Reconstructed and delusional thought histories

I don’t know why I assume that everyone has had an experience of marveling at the peculiarly of where they are, who they are, and what they perceive their lives to be. I have had dozens of them. A sense of surprise and wonder around a momentary awareness of my world – a world built, decision by decision, by me but still almost foreign and strange. “How did I get to be here, doing this?” I assume everyone has had a similar experience entirely without any good justification for that assumption.

“I’m a nice guy, a good guy.”

“I’m a flawed but moral person, a disciple of Christ.”

“I want to be ethical.”

“I want to be an ethical advocate for informed compassion.”

I have thought of it in different ways over the years. I don’t know where this need comes from. If I am honest, it’s as much about being able to feel good about me as it is about empathy and compassion for others but, just as honestly, I feel that is shifting more and more to the space of real altruism.

This need has pushed and pulled me through different worlds and spheres in my life. Pushed and pulled against other urges and desires. The tempest of life – influences, desires, ideas spinning around us clutching at our ‘hearts’, minds, hungers. We are tossed and drawn, gently and violently, imperceptibly, joyfully, painfully from one understanding to another. We learn and we unlearn. We grow and we regress. Through it all, if we are thoughtful, we hope that we are making some sort of progress – whatever that can possibly mean.

As a boy I wanted to be nice and gentle and caring to the only people in this world that mattered to me, women, and I was. I was gentle and caring but insincere and inauthentic. I wanted their attraction and affection and eventually I learned how to get it. I sincerely wanted to be good to them, but I didn’t learn how to be sincere with them and so I hurt people and I hated myself and fled from myself and my world to the Navy.

I fled myself and went spiritually adrift. It wasn’t long before I found a fix for myself, in the form of a good woman and a world of simple moral absolutes. I took refuge on that island for a long, long time. Taking the calmness of the lagoon as all I needed. I wasn’t living; I was protected from living, from navigating the tempest that is life furiously churning just beyond the breakwaters made of religious dogma. Once I realized that, and I realized there was deep suffering that I was ignoring and contributing to by being on that island, I had to leave, and I had to leave alone.

I built a raft with sticks of my own budding ideas and twigs from Hitchens and Harris and I bound it all together with intellectual curiosity. My tiny sail was fashioned from offended sensibilities. Then I headed out, back into the storm, and waves. I think that I will make similar mistakes as those that sent me into the arms of the Navy and of religion but I am self aware in a way I never have been. I am world-aware in a way that I never have been. I have maps. I am adding to my vessel, slowly, and I hope that I will eventually find a good rudder, maybe even an anchor but for now I am content to know that I am sailing.

Moving forward...

So…

How’ve you been?

Yes, yes. It’s been a long time, I know. What have I been up to? Well…..

- I got divorced. I did post, once, right after that so I guess I don’t need to mention that but it seemed like the appropriate place to start.
- I became an atheist activist. 

- I started a freethinkers group, the Flagstaff Freethinkers

- I helped start up the Northern Arizona University Secular Student Alliance

- I started volunteering with the Secular Coalition forArizona as their Community Outreach and Development Director
- I started dating the only professional, state-level secular lobbyist in the country

- I commenced to lose myself in volunteering – both for the coalition and elsewhere, being a single dad half-time, developing the Flagstaff Freethinkers – 150 members and growing,  as well as other nontheist communities throughout the state, going to conferences all over the country, building a relationship – oh yeah, and keeping that day job thing going.

Who cares, right? Yeah.. I know – I’m just giving the background.

So what have I really been doing?

What I have been doing is evolving my ideas around what this movement is, what I think it should be and what, if any, role I should play in it. Even more fundamentally I have been learning. I have been developing, expanding my concept of ethics and compassion. I have learned about the work of Greg Epstein and the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. I have learned about Ethical Culture. I have learned about the Unitarian Universalists. I have had some hard lessons, I have had knapsack thoroughly unpacked with Sikivu Hutchinson. I have seen the amazing efforts of diplomats in the disheartening fight for secularism in my theocratic state of Arizona. I have broken bread with Dawkins but it was the conversation with Sean Faircloth that I remember most from that night. I stood in the rain at the Reason Rally but it was the march to the hill at the Secular Coalition for America’s lobby day that made the trip to D.C. valuable to me.

I was content for a long time, mostly because I needed it as part of my process, to pick religious dogmas and cultures and cannons and ‘moralities’ to pieces. I had an axe to grind and believe you me I still do! I also am ready for more than that. I need more than that. I want to do more than point out the problems, I am not here to champion atheism, really what I want is to participate in efforts towards solutions.

I need community. I need social justice. I need to do something productive and positive. I need to participate in active compassion. So that’s what I will be working on, and writing about much of the way moving forward – building community, finding purpose in service and social justice and the way all of that is motivated by a purely secular worldview. It’s not all going to be secular community activism, Engineers Without Boarders, Humanist schools in Uganda. I still have a lot to vent about. There is at least as much JTEberhard left in me as there is Chris Stedman so I will probably be a little “bi-polar” between my firebrand and my diplomat but that is who I am right now.

I wish I had been writing about this personal process along the way. I would like to have been more conscious and attentive to it for one thing but I would also like to have documented it and shared it with you good people, well… person. The next post will be a short discussion of my thoughts looking back at it from where I am now.

Religion didn't destroy my marriage, but it played a big part.

I received word that my divorce is finalized. We filed in September which is when I went incommunicado on the Blog, on Facebook, everything. I wanted some time for reflection. I’m not sure that I reflected enough but I need to get back to writing and I guess it’s time to write about this.

-Breathe-

Okay…

Towards the end of 2008 I found it increasingly difficult to endure the cognitive and ethical dissonance that occurred as a result of my faith in the LDS church. This was something that had been building for a while with the usual uneasiness of reading certain bible stories to my children, and so on. Those discomforts were punctuated by my deep discomfort with the bigotry I heard preached from the pulpit in support of Proposition 102 (Arizona’s version of the higher profile Prop 8 being voted on in California at the same time). I found it impossible to accept the position of the 'Prophet' on this and once you start questioning the legitimacy of the Prophet, it's hard to keep the house of cards still standing. I tried to wrestle with my doubts privately for months but it was soon clear that this was going to be a bigger process than I thought and it was time to include my wife*. Midway through 2009, I let her know that I was having a major crisis of faith. It was a struggle for us from the beginning. For those who aren’t intimately familiar with the doctrines and culture of the Mormon Church, it may be hard to understand how deeply emotional and profoundly, eternally consequential this struggle would have been—but understand that there are few things that could pose a greater threat.

For many months, while I worked on resolving my doubts, she worked on reconciling herself with the fundamental change she thought she saw happening in her life-partner, praying for it to go back to how it was supposed to be. We had inspirational and terrifying discussions. We went to counseling. We dug deep into the foundations of our relationship and found that without the church we were one very shaky ground. Crucial issues like trust, acceptance, worth and equality, security, value systems, joined our now-divergent worldviews as sources of conflict instead of unity. Most of these issues existed before my departure from the faith, and I'm sad to say some were deeply aggravated by it. I can't lay all of that exclusively at the feet of the religion. I can however, say with certainty that had religion not established itself as the true source of ethics and morality that issues like trust and acceptance might not increased as issues we had to work through.

We spent well over a year working through those conflicts as more and more were exposed. I worked with the Bishop and others to reclaim my faith. I went to individual counseling. I finally asked to be released as Elders Quorum President and stopped going to church altogether sometime early to mid 2010. Angelica* and I worked at it for several more months after that. Finally we separated early this year.

In the end we didn’t come to the same conclusion about what the consequences were for issues we faced. I was the one that finally decided that we needed to end it. Angelica disagreed with me; I think she still does, but I wasn’t the first to give up on us—just the first to stick to the decision. I had spent tears on the other side of that threat plenty during the months prior.

One of the things I had to relearn was something that we both knew from the beginning; we even talked about it when we got engaged. It is this: Love isn’t the most important part in making a marriage work—it’s not even the second most important part—and love can’t keep you together by itself. More than love, you need (1) commitment and (2) some key compatibilities for a marriage to survive the storms of life. “Love” comes in as item (3). Perhaps number 4, now that I think about it, maybe even 5…anyway…I also realized later that those are all completely independent of each other. They barely even inform or motivate each other.

The new, hard lesson was the other side of that truth which is this: Love isn’t the most important part of making a marriage work and love alone can’t save one that won’t work. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, period. Not even between to loving, compassionate, beautiful people. Not even when those people really want it to.  

So yes, my apostasy was a milestone and a central issue in the ending of my marriage and yes the deep, conflicting feelings we had on the issue of religion would have been an ongoing source of major conflict (especially with regard to our children) and yes, that played a large part in my decision. But, if you ask me, the greater damage that religion did to us happened at the very beginning, when it took over, and took the place of the relationship itself. The commitment, the duty to the marriage as an institution and its key role in God’s plan was the first absolute. We had HUGE issues that we never would have, should have, or could have ignored had eternity not been the foregone conclusion. It turned out that we were only partially committed to each other. We were much more committed to “the marriage” and the idea of what we “should be” for each other and for the Church. My role as a worthy priesthood holder was, in many ways, more important than my role as husband friend or lover (Yes, brothers and sisters, I understand it’s all connected, and well-defined but it’s not as simple as that, is it?). Maybe if we hadn’t been so focused on how happy we were supposed to be, we might have been able to see much sooner some of these critical  threats.

On that note, one might think that I should owe the time I had to our faith, allowing us to ignore all that stuff. But I would argue that we may have had an easier start, but I think that ultimately it did more harm than good. That is not to say I regret the time I had with Angelica. I am deeply grateful for my time with such an amazing woman and for the unbelievable joy it was to love and be loved by her. I am grateful for that time and for the amazing children that we will forever share as their parents.

We are going into our first holiday season as a family with divorced parents. There are challenges and heartbreaks but there is hope and reason for rejoicing too. I will probably be telling you all about it.

Thank you for your time and attention.

---

*I will be using the name Angelica in place of her real name.

Don't worry too much. It happens to a lot of people.

I didn't post this to my FB page like I wanted to and like I should have. Why? Because I knew that everyone that should learn something from it would probably just stop listening once they felt accused - for all the reasons discussed in the video. They would feel I was probably pointing the video right at them. Guess what? I am. Guess what else? It's not said with the venom and misconceptions you think it is.  

Bigotry is a natural consequence of transition, of growth and progress. Not everyone can change their minds at the same pace, not everyone should. Not everyone that is a bigot is a bigot because they are hateful or spiteful, shallow or stupid. Sure there is plenty of that out there too, but I don't think that everyone that condemns homosexuality as immoral is a hateful person. Some people are bigots for all the 'right' reasons. They are trying to do the right thing. They are given a paradigm about love and righteousness. It can be instilled and reinforced in a myriad of ways. It happened with racism (which still exists but know you can count on it occurring mostly in the hateful people that I'm NOT talking about here).

I don't condone any mindset that promotes intolerance of people based on who they are but we can't hope to change it if we don't fact facts about what it is. It's not a group of slur spewing, red-faced, rage addicts that are getting in the way of progress. It's sweet mothers and loving fathers. It's the majority of voters in CA and AZ and many other states. Minimizing and demonizing them won't give us any insight in to how to overcome the cultural obstacles we face. It is simply hard for some (again, for a myriad of complicated and personal reasons) to overcome their preconceptions and prejudices about the LBGT community, and the value of "traditional" marriage.

We are also fooling ourselves if we think they don't see gays as fully human and deserving of rights. They really can manage to see these as separate issues. In many cases they don't think that "gay" is real. As DE-humanizing as that is it doesn't sound like it to them. It's not like skin color, it's too easy to make it seem like a choice - no matter how much contradicting evidence they aren't listening to.

Change is hard. Not all change is progress. It's not monstrous to want things to be like you think they were when you were a kid and everything was comfortable and simple. It's not evil to have faith in an ideology that is still shared by a large majority of your fellow citizens. But in this case it IS bigotry. It's intolerance of other people for who they are, and for their differences. It IS bigotry and it is wrong and it's time for it to stop.

Please, if you watched that video and were tempted to dismiss the content, or had trouble concentrating on the words, because of the appearance of the speaker. Or, if you shutdown as soon as you felt like the the bigot label was getting smeared all over you, again. If you didn't give the video your full attention the first time. Please watch it again and really listen.

Thanks.

I'm going to post this on my FB page now...

The terrible power of faith: Javon Thompson

I have often said that it isn’t religion, per se, that I object to. It’s the faithful adherence to dogmatic certainties. This can take the form of devotion to state, party, economic principles, and causes both good and bad. Anytime people choose their ideology over evidence and reason it is a recipe for disaster.

I still maintain that this is true. But I have a particular bone to pick with religion here and now.

I just read the story: Slain boy's mom discusses cult life

I was livid, as I’m sure you are – whether you are religious or not. I would have been when I was a religious person too. It got me to thinking though. What other examples are there of this type of behavior, outside religious devotees? For instance I agree that faithful devotion to an idea like communism (or capitalism) can be and has been as disastrous as any religious belief but where is the communist equivalent of Madeline Kara Neumann? Where is the party affiliation equivalent of Preston Bowers or Lydia Schatz? Where is the North Korean example of that is comparable to the dozens or more children that are beaten and killed , or suffer preventable deaths due to the religious beliefs of their otherwise “sane and loving parents" every year?

I would call the events at Wako with the Branch Dividians primarily religious in nature and but I would concede a similarity to the political motivated stand off at Ruby Ridge. The Jamestown Massacre, however where parents fed the Kool-Aid to their children has no political equivalent that I’m aware of.

There are examples of mass murder on both religious and non-religious sides. There are disturbed people that have done horrific things for religious and non-religious reasons. I fail, however, to conceive of more than a couple instances where otherwise loving, sane parents neglect to care for their suffering children. There are some rare examples, equally horrific like Gloria Thomas Sam , Eliza Jane Scovill where the suffering and deaths we caused not by religious faith, but faith in pseudo science like homeopathy, etc. Aside from these I don’t know of any other time when parents will defy the conventional wisdom/medicine that offers to treat a terrible sickness tormenting their child without a religious reason. In some cases like with Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions, they KNOW it will save their child’s life but deny it anyway , not because they think that they have faith that God will heal their child, necessarily, but because they think that it would be better to die than to disobey God. This is almost exclusive to religion as far as I can see. It may not be YOUR religion but it IS almost exclusively religion that is to blame. This is the dreadful power of belief in heaven and hell. This is the single threat and promise that would justify this behavior to a rational human being. This why I have to speak out against it. Because all the religions in the world have this power and all the major religions have, at one time or another, exercised this power to the suffering and death of men women and children inside and outside their congregations. Name me one religious tradition that has more than a million members and I’m pretty sure I can find an example. My head is swimming with them right now.

If I am wrong and you can think of examples of this type of abuse done for secular reasons by “sane” people, besides the ones I have already listed please share them. I have already considered and discounted vaccine refusal - as dangerous and deplorable as it is, for reasons that, if not already apparent, can be addressed if anyone wishes me to.

Thank you.

Why the LDS (Mormon) is a logical choice: The Trinity

What is the Trinity and what role does it play in our understanding of God? The Trinity is the very concept of the roles of God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. It establishes some of the most fundamental doctrine of the Christian faiths. Whether you are an Evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, or Pentecostal the "Godhead" is one of the keystone doctrines of your belief. So why is it so difficult for so many people to understand let alone communicate. It never made since to me as young inquisitor. The separate but same just never jived and totally fell apart when I thought about how the different roles played out.

God scarified himself, to himself, to atone for sins He created us to commit? That sounds absurd. It always has. If we were created by God, and this world was created by God. Then every experience we have here is something that was set in motion by Him/Her. Yes, we make our own decisions and we are responsible for our own actions but we never asked to be placed in this no-win situation that would require a human sacrifice on our behalf. A sacrifice I never asked for but am responsible for. I am told that I have my own part in the driving of the nails into His hands.

I haven’t ever found this to be a coherent description and I haven’t ever found it a description that inspires awe or reverence. How can this be how we “understand” the God we worship and revere? Reading the Scriptures (and history) it is very clear that the Trinity concept, as we understand it now, was invented long after the scriptures were written and nothing of the sort was ever conceived by many, if any, of the original authors.

So what is the Mormon doctrine on the subject of the God-head? Well, when I was introduced to it it sounded much MUCH better. The Mormon assertion is that there are three separate and distinct entities. There is God the Father (who has a separate, resurrected physical body), His son Jesus (who also has a separate, resurrected physical body) and the Holy Ghost who is a separate, intelligent, conscious, self aware entity (who doesn’t have a physical body) that influences the way we feel and the decisions we make.

This is not without its problems, which I will get into in a minute but at least this is something I can understand. It’s something that makes since not just because I can more easily relate to it, but because the separation of the entities allows for the separation of roles. The idea that God must be just but Jesus can allow for mercy makes more sense, sort of.

This may not be an important distinction for some but it was HUGE for me, that is until I started thinking about it more critically.

I don’t need to get into a verse for verse comparison of all the potentially applicable biblical passages because I’m not here to argue whether one interpretation is more supported by the text than another. It’s a moot point, really, because all the different versions of the Trinity fail on the same fundamental levels. All we need to do at this point is to start with the Mormon Church’s own articulation of the doctrine. The traditional statement is “Although the members of the Godhead are distinct beings with distinct roles, they are one in purpose and doctrine.” How is this any better than being one entity with multiple incarnations? Why does there need to be more than one person? Why does there need to be a sacrifice? Why can there not simply be forgiveness? If forgiveness is good and right then there is no need for a sacrifice, in fact the sacrifice is an introduction of injustice. Why does my forgiveness depend on my acceptance of the story of Jesus? Do you only forgive those that embrace you? Do you only forgive those that are remorseful? No. You forgive what you can find it in your heart to forgive. Why should God be any less?*

All the different convoluted, incomprehensible approaches to the Trinity doctrines throughout Christianity is yet another betrayal of the the lengths theologians have had to go through trying to square a circle. The Old Testament and the New are so fundamentally incongruent accounts that any attempt to reconcile them is doomed.

This is the last entry for this series. I hope it was useful to someone.

*This is leading into a different discussion, the immorality of the doctrine of the Atonement. I want to address that separately so look for that soon.

Why the LDS (Mormon) faith is a logical choice: Prophecy

This is the second to the last in my series about how the LDS faith (Mormonism) is a relatively logical choice among the Christian denominations. I am doing this series for two reasons.

1 – I think that it is good to understand this influential religion and some of the reasons why it is so tenacious in such an antagonistic social environment.

2 – So many of the arguments that skeptics/atheists use against the “standard” Christian dogma’s are often not applicable to the Mormon tenets. And if one might try making an argument about, say, the injustice of Hell to a Mormon - they might be in for some surprises.

Another aspect of “traditional” Christian doctrine that bothered me was the inconsistency between the Old and New Testament regarding the nature of divine communication. Throughout the Old Testament God does his own talking. God speaks to the prophets, to the people. God walks with them. The OT God goes out of His way to create situations (silly for a God to need to do?) where He could show off his power and prove to the Israelites, and their enemies, that He was their God. Divine chest pounding is rampant throughout the OT. Not so much, in the New Testament, and absolutely not now, unless you are Mormon. The claim that God is a constant being, the same now and forever is in complete contradiction with these ‘stylistic’ differences – especially if you believe that Adam and Eve are the first full humans. Why would the Israelites deserve/require so much more direct intervention?* The idea that we, in these troubled and doubtful times, are any less in need of prophet, of demonstrations of power is ridiculous. If you believe that all the secular influences are a threat to a spiritual connection to the true gospel then we are in a more treacherous time than we have ever been. How has Christ’s atonement, or his teaches, supposed to have eliminated the need for that more direct and demonstrative interaction with God?

The Mormon answer to this is pretty simple. There is no difference. We have always needed a prophet as much now as ever and there is one. Currently his name is Thomas S. Monson. Elder Monson receives direct communications from God, as did Gordon B. Hinkley before him and so on back to Joseph Smith. The clear line of communication between God and his people, through a prophet, is the same today as it was in OT times. While this seemed a real strength at first to me it was ultimately this doctrine above all others that proved to be the undoing of my faith.
Here is why:

1. First and foremost a prophet must be a prophet. If they are the prophet and speak for the church, even if there wasn’t a biblical requirement of infallibility (Deuteronomy 18:20-22), there would be a logical one. We have too much information and history on all the modern LDS prophets to ignore how terribly fallible they were. Not fallible as people**, that wouldn’t be a problem, but fallible as prophets, seers and revelators. They are invariably products of the thinking of their eras with no evidence to a higher, more eternal understanding of truth (moral or physical). The minute you hang your hat on a doctrine of prophetic (or papal) authority then the validity of your entire doctrine is contingent on the validity of that single claim and it will invariable prove to be the easiest claim of all to disprove. There are more reasons below why this doctrine of modern day revelation fails but this one refuses any attempt to be reconciled by any other means but blind faith, and dismissal of the preponderance of evidence so completely that you don’t really need anything else. This is the one that forced me to start pulling at the foundation of my house of cards.
Other reasons it fails…

2. Even with the LDS reinstating the prophets on earth, there is still a vast difference between the God of the OT and the one most Mormons 'know' now. There are no more miracles; there are no more overt demonstrations of destructive and genocidal power. The only similarity is that there is a prophet who speaks to God. Some Mormon lore maintains that there is a chair for the prophet AND a chair for God in a special temple room where the prophet and He converse, and that both chairs are equally worn. So the contention is that at least some of the communications are physical face to physical face.

3. If the divine design calls for a prophet to lead his people, what than of the great apostasy, the time between the death of the last of Jesus’ apostles and the revelation to Joseph Smith? How can the wickedness of the Dark Ages be a reason for God to remove his presence instead of a reason for greater intervention? Are we supposed to accept that there was not one single person throughout all those centuries worthy of the “true” gospel? Were all the prophets of this dispensation so much more virtuous then everyone that lived for almost 1800 years? If the contention really is going to be that Joseph Smith was the most worthy individual, the only one able to receive the fullness of the Gospel throughout all that time, well that is a hard case to make considering the true (untarnished, and unembellished, unimproved) history of this character.

4. The Mormon Church’s attempt to reconcile the modern dogma with the OT is just as problematic as any attempt to align the OT and the NT, because they don’t work together. You can align your dogma with one but not the other. Most modern Christians align themselves (sort of) primarily with the NT ignoring most of the old, under the blanket idea that Christ made the OT essentially irrelevant, somehow knowing which few little bits like the 10 commandments, are still relevant. The Mormon Church makes a valiant attempt at bridging the gap, more fully embracing both. This bit about prophecy shows how much folly there is in that idea. Christ was not a prophet, at least not as those that came before. He didn’t receive revelations, he shared that which as innate knowledge. He preached from a totally different kind of authority, and the apostles continued in the same vein thereafter. A place of personal spiritual awareness and authority, much less so the walk and talk and negotiate with God prophets like Noah, Abraham and Moses. So to align themselves more so with the OT the Mormon Church has to distance itself more from the NT in some crucial ways. This is inevitable because they are fundamentally different representations of a fundamentally different God.

* They were not so primitive as to lack the ability to understand the more subtle concepts of modern Christianity. They were not so crude that they couldn’t understand forgiveness, it may not have been as valued culturally, but it wasn’t beyond them. God was not a respecter of cultural justifications for immorality anyway. If loving thy neighbor as thyself is so central a theme to the message from God why was it a new concept in the NT? Why were the Israelites the only people of consequence before the NT, if all the people were God’s creation?

**So much of the stuff that the LDS prophets have established as official doctrine in the past but is unpopular now (Blood atonement, Adam-god theory, spiritual inferiority of blacks, etc.) is disavowed by saying that those were the statements of true prophets but that they we not speaking from divine inspiration when the said them. If you read the statements, it’s pretty clear they were absolutely confident of the divine authority from which they were speaking. So if THEY didn’t know, shouldn’t they have? Who are we to say they were mistaken – except it is current prophets that are saying it.