Why I leave, Part 2: Troubling revelations.

My discussions with Dave continued. One morning in January or February of 2011 I found Dave reading "The God Delusion", by Richard Dawkins. I had no idea who Dawkins was, but the title made the book's purpose clear.

This discussion stuck out to me for two reasons. One of Dawkins' arguments was based solely on the implausibility of an omniscient, yet omnipotent God. If God knows everything, he certainly knows what will happen in my conversation now. He also knows everything I've done, everything I'm doing, and everything I will do in the future. Problematically, though, if God is also omnipotent, he can change anything he wants to - that means that he can change my future, my past, or even the present in an way he wants. In principle, then, he can change the future into something he doesn't yet know.

But even if we ignore this idea, an omniscient, yet omnipotent God precludes even the possibility of free will. If God knows everything and he can do anything, none of our actions aren't known by God already. In short, we have a set fate and there is nothing we can do about it. Although my previous experience learning about the workings of the brain proved to me that I don't have total control over everything I think, I still felt an attachment to the idea of free will. I didn't want to believe that God had already set me on my path and I couldn't do anything about it.

So I did what I had done in the past - I rationalized. If an omniscient, omnipotent God can't exist, then God must be just really powerful and really smart, so powerful and smart that he seems all powerful and all knowing to someone like me who can't understand his position. Luckily, this position fits with the LDS doctrine of Eternal Progression. Joseph himself said that "As man is, God once was, as God is, man can become". My faith was still unbroken.

Our conversation didn't end there, though. Eventually something more troubling eventually came out. Dave mentioned problems with the historicity of scripture during the conversation. I don't remember exactly what it was that brought the subject out, but I was unphased...at least at first. After all, I could just hide behind the "correct translation" clause in our articles of faith, and without further study my "shield of faith" remained whole. What I didn't anticipate, though, was a passing comment Dave made on a subject I utterly dismissed at first - the Book of Abraham. I no longer remember his exact statement, but it was troubling enough for me that I eventually felt the need to investigate further.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This February conversation left me feeling empty. All the rationalizations I had made up to this point were no longer cutting it for me. So I made a momentous decision. I decided to read Dawkins.

Many of the true believers at this point will say "well, now I know why you've fallen away: you've allowed yourself to be led by the devil and his minions...". If you've come this far, though, please continue, at least until the end of this paragraph. I wasn't reading Dawkins because I wanted to give any credence to his arguments. On the contrary, I was reading with the following idea in mind: "To defeat your enemy, you must understand him". I had been blindsided often enough by Dave that I felt I needed to understand what was behind his arguments. What better way to do this than to read his source material? If I understand the arguments well enough, I'll can anticipate his ideas and counter them before they come out.

So I read. Dawkins is no Thoreau, but regardless of his eloquence he was refreshingly frank. He laid out his position, piece by piece, relentlessly attacking every argument I mustered, and many others I hadn't even conceived. Even today I don't agree with everything he says, but at the very least he brought to me a perspective I couldn't ignore. Clearly fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are difficult to reconcile with science.

Most Mormons feel slighted when they are called "not Christian", and with good reason. The term "Christian" as it is used today in the US, is synonymous with a "good person". No one wants to be slighted by being told they aren't good. Ironically, though, after reading Dawkins I was able to escape into the world of the Non-Christians. Christianity does have a history of violence and coercion, but that doesn't apply to Mormonism, went my reasoning. That was just what happened because mainstream Christianity fell away from the truth. Sure, modern fundamentalists are crazy, intolerant, and self-deluded, but that doesn't apply to Mormons. It isn't a delusion when it's the truth. Ironically, the church doesn't take an official position on most modern scientific issues, so that left me free to contort the doctrine however I wanted to make it fit with what I had uncovered.

Still, I was unsatisfied. I was conflicted enough at this point that my faith was no longer enough to satisfy my feelings. Remembering Dave's statement on the book of Abraham, I set out to prove once and for all that while other religions were incorrect and clearly conflicting with modern science, mine was not. Surely there was evidence of the Book of Abraham's divinity and Joseph's inspiration in translation.

Why I leave, Part 1:

I'm writing this to come clean, so to speak. I no longer feel I can live a two-sided life. I understand this "confession" may hurt my credibility in some circles, but that doesn't matter to me. While I can't say I have a commitment to "the truth" in a Mormon sense, I do feel I have a need to be true to the evidence and logical in my evaluation of that evidence. The scientist in me requires this, I think.

I don't intend to pull any punches in these next posts, so for those afraid for their testimony feel free to stop at the end of this paragraph. I no longer believe in the truth of the Book of Mormon or any of the LDS Cannon. I don't believe Joseph Smith ever actually spoke to God, Jesus Christ, or any angels, received or translated any ancient records on gold plates, or received any modern revelation from God on any subject. My reasons for this change of heart follow, but please don't think I do this because I want to sin or because I was offended in any way by members of the church. On the contrary, my interaction with members of my home ward has never been anything less than pleasant. Those interactions, though, can't override my painstaking research. The doctrine of the church stands or falls on its own merits, regardless of how kind, accommodating or good any individual members are.

I should also mention that my story isn't unique, nor is it even the most compelling story I've read in the past two years. I have personal friends who have been disowned, abused, forced into divorce, and fallen into depression because of their loss of faith. Others I know of have been driven to suicide because of the loss they felt. I'm lucky in that most of my immediate family has been accommodating, if not agreeable, as I've gone through my time of doubt and darkness.

I struggled pretty heavily with depression after returning from my mission to Japan. I might give more details later, but the digest version is I took a leave of absence from school in late 2007 to deal with some of these issues. It was then that I first began to wonder if God actually existed. I hadn't lived perfectly, that's sure, but I also didn't see where I had gone so wrong to deserve the mental anguish I felt. Did God really want me to suffer like this?

To help me understand my mental state, I learned a bit about how the brain works. Cognitive Psychology has advanced far enough today to prove that our feelings and moods are not always within our own control. Our brain chemistry determines pretty directly many of our thought patterns. Drugs, and more recently electrode therapy (here's a fascinating Ted Talk on the subject) have been used, often with great success, to help people overcome many of their mental (and physical) pitfalls.

I grew up thinking I was in control of my own mind. In my view, this life was a test where we needed to "prove" our control over our passions. Thus it was something of a relief to me when I discovered that our brains don't give us complete control over our moods. At the same time, though, I realized I needed to jettison at least one of my erroneous beliefs that, while may not have come directly from the church, was at the very least reinforced by the church's teachings.

I eventually decided to continue believing in God, not because I thought he was just, but because I was afraid of what would happen after I die. The seeds doubt were sown, though: I no longer felt I could entirely trust my feelings on things. Erroneous emotions were the primary source of my descent into depression, and only by distrusting my feelings and looking with a colder, more logical eye could I get myself out of my funk. My experience as a whole also led to more liberal political views, by the way, but that's a story for another time...

I eventually went back BYU to finish my degree. About a year into my remaining two-and-a-half years of coursework, I got to know Dave. Dave happened to join the same research group I had, and I quickly found out he went to Japan on a mission as well. Dave was intelligent and articulate, and since I like to talk, we ended up as sparring partners of a sort. Eventually the topic of religion came up. As a BYU student, I naturally assumed at first that he must believe (BYU is 99% Mormon, after all). Before long, though, it became clear to me that he not only doubted, he didn't subscribe to any of the core beliefs of Mormonism.

The two of us argued over religion quite a bit. Naturally, I found myself defending the religious positions, but I never really felt I had the upper hand in our arguments. Often I felt more like I was rationalizing a weak position than supporting a strong one. I never let myself accept any of his core positions (at least at first), but I did slowly allow some of the less essential beliefs to fall by the wayside when they were proven untenable. Let me give an example.

The Bible teaches there was a universal flood in both the old testament and the new (see: 1 Peter 3:20-21 for the new testament info. I don't think I really need to mention the old). Mormon teachings reiterate this (see these links for proof). Problematically, though, no extra-scriptural evidence exists to corroborate the story:

• If the flood really did happen, we'd expect a break in the fossil record around the the time it occurred. There is no known break during the period generally cited as the time of the flood. There is evidence in the fossil record of OTHER breaks, such as the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, but not for the supposedly more recent flood.
• Massive floods leave clear evidence. For example, geologists have discovered clear evidence of a massive flood in the Grand Coulee river valley in Washington State about 18,000 years ago. No such evidence exists for a worldwide flood around 2000-3000 BC.
• Noah's ark wasn't anywhere near large enough to hold all species on earth. There is just too much biodiversity. Even if it WAS large enough, though, it wouldn't have been able to sustain life for all those species for the length of time the earth was supposedly covered. At the very least, the carnivores would have died long before the voyage ended.

This is just a taste of the evidence on this subject. Every other subject that had the possibility of physical evidence ran into problems similar to the ark, to some degree. The evidence just didn't fall on the side of the church. For a while, I was able to rationalize away the lack of evidence, but every time I did I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. I did manage to take comfort in the idea that the Book of Mormon and the rest of the central cannon stood unchallenged, as far as I could see. My conviction had wavered, but I thought that to lose my faith entirely I'd have to be "dragged kicking and screaming" through the "clear truth" of the BOM.

If nothing else, my discussions with Dave made me realize how empty church discussions were. Taking with Dave challenged me. It forced me to learn more, to dig deeper into troubling issues, to try to fit things together in unexpected ways. In some ways I still allowed my preconceived conclusions to overcome the logic of the situation, but many of Dave's arguments were good enough that I had to abandon my untenable positions entirely.

In contrast church was repetitive, patronizing, and childish. Talks from the pulpit weren't really engaging, discussions in Sunday School were shallow. I was far more stimulated intellectually by the lively, yet admittedly troubling discussions I had with Dave. Gospel doctrine discussions never moved beyond the basics. If I brought up any issues I had discussed with Dave, the points were either dismissed or eventually the discussion would come to "well, God just knows better than us. Eventually we will find how these issues are resolved". I was disappointed, but I tried to keep my faith.

Syria - as an average american layman.

I'm not a foreign policy expert. Or a journalist. Or a government official. I'm just some average, run of the mill guy when it comes to Syrian happenings. All my information comes from secondary sources.

Even so, it's hard to ignore the war there. Long before Boston was hit by a (marginally) domestic terrorist, Syria had been embroiled in years of war. Hundreds of bombs like the ones detonated in Boston have exploded all over the Syrian landscape. I remember a particularly shocking (for me) report I read something like two years ago of a bomb that went off in a coffee shop in a university that killed dozens.

The Internet has a long memory, so I decided today to look for that report - but I couldn't find it. It's not as though it was buried, though: there have just been too many other reports that appear to be far worse than the attack that shocked me so much those two years ago. The list seems endless:

April 8, 2013: Damascus Bombing kills 14 and injures hundreds
February 22, 2013: A series of bombs kill "at least 83 people"
January 15, 2013: (report on the 17th): Aleppo university bombing kills 87
December 12, 2013: "As many as 200" killed in an attack on a minority sect
March 27, 2012: Two terrorist bombs kill 27 police and civilians in Damascus
January 7, 2012: 26 killed in a bombing in Damascus

That's just a few of the bombings. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world seems to scoff when we rage against terrorist bombing that occurred a week and a half ago in Boston? I in no way wish to diminish the suffering of Boston's victims, but I can also understand why our outrage falls on deaf ears. I also see why, after two years of conflict, religious control of opposing factions seems to be the norm, rather than the exception.

What right do we have to control the world for our own ends, America? Why must we force ourselves into other's pies. Why must we try to mold the world into a society that matches our own? Expansion of American ideals, American democracy is a pipe dream that won't come to fruition as long as we try to force the issue. Our presence in the middle east has been little more than a trigger fomenting violence for years. Even after our most direct middle-eastern intervention, violence continues unabated.

Some may call me a pessimist; I prefer the term realist. The deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Persians and Arabs hasn't resulted in a decisively democracy loving, people-controlled, peace loving middle east, now has it?

But maybe I'm wrong. I honestly would like to be. Years of direct evidence has proven at the least that a change in the middle east won't come easily. Even should the change happen, I wonder if the middle-eastern people will see us as liberators or tyrants. My instincts suspect the latter.

Chaos and Order

I've been reading newspapers lately, especially the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (because I've got direct access to the papers). I'm more of a new news media person myself, but I can never really forget the time I spent reading our local paper when I didn't have access to the internet at a younger age. I naively and presumptuously read the newspaper thinking most of what they wrote was likely true, or at least reliable. I hold no more such illusions.

It makes me laugh, though, when I read comments from members of the old news corps drumming a beat against the new media. The new media is chaotic, they say. Unreliable. Disordered. Contradictory. The old way was better, they say: "...I think we were better off as a society when we had fallible but reasonable people sorting out what mattered and what you needed to know about it." 

I wonder if they even see the arrogance of their own position. They act as if they were the only people reasonable enough to sort the news and choose what was important. I do agree with them on one point, though: the new media is disordered, unreliable, and contradictory. Personally, though, I'd rather have contradictory reports that I can sort out myself than ordered sources convinced of their own superiority feeding to me what they've decided is important. At least the new media acts as if their readers are smart enough to analyze things on their own.

Our own prejudices

A statement made in an article I read today got me thinking. The gist of the statement was: "Humans like to think they are rational, but that rationality is an illusion". While I was reading the article, I found myself picking apart it's arguments, finding weakness, prejudice, grandiosity, self aggrandizement, and other self promoting argumentative tactics. (Here's the article, you can decide if I'm correct yourself). There's a kind of arrogance in using logic to prove human beings are illogical, I think.

The thing is, though, I agree with the author on this statement. We are illogical, yet self-delusional beings often incapable of knowing what is best for us. We have our goals, our ideas, or desires, passions, loyalties, and we want those loyalties to be logically infallible. Upon closer inspection, though, each of those loyalties turn out to have holes - logical contradictions, unsupported assumptions, untenable conclusions, the whole lot. We are, in a word, fallible.

But does this mean we need to submit ourselves to laws limiting our freedom of choice? Do we need a micro-managing government to stop us from hurting ourselves? I might say yes if we had some non-human, objective entity with far more data processing ability that we have, but such is not the case. Our lawmakers are human, too, subject to the same prejudices, cognitive biases, and delusions as the rest of the populace. What guarantee do we have that their decisions are truly based upon anything more than prejudice? None.

I'm not privy to the inner workings of the cost-benefit analysis done in the higher echelons of government, but I can't imagine the decisions are any more rational than those made on a more local scale. I'm no economist, though. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Gun Control Lunacy

I read an article in the New York Times this morning entitled: Saving Children From Guns. I'm no gun advocate, but neither am I a gun control advocate. Rather, I'm an advocate for data, and unsurprisingly, this article ignores data while attempting to use emotion to manipulate its readership. The article would have us assume accidental gun death represents the majority of accidental child death annually.

This statement is patently false. In 2007, of the 11,778 accidental child deaths in the nation, a mere 138 of them were due to accidental firearm discharge, and this is data for ages 0 to 19. Previous years give similar statistics. Perhaps, if the author wants limit accidental child mortality, he should focus on limiting child car accident deaths (6,638 in 2007) or maybe even accidental poisonings (972).

I surmise the author's real intention is to limit all gun violence, specifically homicide. but if the author really wants such a focus, he shouldn't use accidental child gun death as an emotional lead in for his argument. It's dishonest.

Scary election results

Dear conservative friends who live in my home of Utah county: I have nothing against republicans or conservatives in principle, but the result from your county scares me. 88.3% Romney, 9.8% Obama, 1.2% Gary Johnson. According to Wikipedia, here are the religious demographics of your county: 88.1% Mormon, 10.1% Non Religious 1.8% Other. Maybe you need to use something more than religious beliefs when you decide your political opinions.

Excepting a few other sparsely populated counties (also in Utah) for Romney, and DC for Obama, no other area voted so lopsidedly for a single candidate. Before you decide to say Washington is broken, I believe you need to look at your own county's politics. You might find something broken there, too.