahemla gave a genealogy of his fathers, according to his memory.” Brother Hanna indicates that this is a typical custom of his Semitic forebearers to recite their genealogy from memory.

Indeed.  For that matter it was also a common practice among many other cultures, particularly European and Britton which procide the principle ancestry of America in Joseph Smith’s lifetime.  Here is an excellent write-up on the topic of geneological recitations: http://nicolaa5.tripod.com/articles/Hector/hist/HGene.htm

3. Words of Mormon 17: Reference is made here as in other parts of the Book of Mormon, to the “stiffneckedness” of his people. Brother Hanna perceives that this word would be a very unusual word for an American youth as Joseph Smith to use. An American would likely prefer an adjective such as stubborn or inflexible. But the custom in the Arabic language is to use just such a descriptive adjective. Stiff-necked is an adjective they use in describing an obstinate person.

Again, this is found in multiple places in both the Old Testament (ex. Exod 32:9, 33:3, Deut 9:6) as well as the New Testament (Acts 7:51).  Sure, Smith COULD have gotten this phrase by reading it out of a hat using the same seer stones that he had once used to con money out of his father-in-law when he used them to locate “buried treasure” left behind by ancient indians on his farm land, but if he did he’d have been doing it the hard way; everything he needed was right there in the KJV, and would hardly be “unusual” considering the religious fervor of the time.

4. Mosiah 11:8: “King Noah built many elegant and spacious buildings and ornamented them with fine work and precious things, including ziff.” Have you ever wondered about the meaning of the word “ziff” referred to in this scripture? This word, although in the Book of Mormon, is not contained in dictionaries of the English language. Yet it translates freely back into the Arabic language, for ziff is a special kind of curved sword somewhat like a simitar which is carried in a sheath and often used for ornamentation as well as for more practical purposes. The discovery of the word “ziff” in the Book of Mormon really excited my neighbor, Brother Hanna.

Although I was unable to find any reference to an Arabic word “Ziff” on the entire internet (Google’s never heard of it, outside of references to the Sami Hanna story, nor has my Arabic-English, English-Arabic dictionary) I was able to find the ACTUAL (the above quotation is not correct) reference to “ZIFF” in the BoM that is CLEARLY not meant to denote a weapon:

Mosiah 11:8 – “And it came to pass that king Noah built many elegant and spacious buildings; and he ornamented them with fine work of wood, and of all manner of precious things, of gold, and of silver, and of iron, and of brass, and of ZIFF, and of copper.”  This is clearly some type of raw metal used as a decoration, and does not support the claim in regard to an archaic weapon that may or may not have ever existed.  Unfortunately the author of Reflections also failed to realize that archeologists have discovered that Native Americans never developed the technology to construct metal weaponry, nor was it introduced to the continent until Columbus arrived in the late 1400’s CE.  Later the Natives’ stone weapons, still in vogue in indiginous America in the 1500’s, were easily overcome by Spanish steel.

What’s more, it is likely that I could make a sound with my mouth, and find dozens, perhaps hundreds, of languages for which that sound has a specific meaning among the nearly 7,000 human languages that currently exist.  It would hardly require divine inspiration.

6. Helaman 1:3: Here reference is made to the contending for the judgment seat. Brother Hanna observes that the use of the term “judgment seat” would be quite strange to an American who might have used a more familiar noun such as governor, president, or ruler. Yet, in Arabic custom,the place of power rests in the judgment seat and whoever occupies that seat, is the authority and power. The authority goes with the seat and not with the office or the person. So, this, in the Semitic languages, connotes the meaning exactly.

Romans 14:10, KJV “…we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.”  (yawn)

Points 5, 7 and 8 also describe characteristics of the KJV Bible.

“Well, I have just cited a few of these examples. There are many more! As Latter-day Saint leaders, we are aware of the Semitic origin of the Book of Mormon. The fact that an Arabic scholar such as this seems a beautiful internal consistency in the Prophet Joseph Smith’s translation of the book, is of great interest, for the Prophet Joseph did not merely render an interpretation, but a word for word translation from the Egyptian type of hieroglyphic into the English language. Brother Hanna said the Book of Mormon simply flowed back into the Arabic language.”

“As Latter-day Saint leaders,” the quote says.  Remember that Elder Nelson was, in fact, a leader in the LDS church, but that he denied authorship of this document.  One wonders what the true author must have been thinking as (s)he wrote this line, which is a boldface lie.  Did the author intend a pious fraud, where shady means justify the glorious ends, or was this merely a prank?  Are there people out there whose role it is to create and propagate salacious stories like this in order to reinforce faith falsely?  We don’t know.

But this bullshit has been laid to rest.

Utah loves its porn more than YOUR state does!

Well, anti-depressants and prescription drugs aren’t the ONLY thing we Utahns lead the country in anymore:  According to a study conducted by a professor at Harvard Business School 8 of the 10 states that lead the country in online porn subscriptions (anonymized data provided by credit card companies) are CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN STATES!!!  I’m so happy!

And guess who leads the pack?

Yup.

Utah.  #1 BABY!!!  So what if the Jazz let us down year after god-damned year, we are #1!!!

 

#1 in prescription and non-illicit drug abuse (National Census Bureau)

#1 in anti-depressant use (National Institute of Mental Health)

#1 in internet porn subscriptions (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news) 

HOORAY, Utah.  Your mom is proud.

What I’m not sure about is, does this mean that Mormons are indulging in the forbidden, or are the rest of us just finding that Utah’s bullshit porn laws leave us only 2 options: Drive to Evanston, WY (also the nearest place to buy ACTUAL-strength beer and real fireworks!), or stay home, get a porn subscrip, and rock the night away.

It’s probably a mixture of both, I suppose, but since Mobots outnumber us regular folk, like, 9,000 to 1 I’m guessing that the Morg collective is responsible for the lion’s share of subscriptions.  Either way, it should be clear to the Morg that their tactics are failing and that their decrepit culture is rotting from the inside out, and that our resistence is perhaps not so futile.

Essentially what Utah is doing is pushing normal sexual interests into the closet where dysfunction will fester, pushing drinker’s into the basement where they become a subculture (oh yeah, I didn’t mention the proposed law that would allow cops to issue citations to persons who APPEAR drunk), and pretending that prescription drugs are OK to abuse because your bishop/doctor hooked you up. These laws are actually making things WORSE here, and we’ve got the stats to prove it.  That’s it, next election year I’m voting for people who make decisions based on FACTS instead of beliefs.  …give that a try for once.

 

On a side note, the New Kids on the Block just wrapped up a set on Jimmy Kimmel, and now they are being followed by self-proclaimed “whistle-blower” and ex-con, Kevin Trudeau.  WTF?!?!  We’re bringing THESE PEOPLE back?  This world is going to shit in a pioneer handcart.

Euthyphro for Parents

My kid said “Oh Shit,” today while playing with grandma.

I’m reminded of a line spoken by Ralphy in ”A Christmas Story,” a line that will certainly be true for my daughter.  “Now, I had heard that word at least ten times a day from my old man. He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master.“  But it is somewhat embarrassing when your child blurts it out at gramma.  I think it probably happened because she helped me fix the sink the other day, which reminds me of yet another quote from the same movie: “I have since heard of people under extreme duress speaking in strange tongues. I became conscious that a steady torrent of obscenities and swearing of all kinds was pouring out of me as I screamed.“

Well, that’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one.  I sat down with my daughter and apologized for what I said and told her that Daddy shouldn’t have said those words, and neither should she.  Her mother suggested, “Daddy needs to go on time out.“

I don’t go on time outs, but this got me thinking.  SHOULD I tell her that it is bad for me to say swear words?  Should I let her believe that time-outs apply to her parents?  I am reminded of Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma:

“Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”

In other words is a commandment good, in terms of cosmic justice, because a deity commands it to be done, or does the deity command it to be done because it is good?  If a deity commands something because it is good, then its goodness is independent of that deity; in essence it is a law that transcends the deity, or is supreme to the deity.  On the other hand, if it is only good for the mere fact that a deity commands it, then ANYTHING COULD BE GOOD, if only the deity would say so.  In other words there is nothing inherently WRONG with any actions; an action only becomes good or evil when a god arbitrarily assigns that value to it.

If I tell my daughter that I should not swear, and, in order to uphold the order of justice that we are attempting to impose upon her, I must then go on a time out, then those things that should be done and those that should not be done do not come from me at all.  If I let her see this, does that not make me her peer in some way?  Does that not bring me to her level, and thus I lose my authority over her in her eyes?  And what right would I then have to impose a punishment upon her?

OR, if I show my daughter that I may do as I please, and that punishment such as “time-out” will not apply to me, won’t it then become clear to her that I am inventing right and wrong before her very eyes, and then doling out punishment based on her adherence to my inventions and whim?  How is that just?  Will she then come to believe that there is no right and wrong, only that with which one can get away and that with which one can not get away?  Not to sound like a fundy Christian, or to rip off Dostoyevski, but won’t that teach her that “anything is permissable?”

Well, she’s only 2½ years-old.  Maybe I don’t need to worry about it just yet.  Maybe she is not capable of seeing me as her peer, in which case I should submit myself to punishment to teach her ethical stability.  If, on the other hand, I teach her that the rules apply only to her, I could perhaps temper that with the golden rule, but unfortunately there is quite a lot of evidence suggesting that children are not able to empathize with others until they are 5 or 6 years old.  Without empathy, one cannot make a good moral judgment about how to treat others (say she had hit someone instead of just said a naughty word) based on a humanist viewpoint of “it is bad to hurt other people” or a maxim like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.“

It seems as though I am in a situation where the only effective option is that in which I follow the same rules, and suffer the same consequences, that she does.  But then at what point, and HOW, do I switch that over into a secular humanist ethic, where the only real “good” is in causing happiness, and where the only “evil” is in causing harm to people.  How do I show her that, if she has come to believe in a tangible force of right and wrong, something that is above even me?

This must be why somebody pre-packaged a value system a long time ago and put it on the market as religion.  It would be nice to not think so much…

Euonym

Euonym: an appropriate name for a person, place, or thing

Example: The realtor’s name was Sue House, a euonym.

Etymology: 1889; Gk. eu ‘good’ + onym ‘name’

 ~Dictionary.com

 

Just a quick update to my most recent post, “What Kind of Religion Won’t Let You Quit?”  Actually, it’s nothing new, just something I hadn’t noticed until recently.  The letter I received from the LdS church, informing me that they weren’t quite done with me, was signed by one Greg Dodge, of the LdS Records Department, letting me know that they could not process my request until I spoke with someone at the local level, so that this local person could then contact the LdS records department an tell them that I want to resign.  Is there a better example of bureaucratic runaround?

I found it strange to be toyed with in this way.  Is this one final insult, to dodge my request to be released by sending me the infamous “local ecclesiastical matter” letter signed by a Mr Dodge?  Does this man exist?  Or is it just a really, really funny joke?  Well, I have seen online that many people in my shoes have actually spoken to Dodge directly, and claimed that he was quite cordial…In fact it is apparently a tradition of people who have had to deal with Mr. Dodge to send him Christmas cards at the records department every year.  But isn’t it more likely (or at least more fun to imagine) that when you call you just get some random phone support person who goes by an alias?  Or perhaps they have a strict policy of employing only people with serendipitous surnames:

“Hi, this is Elder Blowoff.  How can I appear to be attempting to be helpful in a condescending and disrespectful way today? Uh-huh.  Oh you don’t say? Wha-?  No I’m listenin, honest.”

What Kind of Religion Won’t Let You Quit?

I know…you’re all expecting that I’ll answer the question in the title by saying, “a CULT, of course!”

Well, I’m not gonna do that.  I’ll let you, the reader (yes, that’s singular INTENTIONALLY*) decide what kind of religion won’t let a person quit.  Also, this marks the last time I’ll bother apologizing for the unreasonable length of my post.  It’s long get used to it.

That’s what she said.

I have been an atheist for, hell, nearly a decade.  As an apostate of the Mormon faith I’ve heard other ex-members mention having their “name removed from church records,” and for the longest time I thought that this was a silly, reactionary thing to do.  I mean, does anyone think they can stick it to Salt Lake City’s biggest pyramid scheme by sending them a resignation letter?  Do they really think it would be honored?

Well, I ended up resigning a few weeks ago.  I’ve moved maybe a half-dozen times since becoming a godless heathen, never bothering to let the church know my whereabouts.  They’d always manage to track me down, and missionaries would inevitably stop by and ask for me by name.  But missionaries, the poor saps, are a tasty breakfast treat, easily taken in a single bite.  HOME TEACHERS on the other hand (the Church’s way of letting you know that your peers are checking up on you and will be stopping by your home occasionally to ask you questions about your private affairs) are not so easy to eschew.  For one thing, you often know these people, and they are just low-level do-gooder henchmen, after all.  Sometimes they even bring treats.  It’s tough to be rude to these people, and as an atheist struggling to be seen as a legitimate human being by these Mobots, I just don’t want to give them the impression that the d-d-devil is living next door and can’t be trusted.  You think they watch you close when you’re a member, try letting them know you aren’t anymore and see what happens.  Besides, I like people to like me, and I might need to borrow a pinch of salt some time.

That’s why, when they stopped by t’other day, after I stopped puzzling over how the hell they knew where I lived and chalked it up to my mother’s meddlng, I decided to make it all stop.  But they won’t let me to quit, which is odd, ’cause I stopped paying tithing years and years ago.

This incident with the visitors was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I have problems and oppositions against that organization on pretty much every level and on nearly every policy, and that is in fact why I quit attending and calling myself a Mormon…why I stopped arguing with people as a Mormon apologist.  But 2008 was a bad year.  There was the issue with Prop 8, the recurrence of the issue of the church YET AGAIN baptising holocaust victims despite the Jewish community’s outrage, and my revelation (from a friend, not from Jeebus) that the “15 or so million members” of that church included people like me, yet that number was still being touted as some sort of ad populi argument for the truth of their flavor of sky-god worship.   I couldn’t let them count me as a supporter any longer.

So I sent them a letter.  The wife of a friend had done this some years ago and had gotten a letter from the church in question saying, basically,

“We are so grateful for your interest in the informercial-cult that is Mormanity, here’s a free holy undershirt, and expect 2 hired goons to visit you soon.  Remember the d-d-devil is using you, and the d-d-devil is bad.”

So I did my research, and discovered through www.MormonNoMore.com that technically speaking, if you say the magic words in the right order and put it in a letter, that you are effectively NO LONGER a member the moment someone from the customer retention department of Mormon Corp, Llc reads the notice.  So I went to the USPS, dropped $5 US on priority, got delivery confirmation so they wouldn’t pull the kind of tricks that MormonNoMore says they like to do:

“You sent a letter, huh?  Well, uh, we never saw one.  Just a sec…Hey, Jedidiah, you see a letter?“

“Naw, didn’t see no letter…“

“Sorry, the United States gov’ment’s postal service musta lost yer letter.  Next year vote on the Utah House Bill to relinquish letter delivery and editing over to the LdS Church…or don’t, we’ll get the vote anyways.  Thanks a bunch for calling, we’re so grateful ya did!“

In my letter I made a few things clear:

1. I quit, effective immediately
2. I know that when you read this I am officially NO LONGER a member
3. I know you think that’s a big deal
4. I don’t
5. The only thing I want to hear from you in return, E-V-E-R, is a letter saying that you closed out my account
6. I know that you dick people around…I know my rights, so don’t do it to me
7. Since I am no longer a member no other member has any authority over me…DO NOT SEND PEOPLE MY WAY
8. Your church is ruining my state, and now it’s trying to ruin California, give up the ghost

Guess who didn’t listen?  I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but that seems pretty straight forward.  Of course, I worded it much better than that.  Made it all official-like, and shit.  Still, just this weekend I got a letter saying, basically:

“We are so grateful for your letter.  But we know what’s best for you.  You are clearly confused.  Obviously you are not competent, so we’ll have a couple goons swing by and talk you down.”

Here’s a sample of some the sparkling gems of respectful consideration with which they bejeweled their correspondence to me:

“Such a request [is] considered an ecclesiastical matter that must be handled by local priesthood leaders before being processed by Church Employees.“ …This, despite the fact that it is patently untrue, and in spite of the fact that I let them know IN MY LETTER that I knew that they would play this card and not to bother, and just to piss me off even though I specifically stated that no clergy members have any authority to act with me in ecclesiastical or disciplinary actions, they’re gonna send some ANYWAY!  Assholes.

“In view of the eternal consequences…[we] urge you to reconsider your request and to prayerfully consider the enclosed statement from the First Presidency (the Mormon leaders)” …Eternal consequences!?  Reconsider!? Prayerful consideration!?  I told them I was an atheist! ROFL. So what did the “enclosed statement” have to tell me?

“We invite you to return and partake of the happiness you once knew.” Right.  Because I left the church due to the unbearable agony of pure truth and endless, blissful happiness.  My face hurt from smiling so damn much.  Apparently they think that ex-Mormons are the only people in the world who  are not influenced by the economic principle of rational self-interest.  Somehow it is our own misery that makes us as atheists happy?  Pair Of Docs, anyone?  Ya know, I find this one offensive.  REAL fucking offensive.   Becoming an atheist can be an arduous mental task, one which alienates you from friends, family, and good social standing.  It is a trial by fire, for sure, and often a painful journey of awakening.  Most zealots-turned-atheists are so in-your-face about their atheism because they are so damn proud of their accomplishment, and yet at every turn, strangers are compounding this pride by saying “the fool hath said in his heart there is no God.  It’s in the Bible, so it’s true!  You’re a fool!  (as if that would persuade an atheist – and apparently ignoring the New Testament verse where Jesus prohibits calling men fools),” family members cry over your new beliefs, and old friends recieve your harrowing tale of overcoming impossible intellectual odds and abolishing mental slavery with, “Oh you fell away from the true church.  How sad.“  God damnit, that’s just asinine.  No wonder fresh meat atheists are so pissed all the time.

I’ll tell you what’s sad…being so junked-out on Christamphetamines that you can’t imagine any happiness that doesn’t include your sunday fix.  Nothing in life is good unless you can cling to your belief that I’m going to hell and you aren’t.  That’s sad.  REAL fucking sad.

So now I play the waiting game.  And, to pass the time, perhaps I’ll play the tuck-away game for a minute or two.  Whatev, I’m keeping my schedule loose.  The Mormon Mafia should swing by someitme in the next few days (I’ve been assured that all my relatives will get a “still small voice” or perhaps just a written letter telling them about my resignation, and asking for their help in saving me.  So it’s a debate they want, eh?

They can’t think like us.  They just aren’t able.  That’s why they can’t win.  That’s why they’re making the mistake of coming to visit me, and why I’m getting my damn confirmation letter a lot sooner than they thought.

Keep your prayers with me…LOL

TheicidalManiac

 

* Statement based on an evaluation of current and past readership

“I Think I Just Proved There is No God, Again”, or “Being Omniscient pt. II”

INTRO

Ok, so I thought I disproved God before in a previous posting.  I got really good feedback from the one person who gave me feedback…so thank you.

But it turns out when I say that I disprove God, often I am talking about a particular notion of God, not necessarily the POSSIBILITY of some thing or force or *other* that created us, intentionally or not. No, I am talking specifically about the more commonly held ideas about what God is, concepts that can be found right here in my American home town.  Previously, in pt I of “Being Omniscient” I did little more than set the stage for what I wanted to say in THIS post.  Truly, for many people, particularly the sort of people who might read my blog, what I am about to say might not be controversial, or novel.  I hope that at the very least I cause people to think some interesting new thoughts on the topic, but certainly I am not the first to have figured this all out.

If you’ve not read my last post, this one my lack a lot of clarity.  By all means, read part one first.  This is a piece that can stand on it’s own if you already think like I do, but if you think like I do, why are you reading what you could write yourself?  So, if you’ve done the first part then let’s carry on.  I discussed minute fragments of time, and I now move to the next point:

THE MEAT OF IT

An omniscient being is one who knows all.  It knows THE future; it is able to calculate ALL possible universes, meaning that it MUST have access to ALL information, so It knows the past.  Admittedly it is tough to make the claim that a being knows EVERYTHING if there is an infinite number of things to know.  After all it is impossible to encompass that which has no end, so if there is an omniscient being then we might suppose that the universe is finite and that there is a limited number of things that can fit in it, due to the limitations of the universe itself, and a limited amount of ways that things can interact with eachother.  Were the universe infinite we would then have to say of an omniscient being; “It knows ALL POSSIBLE FUTURES; it is able to calculate INFINITE possible universes, meaning that it MUST have access to INFINITE information…”  This case would only be possible if “God” was actually the universe itself, all matter-energy-space-time, a set which includes us, and that hypothesis sort of takes all of the meaning out of the term “God,” and it doesn’t matter much here anyway.

Now, this being, this creator created each person, including you, or at the very least started a chain of events that led to you.  It knew this could happen.  It knew this would happen.  It knew and it still created, and it is therefore responsible for the outcome.  It knew what your name would be, when you would be born, when you would die, what you would do at 10:14:27 am mountain standard time on October 22, 2003, and every other possible moment of your relatively short life.  Not only would it know what you did at 10:14:27 am, but also 10:14:28 am, AND the state of you and every other thing in existence at all of the nearly 10 billion tick marks in between 10:14:27 am and 10:14:28 am.  Truly astounding.  It literally stupefies the mind, but it is nevertheless an implication of omniscience.

This has powerful implications for the idea of free will and for the problem of evil, as well as for any relationship a human might hope to have with a being of this magnitude.  They can pretend it doesn’t, but they only bury their heads in the sand when they do.

FREE WILL

If God has already conceived each and every second of your life, and each and every micro-, nano-, AND picosecond in between, then what can you do that could possibly surprise, anger, or disappoint this being?  Honestly what can you do that would MATTER to this being, but we’ll stick to the former question;   What could you do that could possibly surprise this being or experience the emotions borne of surprise, like anger and dissapointment?  What would make God sit up (assuming that God sits) and say,

“Whoa, I didn’t see THAT coming!“

This being has already conceived of every prayer that you will say next year and has set it up so that the answers will come to you in the culmination of everything that will have happened from the beginning of time right up to that fateful moment when you asked God to help you locate your car keys sometime next July.  Everything has already been conceived of and is therefore already mapped out, even if only in God’s crystal ball or his cosmic dvd player.  There is nothing that you can do to escape this path, THE path.  God would have foreseen it and accounted for it before the Earth even existed.  Your destiny and your path are set.  You are on a cable car and you are most definitely NOT the driver.  You can not possibly make a move, not even the flaring of a nostril, that God has not already watched happen in his flawless, omniscient Mind’s Eye.  There is no free will in this scenario, only you playing the part you were born to play until you die the death you were born to die.  And everything that happened in between was “all part of God’s plan.”

EVIL

This also means that it’s not the d-d-devil compelling you to do all those nasty things that people are compelled to do.  God saw it.  God saw it and still created THIS universe, THIS reality, having seen all possible universes and all possible realities, having foreseen your nastiness aeons ago.  You are, in this scenario, in no way responsible for your own actions.  But God certainly IS responsible, knowing perfectly in full detail each and every consequence of the creation of THIS universe.  In effect you are God’s robot, and God will send you to burn in hell for executing your program to PERFECTION.

In fact, assuming God’s omniscience, It is responsible for EVERY act of sin that ever occurred on Earth.  Every attrocity that God’s robots ever committed are God’s attrocities. If you program a computer to carry out a function, then you provide it with the data, and it executes the function, is this the computer’s fault?  To give blame to the computer would be to glorify it above even the man who programmed it, and in this way giving men credit or blame for their deeds places them as equals to God, or perhaps GREATER THAN God, through their defiance of It’s infinite power. In essence the doctrine of evil is PURE blasphemy!

Most religions, curiously enough, do not define evil as an act that causes suffering, but rather they define evil as a failure to follow God’s commandments.   We have seen that if you believe in an omniscient, omnipotent God you can not possibly act in manner which God did not map out for you.  Clearly we need to look at the moral bankruptcy of this decree, but misplaced morals are not the only issue here.  Separating good and evil by the lines of “he who does as God says” and “he who does not” is absolutely meaningless.  According to this approach each and every one of us can only act in exact accordance with God’s will and are therefore not capable of committing sin. 

By contrast if we define good and evil in a way that emphasizes happiness as its goal and suffering in this world is the antithesis of good, then the only one we have to blame in this scenario is God Itself for knowingly and willingly setting in motion the events that would lead to this suffering.  If suffering is pre-ordained by an omnibenevolent God, then we must conclude that suffering is benevolent.  On the other hand if we want to say that suffering is bad, then that which caused it cannot be omnibenevolent, so either:

A) God did not cause it, so that God is not omnipotent, or

B) God is not omnibenevolent.

However, if we reject the hypothesis of God or of sin, then we can begin to mave forward.  At its base the doctrine of sin may appeal to humans, but it is baseless and wildly arbitrary.  If we instead recognize that happiness is good (a fact upon which all could agree) then we have something to work with. There are still many obstacles in the path of such a utilitarian ethic, but there is something solid at its root.

The fact is, the ideas that prop up religion are not intuitive, that is, the ideas are not conclusions that could be rationally deduced from the available empirical evidence that surrounds us.  The idea that there is a God and that this God had a son who came to Earth and died to save us all is not an idea which can be derived from careful study and observation of this world.  If this idea is not a derivitive of rational thought and careful study, if it is not a logical solution or product or property of the natural world then it can only be a product of the human imagination.

 Obviously it is logically impossible to disprove the existence of anything, as with Bertrand Russel’s Jupiter-orbiting teacup.  You can go to the North Pole, survey and photograph every square inch of ground, collect samples, send probes deep into the glacial masses, use infra-red heat detection to search for mammalian lifeforms, and in the end, though you come up with nothing but ice and an occasional polar bear, you still haven’t PROVED that there is no workshop filled with elves, flying reindeer, and a fat, toy-dispensing, time-defying, white-bearded man in a red suit.  Can I “prove” that there is no God? No. You can always move the goalpoast, always invent ad hoc a new property of God that allowed It to evade my investigation.  What we can examine are the specific claims made about God, and prove that they are logically impossible…let them move the goalpost again, if they like.  Soon there will be nowhere left to go.

 

Stay reasonable friends!

Being Omniscient

mmmmm...chocolate

INTRO

Not so long ago I was at a Staten Island bookseller and I perused, as I often do, the physics shelf.  Physics is a topic that I’ve always been interested in but have only a minor understanding of, so I thought I’d pick up a book whose aim is clear; to get someone who has no scientific training to become interested in science.  I found that book…it was called “How to Fossilize your Hamster: And Other Amazing Experiments for the Armchair Scientist” by Mick O’Hare.  Being a rabid enthusiast of all things chocolate I flipped to the chapter about how to measure the speed of light using a chocolate bar and your microwave.  It’s quite a neat trick, really, and very simple, and I’ll not spoil it now, since I think it will be more fun for you to sit and wonder how the hell this is possible for a while.  Sooner or later you’ll look for that book and read about it yourself.

 

ABOUT TIME

The experiment itself is not my focus but rather something that was triggered in my mind.  Let me give a little background: I took a course in electronics math a decade or so ago and it fascinated me that the metric system applied to time in such a strange way.  I mean, we all know what a second is, and anyone who grew up in the 80‘s had a digital watch complete with  a stopwatch that could track 1/100’s of seconds.  But in this class we would describe and attempt to measure effects in not only milliseconds, but micro-, nano-, even PICOseconds (a pico second is one-TRILLIONTH of a second).  It amazed me that things happened on this time scale.

Later in life I became interested in religion and the supernatural, as well as ethical topics.  One issue seemed to tie all of those interests together.  It was a claim that I had heard pro-life (or as I called them at the time ‘anti-choice’) advocates use when describing WHY abortion is so evil.  It goes back to a claim made by the Vatican, that the soul enters the body at the point of conception, and that once something has a human soul, to kill it would be murder.

Well of course as I later studied in biology, all of life’s little happenings are PROCESSES.  That is to say, events don’t happen instantaneously, but rather they occur in time.  This is something we often don’t realize because our perception is such that we only see things on a very limited scale.  The concept of a 14 billion year old universe is baffling to most, and the same can be said for smaller increments of time.  I had read in an article written by the great neurologist Oliver Sacks, titled “In the River of Consciousness,” that the human mind does not see things in true realtime.  Rather, Sacks says, our minds take snapshots, and they do it approximately 200 times per second.  Our mind gives us a movie, essentially.  It might be said that we see in “reel” time, with 200 still images being displayed every second that goes by.  Of course, what this means is that every thing that occurs in between those still images is lost to our senses.  Portions of time representing fractions of milliseconds simply do not compute; we cannot comprehend them. So while the flick of a switch seems to INSTANTLY turn your lights on, it simply is not the case.  Nor would a human see, as a fly might, the flickering oscillation of flourescent kitchen lights.

 

POINTS & PROCESSES

Nor is it the case that there can be a “point” of conception, an argument that earned me a lot of disdainful looks in a social ethics course that I took some time ago while debating the merits of the Pope’s comments on abortion with my Catholic professor in a science-deprived, all-Christian classroom setting. I attempted to argue that conception was not a moment, but rather a PROCESS.  One cannot define the point of conception so easily, for one may wonder if conception occurs at the point a sperm enters an egg, or (VERY shortly) later when the sperm’s DNA is analyzed by the oocyte’s organelles, or later still when the sperm’s DNA is being BUILT by the egg and if so at what time during this building session would we designate as “the moment?”  Or does conception occur when the the egg divides, forming two completely new and novel recombinations of DNA that will likely result in a unique individual?  We are talking about chemical reactions here, and they happen quick.  To be sure, there is a point where we will finally say, “yes, this woman has conceived,” but drawing the line as to precisely when it happened requires us to make a completely arbitrary value judgment, which is what the “point of conception” argument was attempting to avoid in the first place.

I hope you have stuck with me through my admittedly tangential style…I assure I will return to my loose ends.

My reading of the Hamster book discussed the wavelength of light produced by microwaves.  The author claimed as have several other authors who have written on similar topics, that the standard microwave oven should have a sticker on it somewhere identifying that it operates at 2.45 GHz.  This places the frequency of the light wave at 2,450,000,000 cycles per second.  Going back to my training with electronics, as well as an audiology course I had recently failed, I recalled that a cycle has several noteworthy points within it, namely the peak, the trough, and the neutral point, which happens twice per cycle.  So here I am, a little tiny guy riding the light wave, and I decide to scratch a line in my notebook each time the light beam is in the neutral phase, the trough, or the peak…in ONE SECOND I have penciled in nearly 10 billion tick marks!!!  There are therefore AT LEAST that many discrete peices that a second can be divided into that I can account for via my very tiny Mead notebook.

“BLAH BLAH BLAH…where the hell is this guy going with this…?“

Well, I’ll continue this discussion later in my next post coming very soon, but suffice it to say that I will discuss the implications that this has on what it means to be an omniscient being, like “they” say their gods are, and what that means for free will.  I won’t go any deeper than I have on any other post, and it’s been such a long time since I have posted that I am pretty sure that I am once again my only reader, but hey…thanks for reading.

Thought Crimes

A family member mentioned something to me recently that I found extremely curious, and I thought I’d jot it down and display it out in public forum.  According to this person’s faith, if you think something “evil,” then you are guilty of committing the act which you have imagined.  This little deontological gem comes from the section of the New Testament called beatitudes where Jesus says, “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”  I don’t know what other scriptural support might exist to suggest that thinking about adulterous situations is equal to committing adultery, but it’s what he believes, and in fact it’s what a lot of other Mormons believe.

Sure, there’s a lot of variation from one Mormon to the next on what they do or do not believe, but I have found this piece of Kantian wisdom to be a disturbing mindset which is quite prevalent in my area, so it needs to be addressed.  This line of reasoning that my family member takes completely fails to take into account the fact that there is a fundamental difference between considering an action, and ACTING. Many people have, when angered by someone, daydreamed about the physical harm that they might inflict on that person, thoughts of revenge, one might say, are an inevitable reaction given the societal values with which we have been inculcated; a learned but nevertheless normal reaction.  Although on some level it may even be a natural reaction; from an evolutionary standpoint it may be beneficial, because if something or someone endangers you or threatens you in some way, it may have been better to eliminate that threat, rather than run the risk of a second and escalated offense.  Of course today that kind of attitude will only land you in jail and get people hurt, and we strive to overcome that sort of behavior.  That said, imagining punching someone because they called you an asshole has an extremely different effect on your immediate environment than ACTUALLY punching that person.  It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the two very different outcomes that would be achieved by these two very different reactions.  Right and wrong and justifications aside, the two scenarios have drastically different results.  Of course, a utilitarian like myself WOULD think that, and Immanuel Kant, and Jesus apparently, would have us believe that it’s the thought that counts.  Intentions determine character to them, but unfortunately, no one really knows our intentions except ourselves, so all we really have to go on is the apparent intentions of a person as evidenced by his actions.  So we kind of have to be utilitarians.  Pragmatism 1, idealism 0.

This mentally manipulative little idea that my family member borrowed from Jesus tells us that we can actually commit a sin in our mind (I call this “virtual sin”), and thus, that thoughts can be damning, regardless of your actions.  Remember that it was Jesus who first gave us the idea of eternal torment in hell; it was never mentioned in the Bible before him, and it seems that, according to Jesus, simply thinking can land you there.  This is a strong safeguard against “backsliding,” because one can commit BLASPHEMY simply by examining a rival faith or by questioning the reality of God, and we all know how the biblical god feels about blasphemers.  You can actually, according to this concept, commit the worst offense against your god, breaking the FIRST commandment, without actually doing anything at all!
This is known as a “thought crime” in many a futuristic science-fiction novel.  Little did George Orwell know, when he wrote 1984, that we didn’t have to wait for the future to be ingrained with brainwashing fears; it’s been happening for millenia, disguising itself as our greatest companion – religion.  It is ignorance calling itself bliss, falsity posing as truth, and hatefulness toward those who disagree is disguised as a “religion of peace,” and at it’s core it is, simply put, mind control and nothing more.

The Security Blanket

It has often been said that religion is good for society, giving it a moral base, making people happy, and bringing people together. The claim is often made that we NEED religion in order to have a properly functioning society. It is said that our religions are the source of our morals, that it is the cause of peace and happiness, that it has a unifying effect on the public, and that, given its divine nature, no evil can come of it. In fact it is instilled in much of the American public (although I see little reason to doubt that Americans are alone) when they are very young that religion is the most important thing that there is, and that to reject it would be pure foolishness. Being raised with that over your head hardly creates an environment that is open to inquiry on the subject, and most Americans believe that religion is, indeed, a wonderful, love-inspiring blessing from above. At least, that’s what they believe about their own religion.
The evidence, however, illustrates the overwhelming naivety of the belief that religious traditions are benign, or purely beneficial, elements of human society. The fact is that despite all of the good that religions may inspire, religion has and does also inspire people to violence. In fact many things inspire people to do battle with one another, but religion has the added problem of being utterly false in addition to being destructive. To look at history, or even current events, is to see that civil disturbance is religion’s malformed twin, joined at the hip. Freedom or family, life and happiness may all be worth fighting for, but I don’t think that something demonstrably false should necessarily be given that pass. I will attempt to illustrate this from a logical, rational position in order to piece my point together. Understand that it is not my goal to steal a source of joy from anyone, rather it is my goal to expose this joy as a purely selfish and irresponsible one.

Obviously morals do not come from religion. There are just too many “moral” people in the world who have not been exposed to one of our major religions for anyone to even make this claim without betraying their own ignorance. If one looks at universal moral values, one finds in them a great social utility, a point of value which can more than sufficiently explain the continued existence of such morals. The moral ideals that are less universal often tend to be found solely within that groups religious beliefs, often found in scripture. Holy books tend to contradict themselves fairly often, leaving the reader to decide which parts to accept as divine truth, and which parts to reject as archaic wivestalery or mistranslation, or any number of other excuses one might contrive to explain less than 100% adherence to scriptural writings. The very fact that the reader has to sift through the mess to find meaning is the reason that we have so many disagreements ABOUT meaning, so many splinters and sects within our religious communities. Further, because the reader is able to do this task, that is, to use his moral compass to find the wisdom of his holy text, it is therefore evident that his morals can not have resulted from an understanding of that text. In other words, if it is up to the reader to decide what is good in scripture, then he doesn’t need the scripture to tell him what is good – he is telling it!. So something else must be shaping our concept of “good.” Imagine, for a moment, if that were not so; suppose we were to accept the Bible as purely true and good divine wisdom. If we followed each and every holy edict that we encountered, we’d be in trouble. If we weren’t paralyzed by confusion, we’d find ourselves behaving in a manner consistent with the times during which the texts were written. That is not progress. Much of the book not only glorifies, but often demands, the maltreatment of “non-believers,” which is essentially anyone who can be identified as having differing spiritual beliefs. There are many examples, the most poignant of which are mentioned in Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith, as summed up here in an article in The Independent;

“Harris’ quotations from religious texts can be startling. In Deuteronomy 13:7-11, God declares that, ‘if your son or daughter’ or “your most intimate friend” even suggests worshipping other Gods, ‘You must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death. You must stone him.’ Thus, Harris explains, ‘A literal reading of the New Testament not only permits but require heretics to be put to death.’ Nor are followers of the Old Testament let off the hook: Jesus Christ demanded that his believers fulfil every “jot” and “tittle” of the Old Testament.

Just as bad, in Koran 9:73, it says, “make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate.” This is just one of five whole pages of quotations directly from the Koran demanding war on unbelievers. True, there is one (much-quoted) line in the Koran that tells believers, ‘Do not destroy yourselves’ – but it comes in the middle of fire-breathing calls to war against ‘the friends of Satan’.” (The Independent)

This is particularly disturbing, as each person’s idea of what makes someone a non-believer is unique to that person, so that anyone of whom a believer disapproves is a potential infidel.

The more distressing claims are those that suggest that religion has a unifying effect. This is perhaps the most myopic of views that has ever arisen in defense of religion. Yes, in a small homogenous community the effects can be unifying, but that is based on the assumption that everyone IN that community believes the same thing already. It only unifies those who hold similar opinions on specific topics. It does this by setting them apart from others, and handing them a “you are always right” card. All of today’s major religions stake an exclusive claim on truth and redemption. Yet this is clearly a logical impossibility; it is not possible for more than one thing to be the only thing. Therefore, rationally speaking, AT LEAST all but one of them MUST be false, and since the only real differences between any of them are based on miracles and other articles of faith, which are necessarily unprovable, there is very little REASON to accept that even one of them is correct.

Religious beliefs even erode our idea of reality and truth. It is TRUE, scientifically, that all humans are made by sexual reproduction. This does not necessarily mean sexual intercourse, but rather the joining of two haploid zygotic cells to form a fertilized gamete. So to say that a man was once born of a virgin in a time prior to scientific medicine is, scientifically speaking, untrue.

Happiness, too, is a mirage, for the religious, insomuch as they believe that religion makes it possible. Religious conviction has been compared to addiction so often that I scarcely feel the need to cover that in any in-depth manner at this time, except to say that it is clear that most religious people believe that they are happy because of their faith, that their faith makes them better people, and that they could not be happy or worthy of salvation if they were not members of their specific flock. There are many, many problems with this claim. First, and again, there are simply too many people of differing faiths, all of whom find some joy in their lives, regardless of what they believe about the attributes of their creator. Atheists and agnostics also have joy in their lives with or without the influence of superstitious traditions.

The next ridicule-worthy claim is that religion makes you a better person. To put it logically, if religious faith makes you a better person, then anyone without religious faith is not as good as they could be. Epitomizing this stance is the always eloquent Jerry Falwell, stating, “If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.” (The Passion of the Atheist) This automatically separates the faithful from the non-faithful in any given community into a class system, where the faithful are, in their own view, better people than the non-faithful; better because God prefers them, as evidenced by the fact that most religions also believe that if you do not follow their particular brand of faith, then God will not find any value in you, and you will be cast off or destroyed. In a Jewish community, then, the Jews are better than the Muslims and the pagans and the Christians. In the Christian community, the Christians are better than Mormons and Jews. In the Mormon community, the Mormons are better than Muslims or Christians or atheists. Because there is no static law running through one group to the next, no universal pecking order, we must admit that the respective hierarchies are nothing more than human contrivances; arbitrary statements about value that have no bearing on reality. It is truly dangerous to say that having a faith makes you a better person. Does having the belief that blue Crayolas are superior to green Sharpies put you in some higher category of life in the universe? Of course not. So why then, should anyone believe that faith in Ganesh or Allah could make them a more valuable lifeform than they would be with a faith in Zeus, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? If you accept that it is what you believe about your origins that makes you a good or a great person, then your value system is not based on altruism or on making the world a better place for your fellow humans, it is based on being right. Some would argue that treating other humans with dignity and respect, and trying to elevate other people is what makes you a great person. Again, this is a cultural thing, however, it does bring true happiness to a person if you make their life better; in fact, that is what it means to make a persons life better. So in this system, value is placed on happiness, which we have seen is not something that religion can offer, and not an ideal that it promotes.
More importantly, when these social groups are formed in a community, they exclude anyone who does not believe the same as they do. Basically, when you unify Cache Valley, Utah in Mormonism, you set it in opposition to the surrounding Catholic community. Each side believes the other has got it all wrong, and will suffer punishment for their blasphemous confusion. Similarly, having America more or less unified in various sects of Christianity sets it at odds with nearly every other region of the world. There is no overall unity in this structure, only division, and thus organized religions are, in effect, segregatory institutions. An organization that claims to have the only perfect truth also makes the claim, by default, that no one else does. When you place your value on being right, rather than on creating happiness, you only make relations worse for the larger community.