Maybe these people just think that any God worthy of the name wouldn't condem them to eternal hellfire because they are living lives of sufficient virtue already?
I think when people say this sort of thing they just mean that they already try to act morally, and would do so irrespective of whether they believed in god. I assume that if god revealed him/her/itself to us and demanded that we all pray, attend church, and suck up to him/her/it, or burn in hellfire for all eternity if we failed to do so, most of us would capitulate to god's demands.
That's some fairly impressive self-confidence. But this is coming from a woman who wouldn't expect to keep her job, let alone her immortal soul, if her boss knew what she did all day.
I'm with you. Free will is all well and good, but if I know there is a God and I know she has certain rules for right and wrong, who am I to argue.
Isn't your answer to this contingent on which side of the Euthyphro paradox you fall on?
I think you're confusing belief in God with belief in the teachings of Christianity. I interpreted apo's comment to mean that he doesn't see any reason to believe in all the specific stuff, but he could entertain the idea of there being some sort of all-powerful being out there. But whether or not such a being exists, he would stick to his own sense of morality, which seems to work well enough.
Apologies if I'm misinterpreting you, apo.
The link doesn't take me to the place apo said this, so I've tracked it down on my own. I think he's talking about the difference a proof of the existence of god would make. Given such a proof, revelation, the moral law as laid down in the bible, which interpretation of the bible exalts these and condemns those to damnation, etc. remain unsolved. And I think he's saying that proving god exists, by a monsignior wrestling on Monty Python if need be, doesn't make those other consequences you allude to any more likely, or relevant.
I think the people who first began making that statement, in the renaissance, believed he existed, just not the way the church did. And that he would not be that petty, jealous character in any case.
If there was proof of the existance of God and clear evidance of what it wanted and of the benefits of doing what it wanted, I would probably change my behavior.
I think #1 is right. I sort of assume God's a pretty good diety who thinks it's funny when I do certain things that might normally be considered venial sins.
5, whether or not the Eurypthro problem returns depends on 6 & 7 bring up, whether, along with proof that some God exists, we also know what that God requires not to damn us to eternal hellfire. If we do know that, than the problem is stated as, "Would you do what you think is moral even if you know God disagrees and will punish you for it?" This is a new problem, as the Eurypthro problem is, to my understanding, "Is doing/abstaining from X moral because God(s) made it so, or did God(s) command doing/abstaining from X because they recognized it as moral."
Sure I'd obey God's bizarre little laws for a while, but only until the Resistence figures out how to blow him up with the super-anti-Godmification ray.
"Resistence" s/b "spelled correctly"
It would be the height of arrogance for an ant to say, "If I knew that Newt was holding a magnifying glass over the entrance to my home, I would wait til dusk to go back." -- He is just an ant! He can't modify his behavior that way -- he is going to carry his crumb into the hill and burn up in the focussed sunlight regardless.
Are we ready for Paradise Lost or what?
clear evidance of what it wanted
This isn't really a condition that can be met, though. People who already are completely convinced that God does, in fact, exist have been arguing since the very beginning of the whole concept over what the true meaning and dictates of religion are. Knowing for certain that God exists doesn't mean we get a clearly-worded checklist of right and wrong--the ambiguity over what to do with this new-found knowledge of God's existence would remain.
5, whether or not the Eurypthro problem returns depends on 6 & 7 bring up, whether, along with proof that some God exists, we also know what that God requires not to damn us to eternal hellfire.
Well, yes. I'm assuming that part of what Silvana and Apo were saying is that even if they knew that God existed and had some sense of what it wanted that they wouldn't change their behavior. If they didn't know, then not changing makes perfect sense.
If we do know that, than the problem is stated as, "Would you do what you think is moral even if you know God disagrees and will punish you for it?"
This seems like a different claim than the one made -- there are all sorts of areas in which I have no strong moral opinions but God might. If I knew that God existed and was the God of, say, Judaism, with strong opinions about eating shellfish, I'd be right off lobster, with no moral qualms because I don't see myself as having a moral obligation to eat shellfish. I understand Apo to be saying that he would ignore any such strictures, regardless.
If they didn't know, then not changing makes perfect sense.
Which is why I assume that this is their argument.
I guess so, but then it seems trivial -- why bother saying it?
I admire your honesty (both LB and Idealist) in how you would react to a god showing up and saying, "OK, y'all, here's the ground rules." My opinion is that if there's a divine being who cares more about the dress code than anything else, its priorities are misplaced and its rules are stupid. It has better things to worry about. If its rules are all arbitrary and meaningless, I'm (a) probably not going to be very good at them anyway and (b), y'know, up its nose with a rubber hose.
That said, I think it's evidence of the tragic effectiveness of purely human bullying that so many religious leaders - of many if not all religions - have used Hell/etc as a way to push the potential wisdom of their own traditions out of the spotlight and replace it with fear as a tool of control. For example, that the first thing one (I certainly do this, I'm afraid) thinks of is Hell and damnation, when one thinks of Christianity, is a sad reversal of what I suspect were the core beliefs of the first Christians.
I guess so, but then it seems trivial -- why bother saying it?
Because people keep asking you if you believe in God, perhaps?
I think the hypothetical of God revealing him/her/itself is a pretty interesting one, because I don't think the actual reaction to God showing up tomorrow - even in a country where 60% of Americans say they believe Genesis is literally true - would be to obey God or worship him, but to just go completely apeshit. I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian and was taught that the Rapture was going to happen in our lifetimes, and I can tell you that even though I met dozens upon dozens of people who said they believed in God and miracles and the end of the world, and clearly believed they believed, I don't think I've ever met a single human being who actually did. Something like that falls completely outside the history of human experience, and if we woke up tomorrow to see Yahweh in the sky throwing plagues of frogs and turning the seas to blood, James Dobson would be just as shocked shitless as the rest of us.
I admire your honesty
I'm all about the cowardice.
If its rules are all arbitrary and meaningless, I'm (a) probably not going to be very good at them anyway and (b), y'know, up its nose with a rubber hose.
Which is pretty much why I stopped being a Christian a very long time ago. I figured if there was any God who actually ran a Hell, I wouldn't want to spend eternity worshiping it anyway.
Of course, being a fundamentalist Christian, I'd already been raised to believe that pretty much everyone I knew, including all my friends and a lot of my relatives, were already going to hell, so it already wasn't much fun.
That said, if a god showed up tomorrow that contradicted my religious beliefs and said I was going straight to Hell for being any of a number of things I am (gay, not in its religion, not great about doing the yardwork, whatever), I would totally give it the finger. I mean, at that point I'm boned. I'm not giving up fried scallops so it can walk around in its fancy Look At Me, I'm God And I Don't Like Scallops t-shirt. Phbthbthbth to that, I say. Even if I did, it could just change the rules tomorrow, anyway. Nope, not for me, no thanks. I'd be way too busy asking it WTF it's been for the last forever.
That's really easy to say in the absence of said being standing around with the clipboard and the bullhorn, though.
Also, 22 gets it exactly right.
That's really easy to say in the absence of said being standing around with the clipboard and the bullhorn, though.
That's the thing. But if you buy into the hypothetical and you really know that, regardless of your views of the matter, God gets really pissed off if you eat pork or mix meat and dairy, are you going to risk eternal damnation (mixing concepts across religions, here) just for a bacon cheeseburger?
I totally would. Faith as big as a mustard seed? You gonna see some calamoving of some big ass mountains.
not great about doing the yardwork
This would be great. "I, am the Lord Thy God. Bring me, a SHRUBBERY!"
But seriously, I can see taking a particular requirement and deciding that you just weren't going to even try to swing it, and God could do what he liked about it. (Being gay, if there were a God that cared about it, sure). But for scallops? As against eternity in a pit of flames? (Or, to take it more gently, as against displeasing an all powerful and all good being that just wants you to eschew shellfish?)
24: Hey, me too! Reminds me of when a friend of mine objected to my ditching Christianity by saying that, really, our purpose in life was to praise God to increase His glory, and my response was, essentially, "What, he can make the earth in seven days but he can't find a full-length mirror to admire himself in?"
26: Yes, but then, I'm particularly attached to grilling my own cheeseburgers. No, seriously, I just wouldn't have a lot of respect for any being that showed up and had that as its first priority. Maybe this is that whole Southern "up yours" (not yours yours - I mean the Holiest of Holies' own Holy Googley HooHole) thing I'm just expressing reflexively, but I really do prefer to think that I would have it sufficiently together to be one of the people saying, "Um, that's nice about the burgers and all, but can we talk cancer for a second?"
I totally would. Faith as big as a mustard seed? You gonna see some calamoving of some big ass mountains.
I'd will that last two inches onto my penis so it'd be exactly one foot.
For me it would depend how punitive the God in question was about what beliefs I have.
By the standards of most mainstream Western religious faiths, I lead a moderately virtuous life. I don't drink to excess, I'm not an addict, I'm faithful to my wife, don't steal, try to treat other people with dignity, etc. And I would imagine that's the case for a great many or even most people.
However, I believe all kinds of stuff that would have fundamentalists foaming at the mouth. To pick some current button-issues for fundamentalists: that homosexuality is OK and that homosexuals ought to be able to marry, that abortion is OK at least some of the time, that what people get up to in their bedrooms is their own damn business, etc.
Further, I'm not really sure beliefs are things we have complete volitional control over in the first place.* I couldn't just choose not to believe that the world is roughly spherical and orbits the sun on a broadly elliptical path, for example. And if a God is going to punish me for what I believe, I'm screwed.
* Or at least some beliefs are not the sort of things we have volitional control over.
26: Depends on what it is. If it's something as meaningless as dietary laws, well, maybe that's not so bad - God's just Giant Evil Autistic Fucker God who stomps around getting people to make sausage JUST the way he likes it, which makes him a hideous nuisance, but one most people will put up with under a large enough penalty. But most of God's laws don't end with what to eat; he seems very particular about who you fuck, how you fuck them and when you get to fuck them, too. And then there's the times God has told his followers to kill people. If he declares Canada anathema and tells you to kill everyone there because he said so, would you grab a gun and get to it?
I think at that point -- where God was going against what God's own moral code is rumored to be -- I'd be all demanding proof that God wasn't a false idol and dropping mountains on Him if He didn't show up with some proof.
Let's get right down to it: if God were Hitler, what would you do?
That's where you need the anti-Godmification ray.
It wouldn't be a God I'd recognize, so I think my options would probably be a) headbutt b) become smote.
28: Really. What's its compelling reason for loving shellfish so much? If it's that all non-plant life has a soul and we're hurting them unknowingly, OK, great, that's a reason. If it's that it just really thinks they're cute and I'm stressing it unnecessarily, it doesn't have to watch me eat. I mean, I get that it could be some super-intelligent/super-wise being with priorities that don't make sense to me at first glance. No problem there. But if it's capable of appearing to me, it's capable of making me understand. Rah and I have all sorts of rules the kittens just have to follow (in theory), rules they will never understand with their tiny kitten brains, but if tomorrow they were self-aware and intelligent and understood English I would gladly explain these rules to them so they could understand that the rules benefit everyone. If this god character's so hot, it can show me as much respect as I'd show my kittens by at least offering an explanation.
Wow, you walk away from the computer for a couple of hours and everybody starts discussing your eternal soul.
The "rules" aren't the product of God, they are inventions of people, which is why they keep changing throughout history. Also, being raised Baptist, I'm all about the deathbed conversion, bitches.
Anyhow, I live a good life without needing a big paddle-wielding God to make me do that. I live by the Golden Rule and try to help people worse off than I am. Like RMP, if JHVH's all about scallops and not saying goddammit, I'm going to be terrible at following that anyhow. But no all-powerful diety could possibly give a damn about that penny-ante shit after, y'know, creating the entire universe.
So, LB, I suppose it comes down to the vengeful God you stipulate in the post is one that I absolutely don't and can't believe in.
So, LB, I suppose it comes down to the vengeful God you stipulate in the post is one that I absolutely don't and can't believe in.
Agree entirely. Also, LB's going to hell.
34: Well, isn't God as provided by most major religions worse than Hitler anyway? He's condemning the vast majority of humanity to an infinite amount of suffering for a host of incredibly petty misdeeds. The fact that we're reaching for Hitler as a comparison just illustrates that we don't really have the capacity to really believe in something as hideous as God.
This discussion reminds me of the first time I read the "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The Brothers Karamosov.
Also: Mormon theology basically enshrines Paradise Lost with the roles reversed: Satan proposes that all souls march in a totalitarian fashion towards salvation, and Jesus proposes free agency and losing some along the way, God prefers Jesus's business plan, and then the war in Heaven gets going. Wrong and free is okay by me.
To me, the whole notion of an all-powerful being sitting around having a cow about people fucking in non-approved ways, eating shrimp, wearing cotton/polyester blends, not kissing said all-powerful being's ass sufficiently and such is impossible for me to take seriously. Nor do I understand how god can (a) send people to eternal torture for finite sins (OK, maybe I suck, but not enough to deserve eternal torture -- if I were Hitler or Bush, maybe); (b) do nothing to make clear whether he/she/it/they exist(s); (c) do nothing to make clear what variety of religion (Christianity, Judaism, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Zeusism, etc., etc.) is correct and what rules we're supposed to follow; and yet (d) eternally punish those who guess wrong (necessarily the vast majority of humankind, since no religion has more than a third of the world's population as adherents). Ever hear of due process, god? A large proportion of humanity paints god as a total asshole, which means that I am better than god (and so are most people). How can that be?
btw, note that lots of people want crazy Andrea Yates to die because she drowned her five kids in her bathtub. Recall that the bible tells us that god had a total shit-fit and drowned every human and animal on earth other than the few that Noah managed to get onto his ark. Thus, Andrea Yates, even if she weren't nuts, would be many orders of magnitude less evil than god. Tell me again why I'm supposed to worship this guy?
He's condemning the vast majority of humanity to an infinite amount of suffering for a host of incredibly petty misdeeds.
I'm not sure all Christian sects take this view of Hell and/or how you get there.
You know, the hypothesis of god does not necessarily support the hypothesis of an after life. Just sayin'.
43: Not all of them do, but rather perversely the most popular ones do. And isn't the hypothetical we're dealing with the "God of Judgment" model? That pretty much assumes the existence of Hell or some equivalent punishment.
Is it? I'm not sure exactly what the hypothetical we're dealing with is.
Not only would I not eat shellfish (not so hard, considering) and rededicate my hoohah to His glory (harder), I think I would do some bad stuff to other people (hardest) to avoid eternal damnation. I mean, I'd worry about my ability to avoid doing bad stuff if I were being tortured for a finite amount of time by human beings--if that were never going to end? Maybe my instinctive aversion to doing the bad things would prevent me from acting in my rational self-interest; I'm not very aggressive, but if God were like, "if you blink once, a baby in Croatia is going to endure horrible torment for twenty minutes then die, if you blink twice, you're damned," , and I were sure it were true, and not a test, I'd blink once. It's eternal. It never ends!
I'd worry about what I'd do if threatened with torture on earth. I don't expect it's ever going to be an issue, but if it were, I hope I'd have a method of suicide, because once the fingernails start being pulled, I can't swear I'll stay virtuous. No good to the Resistance, like I said.
If it's really Punishment God, each and everyone of us would do whatever he tells us to do. For roughly the same reason the tortured are willing to say whatever they think the torturers want said.
40 seems right to me, and therein lies the paradox. If god exists, and I know this for a fact (let us assume I am somehow also assured of my own sanity), and god's rules involve the obey/disobey, heaven/hell dynaic, then god is essentially a totalitarian. And inasmuch as I have a pretty strong sense of justice, a pretty strong anti-totalitarian streak, and a pretty strong tendency to empathize with underdogs, I honestly find it pretty hard to see myself toeing the line under those conditions.
Satan is my homie.
44, 45, 46: Again, the entire premise of this "what would you do if" hypothetical is that, as LB put it, "such a god had strong opinions about my behavior which it was willing to back up with eternity spent in lakes of molten sulfur," and how we might react to such an entity's demands. If God turns out to be, for instance, the squishily vague and friendly Unitarian God, or the Bahai God, or some cosmic teddy bear being, then knowledge of his/her/its existence isn't really much of a challenge to one's way of life and/or free will. But that's not what we're really talking about here.
OTOH, as Teo is pointing out: if we know for certain that god exists (and we are not insane), and yet there's no particular threat associated with being disobedient, then it seems to me there's a much better incentive to be good. (I'm assuming that god is basically a creator god.) It's the essence of free will: here you are, I'd prefer you to do this stuff, I'm the one that made you. I mean, likely one is going to fuck up occasionally, but if one keeps in mind that the being responsible for one's creation has these preferences, then it makes sense to try to comply with them as much as one can, out of simple decency.
I think 52 is wrong for the reasons alluded to in 53.
52: Right. I have religious beliefs, and really do believe them (or believe I believe them, etc.), but they are also in something much more squishy than the big being with a lake of fire and a strictly enforced guest list. Anything I've said is assumed to be in the hypothetical instance of the hellfire and brimstone being of specific sects of specific religions.
52: But I don't know why there is much of an issue in your case, either. The Abu Gharib story that struck me deepest was the one about a cell full of women being close enough to hear young boys being raped; for some reason, I assumed the women were the boys' mothers. I can imagine being a parent and ultimately having a mindset that accepted my child could/would be raped repeatedly, and still behaving in a way that made it more likely. It is impossible for me to imagine having to hear it and not immediately doing whatever whoever asked me to do. I assume Punishment God can do much worse to me than that.
Moreover, where's the faith required in this model?
Apo's basically outlined my opinion here:
But no all-powerful diety could possibly give a damn about that penny-ante shit after, y'know, creating the entire universe.
The hypothesis was "if there was a God", not "if there was a God who prescribed/proscribed all the things Christianity/Judaism/Islam/Mormonism/religion-of-your-choice does", right?
I try my absolute best to live a moral life, which mostly involves laboring every day toward treating myself with kindness and treating other people with kindness. Hell, I plan to dedicate my whole life to helping other people not suffer while on this earth. If the all-powerful God doesn't care about that, and is going to damn me to eternal hellfire because I allowed a penis in my hoohole before going through some made-up ceremony, well, then, fuck 'im.
54: How is it wrong? I thought the scenario LB presented pretty straightforwardly involved hellfire.
But, but, but it's eternal damnation! It's horrible torment from which you'll never be released. It's not about your respect for God; it's rational avoidance of pain.
In my mind, there is absolutely no reason to think that "horrible torment from which you'll never be released" is in any way possible or probable, and I almost couldn't possibly believe it under almost any circumstances, unless I and hundreds of thousands of other people received direct visits from God saying so.
60: The problem is that we probably lack the capacity to rationally evaluate the scope of eternity, and many of us might reject an offer from a hostile Punishment God without considering how irrational that rejection really is. The more I think about it the less I think I'd be personally capable of such; sickly schoolchildren have been known to beat me up pretty bad, so I'd hate to see what an angry God could do. I guess it depends on how drunk I am on Judgment Day.
The Aztecs tore the beating hearts out of prosoners to keep the world from ending. Carthaginians sacrificed their infant first borns. Lot of tough religions out there. Lot of tough implications of the creator god.
Non serviam, nobadaddy. I spit in Your face.
59: Because 53 said, if it's the squishy non-threatening god, then there's no motivation to change your behavior. But I think that if you knew that a creator god existed, even if it couldn't/wouldn't damn you to hell, that the mere fact of its existence--to which you owe everything--would urge compliance with its wishes far more than the threat of hell.
60: I honestly do not think I would be capable of living the rest of my life according to rules that I found unjust/totalitarian. Which isn't, I don't think, some big claim of moral superiority on my part--even under totalitarian regimes, people rebel in small ways that (thankfully) are usually overlooked. It is simply impossible to be perfect. And I think that realizing that and recognizing what the consequences are would piss me off, and I'd end up joining the Resistance with Strasmangelo.
And Satan.
In my mind, there is absolutely no reason to think that "horrible torment from which you'll never be released" is in any way possible or probable, and I almost couldn't possibly believe it under almost any circumstances, unless I and hundreds of thousands of other people received direct visits from God saying so.
But that's exactly it. LB's proposition was,
"if I knew of the existence of a god, and that such a god had strong opinions about my behavior which it was willing to back up with eternity spent in lakes of molten sulfur"
Under those circumstances keeping my dick to myself until marriage gets a whole lot easier.
Well, that was LB's proposition. That wasn't the original proposition to which Apostropher and I were responding.
Because the likelihood of LB's proposition being true is very very unlikely, while the proposition "there is some sort of supernatural being" is at least somewhat plausible.
Better to fry pork sausage in hell than serve in heaven, except if you have to get in the pan with them that's not so good.
I was raised Catholic and schooled by nuns, and I decided when I was 14 that I didn't believe in god or hell, and it has never seemed necessary to reconsider.
But I think we should be working on the super-anti-Godmification ray, just in case.
I think I've been on the internet too long. At first glance, I read "nuns" as "anus".
I'm with Tia on eternal damnation. If that shit were real... well, for starters I'd stop swearing.
But it's too ludicrous to be real. As someone said up-thread, a god who condemned the vast majority of humanity to eternal torture is worse than Hitler, and a theology that posits the existence of such a god sounds just a bit too petulant to be anything other than a human creation.
If such a being did appear to me, I'd get all Spock on its ass. "What does God need with a spaceship?"
OT: I missed most of this thread because I was at the hairdresser. On a whim, I ended up agreeing to get a shock of red-pink in the front, and it looks rad, but now I am thinking, what the hell am I doing? I work at a law firm.
This could be problematic.
But I think that if you knew that a creator god existed, even if it couldn't/wouldn't damn you to hell, that the mere fact of its existence--to which you owe everything--would urge compliance with its wishes far more than the threat of hell
I really don't think that's true. Let's imagine two scenarios. In our first scenario, God X shows up and says "Hey folks, I'm God, and there's some stuff I'd like everybody to do. If you don't do it, I'll be very sad, but there won't be any consequences." And he hands down a list of laws that sound unobjectionably moral: don't kill each other, don't steal, give to the poor, etc. In this scenario it seems like most people are either going to do have done those things anyway, or do them more now because God X will have inspired them to do so, so that all works out.
In our second scenario, God Y shows up and gives the same speech - he's handing down laws, but with no strings attatched - only the content of his laws is markedly different. Some of it consists of sexual regulation (no sex outside of marriage, no homosexuality), some of it consists of purity codes (instructions on how to handle the dead, how to approach a menstruating woman, etc.), some of it seems completely arbitrary (don't eat meat with dairy), and some of it is incredibly harsh and unjust (those who violate sexual taboos should be executed by the community). Some of these laws will be relatively easy to follow, like the dietary laws; others, like the sex laws, will be ignored a lot more because they're far more intrusive; others, like public execution of adulterers, will be monstrously unpopular.
The kinds of laws God Y wants people to live by simply won't be adopted without the threat or promise of an afterlife. If we're already inclined to follow these laws, or if they're really not much of a bother, then maybe the mere knowledge of God's existence could inspire us to adhere to them more strictly. But very few people are going to follow an arbitrary or unjust moral code if they're not getting anything out of it.
72: Don't sweat it. Funky and cool won't hurt you most firms, so long as you're doing good work.
And man, you people are all sure of yourselves. Put aside the lake of burning sulfur for a moment, and say you just know that God exists and is all-knowing and perfectly good, and has strong opinions about how you should behave which include some rules which you find unintuitive -- say, for the sake of argument, that it really does have a problem with premarital sex, or it would really like a monthly goat sacrifice.
I can't see having a problem with obedience there just because it doesn't make sense. I've had people explain things to me that didn't make sense because I wasn't bright enough to follow the explanation; I'd expect God to do the same regularly. Who's to say that the new moon goat sacrifice doesn't make sense if God says it does? Were you there when Levithan was pulled from the vasty deep? (or however the Book of Job goes.)
70: This should totally turn into a "Star Trek 5" thread. I saw that movie when I was like four and thought it was completely awesome and nobody can convince me otherwise.
This seems to me like one of those crazy "now ogged reveals how little he understands the world" posts.
Organized religions have been along for a very long time, involving many millions of sincere adherants, who sincerely believed it was wrong to lie, steal, cheat, have sex with your various neighbors, kill, sleep till noon, play with cards, eat pork, eat meat on Fridays, dance, and turn away the hungry starving masses, and yet did all of things. The reason being not that they didn't sincerely believe in eternal damantion, but that they were human.
Stanley Elkin ain't Milton, but, like a reviewer said, imagine Woody Allen writing "Job in the Afterlife."
****SPOILER ALERT******
No matter how much pain and madness He allowed, no matter how much injustice and suffering He created, should we still be grateful that...It...exists? Nah, the playpen of an angry child, the fever dream of Jerome Bixby, I will not praise the Lord in fear and trembling. Half of me is a believer, and I am even tolerant of the Aztecs and Carthaginians and Torquemada. If there is a God, He is an Evil God. I hate Him forever.
"All you have to do is love Him, Mommy." said the little girl across the river. "Don't you know how long you'll be in Hell?"
"I know." said Mimi Rogers. "I still can't love Him."
"How long, Mommy? as the girl fades away. "How long?"
..............."Forever."
74: Well, yeah, but that's the problem with the Book of Job. It's a great story, and God gets some awesome lines, but it's not all that convincing unless it happens to you. When God appears to me out of the whirlwind maybe I'll change my behavior, but since I have very little confidence that will ever happen, I see no need to stop wearing clothes made from two different kinds of cloth at this time.
74 -- but what about the ants? What about the ants?!!
73: I'm not talking about "people." I'm talking about the rhetorical "you," by which I mean, "me, and people more or less like me." I mean, shit, threats and anger don't even work on kids as well as appeals to their better feelings and affection for mama--unless you've repeatedly backed up the threats and anger with physical punishment (which we are assuming the god that threatens hell wouldn't be able to do, or else why threaten?).
74: My own "I wouldn't do it" isn't about not understanding rules; it's about following them even though one finds them repressive. Again, the child analogy: you can get them to be obedient by being strict, but then they lie and sneak around. If you're really omniscient, you find out, and they go to hell. If they really know you exist (and are omniscient), they'll figure that out, and then they'll just fight back, figuring they're going to go to hell regardless.
73: God X or Y would understand about intermittent positive reinforcement. Every so often while you were behaving yourself it would zap you with the bliss ray. When you have the bliss ray you don't need the lake of fire.
I don't mean to be such a pedantic ass, I just think we're not all rational actors with regard to eternal damnation and the compulsions of our gonads.
74: The problem is that if God created us, he gave us our capacity to reason and use logic, too. So if he's all, "Bring me a spotless virgin before the rising of the full moon for I am perfect and just," and this doesn't quite mesh with our notion that human sacrifices are bad, then it calls into question why God gave us a sense of morality that leads us to the conclusion that he's immoral. Either God has gone insane in the last couple billion years or you're not in fact talking to God.
I don't mean to be such a pedantic ass
Intentional fallacy alert!
85: Hey! 76 was totally pwned by the second half of 64!
What a tangled web we weave.
If the God that shows up resembles the Christian God, there's going to be chances for *forgiveness* for all the fun you had when you should have been chaste. And all of the rules about what to wear and what to eat don't apply, and then ones that do get overrun by the forgiveness thing. Some denominations believe God asks you personally when you die, so everyone gets a pretty weighted choice to go to heaven.
So if a God shows up and says, 'Do this horrible thing or go to Hell', rationally, I'm going to say, 'you're not the God I've been told about these years, fuck off, I'm waiting for the real one.' If I'm that wrong about what I believe, I'm probably screwed anyway.
If the God shows up wanting all the Jewish rules, well, fine then, but Jewish eschatology doesn't include the whole eternal damnation thing, last I checked. What's the penalty if you don't go around smiting the Philistines? Most of the penalties seemed to happen in this world. The next you just float around being a spirit thingy in Sheol, I guess.
Who's to say that the new moon goat sacrifice doesn't make sense if God says it does?
Human powers of reason, for one. (This is one of the reasons I still find Catholicism intellectually cool.)
76: This is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about my blogging. I'm getting all choked up here.
But substantively, I'd say that the people you're talking about think they believe in God, but don't -- or at least not in the way they believe in the security guard in a bank.
Please to insert the words where they are needed.
Hail Satan!
Sorry. Just felt like it needed to be said.
81: Now you're changing the ground rules. B said nothing about bliss rays; she maintained that by merely confirming his own existence a creator god could get more people to obey his laws out of simple gratitude than a hell-based god could through negative reinforcement. Bliss rays means moving the goal posts.
89 seems like hubris to me (the second part, not the first--the first is sweet). I mean, surely a lot of faithful believers didn't really believe (how Calvinistic) but surely many hundreds of thousands of them, in fact, truly do. Otherwise we wouldn't have martyrs.
That said, though, the idea that even the truest of true believers didn't believe in the way they do the bank security guard just goes to show the impossibility of perfection, and why it is that if god really exists and is really as judgmental as some say, we're basically all fucked. (Which, to be fair, the bible does tell us.)
Okay, 76 was a little pwned by 64, but I retract my "good point" point anyway. LB is responding to the laissez-fair attitude: "yeah, whatever, God, no God, I'll behave the same" which has an implicit willfulness about it. I didn't mean (and I don't believe apo did either) that I would find myself unable to follow different, stricter rules, I meant that I wouldn't try.
So the fact that people are unable to totally refrain from pre-marital sex, or gambling, or whatever, the point is that some of them are trying, because they are scared.
92: Right. Even the electrically-shocked baby monkey clings to the wire mama. Because it's his mama.
88: I had an Orthodox friend who believed in reincarnation, for Jews anyway. But everybody kind of stops and pops out when the messiah shows up? It all sounded very complicated.
94: Hm. So Text's point in 76 is that people try, but fail (which is kind of my point too--or rather, that knowing that trying would be doomed to failure, and thus to damnation, I'd get pissed off and rebel), but what you're saying is, god stands in front of you and says, "see that lake of burning fire? Cover your scarlet hair, you hussy, or I shall throw you into it" and you just shrug?
89: I'm a big softie today. But I think you're requirements for sincere belief are absurdly high. There are no humans without sin (choosing whichever definition of sin we like, still there aren't any) and yet I wouldn't say there are no sincere adherants to the various religions. It's just a hell of a lot easier not to rob the bank than it is not to have sex with your sexy neighbor who wants to have sex with you, or not to lie when there are no immediate consequences, or to devote your life to others.
AHHHHH! "Your requirements."
I am going to hell for that one.
My understanding of my fundie friends' beliefs was that you could do a bunch of bad stuff, but were basically going to Heaven if you accepted JC as your savior. "We are sinners, all," my second fundamentalist Christian best friend named Melissa used to shrug. Maybe being sorry was necessary too. Perhaps SJ can speak to this. It wasn't actually necessary that you not do the bad things to get into Heaven. And if you're Catholic, you need to confess, right? But is there anything you can't get out of by confessing and sincerely repenting of? Thus, the people doing all those bad things don't really believe that the consequences of their actions is damnation.
I did meet a girl once who unironically referred to herself as a "heathen" and seemed to think there was a possibility she'd be damned, but wasn't moving towards changing her ways. She was the best friend of someone who comments on the personal blog of an Unfogged commenter. Maybe that commenter is reading now. (Hi!)
I mean, maybe the commenter on the personal blog. I assume the Unfogged commenter will be reading sooner or later.
It's just a hell of a lot easier not to rob the bank than it is not to have sex with your sexy neighbor who wants to have sex with you, or not to lie when there are no immediate consequences, or to devote your life to others.
I guess, but it still seems like the bank guard problem. Most people don't have a problem keeping their hands of their neighbor when his wife is in the room; or not lying when they'll get caught; or doing their jobs when there's accountability. People have trouble doing right when they think they won't get busted for doing wrong. If you knew you were busted (God being omniscient and all), I'd have to think that behaving well would be easier.
Okay, I guess if your scarlet-hair scenario happened, I'd probably do something about it, at least in the immediate sense. But why is that the hypothesis? We can make it the one we want to discuss, but I don't see the point of it, which is why I've consistently rejected LB's formulation of it. Our current options are a) not believing in a God or b) believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do. Given those two options, I'd behave the same way under either.
103: Okay, but 'believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do' seems very different to me from 'knowing' there is a God. I don't really understand what's going on in most believers' heads, but I know how I'd act if I had knowledge.
"believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do"
If you believed in a God who would allow you into heaven if you were "good enough" (for some reasonable and attainable value of "good enough") and otherwise send you to hell, would it change your actions?
But you could just as easily say "I'd behave the same way under either a god-regime or a godless-regime" and mean, "I'd try as hard as I can to do what's right, and probably fail sometimes."
Saying "I wouldn't live my life any differently" doesn't necessarily entail a lack of trying.
So in other words, give me back my "good point."
Oh, and importantly, where part of "good enough" was something that doesn't mesh with your current moral beliefs, and is perhaps somewhat against it?
102: But the point is the difference between immediate consequences and long-term consequences. And even when the immediate consequences are right in front of us, we sometimes screw up.
I'd try as hard as I can to do what's right, and probably fail sometimes.
That is in fact what I'd do, and it is what I already do, which is why I said I wouldn't change my behavior.
106 was to various silvana posts.
This is to 102:
First, there's the forgiveness thing. Second, I think you overestimate our rationality when faced only with extremely long term consequences. I mean, people smoke cigarettes, ride motorcycles without helmets, ingest large amounts of animal fat, etc., knowing at least intellectually what the long term consequences are. Damnation is even further off.
People take all sorts of stupid risks where the damage won't be incurred for quite some time. We're not that rational. And when you mix in the sex drive, it's much worse.
well now I've been pwned by B, so all is even.
Silvana, we totally agree now, so just give me back the "good point" and we can have ice cream.
Thinking about it, I guess you get your good point back. Looking at LB's 104, even knowledge can only get you so far. I know that if I keep smoking indefinitely I'll probably get cancer and die, which would be pretty bad, at least bad in the way that I can imagine (rather than the way I can't imagine, i.e. eternal damnation), but I haven't quit yet.
109: That makes sense. But the distinction remains: do you currently try as hard as you can to do what's right by your own lights, or by what you understand of god's lights? And if it's the former, wouldn't your behavior change if god showed up and said, "no, I don't care at all if you go to law school, but you are so not allowed to dye your hair"?
Also, I have no particular illusions that I am anywhere near as good a person I could be from Stereotypical Christian God's perspective (I say 'stereotypical' because I don't really know everything that's in the New Testament; maybe there's some verse that says you should be comfy and have an Ipod). If I were I'd spend my life in the Peace Corps, or go to Iraq to minister to the sick, or at the very least give away all my money above what was necessary for subsistence. If I knew, really knew in the LizardBreathian sense, that everything like this I did would make damnation less likely, I'd live differently.
Do I get more ice cream because I gave it back before you offered the reward?
This is instructive. People will behave in a way that they intrinsically feel is right, combined with some level of selfish behavior, like how I submitted even without the promise of ice cream.
Maybe the point is that LB is right, and I'm an arrogant bastard. I'm kind of ok with that.
Ugh, Tia, you've just proved the fundies right: everything that's wrong with the world is because we sinners don't really believe. Take it back!
Yeah, I'm not buying the 'you aren't perfect therefore you really don't believe in God' line. First off, most religions acknowledge that to be human is to foul things up; God's already cool with that.
Second, and more importantly, that's not a type of reasoning we normally accept. If I'm on a diet but I have a moment of weakness and devour a chocolate cake (or, say, half a baguette. erm.), that doesn't mean I don't value my health or don't believe the consequences. It just means I'm not perfect.
On preview, what text said.
you get lots and lots of ice cream, and I decided that before I read 115, which means that we will be provided with an even greater abundance.
Between ice cream, chocolate cake, and baguettes, I choose the lattermost. Can I get some of that as the comity prize, text?
My understanding of my fundie friends' beliefs
See, this is where it all falls apart for me. All the rules are clearly human inventions. Because if there is a being powerful enough to create the entire universe, then its nature is so utterly beyond us that we couldn't begin to fathom what it would have us do any more than a shark could predict wind conditions on top of a mountain. To posit the existence of something that grand that has a specific set of dos and don'ts and keep a daily scorecard for each of the X billion people over x million years inflates our own importance so wildly that it's absurd.
There may be something out there that is the essence of existence, to which we go upon shuffling off this mortal coil, but that's something so enormous that our petty goings-on here on this wet dust mote in less than a blink of its heavenly eyelid really isn't going to be of importance.
And presto! -- there goes another evening spent on Unfogged instead of assembling furniture.
most religions acknowledge that to be human is to foul things up; God's already cool with that.
If he were cool, there wouldn't be things like being born again or confession. Or, while we're at it, original sin. Or the crucifixion. I think most religions acknowledge fallability, but I don't think that, strictly speaking, we can say it's okay with god (although obviously that depends on how liberal your theology is).
Well, people rob banks too, despite the existence of security guards. I'm not so much claiming that the fact that religious people aren't perfect means they don't believe in God, more that most of them don't seem particularly more punctilious than us heathens. I may be wrong, but I'd think the addition of some sincerely believed in fear or hope related to my moral status would make me behave more scrupulously than my own unaided efforts do; I don't see such an obvious effect among the theists I know.
124: Well, sure. Most religious people just go through the motions. Which gets us back to that whole rich camel who won't do its own mending thing.
It's okay with God to the extent that the religion doesn't say 'live a perfect life or be damned'. All the born again/confession/redemption bit is the get out of jail free card.
Which gets us back to "My Humps".
Unless you're Calvinist or something.
That's why it's best to go with one of the deathbed conversion sects. As long as you don't go in the flash of an eye, there's always time to hit the reset button.
Calvinists don't hump. It's bad and sinful.
And if they do, they have to sew their own scarlet As on their clothing. But if they can do that, then they get into heaven. It's all so very confusing.
Calvinists don't hump. It's bad and sinful.
I thought changing the rules to your advantage was the whole point of Calvinball.
129: See, I'm thinking that a god who actually cares about sin is not going to be fooled by your plan, Apo.
126: Yeah, that's what I was saying in 100(!). No one's actions on earth actually address LB's "what if you knew you'd be damned" hypothetical, because Christianity has escape hatches.
131: Different kind of Calvinist. Anyway, maybe I've got it wrong and the Hawthorne people were some other strict assholish dissenter sect. That early American stuff always confuses me.
well it would suck to operate out of fear, right? I think most religious people would rather think they act according to what they should do, and not out of sticks and carrots. So we can all tell what's moral, regardless of faith, and all should try to act accordingly. I don't see what's wrong with that.
And from way back, of course Silvana, I can arrange for a baguette.
LB, some people are allowed to be bad Christians, too. Surely some people only go through the motions; I'm just not seeing what that's supposed to be showing.
135: Nothing's wrong with that, but LB and I, at least, are trying to have a stoned college dorm room conversation here. Like, dude, if you *knew* you were going to hell if you masturbated, really knew...I took this post like the Ogged Armageddon-like disaster post. This was an oggedian post, LB. Be proud.
It was, and an oggedian thread. I feel all warm and fuzzy. Really, really fuzzy.
That's only because you're one of those man-hating, hairy feminists.
Ironically, I actually did bother shaving today.
Not my back, though.
Or the alternate t-shirt slogan, "I'd shave my pubes, but I haven't got the balls."
134: No, they were indeed Calvinists, Puritans specifically. Later known as Congregationalists, now part of the UCC.
If you want to talk about ball-shaving, talk to apostropher.
Just imagine what kind of google search I had to do to find that thread.
146: Woot! I was right! (Little dance of joy.)
Um, I mean, of course I was.
God is just an imaginary friend that some people need, and even if he existed, fuck it, I'd keep on living the way I do, and if he didn't want me in his heaven, I'm sure I'd find a lot of friends in the other place.
If God told me I wasn't allowed to shave my balls, I could probably comply with that restriction.
God doesn't like hairs in his teeth, apo.
God doesn't like hairs in his teeth, apo.
Wait, God gives blowjobs?! I'm so confused. btw, since we're on the subject of God and his sex partner(s), do you suppose the Virgin Mary was just a "technical virgin" like the young women who take the virginity pledges and then have oral and anal sex with their boyfriends, reasoning (a la Clinton) that that's not really sex? If Mary was a virgin in the strictest sense of the word, Joseph must really have been pissed. Refusing to put out before marriage is bad enough, but refusing to put out (in any way) after marriage, and then getting knocked up and claiming God's the father, is really beyond the pale IMO.
151 - 153 made me laugh out loud.
121: Because if there is a being powerful enough to create the entire universe, then its nature is so utterly beyond us that we couldn't begin to fathom what it would have us do any more than a shark could predict wind conditions on top of a mountain
Apo's comment remind me of one of my favorite unfogged comments ever [#73]:
In the grand scheme of things, we are mites who exist for less than the blink of an eye, riding through space on a wet speck of dust. Whether you or I or Phelps (or our great-great-grandparents or great-great-grandchildren) miss our calling isn't really that important.
We will return you to your meaningless Sartrean existences following these brief messages from our corporate sponsors.
I move for an Apo book of poetry on the question of g-d's existence.
re: 154
I thought most people -- except Catholics -- now believed that they had other kids too. Joseph was gettin' some.
What if he said you had to?
Then we'd be back to me not behaving any differently.
but refusing to put out (in any way) after marriage, and then getting knocked up and claiming God's the father, is really beyond the pale IMO.
Mary was knocked up when they got married. Whether she and Joseph had children was not discussed in Catholic school, at least.
92: Sure, bliss-ray = moving goalposts, but then what would you call the super-anti-Godmification ray, hmmm?
There's clearly been a lot of judeo-christian brainwashing going on here. Who said that people are inherently flawed? That's original sin. It's not anywhere near a universal principle.
Rather, I'd say that in most religions god doesn't have much to say about what I do, but rather what I do for her.
For instance, say God was one of those greek-type dieties and came to me and said, "I'm as hungry as a motherfucker. Sacrifice me one of those lambs. Maybe a few of those grapes. And make it snappy or I'll torch your ass with one of these here thunderbolts."
I'd be rounding up the sheep as fast as I could and I doubt the sanity of anyone who did differently.
That's original sin.
Or the result of simple observation.
I live in a community where I keep my trap shut about my lack of religion. Reading all these comments is making me feel REALLY warm-fuzzy. I'm sort of tearing up and fanning myself and thinking 'I can't believe there are so many people who aren't threatened by casual talk about the non-existence or implications of God. '
No, it's not simple observation. The observation is that people do all sorts of different things. The notion that many of those things that people often do is bad or wrong does not follow from that observation.
If I'm a shellfish god, I wouldn't care what you did to your neighbour, but it would matter a great deal what you did to my scallops.
No, it's not simple observation.
Flawed does not equal either bad or wrong. It equals imperfect.
163: No, the observation "people are flawed" is that people make mistakes, despite our good intentions. Sometimes we try to be good and kind, and sometimes we don't, but even when we are trying, we still can't always get it right.
Sure, bliss-ray = moving goalposts, but then what would you call the super-anti-Godmification ray, hmmm?
Any God real enough to convince everyone he's not a hallucination or a space alien with neat AV equipment is real enough to get torched. We have the technology!
If we fail to zap God, it will be because our will was sapped by the backstabbing diety-appeasers and the traitorous media. Failure is not an option, people!
"Original sin" is not the same as saying "people aren't perfect." It's the religious doctrine that all humans inherit a mystical "sin nature," which is not merely the propensity to do wrong but a taint of wrongness in and of itself that makes one guilty and undeserving of heaven. This, as I understand it, is why infants are baptized under Catholicism; there's no actual wrong a baby could have committed, but she's still guilty of sin by dint of the sin nature inherited from her parent.
I didn't mention it at first, because I thought it was a typo, but so many people are doing it that I have to say, "Folks, it's 'deity.' " If God is on a diet, let's hope it's a vegetarian one and not Atkins. Otherwise, when we masturbate, he might gobble us up to stave off his craving for pasta.
to get at the carbs in the resulting product?
No, he'd rinse us off first in his God sink. I assume God would stick to his diet. Wait--is God so powerful he can make a diet too hard for him to stay on?
I believe God subsists on a diet of worms.
'deity.'
Yikes. I knew that and still managed to do it twice. Though if we kill It with the anti-Godmification ray, maybe diety would work.
169: Thank you for pointing that out, Tia. Another misspelling that galls me (well, OK, they all do) is "athiest." "It's" when one means "its" might be the worst.
157, 159: Huh, I somehow was under the impression that Mary was supposed to have been a virgin forever. Being a virgin temporarily isn't much of an achievement -- everyone's a virgin at least temporarily. I guess the big deal is being a virgin and yet managing to become pregnant and give birth. These days that's not a difficult feat to achieve, what with artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Then there's that bizarre Civil War story, beginning with a soldier who got shot in the balls; the bullet traveled on, lodging in some Southern belle's abdomen and knocking her up. Some local doc knew both of them and figured out what had happened. He introduced them, they got married and lived happily ever after, and he wrote the whole thing up for a medical journal.
Damn. Snopes says the story is bullshit. Another one bites the dust.
OT -- Fearless Leader has exercised his first veto, vetoing the stem cell research bill. Asshole. There's an outside chance of overriding the veto, so contact your Senators/Rep now.
Crud. I meant to link to this story about Bush's veto.
Jesus' siblings are specifically mentioned in the Bible, Matthew 13:55-56.
Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?
And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?
I always think of the first two as Jimmy Christ and Joey Christ.
OT -- Fearless Leader has exercised his first veto, vetoing the stem cell research bill. Asshole.
Good. We're heading into election season. I hope he keeps this up.
I was not raised Catholic, so I don't know first-hand, but my understanding is that official Catholic doctrine is that Mary remained a virgin for the rest of her life. However, several passages in the New Testament mention Jesus having siblings (specifically, brothers, who are named - I don't remember any, except that one was named Judas, but not that Judas), some specifically in the context of "his mother and brothers did X thing," leaving really no interpretation other than that Mary and Joseph did the marital wild thing. If I remember, part of the discussion around the ossuary that was found in Israel a couple of years ago (some people claim it has the bones of one of Jesus' brothers or nephews, again I can't remember) is that its authenticity would challenge Catholic doctrine on Mary's virginity.
I'm also not a Christian, so I don't have a dog in that fight.
Also, in Acts, Jesus' mother and brothers pray for him after he has ascended.
179: Heh, my ignorance is revealed yet again. Thanks, apo.
Here we go, Wikipedia to the rescue:
That Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus is a doctrinal stance of the Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. Of the early fathers of the Church, only Tertullian seems to have questioned the teaching.
The question of Mary's virginity is related to the interpretation of the New Testament references to Jesus' "brothers". Those who defend the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity point out that Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ and his disciples, lacked a specific word for "cousin," so that the word "brother" was used instead. This is also true in Hebrew and there are several places in the Old Testament that use the word "brother" to mean nephew or cousin. Others argue that Jesus' "brothers" were sons of Joseph by a previous wife -- and thus Jesus' stepbrothers, who would have been regarded as his half-brothers by the people Jesus and Mary lived alongside, who were unaware of Jesus' divinity and assumed him to be the son of Joseph. Matthew 13:56 and Mark 6:3 also mention the presence of "sisters" in addition to the "brothers."
The most prominent leaders of the Reformation, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin also defended the perpetual virginity of Mary against those who questioned it. But by the 17th century, the Catholic and Protestant churches came to see Mary as a major point of division, and Protestant theologians began arguing that Mary did not remain a virgin and that the "brothers" of Jesus were indeed his half-brothers, sons of Mary and Joseph. Today most Protestants reject the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. They find no explicit scriptural mention of Mary not having other children, and consequently, with the evidence in the Bible that she did have other children, find no scriptural basis for the doctrine of perpetual virginity. Proponents claim there is implicit evidence of Jesus being without living brothers or sisters at the time of his crucifixion in that Jesus entrusts his mother to John. They say this would not be done if a relative of Mary were able to take her into his or her own family. However, it is also said that Jesus' brothers were not believers (John 7:5) until after the resurrection (Acts 1:14), so some believe Jesus entrusts Mary to John, the beloved apostle, for that reason.
Muslims also believe that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life.
181: It wasn't discussed in grade school, except in passing by the occasional psycho nun, but I don't think Catholics believe in Mary's perpetual virginity. Although they might believe her virginity was restored when she got to heaven, for all I know.
I must say, I was raised as a Protestant, don't remember when I didn't know about Jesus' brothers, and had no idea Catholics believed otherwise. And therefore I assumed that references to "the Virgin Mary" referred to her at the time of Nativity, not as a perpetual condition. Learning otherwise puts a new complexion on things for me.
185: crushed beneath the weight of Wikipedia!
I don't know if it's still current doctrine, but back when I was reading medieval lit in college, there were a number of references to the doctrine that Mary remained physically a virgin (which I understood to mean intact hymen) even after childbirth -- that Christ passed through her without injuring her as light passes through a stained-glass window, picking up color/humanity along the way.
Christians are weird.
A friend of mine, raised as a liberal Catholic, has told of her own religious education in a way that reminds me of what JM says about her Mormonism: that the faith as experienced by the majority of its adherents was as foreign to her as it would have been to me.
When my wife taught at DePaul and Loyola, she would sometimes need to refer to the doctrine to make sense of a poem, and would make sure everyone knew transubstantiation was Catholic doctrine. The reaction of her (mostly Catholic) students was "No way!"
No. Really? No.
You mean they didn't know that the wafer and wine were supposed to have become the body and blood of Christ in a real, rather than metaphorical, sense? How could you be Catholic and not know that?
Her question and mine, never satisfactorily answered. Asked to choose whether a "symbolic" or "literal" interpretation was Catholic doctrine, almost all chose "symbolic," and were sometimes quite unnerved to find the opposite. Her closest friend, a former nun, waved her hand when told this, as if to say this disconnect was old hat.
Although they might believe her virginity was restored when she got to heaven, for all I know.
Dunno what that would entail, but John Paul II did claim that there's no sex in heaven. (Disclaimer: I am not endorsing anything else that the blog I linked to, which looks pretty weird, has to say.)
5:
No, because being loved by the gods is still a pathos of piety (or whatever value property turns your crank).
Fred, don't have my bible with me — and why not, you may ask — but I remember him referring to the passage where Jesus says something like: "In the world that is to come, we will not be husband and wife, or man and woman..." I remember liking that when I read he had said as much, some twenty-five years ago now, I think.
Actually, yeah, I was having a conversation with a guy who was raised Catholic (or so I thought, at least they went to mass on a regular basis in childhood) and we were talking about various implausible religious beliefs, and I mentioned transubstantiation, and he was like "do [the Catholics] really believe that it becomes the blood and body?"
Um, yeah.
Maybe they don't teach that to kids as much these days.
Dude, everyone pretends to be Catholic when hitting on women. That or Buddhist.
Way, way late -- this:
Rah and I have all sorts of rules the kittens just have to follow (in theory),
from 37, struck me as the funniest thing I've ever heard a cat-owner say. How are those rules for the cats working out for you?
Dude, everyone pretends to be Catholic when hitting on women. That or Buddhist.
What? Why?
Are we talking about what Catholics believe, or Catholic doctrine? B/c they're not the same thing.
Doctrine is that Mary was perpetually a virgin, that she was herself conceived w/out original sin (otherwise somehow being inside her would make Jesus dirty) (that parenthetical is not part of Catholic doctrine, officially, though it's obviously why the w/out original sin thing matters) (imho. The second parenthetical also doesn't reflect doctrine. Nor does this one. Obviously), that Jesus was an only child, that the host (communion wafers) literally transforms itself into the body of christ, etc. etc.
As an actual Catholic, I personally believe that "original sin" is basically the same thing as "evolution means survival of the fittest, not progress towards perfection, dummy--get over your teleologies." We have wars and get cancers and kill ourselves because being at the top of the food chain doesn't mean being perfect organisms.
201: Presumably b/c being Catholic is supposed to mean "I won't pressure you for sex" and being Buddhist is supposed to mean "I'm a really together and sensitive guy"? I dunno. I think SCMT is being weird.
Catholic doctrine. I know that lots of Catholics are pretty far from the Church doctrinally -- what I find weird is the idea that lots of them don't know the basic doctrine they're differing from.
We're talking about the discovery that many Catholics don't appear to know basic doctrine, not what they privately believe.
LB and I chose very similar language to explain, I note.
201: I was kidding. I just like the idea of guys slipping on crucifixes and stuffing rosaries into their pockets to impress the layd-eez.
Ah, but I did it first, rendering you Wiener-pwned.
I know. Does anyone have a link for the exegisis of Wiener-pwned? I know broadly but would like to be completely informed in the premisses.
199: You know, rules like "kittens do not, in fact, live in the pantry," or "kittens do not get to climb up the screen door no matter how awesome it must be for them."
As for how it's going, they test just fine on paper but their lab work really lacks something. So far all they seem to grasp is that they are not supposed to do these things while we are watching.
I don't have a link (as I recall, this evolved over a number of comment threads), but Weiner started using 'pwned' to mean 'I said it first' rather than its more conventional meaning 'I have bested and humiliated you.' Ogged took exception to this solecism, and Weiner-pwned sprung up to fill the new meaning without creating ambiguity with pwned-pwned.
210: For cats, that's really pretty good. My mother's old cat never got 'Don't put neighbors in the hospital' down -- if yours are staying out of the pantry when directly observed, that's excellent.
209: "Does anyone have a link for the exegisis of Wiener-pwned? I know broadly but would like to be completely informed in the premisses."
Really, there should be an entire Unfogged glossary, with links. But there won't be, because it would interfere with the mechanism and point of Insider References.
You mean the glossary, with links, exists but its existence, and location are a secret?
You can be a Catholic just by being baptized and confirmed, technically. It's sort of like being born into a family, in a way that doesn't seem to be present in many Protestant denominations. A Catholic's Catholic short of being excommunicated, as far as the Church is concerned; an evangelical is only an evangelical insofar as she's currently practicing. (Mormonism seems to be similar.)
'Catholic' is just a bigger tent, and no one gets kicked out easily, just made to feel guilty, and a lot of people never learn all the ins and outs of the doctrine. As long as you've got the creed it's pretty much all you need, anyway.
217: Catholicism is quite similar to Judaism in this way.
213: Reading Unfogged is really like listening to smurf conversation. To the vast majority of the population it's always going to be gibberish, but if one filters out the noise, the structure of a recognizable language becomes apparent.
Ex. "It's such a smurfy day. Can you smurf me that smurf-smurf w-lfs-n smurf?"
"Weiner-pwned!"
Oh dear. Is it that bad?
I have the sense that most of the injokes are one-off; that you don't need to know them to follow the conversation when it's about something rather than just being chatter. But I may be wrong.
220: Well, who doesn't like the smurfs? Crabby old wizards, that's who.
I can't often follow the in-jokes and I'm here a lot. It took me forever to figure out what 'fuck to oboe' was, and I had posted on the thread it originated.
To be fair, a great many Protestants are just as clueless, often about the defining issue which created their own denomination. I was given an old-style catechism, with the Westminster Catechism, in the mid-sixties at just about the last moment that was happening. When a year later we moved to a more affluent area, it was obvious that the Presbyterian church there had never taught such things. When I get into conversations with church members today, basic historical and doctrinal issues are utterly unknown, and in my experience, many Protestants know nothing about the history, or even what their denomination's name means.
what I find weird is the idea that lots of them don't know the basic doctrine they're differing from.
Did everyone see Stephen Colbert's interview last month of a U.S. congressman, from one of the Carolinas IIRC, who wants to put the Ten Commandments up everyplace? Colbert asked him, "What are the Ten Commandments?" The guy was completely flummoxed: he came up with "don't murder; don't lie; don't steal," then gave up. (To be clear, I'm not saying the congressman in question was Catholic. I assume he was not.)
I wonder what percentage of ostensible Christians have actually read the Bible -- 1%, maybe? On the subject of "crazy shit in the Bible," the Freedom from Religion Foundation's Bible quiz is most enlightening. If people who claim everything in the Bible is true actually did what it tells them to do, they'd get locked up for the rest of their lives. For example, the Bible directs one to stone to death disobedient children, people who work on the Sabbath, women who fail to cry out while being raped, etc. Fun stuff. :P
I see that my efforts to redirect this thread into a discussion of the awesomeness of the smurfs have been perhaps too subtle.
Dude, the smurfs are totally awesome, if completely anti-feminist. I went through quite a smurfs phase in my childhood.
220: "I have the sense that most of the injokes are one-off; that you don't need to know them to follow the conversation when it's about something rather than just being chatter."
I'm frequently baffled, for what little that's worth. Very little, no doubt.
Oh, and I'm particularly frequently baffled by Unfogged references; I should mention that, too.
(Also, I only occasionally click on links, because it's particularly tiresome to wait for them to load on dial-up speeds.)
225: I'm afraid that as regards smurfs conversation, I gots nuthin'.
222: "It took me forever to figure out what 'fuck to oboe' was...."
Beats me. (Does it? I have no idea.)
"Did everyone see Stephen Colbert's interview last month of a U.S. congressman, from one of the Carolinas IIRC, who wants to put the Ten Commandments up everyplace?"
So far as I can tell, given the number of blogs that linked to it: yes.
They were egregiously anti-feminist, but they were also wonderfully pacifist and squishily Marxist, so it all balances out*. Also, that one where the one smurf wants to be an astronaut but can't get off the ground and all the other smurfs dress up like aliens to convince him he's landed on another planet is like the best story ever.**
*probably not
**also probably not but I still liked it a lot
Ohmigod that is totally my favorite smurf story, too.
what percentage of ostensible Christians have actually read the Bible
Here's one that hasn't, to hilarious effect.
I try to keep my Bible knowledge up to speed, because I find it extremely useful when the door-to-door Christians come knocking. It really throws them when you argue back using scripture. You can see the panic in their eyes.
That's why they hate us, Apostropher. Because you had to have your fun. Thanks for W's second term.
Aw, don't be mean to the poor door-to-door missionaries. They're somebody's cousins.
JM: Been reading upthread? I feel the "sect-ier" a faith is, the more likely its adherents know its doctrine; the "churchier," the less likely. Something for us Matthew Arnold buffs to chew on.
It gets complicated, though, when a faith sets up hierarchical structures of knowledge. A lot of the stuff Mormons get ragged on for--the holy underwear, each couple Gods for another world--only gets "revealed" in Temple rituals. I bet there are young Scientologists raised in the religion, if that's the right word, who first hear of the wackier inner secrets from schoolyard friends and the internet.
This comes down to the mechanisms of social control, really, and how humanely they're exercized.
Then perhaps the ignorance of Catholics about what us non-C's are actually taught about their religion is in a sense, deliberate on the part of the church? I would have thought it was more a matter of the knowledge being there, just not emphasized.
234: each couple Gods for another world
OK, in all the webbertrons lore of the Mormon church I have read, I've never heard that one. Is this something along the lines of "true believers become the God of an alternate universe?" Have I parsed that statement correctly?
I have, but I'm the kid on the schoolyard.
No, I do think it will depend on the faith--its newness, its perceived need for retaining believers, its defensiveness, and, perhaps, the maturity of its more obscure theological points.
I have to go to bed now; tomorrow I have to make sure I don't get assigned to a very long and very nasty weapons-conspiracy-murder trial.
Good luck portraying yourself as a prejudicial lunatic, JM.
238 was to 235.
McManlyPants, it's complicated. But basically the exhortation to be like Jesus, for Mormons, entails a promise that, if they are truly stand-out specimens of righteousness, they can actually do what Jesus did. For some other planet.
This is a pretty distant impetus for moral action for most of the Mormons I've known. They might remember it if someone prompted them. I first heard about it on the schoolyard, and some apologetic graduate student who'd been roped into teaching Sunday School explained the thinking behind it after I brought it up. As far as I know, this theological precept hasn't really developed much in the way of a mature commentary or integration into Mormon culture.
(But then there's Orson Scott Card. A third cousin!)
I'm going to plead hardship. Without going into particulars, I think I should have a good case. Thanks for the good wishes!
I would have thought it was more a matter of the knowledge being there, just not emphasized.
In Catholicism, it's not hidden. Most of what I know was mentioned in CCD classes. But it's generally presented at a very low level; and that's because Catholic theology is fucking hard. Like, probably-a-PhD-candidate-hard.
And really, whether one can explain transsubstantiation isn't really the point of the faith. All you really need is the creed; if that's too hard, a) God loves you and died for your sins b) be nice to your fellow humans c) if it feels good, stop.
Plus, I think the Catholic Church hasn't quite realized that it has a literate laity yet; it spent a long time assuming that its adherents couldn't read or write or afford books, and I don't think it's quite awakened to some of those changes yet.
I have an unholy memory for Biblical trivia. When I was applying to colleges I applied to a conservative Bible college and I won a scholarship on an exam that explicitly tested, among the history, science, and other stuff, knowledge of the Bible. I'm sure that didn't make the Protestant founders of the school happy.
Don't tell me Ender was Mormon. I will cry.
I do remember Card musing about the disproportionate number of sci fi writers who were Mormons in his Beliefnet column a few years ago. I made the connection you just alluded to, I don't remember if he made it explicit.
rules like "kittens do not, in fact, live in the pantry," or "kittens do not get to climb up the screen door no matter how awesome it must be for them."
AWWWWWW!!!!
Okay, excuse the necessary cuteness moment, please.
The Catholic hierarchy does not deliberately conceal doctrine, not by a long shot. They periodically bemoan the fact that lay Catholics don't know much about it. But as Cala said, we're baptized as infants and confirmed in middle school, so that the primary education most Catholics receive in the faith happens when they're children.
Plus, there's just more of an emphasis on practice than on doctrine. "Good Catholics" are the ones who go to mass, who volunteer at the soup kitchen and homeless shelter, who send their kids to Catholic schools, who are involved in the life of the parish. None of this requires people to know a lot about whatever weird rules the Pope is coming up with nowadays.
I think that the Ignorance-bemoaned/learned-a-simplified-version-as-children/practice more-than-doctrine pattern holds for Protestants and Jews also. The religiously informed and mature are minorities in every faith.
Pardon my availability heuristic, but is this blog not lousy with Catholics? For these purposes I count our dear Jesuit ogged.
Orson Scott Card not only voted for Bush in the last election, but advertised such on Slate. For nerds everywhere, it was like learning that Ezra Pound supported the nazis.
Protestants generally have a greater knowledge of the minutiae of Bible knowledge, though; there's more of an emphasis on personal discovery relationship/etc. I may be confusing 'Protestant' and 'fundamentalist', though. (Ex cathedra, the lot of 'em.)
Knowing rules gets you nowhere. (1 Corinthians 13!!!!!!) On the other hand, it's good for winning arguments, if not the love, with a devout sister.
Kittens on screen doors are cute. Kittens that have climbed screen doors and don't know how to get down are really funny.
247: We should totally do a survey. It seems to me that compared to the general U.S. population we're disproportionately Jewish but about right in terms of Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Mormons. Really underrepresented as far as Hindus and Buddhists go, though.
Also, my sense of the Catholic::Protestant ratio being about right probably has something to do with my having never lived in the south.
don't be mean to the poor door-to-door missionaries. They're somebody's cousins.
I'm somebody's cousin, too. I'm never mean to them; I have a certain admiration for them, actually. Lord knows I could never go door-to-door doing that. The very thought gives me the creeping jibblies. On the other hand, they knocked on my door looking for a conversation about Jesus. I'm just accomodating them.
I don't get the feeling they get non-hostilely engaged very often, because they usually seem so surprised. I'm always polite, offer them something to drink, and whatnot. But I also know the Bible pretty well thanks to that Baptist upbringing, and if you know it well enough, almost every argument has a contradictory argument somewhere else. If you're gonna witness, you ought to come prepared.
Arguably, this blog is also lousy with ex-Mormons--three regulars? what're the odds?
Cala, Ender wasn't Mormon. His universe was, deeply, but going further might make you sad.
Some of Card's more explicitly LDS-tinged SF that remains interesting: A Planet Called Treason (republished as Treason, if I've got the sequence right) and The Worthing Saga. Both of them are very clearly working out theological problems within the LDS tradition, but both of them--especially the first--could be read by gentiles non-Mormons as simply posing interesting questions.
(I'm going to bed any minute now, I swear.)
"I do remember Card musing about the disproportionate number of sci fi writers who were Mormons in his Beliefnet column a few years ago."
I missed that one. I can think of only a handful of Mormon skiffy writers, of whom he is, absolutely, most prominent. Do you have a link to this? (It's true I'm not keeping up currently on the last couple of crops, but still, curious.)
Also, my sense of the Catholic::Protestant ratio being about right probably has something to do with my having never lived in the south.
You're probably right, though. Lots of Catholics in this country.
Whoa, there are three ex-Mormons? Okay, we're disproprortionately replete with you guys, too.
251: In this context, though, I tend to understand my duties of politesse as "not leading them on." A polite and firm "no" rather than engagement is less cruel, considered under that paradigm.
Because they're not just looking for a conversation about Jesus, no more than the oily lech in the club is looking for a conversation about music. Come to think of it, the latter is probably better equipped for being fucked with, actually.
"Orson Scott Card not only voted for Bush in the last election, but advertised such on Slate. For nerds everywhere, it was like learning that Ezra Pound supported the nazis."
Not to anyone even remotely familiar with him.
To be sure, I'm an "insider," and speaking of that which Everyone In The Community Knows doesn't mean that those not amongst the few thousand who don't know... wait, how do I end this sentence?
Anyway: some of us are pretty familiar with Scott's political beliefs, for a couple 'a decades now.
And his (conventional Mormon) opinions on being gay hit the internets more than a decade ago.
The whole Alvin Maker series was Mormon-derived, but since I only read a smattering of the first, after picking up a bunch when I was freelancing for Tor, I can't say much more.
Good writer, person whose politics I strongly disagree with; pretty common in the sf field, basically, which is full of overly-proud outliers.
A polite and firm "no" rather than engagement is less cruel
But where's the fun in that for me?
The fun lies in knowing that you are not earning Jackmormon's disdain.
The fun lies are the ones worth telling.
Is it common to refer to him as "Scott"? (Honest question.)
I'll never forget the only time I met him; it was a reading in Berkeley, the mid-1990s, I'd guess, and someone circulated a flyer before he came up with various quotes that positioned him as anti-gay. I was a teenager, but already I knew enough to wait and hear what he had to say. To my astonishment, his response in the q-and-a was that people who felt homosexual desire, which he admitted was probably ingrained, were probably a priori condemned either to sin or to chastity. It was literally the first time I'd ever heard that argument, that version of my religion. His shrugging excuses about the Church's official position only made it worse. I didn't react immediately, but it burned a slow fuse.
I can live with disdain on this issue. When people knock on my door and expect to take my time in the hopes of swaying my opinion, I think we're on even ground at that point. I tell them up front I'm not a Christian (because that's usually one of the first four or five questions) and, believe me, that only makes them want to talk to you more.
If it makes a difference, I've never had Mormons come to the door. It's always the local Jehovah's Witnesses, of which there seem to be an awful lot in Durham.
258--Seriously, though, if I were to profess my pleasure in baiting earnest young men who perhaps over-enthusiastically manifested their desire to sleep with me, I'd come in for some criticism, right?
How does "I don't talk to anyone who knocks on my door out of the blue" work?
263: They're out trying to convert nonbelievers through the power of the word. I'm a non-believer. Hit me. I'm not leading them on, I'm arguing with them.
"Is it common to refer to him as "Scott"? (Honest question.)"
Scott Card. I've barely said "hello," in passing, and otherwise been in the room with the man a few times, and that's my personal acquaintanceship, though I used to know his editor extremely well. I don't imagine he'd know me, but even though I've been fairly "gafia" ("Getting Away From It All") the last few years, it at least used to be a not huge community. Maybe someone calls him "Orson," but I've never run into that.
"The fun lies in knowing that you are not earning Jackmormon's disdain."
As a matter of practice, I do precisely what JM advises with missionaries: a firm "I'm not interested, thanks," and closing the doors.
But without intending to disrespect the religious impetus put on missionaries of any religion to do their mission, I'm unclear that it's particularly immoral, if someone knocks on one's door with the mission to change their world beliefs, to engage the intruding knocker on their own terms. It's not like going into their home to argue with them.
"When people knock on my door and expect to take my time in the hopes of swaying my opinion, I think we're on even ground at that point." seems to me to get it right. Don't want to be argued with? Don't come bother me at home. I don't think that's too much to ask of anyone. And if you come to argue, arguing in return isn't rude.
I still wanna know whose these "disproportionate number of [Mormon] sci fi writers" are from I Don't Pay.
"Seriously, though, if I were to profess my pleasure in baiting earnest young men who perhaps over-enthusiastically manifested their desire to sleep with me, I'd come in for some criticism, right?"
Um, no? If they came up and knocked on your door out of the blue? Pretty much think not.
264: But I do talk to people who knock on my door out of the blue.
I just had the most fantastic idea for a short story. There's this planet, see, where the Jehovah's Witnessess only come by once every seven years; and this little girl wants nothing more to see the Jehovah's Witnessess…
Apo, you big soul-tease.
3 ex-mormons? JackMormon, obv., Silvana, and who?
I would think even an intelligent homophobe, to the extent they exist, would have been shyer than Card was on Slate about supporting Bush. Then again, I was sure Kerry was going to win.
I probably should have said I liked Ender's Game as a child, and was disappointed, but it would have provided Gary less opportunity to demonstrate his expertise.
267--This might be a regional thing. Once I've unbolted the door, there had better be a relevant person on the other side.
266--Thanks for clearing that up. "Scott Card" makes sense as an internal shorthand, but "Scott" just didn't; the Cards are an old Mormon family, and I'd imagine he'd not mind the association.
As for the baiting question, I think my analogies aren't workin with you, for reasons I would disagree with if I had more energy. G'night.
ah, yes. geography alone should have clued me in.
I would disagree with if I had more energy. G'night.
Tease.
"I probably should have said I liked Ender's Game as a child, and was disappointed, but it would have provided Gary less opportunity to demonstrate his expertise."
More like, as regards, "demonstrate his expertise," "found membership in a cult devoted to freethinking, and being perversely original, and devoted to science," perhaps. Which I still thoroughly and entirely approve of, mind, even if I'm a tad estranged, for various reasons at present. (If I weren't, I'd be talking on Their mailing lists and blogs and sites; instead, I'm out here with the gentiles -- I kid, but only somewhat. Still, I grow!)
268: It's entirely possible I'm forgetting my basic Bradbury, whom I have to say, though I'm as fond of as many, I was never an ultra fan of, but I'm being dumb about Not Quite Getting It. It's probably me being slow, and perhaps also that I'm also drinking to celebrate not being evicted.
I had the same thought as 269, as well. As regards 271, since gswift doesn't seem to be testifying to being Mormon, and I'm lazy about reading more: um, huh? (See again about slow, drinking, lazy, etc.; there are many comments there, and life is far too short for me to read them. If the point is that gswift is Mormon, fine, but I'm not going to spend time reading endless crap to find out. Sorry, and no offense intended.)
272: "267--This might be a regional thing. Once I've unbolted the door, there had better be a relevant person on the other side."
I've lived in the Northeast (NYC, 4 boroughs and Long Island, majority of my 47 years), the Midwest (East Lansing, Michigan, 3/4s of a year), the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, eight years), and the southwest (Colorado, four and a half years), and I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that. When people are rude enough to bang on someone's door, and claim they have metaphysical superiority and they're here to talk about it, there's a regional response?
271: Huh.
265: That's a transparant rationalization, and you know it. It's obvious that you do it simply because it amuses you to outwit, and thereby annoy, proselytizers. I, personally, am on your side, but JM's argument against it compels sympathy.
I admit that I do get annoyed when Mr. B. deliberately leads on telemarketers, though, because I know they're not allowed to hang up on someone and that they're also often paid/promoted based on sales. Which they can't make if he's keeping them on the phone. Admittedly they are evil, but the specific people he's fucking with are not the ones that invented the system--they're just the poor fucks who can't get better jobs.
That said, maybe your approach, Apo, will make a few of the poor evangelist bastards rethink their belief system, which can't be a bad thing.
gswift doesn't seem to be testifying to being Mormon
I linked to the wrong comment in that thread, Gary. It should have been this one.
you do it simply because it amuses you to outwit, and thereby annoy, proselytizers
Whether it amuses me is beside the point. The entire point of proselytizing is to go talk to people who don't share your beliefs. They are the ones who asked to speak to me, not the other way around.
I immediately cut off telemarketers, because I don't like talking on phones and it would be just about the crappiest job I can imagine. But the folks at the door are not particularly different than when a random Republican shows up in the comments here. It isn't rude to engage them either, despite the fact that they aren't ever going to get me to vote GOP.
"I admit that I do get annoyed when Mr. B. deliberately leads on telemarketers, though, because I know they're not allowed to hang up on someone and that they're also often paid/promoted based on sales."
I was thinking of exactly that during the earlier comments. Some of my first jobs when I had to support myself as a fifteen-year-old were phone interviewing and phone sales. I did it later in life a few desperate times (once as recently as shortly after I moved to Colorado, about four years ago, though that was purely political polling, no selling).
As such, I felt sympathy for what LB was saying, insofar as that I wish people would hang up quickly on phone pollers or sellers they don't want to engage with, given the nearly minimal wages paid to the people they're talking to, and the fact that stymieing them is approximately like fucking with a McDonald's worker.
The rather small difference I feel is that if one offers to debate a phone poller/whatever, the person on the other end has a choice; if one wants to play games, as some, not on this thread, but as tend to come up in similar discussions, tend to suggest as ways to fuck with them, as to keeping the caller on the line, the result tends to be in screwing with a near-minimum wage worker getting screwed. If one engages, on the other hand, with the debate someone knocks on one's door to engage, then aren't they simply responding as they've been asked to?
I'm entirely, and utterly, willing to believe that my peculiar set of personal experiences are entirely biasing me here, and interfering with my seeing exact parallels I should see.
Also, the thing about drinking this evening. Etc. So I welcome argument and insight, including, particularly, from Jackmormon when she awakes or comes back, and etc.
Phone soliciters: people subject to commercial subjection, and wages of capitalism.
Religious soliciters: people subject to social and religions subjection, and wages of religion.
Treat them differently, or not?
I dunno. Never really thought about it in those terms before. Thanks, Ogged (creator of what is here)!
Generally speaking, abusing peons, I'd think, should be right out, no matter how convenient they are, and the subjects of our misery. So that thought does advance Jackmormon's comments.
aren't they simply responding as they've been asked to?
That's how I see it.
My subsequent thinking is more sympathetic to JM's.
If the Mormons, etc. (Jehovah's Witnesses, what have you) were spontaneously working under free will, then wasting their time and mocking them and what have you, would be engaging equals, and a moral ok.
But given that they probably have a quota in their society to survive in, and that they're kinda oppressed and not acting of free will, treating of them otherwise is not such a clear moral ok.
So I'm maybe switching more towards JM's POV for now.
On the basis that abusing of powerless people, no matter that they represent and are in our faces, as folks we hate, aren't the right targets, and that it's wrong to pick on the little, subjugated, people.
I dunno. I'm Becks-style. Discuss. Take the fight to the evil bosses, people!
If the point is that gswift is Mormon, fine, but I'm not going to spend time reading endless crap to find out. Sorry, and no offense intended.)
I was once upon a time.
Raised in it by my mother, who's a member. Dad's an agnostic biologist. Weekly attendance, baptized at eight, the whole enchilada. Wasn't really all that keen on it by high school, but headed off to school to BYU because it was really cheap. Went there for a couple years, dropped out when I knocked up my girlfriend, now wife. She was understandably stressed out of her mind, so I figured that was a bad time for confessions of nonbelief. I went with the flow for a couple more years, temple marriage, etc., before I left. She's a smart girl, and understood right away why I wasn't a believer. So we're both no longer active at all. Still up here as we've both been attending the U. of Utah while raising the kids, and managed to buy a house along the way. Gotta love that cheap housing. She's from Salt Lake. I was born and raised in L.A.
"I immediately cut off telemarketers, because I don't like talking on phones and it would be just about the crappiest job I can imagine."
Speaking as someone who dropped out of college in the first year, and who tends to awfully feel a lot of class resentment around here that he rarely speaks of (think differently and you're wrong, and boy, this is a big unspoken issue for me here -- that is, I hate the assumptions around here, not vice versa) -- and as someone who, as I said, worked those jobs as a kid, and fell back once or twice on them for a while in modern times, simply out of pure necessity, yeah, they suck bigtime, but not as much, at least in my opinion, as working at McDonalds, etc.
I don't ask for any sympathy for that, but I do appreciate people who cut off phone soliciters, rather than tease them. The person on the phone isn't the one paying to bother you, and isn't the source of the annoyance. Hanging up is a kindness.
Fortunately, this is mostly becoming a moot question.
Minor point, though, is that pollsters still serve a semi-useful purpose. Probably someone will disagree, and I'll half-agree with them.
281, gswift: "I was once upon a time." (Mormon.)
Okay, cool. I once was deeply involved with a former Mormon, who wrote a semi-famous essay about being ex-communicated, back when we were sleeping together, and all.
No more about that, but thanks for clarifying. Got the three here. (Doesn't seem like a huge number to me, given the numbers and trends and propensities and what not.)
and as someone who, as I said, worked those jobs as a kid,
Same here. Did it for 8 months when newly married. God did that suck. But I was barely 21, no degree and no resume to speak of. I had a kid on the way, and I would have done just about anything to get health insurance. People who string along telemarketers just for fun should thank God they're far away from the call center, or else I would have choked those fuckers.
"Weekly attendance, baptized at eight, the whole enchilada. Wasn't really all that keen on it by high school...."
As I'm sure I've said here before, I was raised to be a Reform Jew, was sent to Sunday Hebrew School from early childhood, until I was bar mitzphahed (Temple Beth Elohim in Brooklyn), and then informed the parental units that I was done with what I didn't believe in. Just to offer up my own faint parallel. (And not intended to disrespect believers of many things; I'm one of the weird folks who doesn't believe in prosletyzing my own non-belief, and who respects many, though not all, various sets of beliefs he doesn't share, though that gets complicated.)
"Gotta love that cheap housing."
Yeah, but I don't expect that Medicaid for single male adults, or tenant rights, or similar stuff, is great, though I admit I've not checked.
Yeah, but I don't expect that Medicaid for single male adults, or tenant rights, or similar stuff, is great, though I admit I've not checked.
Not sure about the Medicaid, although from your description, the tenants rights are better. CO has to be the worst on that I score I've ever seen.
And house prices are definitely going up much faster than wages here. 5 years ago we bought our house, a decent sized rambler in a nice suburb in one of the good school districts for 175K. Now, I could probably sell it for 260K in a heartbeat. It's nuts.
I worked call-centre jobs -- telesales for a few months and then Internet tech support for nearly 2 years -- between my undegrad degree and my masters and it is a truly shitty job to be in.
They really are the dark satanic mills of the late 20th century. When working sales in particular*, these are places where junior management gimps** track how long you spend going to the toilet each day and give you warnings for exceeding your 'quota' and where the tracking system monitors everything you do: enabling them to keep you on the phones talking constantly for 7 hours or more in an average shift.
I always just hang up with a polite 'No thankyou'. These people don't need any shit from me.
* Working the techie end, where I was eventually a boss, is easier from the internal point of view. Techie types get treated with much more dignity within the call-centres. However, you have to deal with the public who are usually angry and abusive because no-one likes to feel like an idiot and have to call someone else for help.
** Actually, given the composition of the workforce in these places, much more usually 'gimpettes'.
"And house prices are definitely going up much faster than wages here. 5 years ago we bought our house, a decent sized rambler in a nice suburb in one of the good school districts for 175K. Now, I could probably sell it for 260K in a heartbeat. It's nuts."
By current standards for a lot of the south of England that sort of price rise is so low it's damn near negative. Not a good thing for people in the south of england who don't already own a house.
"But I was barely 21, no degree and no resume to speak of."
As I've mentioned a few times before here, I moved out at 15 to live with my sweetie, and support myself. There weren't a lot of job choices, and though people of all ages worked at the phone call places, none of them had many other choices, for a variety of reasons. Old age, bad appearance, drug habits, what have you.
Anyone picking on these folks are doing so out of privilege, but mostly, overwhelmingly, out of ignorance. They wouldn't kick them if they ran across said folks in the street, begging, but like the internet, it's easy to be horrible to faceless people one doesn't know whom are in one's face, though on the internet, it's usually voluntary, and not a matter of basic survival.
I never worked a phone place where I got health insurance, though. I sold TV Guide, and Time-Life books, etc., and then in the other job, about five years ago, I did political polling. All per dollar per hour (the last about $7/hr, woohoo).
It had educational moments, as regards politics, actually.
Beyond that, all I can say is that my having skills at being verbal served me well. But it was always beyond tiresome, and not much fun at all, given the low pay.
Having generally spent most all of my life, with a handful of exceptions, making only single-dollars-per-hour wages (when I've had work at all), gives me a lot of class issues around here.
I've never had remotely the strength to bring them up. But there are an awful lot of threads I don't participate in because of them. I can't imagine it would be pleasant.
[Paragraph to cut: (I wish my parents dressed me shabbier: boofuckinghoo; how "fascinating"!; jeebus!; save me from fucking strangling these people; spend a few decades begging for food to eat, and not being able to afford a roof, and I'll feel sorry and fascinated.) Yeah, absolutely, I should cut this, and I'll be sorry when I don't. Probably incredibly sorry. But: JEEBUS!]
Later. Pondering. Post or cut. Cutting is easier. I've done it innumerable times before. Posting is hard. I'll surely regret it. I'll feel bad.
Of course, I always feel bad, and I always wind up hating myself.
Yeah, more reason for other people to hate me. What else is new? Take a drink. Feel bad. Feel worse later. Feel yet worse in the morning. Same old same.
Click.
Okay, not wanting to be hated. Probably shouldn't discuss real class issues amongst good liberals. Doubtless I should bring up all my own faults first. No, wait: castigation always first self-impulse. But, yes, deserved. But, also, not the entire subject. But, yes, still relevant and crucial. Oh, shut up.
Click. Wait for beating.
Click.
"When working sales in particular*, these are places where junior management gimps** track how long you spend going to the toilet each day and give you warnings for exceeding your 'quota' and where the tracking system monitors everything you do: enabling them to keep you on the phones talking constantly for 7 hours or more in an average shift."
Oh, they all do that. Wonders of the modern technology. Everyone gets measured per second.
I happened to be really good at talking fast, and being persuasive, and hitting buttons, and the other required skills. (Actually, that's pretty much all the required skills, other than holding it in for a while before peeing, which is no longer one of my skills.)
But, yeah; it's just McDonalds for those good with their voice and (trivial parts of their) brain, rather than their hands.
By current standards for a lot of the south of England that sort of price rise is so low it's damn near negative. Not a good thing for people in the south of england who don't already own a house.
Yeah, that sounds like my parents neighborhood back in L.A. Thank god they bought back in the 70's. Pretty much everything is 7 figures there now.
This is where I should apologize to Kotsko, right?
Apologies. Orthogonalness.
A college friend of mine, one summer, went to her door to find two Mormon missionaries sweating their guts out and asking if she'd like to hear their deal. "I'm fine with the religion I've got," she said (she's Methodist), "So you're not going to convince me, but if you want to come in and enjoy some air conditioning and chit-chat, that's fine by me. If you want a drink, I've got some milk in the fridge." She paused for a beat, then: "It's decaf."
They did not take her up on the offer.
Phonebanking would be the crappiest job imaginable for me, I meant, because I really, really hate talking on the phone. It's not quite rational. My phone almost never rings at my current job and that's one of my favorite things about it
I worked fast food through college and didn't really mind it that much. It wasn't all that strenuous and I worked with a whole bunch of Middle Eastern guys (Iranian, Lebanese, and Moroccan, mostly) who were all interesting and fun. Then again, it wasn't a McDonald's. We didn't really have to show up sober. Delivering pizzas was okay, since it was mostly driving around listening to my stereo.
Working at Kinko's was a pretty soul-deadening experience, though.
Phonebanking would be the crappiest job imaginable for me, I meant, because I really, really hate talking on the phone.
Me too. We have so much in common. Call me.
I also worked as a cleaner for a few years -- paying my way through my undergraduate degree.
Cleaning is a much more dignified job -- in my experience -- than working in a call-centre.
When I was cleaning my thoughts were my own, I could listen to music on a walkman, stop to chat to the people I worked with, go to the bathroom whenever I wanted, etc. There was no-one micromanaging your time; as long as you got the work required done in the time alloted no-one cared about precisely how you did it. The money wasn't great* and it was physically a lot tougher than you'd think, but it didn't feel like the company wanted your soul as well as your labour.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a great job, but it wasn't as soul destroying as entry level micromanaged customer service jobs -- call-centres, some fastfood places, etc. -- which are just teh shit.
I am actually quite good on the phone -- I have been told I have a good voice for it -- but I hate selling. Doing tech stuff over the phone would have been bearable if the people phoning weren't such shits.
* Although easily on a par with working in McDonalds.
Agreed, phone sales workers are les damnés de la terre, and you should never be unkind to them. But I don't see why you shouldn't tease or waste the time of bible thumpers. If a political canvasser you disagreed with knocked on your door, you'd feel entitled to have a go at them, if only to give them less time to work on somebody else who might be more impressionable. I don't see why you shouldn't do the same with people whose religion you felt to be wrong-headed.
am actually quite good on the phone -- I have been told I have a good voice for it
Matt, are you sure that people didn't tell you that you have a good face for it? :-)
I have had good luck with telling the Jehovah's Witnesses et al that "we're Catholics". If you profess to be an atheist, Jew or most major religions they will try to engage you in debate about the finer points of faith, but clearly someone has written in the training manual that there is no point arguing with Romanists.
re: 299
Heh.
I can't remember the last time I had Jehovah's Witnesses at the door. Years, anyway.
An old workmate of mine used to share a flat with a failed missionary. A guy who'd gone through a full theology degree, training for the ministry, etc. He could read Hebrew, Biblical Greek, and so on. Anyway, he'd given up the idea of being a missionary when his wife-to-be ran of with one of his missionary school colleagues and was quite bitter about organised religion.
He used to relish visits from religious proselytisers. It was just a chance for him to beat up on religious people from a position of extreme strength -- he inevitably knew about their doctrine than they did.
Cruel but sort of funny.
Yes, the Witnesses do seem to have given up, don't they? And I should think the Adventists have all died of old age. I overheard a conversation on a bus recently between a chatty old lady and a couple of American Mormon missionaries (you could tell they were Mormon missionaries because they had name tags saying Elder Smith and Elder Jones, which caused a bit of cognitive dissonance because they both looked 18). She asked how they found it, proselytising in Sheffield.
"It's hard, ma'am, very hard", one replied, with such a world of weariness and disillusion in his voice that I wanted to get up and give him a hug. In future I shall try to think more charitably of the poor kids. But if they get me out of bed on a Sunday morning, they're still toast.
the Witnesses do seem to have given up
Maybe they all moved here.
Maybe they all moved here.
We live to serve.
Any kind of proselytising in the UK must be a thankless task.
Any kind of proselytising in the UK must be a thankless task.
And not just because of our national scepticism. When I was a kid and was still dragged to church to indulge my father's love of singing in the choir, the vicar once preached a hellfire sermon against the Witnesses. It was the only time anybody had ever heard him express an opinion more radical than "I'd like to teach the world to sing".
I knew someone whose father was on the staff of the Cathedral in Birmingham. He said that his sister would often spend time talking to right-wing Evangelicals, because she figured that she was strong enought to take it, and she wanted to slow them down to keep them from getting to more impressionable souls. He was reading Theology at Oxford and didn't have the patience.
Jehovah's witnesses can be remarkably persistent and rather brazen. I've seen them continue to solicit even after they realized that all of the houses they were visiting were on-campus housing for students at an Episcopal seminary.
306:I've seen them continue to solicit even after they realized that all of the houses they were visiting were on-campus housing for students at an Episcopal seminary.
HA!
maybe they got some good theology out of it?
i have seen mormon missionaries in rome, which also must be a very thankless task.
strasmangeo jones in 168:
"Original sin" is not the same as saying "people aren't perfect." It's the religious doctrine that all humans inherit a mystical "sin nature," which is not merely the propensity to do wrong but a taint of wrongness in and of itself that makes one guilty and undeserving of heaven. This, as I understand it, is why infants are baptized under Catholicism; there's no actual wrong a baby could have committed, but she's still guilty of sin by dint of the sin nature inherited from her parent.
I am not up on the Roman Catholic theology of baptism, but I'm not sure that this is what's going on with infant baptism. It isn't why Episcopalians baptize infants. (In a swift move tojustify my laziness in not looking up the Roman Catholic doctrine, I'll just say that post-Vatican II and under the influence of the ecumenical movement, all of the credal churches are a lot closer than they used to be on a number of liturgical issues.) Episcopalians and other Anglicans view baptism as Initiation into the Church. It's okay tobaptize infants (and it wouldn't be disastrous if we didn't), because when we baptize people we are welcoming them into the Church and promising to support them in their lives as Christians. "You are marked as Christ's own forever," etc.
307: maybe they got some good theology out of it?
No, because all of the Episcopalians were too polite to do anything other than thank them for their literature. Episcopalians don't really believe in telling people about their religious convictions unless those people are seekers who'have actually asked for it. We're terribly anxious about offenidng others and don't wish to be seen as not respecting the sicnere convictions of others.
Yeah, more reason for other people to hate me. What else is new? Take a drink. Feel bad. Feel worse later. Feel yet worse in the morning. Same old same.
Jeezus, Gary, you sound like a page from the big book. You should consider quitting alcohol. It can't be helping with the gout either.
308 is half right. Traditionally, the point of infant baptism for Catholics was to save babies' souls from limbo (and y'all Anglicans just inherited the tradition and tweaked the meaning a bit to be more rational, which annoyed the dissenters). Nowadays I am given to understand (by the priest who baptized PK) that the church no longer holds to the limbo teaching and yes, the point is more initiation into a church community and a recognition by the parents of their responsibility to raise the kid in the church.
Nonetheless, the fact that the priest felt compelled to explain that to the folks baptizing kids that Sunday shows that the laity still hang onto the limbo idea--though maybe not literally.
I think at one point, even limbo was a half measure; original sin means if you die you go to hell. Limbo by that standard didn't sound insane. It's mostly a community thing.
B, you're raising PK as Catholic? Isn't this the little kid who is certain God doesn't exist?
308/311 - BG, I don't know why, as a raving atheist, I'm justifying the ways of the Anglican church to woman, but I think sj is right here -
We call upon thee for this Child (or this thy Servant), that he, coming to thy holy Baptism, may receive remission of sin, by spiritual regeneration. The Minitration of Holy Baptism, 1928 Book of Common Prayer.
Which isn't to say that it's not about receiving the child into the church as well.
B - Episcopalians have never believed in Limbo, but it doesn't stop them believing in Original Sin. I suspect this now throws both churches back on Augustine's position of minima damnatio for unbaptised infants. I also suspect they prefer not to talk about it.
B, you're raising PK as Catholic? Isn't this the little kid who is certain God doesn't exist?
Yeah. Ironically, he got that from Catholic preschool--their explanations of the origins of the world made him quite angry, because "God didn't make the world, it was the germs in the water that began to turn into more complicated organisms. . ." Smack in the middle of the evolution debate without intending it. He also gets angry at his more religious little schoolmates who try to convince him that Santa doesn't exist. (Why fundie parents don't tell their kids not to disabuse other kids of this myth, I don't know; I tell PK not to try to disabuse other kids of the god story.) His perfectly reasonable empiricist argument is that it's obvious Santa exists, because he brings presents; but no one has ever seen evidence of god.
Basically, when we take him to mass (which we haven't done in ages, b/c I'm not interested in the cathedral here), it's a Catholic mass and I intend for him to know something about the history and practices of the church. Raising a kid Catholic, to me, doesn't mean indoctrinating him with the idea that the church's teachings are literally true--after all, I don't believe that myself.
As far as I know, limbo was never official Catholic doctrine; it was just a way of saying "we're not really sure what happens to this group of people." It's been a widely-held belief for a considerable period of time, but I don't think it was ever formally recognized by the Vatican as a place where unbaptized babies go.
Nevertheless, there's definitely the sense in official Catholic doctrine that baptism is important enough that it actually does something or changes something real, and that's why it's done to children as soon as possible. And the notion of inherited, original sin obviously still exists, across many, many Christian denominations, even if some interpret it milder than they used to. It's really not just a matter of humans being imperfect - it's a matter of having a sort of soul-stain that needs to be cleaned up or atoned for (often involving the rather arcane ritual of Jesus's death).
314 cont: Although, to be honest, I'd say that of the three of us, I'm really the only one who would claim to be Catholic. Mr. B. and PK would both say they're athiests.
315: Actually I think that's right about limbo--never official doctrine, just an unofficial attempt to reconcile the idea that baptism = salvation with a sense of injustice about unbaptized babies going to hell. Although it was official enough that a few hundred years ago there were quite engaged arguments about things like baptism in utero or delivering babies alive so they could be baptized, even if it killed the mother.
Why fundie parents don't tell their kids not to disabuse other kids of this myth, I don't know
Fundie parents are big on cruelty to children. It's part of a pattern.
314: I've previously described my method for weaning kids off Santa Claus.
saying Elder Smith and Elder Jones, which caused a bit of cognitive dissonance because they both looked 18).saying Elder Smith and Elder Jones, which caused a bit of cognitive dissonance because they both looked 18).
Not far off. "Elder" is a rank within Mormon priesthood. You're eligible to go on a mission at 19, so a great many of them are in that 19-21 range.
OneFat.
The short response to that is that we got a new Prayer Book in 1979.
And I don't reject some notion of original sin, that is the recognition that human beings are fallible and tend to mess things up, and despite our best intentions this happens all the time.
There's definitely an element of death and rebirth in baptism, but it's more about saying that we are People of a resurrection faith. You're supposed to be baptized (in any denomination) before you receive communion, though a lot of the more liberal types will say that they want to be welcomng and that unbaptized people are welcome, but that they ought to get baptized if they want to make a regular practice of it.
i have seen mormon missionaries in rome, which also must be a very thankless task.
Friend of mine I used to rock climb with did a mission in Rome. Not one conversion in two years. He still enjoyed it though. The missions are a very good thing for the members who've spent their lives in Utah. Gives them an idea of what other cultures are like. This is one seriously white state.
His perfectly reasonable empiricist argument is that it's obvious Santa exists, because he brings presents; but no one has ever seen evidence of god.
This is perfectly silly. Religious theists attribute all sorts of natural phenomena to God (appearance and development of the natural world, successful field goal attempts, smiting of enemies, etc.) in much the same way that children attribute presents to Santa. This is dogma, not evidence. You've raised your child as a devotee of Santaism.
But as any Santa skeptic will point out, there are dozens of holes in Santaist doctrine, from the logistics of worldwide overnight delivery to the plausibility of entry into chimneyless homes to Santa's own Problem of Evil (who do bad kids still inevitably get presents? why do poor kids, Jewish kids, Muslim kids and Hindu kids tend not to get presents at all, no matter how good they are?). Maybe when he's older PK can construct a reasoned and compelling theodicy of Santa, but for now I remain unconvinced.
Is there a large, or any, Black representation in LDS? My could-be-mistaken understanding is that Smith initially said that Blacks could not be Mormons but that the church reversed this sometime in the 20th Century. My ex-Mormon friend is Black but his parents are immigrants from Antigua, where they were converted by missionaries; I am wondering if there are many Blacks in the church who are not recent immigrants.
My only experience interacting with Mormon missionaries was in Alicante, Spain, when I was coincidentally with the ex-Mormon friend; we had a nice chat which didn't really touch on religion.
devotee of Santaism
Papa Santa, allepe!
321: Still in there -
Now sanctify this water, we pray you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that those who here are cleansed from sin and born again may continue for ever in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior.
- that dear old diehard, original sin (Noel Coward)
Santaism would be such a cuddly religion.
What I don't like about Christianity is that its central symbol is so sadistic: some poor fucker strung up bleeding from his hands and feet on a cross.
What kind of a sicko thinks up a religion like that, and what kind of a warped bunch of s/m crazies follow it?
You're supposed to be baptized (in any denomination) before you receive communion
This is not true for (oddly enough) Baptists. Or rather, it may be true for some congregations, but all the churches I attended, you took part in communion as soon as you were old enough to sit through the service. You don't usually get baptized until you're 12-13 or so.
It's really not just a matter of humans being imperfect - it's a matter of having a sort of soul-stain that needs to be cleaned up or atoned for (often involving the rather arcane ritual of Jesus's death).
In my understanding, 'imperfection' and 'soul-stain' amount to the same thing.
323: It's perfectly reasonable given the information PK has--that is, from his point of view.
That said, he has expressed doubts from time to time based on many of the issues you yourself bring up. Although not the problem of evil, since I don't subscribe to the theory that "bad kids don't get presents," which PK agrees with me is idiocy, since all kids are bad sometimes.
But you're right, I am raising him to believe in Santa, damnit. It'll all fall apart once he starts pressing me on the question of why Muslim or Jewish kids don't get presents, but for now he hasn't quite put that together.
There's a vestigial part of my upbringing that still finds infant baptism vaguely troubling. It caused some issues with my first set of in-laws, who were Greek Orthodox. I think they're still a bit freaked out that Keegan has never been baptized.
why Muslim or Jewish kids don't get presents
because Santa only brings toys to good boys and girls who aren't bound for Hell.
Alas, it will fall apart when he wakes up at an inconvenient moment on Christmas Eve.
Or when he wonders why the note Santa left is in his dad's handwriting.
Is there a large, or any, Black representation in LDS? My could-be-mistaken understanding is that Smith initially said that Blacks could not be Mormons but that the church reversed this sometime in the 20th Century.
Some black members, but not many. The issue was over ordination into the priesthood rather than membership. Blacks could be baptized as members, but the male members were not allowed to be ordained into the priesthood. Smith didn't have a problem with this, he actually ordained a few blacks. The doctrine of "God says blacks aren't ready for the priesthood" magically arose after Smith's death when Brigham Young took over. Young also gave sermons railing against racial mixing, saying the wages of interracial marriage would be death and destruction, etc. Peach of a fellow. The church didn't allow blacks to have the priesthood until 1978. My favorite racial doctrine of the Mormons is that the Native Americans (Lamanites) were originally white, and are now dark because of the Lord's curse he put upon them. But if they convert back, they will be made "white and delightsome" again. Awesome. They don't talk much about it anymore, but it was still pretty open in the second half of the 20th century.
SPENCER W. KIMBALL
General Conference Report, October, 1960.
Improvement Era, December 1960, pp. 922-923.
"I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today.... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation."
"At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl--sixteen--sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents--on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather....These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated. "
335: No, the note Santa left is printed out from Mama's laptop using an unusual font and home made stationery with a downloaded border iage of mice.
Because I thought of the handwriting problem myself.
It caused some issues with my first set of in-laws, who were Greek Orthodox.
Seriously? Weren't they the nightmare in-laws? And why are all of the ethnicities that I'm currently crushing on being associated with nightmare families?
Blacks could be baptized as members, but the male members were not allowed to be ordained into the priesthood.
It's a really sobering testament to my false consciousness that I read this, thought "what black person would be crazy enough to join a religion like that?" and then realized that of course that's exactly the same as the Catholic teaching on women.
Good morning. I had to leave last night about when my last comment posted.
Gary: I have searched the Beliefnet archives, and concluded my opinion was based on this article. In it Card muses on the subject; it's not one of his columns.
Seriously?
Yes. My ex wanted to get him baptized just to appease her father (this was after we had divorced and he was no longer an infant). In my typically passive-aggressive manner, I told her she could take him to any church she wanted but that if she got him baptized, I expected her to take him to that church on Sundays and actively raise him in that church because baptism is serious business. Of course, she isn't about to drag her ass out of bed on a Sunday morning (and I knew that), so he remains unbaptized.
I win.
Weren't they the nightmare in-laws?
Just the mother, really.
337 -- probably a better idea would be to cut letters out of magazine headlines and paste them in ransom-note style.
342, ugh. My dad's approach was just to have my sister and I re-baptized (long story) after mass one Sunday without telling my mother ahead of time. She was pretty pissed.
re-baptized, B? How can you be baptized, as opposed to received into a different denomination, more than once?
Have I said this on Unfogged before?
I wanted to get baptized when I was little, even though I was an atheist, because I went to an Episcopal school and Katie Star got baptized and it was like the whole school was having a party for her, and after she became a Christian, the only people left refusing communion were me and Mrs. Schmidt, and Mrs. Schmidt was not particularly popular. My parents said no, and I'm thankful for it.
born-agains are almost all baptized a second time.
336, 340: Isn't "the priesthood" in LDS something that pretty much every adult full-fledged (male, I think) church member belongs to? I am also given to understand that someone had a divine revelation reversing this doctrine when the church was threatened with loss of its tax exemption.
Just the mother, really.
I think that was the backbone of ogged's complaint about Iranians. So...Iranians,Greeks. I'm afraid to find out what's wrong with Korean in-laws.
My Korean co-worker's brother is apparently dating someone semi-seriously, and his parents were not content to just have a brief meeting with her to evaluate her fitness for marriage or whatever. Instead, they met her briefly, and then demanded that she come stay with them for a week. Without their son.
348: I think that's right. It's not quite in the same position as 'women can't become priests or rabbis or imams'; it's more like 'they can't be full adults in the faith.'
I sorta feel bad for Mormons, though. It's hard to develop a new religion and keep others from snickering when there's a paper of record.
348: Yes. So saying that black males couldn't be ordained to the priesthood is a much, much bigger deal than having women ineligible for the priesthood in Catholicism.
In fact, the Aaronic (lower-level) priesthood starts at age 12.
This whole nonsense (about Blacks and the Mormon church) is what made me first start hating the church, when I found out about it when I was 13.
349: It wasn't her being Greek that was the problem; it was her being nuts.
It wasn't her being Greek that was the problem; it was her being nuts.
How is looking at people as individuals, rather than stereotyping them on the basis of ethnicity, fun? What has happened to you, big man?
It seems to me that compared to the general U.S. population we're disproportionately Jewish but about right in terms of Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Mormons.
Unfogged must also have way more atheists and agnostics than the general U.S. population. That seems to be true of liberal blogs generally, not surprisingly. I did a poll on Daily Kos once and only about half of the respondents believed in God.
Re baptism: my wife and I have always speculated that her parents probably took our daughter and got her baptized at some point when we left her with them.
btw, the three of us lived with my wife's parents for over a year (gag) when our house was being renovated. I was shocked when I realized that they had NEVER gone to church during that period. (I infer this from the facts that we always got up earlier than they did, but at no time did we wake up on Sunday and find that they were gone (or observe them leaving for church subsequently). I realize that it's conceivable that they went to church on some non-Sunday sometime, but I doubt it.) They're both in their mid-to-late 80's, with some serious health problems. I would think that if I were a believer of their age and state of health, I would be doing my best to suck up to God big time.
I always wonder how many people really believe in God, and how many are just taking the Pascal's Wager approach. It also seems odd that most believers are interested in prolonging their lifespan, and are afraid of death. If you're confident you're going to heaven, what's the big deal? As the Righteous Brothers sang, "If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand." Injustice Scalia actually said something like, "If you're a Christian, death isn't a big deal," by way of explaining why capital punishment didn't trouble him.
330: Except that Christians don't become perfect once the soul-stain is removed; God can atone for your sin, and in doing so sort of remove the soul-stain, but you still have the capacity to sin. There's a conscious distinction being made here, at least in every conservative interpretation of original sin I'm aware of. Again, it's really not anything as straightforward as "human beings are fallible," and if it doesn't seem to make sense it's probably because it's more mysticism than logic.
I'll bet on Pascal's Wager, 80:20. Also Pascal's Wager has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.
353: And what's wrong with crazy Greek women?
358: Nothing per se, but if the crazy Greek woman happens to be your hypochondriac mother-in-law (who left your father-in-law almost immediately after you married into the family), the situation turns expensive quickly.
I am also given to understand that someone had a divine revelation reversing this doctrine when the church was threatened with loss of its tax exemption.
I've heard that too, although I've never seen any actual documentation. I've also heard another factor was the scheduled opening of the San Paulo, Brazil temple that same year (1978). As the story goes, the range of ethnicities in Brazil posed a problem as they had no idea how they were going to draw the line between who was black and who wasn't.
I was baptized twice, once into the Catholic church as an infant because my father's mother insisted, even though my parents had no intention of raising me Catholic, and then again into the Mormon church at age 8.
That was pretty cool, though, because instead of doing it in some lame-ass font, we took a trip out to the Red Sea.
Also Pascal's Wager has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.
Indeed. I recall that Wikipedia (of course) has a long discussion of them all.
instead of doing it in some lame-ass font
Courier, for example?
Courier's ok in certain circumstances (although for that style, I much prefer American Typewriter). What I cannot abide is Comic Sans.
You know what I discovered when I did some graphic design work in college? That there is a whole world out there of fonts that are orders of magnitude more awesome than the ones that you get with Word, and that they are quite expensive, but it's worth it, damnit.
Mmm. Typography.
What I cannot abide is Comic Sans.
Amen.
apostropher and I may be godless heathens, but we do pray at the shrine of Get Your Bubbly Sans-Serif Away From My Face.
I did a web-design (I don't really think it can be dignified with those terms, actually) job for a college once. They *insisted* I use Comic Sans for the main font on the front page.
The page is still up and somewhere in the meta-tags is my name. The shame still lives with me.
368 made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.
So did this.
Those photos linked in 369 really are sick-making.
360: Oops, looks like I jumped the gun there. This seems to suggest that tax exemption was potentially an issue, but this certainly suggests that the official LDS view is that Sao Paolo spurred the change. (Not sure where that site comes down, it certainly doesn't seem to be orthodox LDS.)
>logistics of worldwide overnight delivery
Due to the different time zones, santa has 24 hours + an entire nighttime period to deliver the toys. Plenty of time.
369 is horrible, but it also strikes me as all-too-natural. As do Palestinians cheering in the street when some bad thing happens to the US, etc. War sucks.
369:
Fuck me with a warhead, that's really nasty.
I went looking for some explanation of 369 and found this page -- which reads a bit trying to minimize but if you leave off the spin sounds plausible -- what an appalling thing!
(Also a weird bit of numerology -- when I clicked on the link in 369, there were 369 comments on the linked post.)
I feel a bit better about things after reading the link in 376. The whole thing is just so sad.
Clownęsthesiologist takes the pain away.
But I'm crying behing my painted-on smile.
341: Thanks for that link! I found it fairly interesting. (I dunno that anyone else here will, or what I say about it, but anyway.)
From the article: " Mormon speculative-fiction writers range from some of the most popular--such as Card, author of about 50 books--to those less well-known, such as B. Franklin Thatcher...."
Uh, yeah, that's a big who?
This is a guy who won a Star Trek fiction contest, and a Scientology contest. No one (outside Mormon circles) has heard of him.
But then we get to: "in between are writers including Tracy Hickman, Anne Perry, Zenna Henderson, and Russell Asplund."
Okay. Hickman wouldn't exist outside D&D gamers and doesn't, although that market did propel his/her crap to best-sellers lists. Still. Anne Perry: very notable, but totally outside sf/fantasy genre, and in the mystery/crime/real crime genre.
Zenna Henderson: absolutely a genre sf writer, although dead lo, for some decades (though I loved her stuff as a kid, and was very happy to put together a complete Book Of The People, including unpublished stuff, and a story for Last Dangerous Visions, for Avon Books, that never happened for me, but ended up at NESFA Books with no word of credit to me for my work of about a year with Virginia Kidd, but that happens; still love the People).
Russell Asplund. Another Scientology winner. Sold to Marion Bradley's semi-amateur outlet after she was dead. Well, an up and comer, nonetheless; most folks start humble.
Okay, so that answers my query about the Mormon skiffy writers.
I'm slightly tempted to comment on Scott Card's remarks about Mormonism and skiffy, but I'm fairly sure I'd be unintentionally offensive, so I won't.
"The course has been offered every year and is always filled to capacity, but that first class has been the most prolific. It included M. Shayne Bell, author of "Nicoji" "
Kewl, because, as it happens, I copyedited that novel, a fact that I'd totally forgotten.
(I tend to process a lot of copyediting and proofing and pro reading as in and out, and after three days intensive work of non-stop coffee and no sleep, I return it, and retain little memory; this seems to be not entirely unusual when focusing intently on words, rather than the whole, amongst other pro copyeds, though it's by no means universal.)
Although now that I recall, "nicoji" basically were shrimp.
I think I tried to forget that. Hard.
Which brings me back to working for Jim Baen, but so it goes.
Anyway, thanks muchly for the link and answering my query!
345: I was born shortly after Vatican II, and my parents' Catholicism at the time was centered around an alternative Catholic community headed by a defrocked priest. It was a time of much experimentation. Anyway, I was baptized in that community as a baby, but then a few years later when my dad went back to a more conventional church, he either couldn't find the certificate and needed it so he could get me enrolled in CCD (which I hated) or else he felt that the first baptism didn't take and therefore went behind my mother's back and undermined their past and her firmly-held opposition (by then) to all things Catholic (or possibly just all things related to my dad.
Which interpretation you think is correct depends a lot on whether you believe my dad's or my mom's version of events.
there is a whole world out there of fonts that are orders of magnitude more awesome than the ones that you get with Word, and that they are quite expensive, but it's worth it, damnit.
*swoon*
Techie types get treated with much more dignity within the call-centres. However, you have to deal with the public who are usually angry and abusive because no-one likes to feel like an idiot and have to call someone else for help.
In fairness to the people calling technical support, sometimes it's clear that the tech support people don't know how to fix the problem; sometimes they say they'll call you back in 48 hours after they've had time to research it and then you end up having to call them because they never did call; sometimes it takes three days of unsuccessful attempts to fix the problem over the phone by repeatedly trying the same steps that repeatedly result in the same errors until they finally decide to send you recovery disks they could have sent in response to the first day of calls given the fact that nothing changed in terms of information about the problem between then and the day they sent the disks and you told them, on that very first day of calling, that the computer was prompting you to insert disks that had not been included with the machine; and sometimes it takes the unsuccessful attempt to use those disks to fix the machine to finally, five days after you first called, get them to offer to actually look at the machine instead of taking you through the same steps yet another time over the phone. Sometimes you end up returning the machine to the retailer for a refund because it never worked correctly from the moment you turned it on and rather than give it to tech support for another week it makes sense to cut your losses and get a different one.
None of this excuses abusiveness on the part of the customer, of course, but certain levels of frustration I hope would be understandable in certain situations.