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Without Eugene England, I Probably Wouldn’t Attend Church

Reflections on the Growth-Promoting Gifts of Paradox

First, A Confession

Let me begin with a confession: I often don’t like going to church. I find the experience incredibly taxing, exacerbating, and just plain boring. Rarely am I uplifted. Frequently am I peeved. Paradoxically, and interestingly, I also find going to church one of the most redemptive experiences I am trying to learn to love. It is very difficult for me to articulate the origin, nature, and depth of this love-angst relationship. And to be honest, if I wasn’t aware of who Eugene England was, I probably wouldn’t appreciate the discipline of community that comprises church-going, nor respect its attendant paradoxes. Put differently,without Eugene England, I probably wouldn’t attend church.

This loaded, semi-provocative thesis needs unpacking before it’ll make sense to orthodox ears. Let me drill down a bit.

In 1986, Eugene England, a faithful, critical Latter-day Saint scholar, wrote a game-changing essay entitled, “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” Personally, this essay has had a huge influence on me and my relationship with the institutional Church. It has carried me through difficult times in my discipleship, given me a lot of hope, beauty and pragmatic bearing, and has provided invaluable perspective on how “not only to endure but to go on loving what [is] unlovable.” In short, it is an essay that I think all Latter-day Saints should read and become familiar with.

The Power of Paradox: The Gospel and the Church

Much of England’s treatment of effective church-going meditates heavily on the power of paradox. Joseph Smith referred to the concept of paradox when he stated that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” Half a century earlier, the poet William Blake had similarly observed, “Without contraries there is no progression.” Contraries, or oppositions, give energy, force and meaning to virtually everything.

Think about it.

The art you see in a theater, a museum, or historic site has risen from the tension of human conflict and opposition. Economic, political and social enterprises have and continue to emerge from competition and dialogue. Human life itself grows out of pain and controversy. Galaxies form spectacularly amid swirls of chaos and explosion.

The gospels, too, are awash with many paradoxical statements:

To be rich you must be poor. To be comforted you must mourn. To be exalted you must be humble. To be found you must be lost. To find your life you must lose it. To see the kingdom you must be persecuted. To be great you must serve. To gain all you must give up all. To live you must die.

Paradoxes, contraries, or oppositions can sometimes tempt us to think that two conflicting propositions will always be incompatible. Yet, it is often when we sacrifice traditional concepts and change our frame of reference that rival statements of paradox suddenly appear compatible.

A paradox, in other words, is not antithetical to the pursuit of truth, but in fact the very definition of it. In his acclaimed essay, “The Institutional Church and the Individual,” Bonner Ritchie stressed the importance of this pursuit: “By confronting the contradictory constraints of a system and pushing them to the limit, we develop the discipline and strength to function for ourselves. By confronting the process, by learning, by mastering, we rise above.”

“It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” is thus a profound statement of abstract theology in our scriptures that describes how vital paradox is to the development of all living things.

From the perspective of paradox, England is armed to build a persuasive case for why the Church (the Work) is as true as the Gospel (the Plan). Upon first blush, this rings like a weighty contradiction that just can’t be. The principles of the Gospel are pure and ideal, we say, but the workings and people of the Church are weak and imperfect. As Hugh Nibley once recognized, “The Plan looks to the eternities and must necessarily be perfect; but the Work is right here and is anything but the finished product.” We seem to envision the Gospel as a “perfect system of revealed commandments based on principles which infallibly express the natural laws of the universe,” says England, but in reality all we have is merely our current best understanding of these principles, which is invariably limited and imperfect. Such an unwieldy divine-human paradox seems to put us in a spiritual straightjacket.

In what world can the Church and the Gospel be as “true” as each other?

Consider first how England uses the word “true.” He’s not bearing down any sort of indexical relationship nor conflating the two with some grammatical set of historical, empirical, or metaphysical propositions. His approach is much more pragmatic and existential in nature. What he means is that the “Church is as true — as effective — as the gospel” because it is precisely the place where we are given a genuine and participating feel to practice the Gospel in specific, tangible ways. “The Church,” he says, “involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the oppositions within ourselves and especially between people, struggling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us.”

Callings, for example, draw us into a very practical, specific, sacrificial relationship with others. We learn firsthand how exasperating people can be, how demanding and nagging human diversity often is. Paradoxically, when we work with, serve, and are taught by those who differ from and sometimes frustrate us, we allow ourselves room to become more open, vulnerable, gracious, and willing. When we grapple with real problems and work towards practical solutions with those we serve, we are pushed “toward new kinds of being in a way we most deeply want and need to be pushed.”

The “truthfulness” of the Church thus lies in its ability to effectively concretize the principles of the Gospel, bring them down to earth, down into our bodies, our hearts and minds, giving them corporeal form, thereby allowing imperfect agents to painfully develop divine gifts. And the better any church or organization is at drawing out these gifts, the “truer” it is.

Remember this point: “truth” from England’s perspective gains its meaning in relation to the quality of life, or being, it inspires.

England’s argument follows the late eighteenth century existential tradition of how our pursuit of truth must exist in relation to a more pressing concern than mere historical, metaphysical or scientific claims. Truth must lead us to a certain quality of life and quality of character —what philosophers and theologians have long since called “the good life.” Truth must bear down on the particular, not the general; the concrete, not the abstract. England isn’t elevating one over the other per se. He’s merely exposing the myth that the Gospel (the general) can somehow be salvifically divorced from the Church (the particular), as if pretending that sheer academic knowledge alone, and with it the freedom from dealing with the querulous, niggling life-pulse of a congregation, were sufficient for redemption.

This paradigm, he contends, is misguided.

Abstract and Practical Gospel Living

There are many principles of the Gospel that are conflicting and paradoxical and can’t be effectively lived in the abstract. They must instead be faithfully embodied for them to prove redemptive. Agency and obedience, for example. These two foundational principles are in dynamic tension with another, creating a critical paradox in the Church for how we work with others who may offend us or exercise unrighteous dominion. If God’s anointed leader makes a decision without inspiration, are we bound to sustain that decision? The friction created between obedience to authority and obedience to agentive conscience sparks the creative energy “we need to allow divine power to enter our lives in transforming ways.”

These moments of friction call us to walk an authentic path carved out between two easier paths of blind obedience and blanket rejection. They reveal the truth of how to act and not merely be acted upon.

England continues: “It is precisely in the struggle to be obedient while maintaining integrity, to have faith while being true to reason and evidence, to serve and love in the face of imperfections, even offenses, that we can gain the humility we need [to] …literally bring together the divine [the Gospel] and the human [the Church].”

The confession I began with is a good example of the tension I feel each Sunday while wrestling with these principles in the pews. I’ve attended many wards throughout my life, each replete with a common brand of middlebrow, prejudiced, intellectually unsophisticated types whose opinions I oftentimes vehemently disagree with. I’ve struggled endlessly with socially scripted class discussions, platitudinal public prayer, legalistic watchdogs, and those who proof-text the scriptures to support some idolatrous claim. The people in the Church, to put it mildly, have exasperated me to no end. And it is these very “exasperations, troubles, sacrifices [and] disappointments” that characterize my experience at church that England says “are especially difficult for idealistic liberals to endure.”

But herein lies the power of his thesis: it is precisely in our exasperations with other people at church — those who sometimes piss us off — where we are invited to enter a “school of love,” one that enables us to painfully grow in Christ-like character by “loving what [is] unlovable.”

How might this work?

Not many people I imagine willingly choose to build relationships with those whom they have very little in common with, or who have vastly different temperaments. Paradoxically, when we struggle to serve people we normally would not choose to serve (or possibly even associate with) we enter into a very specific, sacrificial relationship with them that allows us to exercise divine muscles that otherwise may have remained dormant. To accept this challenge, to enter this school, is to potentially become “powerfully open, empathetic, vulnerable people, able to understand, serve, learn from, and be trusted by people very different from [ourselves].”

By entering this school of contraries, we give birth to divinely needed gifts such as patience, compassion, mercy and forgiveness.

These gifts are forged in the furnace of paradox.

Terryl and Fiona Givens have also rightly backed the paradoxes at play in England’s thesis. Sometimes we “imagine a religious life encumbered by fallible human agents, institutional forms, rules and prohibitions, cultural group-think and expected conformity to norms.” Sometimes we “insist on imposing a higher standard on our co-worshippers” by wishing that their prejudices and blind spots did not inflame us. We wish others could simply think about the Gospel like we do. Practice it like we do. Yet when we “submit to the hard schooling of love” the Church offers, we’re able to experience wards and stakes that “function as laboratories and practicums where we discover that we love God by learning to love each other.”

The Church’s perceived weaknesses, paradoxically, are thus actually its greatest strengths.

Each imperfect encounter we experience at church will no doubt stretch and wear down on us, and yet if endured with the right attitude, can act as the very experience, the very gift, needed to become more Christ-like.

If this sounds too sentimental, too lofty, if we would prefer instead our worship services to constantly align with what “we get out” of a meeting, we may be missing the point. England argues, “If we constantly ask “What has the Church done for me?” we will not think to ask the much more important question, “What am I doing with the opportunities for service and self-challenge the Church provides me?” If we constantly approach the Church as consumers, we will never partake of its sweet and filling fruit. Only if we can lose our lives in church and other service will we find ourselves.”

It is a fairly easy exercise to analyze these principles from afar, criticize and make stupid those whose opinions we don’t share. Sometimes we remain too bookish, academic, or idealistic, with little hands-on involvement for the ongoing life of faith. If knowledge and books and abstract learning is where we tap real meaning, and have not charity, the principles we claim to admire so much will have the hollow, disembodied ring of “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” We will not know the character-transforming truths that the Church means to imbue us with. It is only when we step into the arena with others, play the game, tussle with their ideas, wishes, and misinformed biases, and try to give constructive answers, that we come to slowly learn the truth of the child-like phrase, “I know the Church is true.”

Or rather: I know the Church is an effective vehicle for divine endowment, despite of, even because of, its very real and imperfect people.

And here is Mormonism asking us to do just that:

Step into the imperfect arena. Wrestle with our leaders. Create an embodied relationship with others. Maintain individual integrity in the face of pressures to obey and conform. Patiently serve those who irritate, bruise, thwart and offend. Love obedience and agency — learn not to resolve their tensions in favor of one conflicting set over the other. Rather, learn to transcend them in our own customized ways while still remaining true to ourselves and our community. Remember, it is not about blind obedience or wholesale rejection. It is about walking the harder path carved out between the paradox. In doing so, we develop divine character in creative ways that no abstract system of ideas (uncoupled from service) could ever produce.

By acting within the zone of this paradox, balancing our individual conscience while serving others and sustaining church leaders, we open doors to prove contraries and encounter truth in tactile ways.

But Really, How Necessary is Church?

Can we not find a framework for practicing divine gifts such as mercy, humility, patience, and service in any number of settings? Of course we can. The Church has not cornered the market on what it means to be a good person nor to practice goodness. All faiths and secular walks of life can be receptive to the larger world of truth and beauty and moral goodness.

Ok, but if the Church doesn’t provide unique opportunities for spiritual practice that can’t be obtained elsewhere, why go at all?

When England takes a hard, all-or-nothing line on this question by evoking the traditional, orthodox answer that the Church has the authority to perform essential saving ordinances, his response is less than satisfying. However, there’s another approach that hides in the margins of his thought that better articulates why church-going (or some semblance of formalized community) can be a powerful boon for developing divine gifts.

To start, we might ask:

How often are most people sufficiently finding ways of their own efforts to love those they would normally not choose to love? And what value could there be in loving those we might consider as enemies?

One way to approach these questions is to consider the kinds of people we normally choose to associate with: If, for example, we choose only to surround ourselves with like-minded souls, people who think, feel, share and welcome our commitments, praise our ideas, flower our egos, what reward do we have? If we salute only those who salute us, if we love only those who love us, what good does hearing what we want to hear and having others confirm what we think we already know do for us? In truth, such groupishness is thoughtlessness. It remains too cloistered. Too bubbled. It runs the risk of creating an in-group echo chamber that appraises the status quo while at the same time teaching us to demonize those who disagree.

Admittedly, it is often in the nature of religious institutions to homogenize disparities and command conformity.

We might ask, but isn’t church just some big, sequestered parrot hall where everyone thinks the same, talks the same, gives unfettered assent to the same basic truth claims? Loyalty to an organization of course can and should be a very positive force, but it can also be a careless excuse to unload responsibility for our spiritual lives onto another. Bonner Ritchie has persuasively framed the dangers involved. Loyalty bent on unthinking conformity, he says, can be “a force which victimizes the individual, who feels freed from the burden of moral choice…We cannot allow the dictates of anyone to relieve the burden, pain, or growth that goes with individual responsibility.”

Indeed, religious institutions are enmeshed in shared networks of meaning and moral matrices that tend to lean towards conservative groupthink, sometimes to the point of giving off the appearance of complete doctrinal uniformity and a fierce, hive-minded group homogeny.

Such tendencies and appearances do not yield optimal religion.

We need the wisdom that is to be found scattered among diverse kinds of people, those who can pull us out of the status quo and be willing to create the dynamic tension needed to constructively fight the overbearing cultural orthodoxy. We need people in our congregations who revel in distinctions, variations, and differences, even those we’d deem as enemies — those we would normally not choose to associate with or love.

As Adam Miller contends, our love of people must be fearless, “marked by [our] confidence that every truth can be thought again — indeed, must be thought again — from the position of the enemy.”

To translate Miller into England’s terms: we must learn to love those who differ from us from the position of paradox. While those who differ from us can always be found both inside and outside the institutional walls of the Church, the practice of going to church can have a unique way of positioning paradox and framing our enemies in redemptive ways that might not be as readily available or instinctive on the outside.

Take the Church’s organization, for example.

That congregations are organized at the local level with a lay clergy and are bounded “geographically rather than by personal choice” cannot be overstated in how Mormon culture is shaped. Many members attend the ward they locally find themselves in rather than shopping around for the ideal, heavenly congregation. There are exceptions of course, but the significance of such standard Zion-building creates a particular kind of community that keeps us within intimate range of each other. We’re threaded together with the devout, the wayward, the liberal, the conservative, the feminist, the watch dog, the intellectual, etc. All kinds of disciples and potential enemies abound. We need all kinds of temperaments, too, to complement the full body of Christ, providing a cohesive enough space to bind our temperaments and differences into mutual loving ties.

Callings, as mentioned earlier, then provide constant encouragement, even pressure, to practice this spiritual binding; they help socialize, reshape, and care for people who, if stripped of them, would have less opportunity to make the sacrifices needed to grow and develop divine gifts. As the Givens put it, church attendance causes us to be “forced back to the renegotiating table by an unavoidable proximity” to iron out, smooth over, and make atonement with those who irritate, bruise, and deeply offend. The luxury to click the block or mute button, like on social media, is not readily available. We are commanded instead to be in harmony. To be at one. And that it is up to each individual to get there through prayer, service and ritual. Though difficult, the rewards of such a community are often, paradoxically, the empowered gifts of patience, mercy, humility, charity, kindness, and forgiveness.

Nothing here suggests that non-religious people living in looser communities with a less binding moral matrix can’t find opportunities to equally advance a charitable praxis. Many in fact do. I’d wager to bet there are actually many atheists who care for people better than some religious people do. The point rather is to raise the question of how often we naturally feel compelled to associate ourselves with people of vastly different temperaments, especially enemies. How often do we assume the hard work of paradox, take up the mantle of sacrifice and renegotiation, then strive to love, serve, cooperate, and bless our enemies in ways that better awaken divine gifts?

This question gets at a critical distinction that has less to do with pitting religion against secularism and more to do with how we might better encounter the growth-promoting gifts of paradox. As Patrick Mason has observed, “there are many orbital paths around the sun, but not all are equally suited to maximize opportunities for life to flourish.” We might, for example, join a book club, attend a conference, or volunteer at a homeless shelter. Each of these activities would help foster a sense of community and provide chances to put the gospel into practice.

For England, the Church is the best vehicle “for helping us to gain salvation by grappling constructively with the oppositions of existence.” He doesn’t draw out specifically why church attendance is the best medium above others. Nor does he deny other existing contexts to help promote the good life. He walks the harder path carved out between the paradox that suggests that while the Church may be in possession of sacred and distinctive truths, it by no means owns a monopoly on truth.

It might be noted here that religious ideology, interestingly, even paradoxically, does make one thing obligatory that secularism doesn’t always reveal as instinctive: it sacralizes and binds us to the enemy.

We must do as Jesus says: we must love our enemies, bless those that curse us, and do good to those that hate us. No escape hatch. No transfer to another school. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer realized, cheap grace would be to remove ourselves from the “discipline of [this] community.” This distinction, this obligation to love someone who hates us, is ground zero for the greatest manifestation for the life of paradox and divinity to thrive. It is the ultimate school of love that reveals, as England would say, a “frustrating, humbling, but ultimately liberating and redeeming” spiritual praxis. To the extent that people feel a disproportionately powerful gravitational pull of being repeatedly drawn out of their comfort zone to love, serve, wrestle with, and sacrifice on behalf of their enemies, these communities provide the best context to awaken divine gifts. Whether we experience this pull in religious or secular settings is secondary.

What matters first is that we actually feel and experience it.

On a Personal Note

If we need to go to church, like we need ethics or community, it is because we live with other human beings. Who would need church, alone on a desert island? The very act of congregating with others helps us achieve together what we cannot merely achieve on our own. And yet, to be educated and wise is to admit what sometimes we would rather not: however special we believe our spiritual customs are, no church, no God, no system or secular organization has conquered the world so dramatically as to universally compel all human hearts and minds to follow it.

We are all, in our own way, still searching for the ideal community — that place to best awaken divine gifts.

While acknowledging that my community experience at church is far from ideal, I personally have yet to find a better substitute than Mormonism to work through and redemptively prove contraries. I have yet to hear a more compelling story of human potential; one that frames the divine nature of paradox in more educative, purposeful, and ennobling ways to help me realize that potential. In this regard, England is a big hero of mine. He’s opened my eyes to the real redemptive possibility of what the Church means to engender within me. It’s full of nagging, irritable people, yes. The historical record is muddy and replete with skeletons, yes. Our leaders are liable to sin and error and actually have made egregious mistakes, yes. The gospels themselves are rife with contradictory tensions, yes. And our meetings are often so boring and soul-suckingly lifeless, yes. Does this all mean the Church is a scam? That it’s broken? That it doesn’t work?

I believe, like England, that all of these detours and complications are paradoxes that can behave more as blessings than curses, if we let them. They encourage me, though sometimes painfully, to sacrifice traditional concepts of the divine, take risks, become vulnerable, and reassess my assumptions. They become harrowing lessons that help me “engage in not merely accepting the struggles and exasperations of the Church as redemptive but in genuinely trying to reach solutions where possible and reduce unnecessary exasperations.” Church attendance is not about singing kumbaya or blithely picking marigolds while ignoring the Church’s myriad problems, failures, and contradictions. That would be “returning to the Garden of Eden where there is deceptive ease and clarity but no salvation.”

Rather, church attendance for me is about being stretched and challenged, even disappointed and exasperated, in ways I would never otherwise choose to be. I’m meant to be bruised and irritated by the flaws and limitations of others, then called to walk the harder path of working to serve and love and patiently learn from them. These experiences provide lessons in grace, charity, and Christ-centered moral improvement. And when accepting these sacred bonds and obligations to love the unlovable, I’m given “a chance to be made better than [I] may have chosen to be — but need and ultimately want to be.”

Living with contraries is a burden for both the religious and irreligious alike. England has merely reminded me of how to thrive in the face of paradox rather than be frozen by it. He’s provided a redemptive context that’s helped me “see and experience the conflicts [at church and elsewhere] in more positive ways.” He’s framed a particular kind of discipleship that to me is most worth believing and following. Without him, I honestly don’t know how well I’d endure on the path of discipleship.

Who knows, without Eugene England I probably wouldn’t know if the title of this post was meant as hyperbole.

[divinehumanism-blog]

mother! — What the “Baby Moment” Signifies

Plumbing the Third Act

For weeks I’ve been haunted by the dark, dark, dark third act of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film. I remember feeling this way for weeks after Black Swan, too. It’s an emotion that stretches like vines, like fingers, pulsing and slithering its way about without letting go easily. Aronofsky, of course, has always had a gifted predilection for exploring darkness, but in mother! he really amps up the insanity, delivers a mind-blowing climax, and goes places I wasn’t entirely expecting, nor have seen in his previous work. It is difficult to describe how disturbing, how revelatory, this third act is, only to say that the more I think about it, the more I am moved by its madness.

Hence, the reason I am writing a second review — to fathom this madness, approach its depths, and explore its merit beyond first impressions.

Let me start with an observation that I hope will be uncontroversial: there is a big difference between being moved by something versus liking something. I did not “like” this film in the ordinary sense of the term. These ugly, hideous, hateable truths do not ask to be liked or loved. They only ask to be grasped and contemplated. It’s totally possible to grasp what Aronofsky is doing and still find the film hard to connect with, and that’s ok. It just means its themes did not speak to you. Personally, I cannot deny how tremendously moved I was by its themes, its dark wit, sadness, and cautionary sting. This distinction is an important one to parse because the depiction of shocking, revolting, nauseating acts in film is not always equivalent to their endorsement, likeableness, or celebration (unless of course you’re Eli Roth). Rather, these moments can be tantamount with societal mirroring, mourning, and meaningfulness (which Aronofsky’s work always attempts).

This observation, I think, has something to do with how we critically watch film and how we might watch them better. It also prepares the way for how this grisly third act functions, and what it signals.

As a devout theist who leans on the side of a culturally religious agnosticism, I was deeply moved by how the third act descends into a decline-of-civilization allegory, but one that especially critiques the sacrament of the Eucharist. To set this critique in context, be warned (spoilers ahead): nothing is more sinister, more taboo in cinema, than killing a child onscreen, let alone an infant. So, naturally, nothing is more seriously fucked up than hearing a blood-curdling snap of a baby’s neck, then watching his mother push through a crowd only to find his carcass lying on an alter, and a human horde feeding on his body. Symbolic of the murder and sacraments of Christ, these appalling sights and sounds will likely never leave my mind. Ironically, no sermon, ritual or doctrinal discourse will probably ever better teach me, on a visceral level, about what it is we church-going people are doing each Sunday while feeding on the sacramental emblems.

This is not blasphemy. This is admitting we’re all ungodly.

The baby moment, like so many other horrific acts of violence in this film, goes beyond mere symbolic gesture and religious iconoclasm. Aronofsky uses hyper-wacky emblems to get at deep, uncomfortable truths about how we humans always seem to destroy what we’re given. These emblems comment on the way we construct, then degrade, each other and our planet. As more and more strangers arrive and the story becomes increasingly calamitous, these emblems work extremely well because they mirror our world problems back to us. They also indict us on multiple levels, essentially holding up a middle finger to religion, environmental issues, society’s treatment of women, fame, consumption, the artistic need to create, and probably a lot of other things. This film should be weeping, wailing, and gnashing its teeth. We live during an insane time in human history. And we can be rightfully shocked by how mother and her baby are treated, but we would be damned to believe we aren’t in the human horde ourselves participating in its chaos.

That’s a terrifying realization, but an important one.

Who among us can’t identify with these menacing house guests? Who among us has not cast a stone, has not consumed, disgraced, taunted, ignored, vandalized, or polluted the earth and its people in someway? It would be easy to otherize these strangers, look around, point to someone else, and say, “Hell is other people.” It would be intellectually honest, however, to look inward and ask the penetrating question: “Are any of these strangers me?” What an ugly feeling that invites, even if only at a marginal level.

As a religious person asking why the third act is hard to watch, I think it’s because I’m able to discern how complicit I am in the human horde — both symbolically onscreen and literally in my congregation—one who feasts on the pure, saving emblems of Christ each Sunday. I’ve been complicit in joining the throng, adding to His unspeakable pain, grief and sorrow. I’ve felt guilt from bad choices and have sought remedy in the Eucharist. And in the Eucharist I have experienced a kind of soul-cleansing neo-cannibalism — the type that is detached from the eating of human flesh and is focused instead on a symbolic petition, one where I ask to be absolved and forgiven for all of my ills and wanton consumptions. In this state of mind, watching Aronofsky’s iconoclastic take on the Eucharist forced me to look deep into my soul and confront my own fears, weaknesses, and limitations. It was as though I was looking into a mirror being forced to reckon my own evil.

That was a powerful, albeit unsettling, meaningful experience.

As a secular person asking why the third act is hard to watch, I think it’s because I’m able to admit how society’s treatment of women and the planet at large is hard to watch. “It is a mad time to be alive,” said Aronofsky. He then listed all sorts of social, political, and ecological grievances that helped contribute to the creation of this film. Things like overpopulation, starvation, species extinction, human trafficking, schizophrenic U.S. climate change, the killing of baby dolphins, the refugee crisis, and our daily state of denial about all of the above. “From this primordial soup of angst and helplessness,” he wrote, “I woke up one morning and this movie poured out of me like a fever dream.” Similar to the baby moment, our pursuit of knowledge, power and mastery over the earth has brought about all of this angst and helplessness, destroying our once pure, guileless paradise of an earth.

All of these layers astound me — the religious, the secular, the referential — all stacking together to weave a bold, epic, challenging drama that won’t be for everyone yet ironically will be about everyone.

Many will avoid Aronofsky films after witnessing the cannibalistic devouring of a newborn child in front of his mother. I wouldn’t blame them either. The moment is so polemical that it will blind many from seeing beyond the symbol to what it signifies. And even if many do look beyond the simulacrum, it will be difficult to admit what its ugly truth mirrors about human nature generally, and each and every one of us specifically.

Interestingly, watching this film because you’ll hate it might be just as valuable as watching it because you’ll find meaning. Why? Because this is a film that wants to piss you off, wants to hurt you, wants you to howl and weep at its violence, but it also wants you to take a seat at its table for further discussion and debate, even if you vehemently disagree. And there is value in listening to those voices that heatedly disagree. This isn’t high-brow, deeply philosophical art. It’s actually quite accessible and wants you to think about hard but important issues. It’s also a film that follows a moral pattern familiar to Aronofsky’s previous work of punishing wickedness and mourning for the oppressed. For adept viewers, these patterns are angry yet compassionate howls that bemoan human brokenness. Thus, nearly everything in them should be viewed as a confirmation of some grieving truth.

If there’s one powerful takeaway from the third act, it’s that its grieving truths have yet to be written. The writing may currently be on the wall, but there’s still time to change course. This kind of cautionary art is exactly what we need right now to fuel important conversation. It’s a sacrament of anger, woe, and indictment that may lead to catharsis. You do not have to like or love or even admire anything about what this film depicts. But you’d be wise to take its messages seriously. You’d be wise to not allow discomfort to lead to disdain. And above all, you’d be wise to help write a new ending.

[divinehumanism-blog]

mother! A Dark Allegory Sacralizing the Relationship Between Religion and Secularism

My vitals are oatmeal, my brain is slain, my soul is recovering from the syringe-injected wtf emotion. I haven’t been this excited since Aronofsky’s last release, NOAH (2014). And BLACK SWAN (2010) before that. And THE WRESTLER (2008) before that. And…you get the point. I’ve been team Aronofsky from the beginning (Sundance 1998, where he debuted PI). And, like all of his films, I’m destroyed in the most cathartic way as the credits roll. I’m reveling in the darkness of this feeling, this theater, paralyzed with intense awe. I have strong hope there’s light dancing somewhere inside my marred head, guiding me through the fiery, hellbent tunnels of what I just experienced. And MOTHER! is an experience!

What an absolutely sickening, messed up, brilliant cinematic masterpiece!!!!

Here is a film that only Aronofsky could’ve made, a film that contains a motherlode of rich interpretations, a symbolic maelstrom of ideas needing to be painfully birthed. The imagery stains, the ideas baffle, the third act impossible to predict, stomach, or prepare for. Believe me when I tell you: The barbs are real. And it makes for an ultra provocative kind of art because it’s so vulnerable, so sprawling, relevant and contentious in its reach. I might even describe it as a scalpel-sharp metaphor that rips, grinds, and eviscerates every faction of humanity ever to exist. No one is safe. Everyone is indicted. And Aronofsky, like the God of Genesis, is pissed with everyone, pissed with creation, pissed with politics and religion, with the overall state of the world, and he’s ready to burn it all down and start anew.

It’s a film that kind of plays out like NOAH — its prequel and sequel—but replaces the watery deluge with apocalyptic fire. It uses a biblical framework to shape and express a lot of political and humanitarian turmoil, and wraps them all together into one grand, outrageous, cyclical metaphor that might be difficult to grasp without a solid backing in these subjects.

MOTHER! isn’t a political or religious film per se as it is a human film commenting on the state of the world and how we endlessly abuse it. It evokes political and religious overtones to the extent of retelling the creation myth from a gnostic, secularized perspective. It’s also about a lot of other things — the social dynamics between artist, muse and feasting fandom, the creation of art itself, the downfall of civilization, of ecosystems, of human safety, the obsession with social media, tabloids and selfies, the portrait of a decaying marriage, the dangers of open-mindedness, and the list goes on. The interpretations will be myriad.

I found its retelling of the creation myth, however, one of the most moving, cross-pollinating attempts to ever sacralize the warring relationship between religion and secularism.

That retelling might go something like this:

The Earth — our world — is feminized, a Mother to all, a source of both nourishment for humanity and victim of male aggression.

Man’s aggression spawns from greed — from His dominion over Her (the Earth) — thereby becoming a catalyst for His belief in His dominion over Woman.

And so as the Earth is mastered, conquered, penetrated, plowed, tilled, burned, subdued, inhabited, and controlled, so is Woman.

Her paradisiacal garden is turned to waste, but Man continues to plant and labor and sow, and by brute sweat makes Woman yield — conceive.

The Earth — the Mother of all — “gives and gives and gives,” and in return gets invaded, pillaged, and raped, rebirthing the vicious cycle.

And Mother bears it, endures it, braves it, serves it, puts up with it.

Cruel male pagan gods divine this link between Mother and Earth, they gaslight it, and allow for the problem of evil to run amok for the sake of artistic musing and divine retribution for sin.

We’ve seen Aronofsky’s pagan sensibility shine before in BLACK SWAN, where anything that manifests itself to you may be a god, but in MOTHER! this paganism pulses and groans under the weight of what I found were five highly potent, timeless, relevant-in-2017 themes:

1) Mother, as an earthen vessel, holds the seeds to every noxious, selfish, unbending human crime within Her.

2). Mother, as an earthen vessel, may be pillaged, raped, and controlled by Man through “divine” rights, even corporation rights, unleashing the revelations and purgatories within Her.

3) Mother, as an earthen vessel, births, feeds, rears, nourishes, and puts up with a lot of vile, inane, intruding human garbage.

4) Yet Mother, even as this earthen vessel, can reach a furious, volcanic melting point, a chamber that can no longer contain the scalding pressure inside, exclaiming:

(!) “Enough!” (!) “No More!” (!) “The End!” (!)

5) Yes Mother! now as embodied, apocalyptic fury, can reject crude male taming and savagely roar back and boil over with destructive, unmatched chaos.

These themes stretch towards the sacred and the profane equally, finding home within the religious and irreligious alike. It’s a brand of home invasion horror that’s critical now. A story about our world bellyaching, roaring, reaching critical melting point — now! And what’s fascinating here is how Aronofsky transfers his past auteur portraits of hysteria and madness (think PI, BLACK SWAN, NOAH) over from his characters now suddenly to the lap of his audience. This will hit very close to home, and many will feel uncomfortable. In fact, the film almost plays out like Aronofsky’s middle finger to humanity at large, a venting frustration at how we mistreat each other and abuse our sacred, mother planet.

The result? Piqued reactions, confused reactions, zero neutrality, shifting accountability, and above all, a puzzle to be ciphered and querulously debated for years to come. This is the BEST kind of art. The kind that divides yet hopefully unites. It certainly is one of the most moving, thought-provoking films I’ve ever seen, one that hits personally close to home. I say this especially as a devout theist who leans on the side of a culturally religious agnosticism.

While this experience won’t be for everyone, I’d argue there’s a moral blade to the film that cuts DEEP, DEEP, DEEP into a problem that everyone is complicit in, right and left, black and white, male and female, me and you, but it isn’t necessarily preachy or scorning in presentation. Ok, it’s seriously messed up. But I reject any reading that claims Aronofsky is a misogynist or without compassion — especially for Jennifer Lawrence’s character — in part because this posture entirely misses the point by disguising a surface criticism as one that ignores the film’s larger, looming global symbolism, and the mighty realities for which those symbols stand.

MOTHER! might be the kind of art that liberals love to hate because some are unable to fathom how bad things being depicted is not equivalent to bad things being endorsed, but merely commented, mourned and reflected on. You need look no further for evidence of this than when Javier Bardem stated in an interview with USA Today, “Darren is the opposite of my character…He’s more into Jennifer’s character than my character. When I met him, I was like, ‘Where is this darkness coming from?’ Because he is the opposite of that. He’s nice, caring, generous, funny, very creative.”

MOTHER! has a moral edge to the extent that it forgoes pleasure, or punishes it wherever it occurs, to deliver a higher message. And my reaction to the film was one of total compassion, like a surgeon cutting into rotten tissue to find what parts are still salvageable. Put differently, Aronofsky plunges DEEP, DEEP, DEEP into darkness in order to find what shards of light may be hiding there, a skill he has always excelled at. His canon of work has proven how repeatedly and exceptionally acrid his ability is to peer into the abyss to yield enlightenment. And to make great art you have to go to the darkest place, the forbidden place. MOTHER! raises this cost as an insanely moving, nuanced presentation of what happens when you stare into the abyss — the forbidden place — too long.

If REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is Aronofsky’s required viewing for D.A.R.E programs, MOTHER! is his required viewing for earth stewards and married couples. If NOAH is Aronofsky’s biblical making of Genesis, MOTHER! most certainly unleashes his apocalyptic, unmaking, hellfire vision of Revelation. If PI is Aronofsky getting into the confined, mentally ill space of his characters, MOTHER! is him flipping that headspace burden over to his audience. If BLACK SWAN is Aronofsky doing hysteria-horror, MOTHER! is him making BLACK SWAN wishing it were difficult material for Sunday School. If THE FOUNTAIN is Aronofsky’s metaphysical view of history, MOTHER! is him exclaiming there won’t be any history left if our course goes unaltered.

And Aronofsky was right: No matter how many trailers/snippits I read prior to watching, NOTHING could prepare me for this sacred, unholy event. NOTHING! And don’t worry, my take here won’t spoil the madness you, too, will be put through (assuming you dare to step inside his theater!). And the third act. Good sweet mother Mary of all things blessed and disturbing, the third act! Good hell. Can’t wait to follow #mothermovie on that one. In sum, I’ve never seen anything like this. Will never be the same again. And will never answer a door knock again. Thanks a lot Darren.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Wrestling with Prophets — There is Balance Between Full Assent and Full Dissent

I am not convinced that the intoxicating need to be right, to be certain, is supported by scripture. As mentioned earlier, Christ does command us “to be one” and to avoid “contention.” There are also several other passages that embolden us to “doubt not, fear not,” or when seeking knowledge to “ask in faith, without wavering.” However, I am not convinced these passages are trying to reduce the journey of faith into propositional beliefs made firm by dogmatic certitude. “We see through a glass darkly” and “Lord, help thou my unbelief” provide balanced expressions for those who live in doubt, even as they model an acceptance of mystery and surrender of cognitive certainty. Ideally, church is a place where we should feel safe to nurse our doubts in a community of saints who covenant to mourn with each other; yet, church often feels like a country club where we collectively show off how certain, with it, we are. This posture, I believe, stems from the unscriptural and dangerous assumption of infallible leadership.

Let me break this down by posing two questions: When a prophet speaks at a pulpit does he automatically speak for God? If someone doubts what a prophet says will he or she not be combatively received by their culture as subversive or apostate? Both questions reveal important doctrinal components of a lived-in faith. Mormons believe strongly in both prophetic authority and agentive authority. Put differently: How do I remain loyal to my Mormon community while at the same time remain true to my own conscience that’s been seared in the furnace of experience? Or, as Frances Menlove asked: “How free are Mormons to confront themselves? How free are they to question and analyze, to admit their strengths and weaknesses, their beliefs and doubts and problems with the Church?”

In a church where children are taught to sing “Follow the Prophet” and are assured that he will never lead the church astray, I think members harboring doubts or uncertainties are extremely limited in their ability to freely voice their concerns without being marginalized as insubordinate. In Sunday School, for example, the pervasive rhetoric of trust and certainty placed in our leaders can create tremendous fear in those who have contrary or countercultural opinions. The fear of looking disobedient offers too much friction for the soul in such daunting situations, that the options imagined are either to silently conform or leave the church.

I find this to be an extremely unfortunate position to feel pitted against, mostly because I believe there are many sincere members wrestling with doubt whose voices need to be heard. They can help us resist the temptation of certitude. They can help foster renewal and increase our humility. Sunday School far too often feels like a litmus-test of obedience, where the more conservative and squarely align our answers are to the brethren the more righteous and obedient we appear to be. If we are not completely turning over our agency to others in these moments, then we are pretending to place great worth on individual revelation, but only insofar that it inspires us to follow the teachings of the brethren. I believe that if our sustaining vote is to hold any meaning whatsoever, we must be able to voice our dissent in respectful, constructive, worthwhile ways.

The choice between blind obedience to the prophets and blanket rejection of their teachings is, I believe, a false dichotomy. As I have stated elsewhere, the church is not an all-or-nothing enterprise for me. There must be a meaningful balance between full assent and full dissent, where agency is not overridden but works to our advantage as we experience, think, struggle, stretch, and ultimately make our testimonies our own — not someone else’s. Anything less is just too easy, where either we’re asking for someone to keep our conscience, or, giving free reign to any impulse we feel and calling it our “conscience.” The first path is fueled by laziness, the second by ego. We are part of the House of Israel, whose name literally means “We who wrestle with God.” We do not simply acquiesce to every rigid, status-quo, stultifying pronouncement that prophets might make on behalf of God.

Like Jacob, we wrestle all night and perhaps even our entire lives with those pronouncements. And when done, we limp away, says Rick Jepson, “from the exhausting and injurious night as a new person, changed emotionally and spiritually.” We become “God-wrestlers,” confident and revitalized. This will often mean sustaining other fallible human beings while at the same time following our own inner-light that may lead us outside the comfort of traditional orthodoxy. It will mean admitting that doubt is not a final form of enlightenment but neither is sentimental projection. As Bruce Hafen admonished: “Those who will not risk exposure to experiences that are not obviously related to some Church word or program will, I believe, live less abundant and meaningful lives than the Lord intends.”

For these reasons I do not conflate my testimony of prophets and apostles with the unscriptural assumption that they are always right, or beyond criticism, or that vocally disagreeing with them somehow constitutes apostasy, or evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. My loyalty to the church is not uncritical loyalty. To be intimidated otherwise would be for me to allow obedience to trump conscience, to deliberately give consent to an action or proposition I felt was wrong. My will is mine to give to Christ alone.

I hope that we can become culturally mature enough to forgo the temptation of turning our leaders into righteous celebrities who cannot err, both individually but especially institutionally. There is power uniquely designed in admitting that our leaders are not just fallible, but sometimes make egregious institutional mistakes while serving as God’s mouthpiece. But that’s ok. That’s expected. There is sanctifying power that can enter our souls when we forgive our leaders as they forgive us. That power helps us learn and practice the grace of forgiveness. It helps heal the pain that has been so disorienting when others have tried to defend what shouldn’t be defended, but simply owned. On extremely rare occasions, I have felt that power invite a special kind of honesty and soul-cleansing vulnerability into our meetinghouses. It dispels the competitive certainty of needing to be right and reminds me of what true religion looks like.

[divinehumanism-blog]

LGBTQ Orientation is a Given, Not a Chosen

Issues of gender and sexual identity are complex. I believe we are living in a very dark time with regard to the church and these issues. I have many LGBTQ friends, many of whom do not feel welcomed at church. They are extremely pained over the conflict between their conscience and the current teachings of the church. Even more, they are anguished by the many unthinking, insensitive, uninformed practices, beliefs, and attitudes we hold in our culture that dehumanize them. As one anonymous author wrote: “In a lifetime of church activity, I have yet to hear a single word of compassion or understanding for homosexuals spoken from the pulpit.” This wouldn’t be so tragic if it weren’t so true.

I disclaim any church posture that puts my LGBTQ brothers and sisters in the margins of a stigmatized identity. I also disclaim any posture that would make them feel that their orientation is something to be shamed.

LGBTQ inclinations are a given, not a chosen.

I do not believe LGBTQ orientation is a choice. No one willingly chooses to be gay or transgendered. And no one willingly leads a life targeted by fear, hate, intolerance, and other deplorable sentiments thrust upon them without honestly, and miserably, shouldering these crosses. In our church culture there is plenty of mythology tossed around that is frankly very destructive to our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, as well as their families. Just the other day during Gospel Doctrine, for example, an older man compared the LGBTQ community to the “wiles of Korihor.” I’ve also heard the rancorous Old Testament rhetoric of calling LGBTQ orientation an “abomination in the sight of God” and a “perversion of nature.” This kind of language is simply disastrous and is exactly the kind of posturing that leads to broken lives, families sundered, and even suicide.

I do not want to make it a point that having LGBTQ orientation is the defining characteristic of a person’s existence. We are all children of God first which means our primary identity is rooted in divine parentage. However, while I believe we choose which characteristics define us, there is something immensely disturbing about denying relations between two happy, monogamous, legally married, consenting adults, and then equating those relations with inflammatory rhetoric such as “sinfulness.” This posture is unrelentingly dehumanizing. It wants to characterize an LGBTQ lifestyle by unbridled lasciviousness, when in reality many people of LGBTQ persuasion just want an intimate, loving relationship like heterosexuals have. To insist on using such rhetoric is, I believe, to be swallowed up in the unforgiving deep of legalism. We can do better than this. We must.

Until heterosexual members — prophets and apostles not barred — are willing to bear the cross of celibacy themselves, or would be willing to stand proxy for the pain and anguish their gay and transgendered ward members feel, I find their privileged positions lacking in essential Christ-like virtues and feel no need to take their posturing seriously.

Do not misunderstand me.

I very much agree with the church that celibacy should be required before marriage in order to keep the law of chastity. I am also fully aware that there are plenty of celibate heterosexuals in the church. Some would even argue that the reality of single, celibate heterosexuals invalidates the uniqueness of LGBTQ orientation. However, I don’t think this posture is really sustainable. Single, celibate heterosexuals always have the hope to eventually meet someone (whether in this life or the next) who they can then spend the rest of their lives with. 

LGBTQ people do not have this hope. 

While everyone experiences the “desperation of temptation and the emptiness of sin,” LGBTQ people are essentially being told to carry an additional, unnecessary cross by being forever mortally denied basic human needs, intimacy, physical touch, and physical connection. They are starving for affection and emotional intimacy, and the only “hope” the church can offer them is to equate their mortal existence with an “unnatural” physical disability, or illness, one that did not exist in the pre-existence and will not persist in the next life. Many of my friends have explained to me that being changed or fixed in this regard in the afterlife would be like living in hell. I ask my heterosexual friends to therefore consider the following: 

How would you feel if God fixed your heterosexual feelings in the afterlife and made them homosexual? I’m sure your answer would be the same: It would be hell. 

I am not convinced that LGBTQ orientation is a disability, or illness. After all, it is a pretty well-demonstrated fact that numberless kinds of birds and mammals and primates do engage in homosexual behavior, but our species for some reason is the only one desiring to condemn it, calling it “unnatural,” even though it is the most naturally occurring reality — albeit marginal reality — among all species. It is privileged rhetoric that tells LGBTQ people they are disabled and abnormal, even though what they feel is no different than what their heterosexual friends feel. As many of my LGBTQ friends would say, “I’m not ill. I’m just in love.” This statement reveals that LGBTQ people are essentially desiring everything we hold valuable in our religion — families, committed relationships, loving each other, etc. Ironically, their desires for these things are being intimidated with disciplinary councils and excommunication if they act on them. 

Again, do not misunderstand me.

I am not endorsing any sort of laissez-faire, promiscuous relations between LGBTQ people. I am not in support of those relations even among heterosexuals. I am merely arguing against the swaggering, puritanical certainty that exists in our congregations that compels us to reject the value of LGBTQ relationships, then assembles us to legislate laws through organized phone banks that deny them the same privileges that heterosexuals enjoy. I am arguing against our inability of admitting that good can come from family structures we institutionally disagree with. I am arguing against how convinced we think we are — how absolutely certain we know! — that relations between two happy, monogamous, legally married, consenting adults somehow merits our profound social and legal hostility.

I feel great compassion for my LGBTQ friends and will stand with them in whatever they decide to do. I will not demand that they become who they are not — nor will I guilt them with harmful rhetoric as the price of my friendship. I will look to find Jesus in them, who always stands disguised in those who suffer. I will look to them to be my teachers, their patience having been made deep by pain can impart profound lessons. I will encourage them that when their loyalty to church authority is held in dynamic tension with the demands of an informed conscience, to choose conscience. Choose the light within. Choose the still, small voice. These teachings I learned from my Mormon heritage, which I feel richly blessed by.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Priesthood — Its Power is a Gift, Not a Rite

Similar to the misperception about our claim to a one true church, there is a general tendency among members to reject the efficacy of any priesthood administered outside the institutional walls of the church. Good, honest, diving-seeking people outside of Mormonism have been culturally determined within as having no legitimate priesthood due to their lack of institutional mediation and ordination. This posture is misleading and non-scriptural and forgets that the priesthood was restored before the church was organized and can exist and operate independent of a formal organization. Our claim to divine institutional authorization does not need to be confused with the non-scriptural assumption that no divine priesthood or spiritual power can exist outside of Mormonism.

Joseph Smith, for example, taught that priesthood was first and foremost a divine, spiritual power inextricably tied to the Holy Ghost, and that the rights to the priesthood “are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven.” The priesthood, or any responsibility within it, cannot be purchased or commanded, but operates “only upon the principles of righteousness.” Failure to live the gospel and retain the spirit separates the rights of the priesthood from our ability to speak and act authoritatively. We may very well then believe we hold the priesthood and still not actually be empowered by the priesthood if our full-bodied desires — including our heart, mind, and might — are not in the right place.

Ordination, in other words, or mere membership alone, does not guarantee genuine spiritual transformation, nor does it guarantee the all-important power needed to sanction the priesthood as effective. What good, then, is the priesthood if it has no power? Priesthood without power is like Jesus without Christ. Without the power of the priesthood — the Holy Ghost — the legalistic function of the ordinance is dead, good for nothing. Or, as Joseph taught, we might as well baptize a “bag of sand.”

One reading of Section 121 implies that we should start viewing priesthood beyond ordination rites and more as inward spiritual power. This is not to suggest that ordination rites are unimportant, only that our preoccupation with them often swindles us into believing that priesthood can be compelled by position, office, gender, or mere membership alone, none of which are true. Priesthood power, and the ability to speak and act authoritatively, is contingent upon personal strivings, or light-of-Christ righteousness. Because this power cannot be patented except on these principles, I think it would be healthier to view priesthood beyond church governance, ordination, maleness, and the exclusive right to act for God, if only to avoid the dangerous arrogance of believing that we alone are right, that we alone can vie for God’s power, and that others cannot if they disagree. I believe that a very real form of priesthood — even if not its fullness — can exist among people outside our church who especially exhibit great “faith, hope, charity, [and] an eye single to the glory of God.” “Therefore,” the Lord says, “if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work.”

Institutionally, we are not accustomed to speaking of believers outside our faith as having legitimate priesthood because 1). it disrupts our narrative of formal ordination, 2). it makes us worried that the need for ordination is unnecessary, and 3). it opens the door for anyone to make false claims to priesthood authority. However, these beliefs do not take into account that many sincere people can and often are spiritually reborn long before a given community ever ritually embraces them. Joseph Smith and even Jesus understood that there was divine power in many of the words and works of people outside the covenant, demonstrated when they asked if a person’s spiritual acts resulted in good fruit. When outsiders are empowered by the Spirit, their fruits are empowered by God, and if empowered by God, what other priesthood could they be wielding?

What makes these points above disturbing is how quick we are to disclaim any priesthood that bears not the mark of ecclesiastical office, even if the power of God is palatably present in those without the mark. Even more disturbing is how willing we are to accept any priesthood that does bear the ecclesiastical mark, because we assume that proper ordination automatically implies a direct line to God. I find these postures idolatrous and perhaps even anti-scriptural because they place trust in the appearance of priesthood while denying the reality of priesthood whenever it manifests in non-traditional ways. Section 121 leaves open the possibility that individuals called of God but not necessarily ordained by the institution may access the power of the priesthood on mere principles of righteousness alone.

After all, there is no way to validate institutionally those who claim to speak for God except to know them by their inward, spiritual fruits. We do not often think of priesthood in terms of inward spirituality because we’ve somehow allowed outward priesthood (office and ordination) to take precedence over inward priesthood (spiritual gifts). There are reasons for this of course. My argument here is simply to invite us to accept the inward, spiritual priesthood of God wherever it may manifest, both inside and outside the church, both in traditional and non-traditional ways. My argument here is to showcase that there is more than one way to interpret our traditional narratives.

Personally, I am not inspired by narratives that perpetuate the primacy of male-dominated institutional power, nor am I inspired when we promote the primacy of Mormon-dominated priesthood power. Instead, I am moved by narratives that embrace the powers of the Spirit in conditions where males and females, members and non-members, share with God their power, profession, and spiritual mission to heal and bless human families. God’s work is not limited to Mormons, nor should it be limited to worthy, male Mormons either. As various church leaders have emphasized, “men are not the priesthood.” I would go one step further and state that Mormons are not the priesthood either, nor do they possess it when they undertake to “gratify [their] pride” or “grieve the Spirit of the Lord.”

Admitting that other religious and secular traditions can possess inward priesthood is no different than claiming that God bestows spiritual gifts and callings upon all cultures and people. It also means that if we do hold the fullness of the priesthood, both outer and inner forms, it is imperative that we forgo emotions of elitism, arrogance and complacency. As President Dieter F. Uchtdorf has challenged, “In order to exercise [God’s] power, we must strive to be like the Savior.” I would hope this “exercise” can include room for people outside our faith to do the same.

[divinehumanism-blog]

The Scepter of LDS Exclusivity

Whenever I hear members bear testimony of belonging to “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth,” I automatically think of Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride.” In my head, I rehearse the famous line: “You keep using that [phrase]. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Many I know have interpreted this scripture to mean there is no truth or spirituality or salvation outside of Mormonism. Others have been more subtle: “Well, there’s truth to all religions, but ours is most essential.” Both attitudes are where arrogance and the sin of idolatry take root. I think the most unfortunate misperception about our claim to “the only true and living church” is that we rarely articulate the all-important paradox at play that could even make sense of such a conceited claim.

The Book of Mormon, for example, paints a different picture. 2Nephi 29 challenges the authority of the Bible by breaking its monopoly on scriptural truth, then goes one step further implying that The Book of Mormon itself (along with other distinctive sacred texts outside our canon) is but one divine record in a vast world compendium. As Richard Bushman points out, “The Book of Mormon . . . prepares the way for itself by ridiculing those who think the Bible is sufficient.” It then warns against anyone who restricts God from speaking outside of Mormon scripture, especially when God’s voice appears to go against the grain of rigid orthodoxy.

“For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written.”

Prophetic books and voices are flooding the earth. Wherever Israel is scattered those histories are being recorded, regardless of whether its writers are ritually embraced into the covenant. The Book of Mormon thinks big by multiplying God’s people beyond an exclusive, organized church and reminds us that all nations will receive their measure of revelation: “For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word; yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have.” The misguided, though, will exclusively cling to their particular set of books as sacrosanct when they should be willing to accept new revelation wherever it breaks forth, both in traditional and non-traditional ways: “And because my words shall hiss forth, many of the Gentiles shall say, A Bible, A Bible, we have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible.” Ironically, many of the covenanted will replace the word “Bible” here with “Quad.”

The Lord rebukes this posture in ecumenical terms:

“Wherefore, because that ye have a [Quad] ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written…For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.”

Bushman continues: “The tiny land of Palestine does not begin to encompass the revelation flooding the earth. Biblical revelation is generalized to the whole world. All peoples have their epic stories and their sacred books.”

The tragic paradox of our culture is this: 2Nephi 29 teaches us about an ecumenical, generous, liberal, and almost near universal dispersal of divine power, truth and scriptural communications as belonging to everyone in general and no group in particular; and yet, many Mormons I know still narcissistically position the church as monopolizing these gifts under a traditional, institutional framing of an exclusive-organized tribe. The Book of Mormon derails this pompous posture, revealing instead that God has not spoken the final word or given the whole of divine truth to any person or people or institution. Bushman writes: “The world is a hive of bible-making, and in the end all these records will come together, and people will know one another through their bibles.” 2Nephi 29 reaffirms there are many promised lands, many chosen people, many lost tribes, and many records yet to emerge to reconcile us all. Knowing this, we can’t afford to substitute our humility with a closed, cocksure posture.

Ironically, it took The Book of Mormon to challenge us to reassess our assumptions by calling into question any vain denial of the validity and holiness of other traditions. The 1831 revelation in Doctrine & Covenants 49 further undermines this pernicious myth that outside churches and traditions are without truth or spirituality, wherein the Lord tells Joseph that nearly the entire world is under sin, “except those which I have reserved unto myself, holy men that ye know not of.” The Lord’s true disciples, in other words, are not limited to those who find themselves within the walls of Mormonism. As the apostle Orson Whitney declared:

“God, the Father of us all, uses the men of the earth, especially good men, to accomplish [God’s] purposes…They are among the church’s auxiliaries, and can do more good for the cause where the Lord has placed them, than anywhere else…God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of [God’s] great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous for any one people…We have no quarrel with the Gentiles. They are our partners in a certain sense.”

Until Mormons are culturally mature enough to celebrate and diffuse an attitude of love, humility, and acceptance of God’s work among all people of the earth — and truly accept the Divine in images other than our own — our ironclad claim to a one true church falls ineffectually short to living up to its ecumenical potential. Thank God for 2Nephi 29 and Doctrine and Covenants 49, right? We can now give up our pretensions to a traditional-exclusive church and look forward to that glorious day that Nephi portends, wherein all truth will be circumscribed into one great whole.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Reasons I’d Be Atheist, But Choose to Be Religious

Putting it Mildly

I often wonder how I’m still an active member of the Mormon Church when many of my personal beliefs frequently do not align with the members of my congregation. My faith has changed and deepened over the years, hopefully for the good, but I am finding it harder and harder to attend church most Sundays. I still faithfully attend, serve, and uphold my callings, but the act for me has become a routinized widow’s mite. A kind of wild clinging to the iron rod that ten years ago felt more nailed in the sure place.

Unlike most faith crises, I am not really struggling with historical, theological or metaphysical claims of the Restoration. I am mostly just bored at church. I am deadened by how small, vapid and homogenous the gospel picture looks when interpreted by my fellow ward brothers and sisters, even prophets and apostles at times. I am amazed by how alien I feel in the pews; an insider who feels like an undesirable outsider. I do not think like those in my ward, and can only imagine what they’d think of me if I were to let them in on my well-guarded secret. Instead of feeling strengthened and uplifted, I often leave church feeling totally drained, depressed and disturbed. For me, Sunday is not a day of rest but a day of cross-bearing.

The Gospel is Pure, but the Culture is Messy

These feelings are really hard for me to process. They do not represent well the expansive and exciting character of Mormonism I read about in the scriptures, nor are they in harmony with the deep, panoramic feelings I get when worshipping in the temple. The Creative God I learn about in Genesis, for example, revels in distinctions, differences, and variation, whereas the Uniform God I learn about in Sunday School militates to homogenize disparity and command conformity. Fewer propositions are more aesthetically, morally, and rationally appealing than Joseph Smith’s theodicy of human potential, yet fewer places are more dull, tiresome and soul-suckingly lifeless than a Mormon meetinghouse. The Zion I live in, as opposed to the Zion I aspire to, is replete with all sorts of messy, counterintuitive feelings.

Such feelings call me into a paradox: I should confront my emotions, own them, but never maintain a false sense of certainty of “all is well in Zion.” Truth is, I am not certain about a lot of things I hear at church. This is not to say I am stating unbelief in the central tenets of Mormonism. To the contrary, I would argue that my views strive to be in concert with the many core principles and doctrines (albeit some interpretations). However, I am reticent to embrace the many testimonies and other expressions of certainty I hear that use clear-cut rhetoric to describe circumstances that are, in fact, not so clear. I am not convinced that feeling certain automatically implies that our emotions hold an ethical valence. Good thing in Mormonism we’re not required to believe anything that isn’t true, right?

While the gospel resonates with me in a really powerful way, there are many opinions we voice and postures we hold at church and throughout our culture that make atheism, at times, feel like a more desirable option. I am genuinely frightened, for example, by how quickly we seem to understand things, how defensive we get when challenged, and how easily we draw conclusions with the weight of authority on our side. I am staggered by how often we treat our prophets as demigods, our scriptures as inerrant, and our infallible testimonies of both as incontrovertible. It’s not even necessarily the opinions I hear at church that unease me. It’s the impressive, ironclad — “We can’t be wrong” — certainty that’s used to support them.

These might sound like “cultural problems” that are unrelated to the purity of the gospel itself. Yet, the truth is that my experience of the gospel is almost always inescapably mediated by, and conditioned by, the culture I find myself in. Where the gospel and the culture clash is that place we call “Church,” and this means admitting that the gospel will always be entangled with a mess of unfortunate ideas, boring meetings, people who exacerbate, and legalistic postures that irritate, bruise, and anger me at times. Hearing the Lord’s voice through this noxious environment is extremely difficult, especially in a church that cherishes certainty over humility.

The Challenge of Certainty

Where did we learn this posture of a pure and undivided certitude,  in which everyone agrees (at least it seems at church) about the nature of doctrine but no one ever feels inclined to doubt another’s interpretation? Are we saying there’s only one correct way to be a follower of Christ? Is this something Joseph Smith endorsed? If not, why are we so bent on being so agreeable? So overbearingly polite? I mean, really, why are we so bad at handling disagreement? I can think of maybe two examples.

Jesus did unequivocally state: “I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.” He also said “the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil.” From these verses, which arguably have multiple meanings, it’s not hard for me to imagine why most members of the church are tempted to prize certainty at all costs. Certainty alleviates the anxiety and fear that accompanies ambiguity. It dispels the thought of being wrong about deep, cherished beliefs. It grants power and control over uncomfortable feelings. As Bruce Hafen suggests, certainty helps engender feelings “of trust, loyalty, harmony, and sincerity so essential to preserving the Spirit of the Lord.” And when reached, certainty helps us feel “at-one” with our ward brothers and sisters, thus fulfilling the command.

Yet, what could be more troubling than becoming at-one with others prematurely, too quickly, or worse, dishonestly? Is the true gospel meant to reduce life’s most ambiguous challenges to glib forms of pseudo-harmony? What costs are there to consider for a culture that almost entirely eschews mystery and instead maintains the appearance of absolute certainty, but inwardly wrestles with raw, messy emotion? Or worse, maintains the appearance of certainty and inwardly is sure they cannot be wrong about God’s ways and intent? If you are reading this now and do not suffer doubts and questions and are perfectly content with the church just the way it is, I would argue that your posture is not only a fiction; it defies a central tenet of Mormonism that claims need for continuous revelation. As the scripture suggests, the church “doth not yet appear what [it] shall be.”

Frances Menlove articulated this Mormon (and generally human) posture well, essentially calling it a “myth.”

“This myth [of the utterly certain Mormon] is simply the commonly held picture of the Mormon as a complete, integrated personality, untroubled by the doubts and uncertainties that plague the Protestant and oblivious to the painful searching and probing of the non-believer. The Mormon is taught from Primary on up that he, unlike his non-Mormon friends, knows with absolute certainty the answers to the knottiest problems of existence, that in fact his search has come to an end, and that his main task in life is to present these truths to others so that they too may end their quests.

In reality, the Mormon is also subject to uncertainties and doubts. This fact derives inevitably from his understanding of free agency, his freedom to love or turn away, his freedom to choose this path or another one. “Lord, I believe. . .help thou my unbelief” expresses simply the profound experience of those who seek God. He who blots out internal awareness in order to maintain to himself and to others the appearance of absolute certainty, who refuses to examine his inner life, may all too often settle for the appearance of a Christian believer rather than for its actuality. No one should doubt that in some way, or for some reason, he is also a doubter.”

The Honest in Heart Doubt: The Myth of the Utterly Certain Mormon is Not Sustainable

I am not convinced that the purpose of true religion is to provide conclusive answers to life’s “knottiest problems.” “We see through a glass, darkly,” the scripture says, which seems to point us towards a humble, not cocksure, posture. “As for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part” is another reminder that the narratives we frame around deep, cherished beliefs are not inerrant, but partial to reinterpretation, criticism, and further development. Knowing these limits, there’s something about giving pat, unfeeling answers to tough questions that does terrible disservice to the idea of empathy. In these moments we seem to negate our baptismal covenant to “mourn with those who mourn.” The Mormonism I am most moved by is the one that leads me away from the stasis, ease and comfort of this Edenic myth, and instead challenges me to walk through the valley of incertitude with those who doubt. I embrace Patrick Mason’s sentiments on this point: “Given everything I was seeing in the church the past few years, in particular the pain of people leaving the church and those who were watching them leave, I decided to enter the fray.”

Perhaps Mormonism would be more appealing to those who doubt if we actually gave up this myth altogether and instead pursued innovative ways to make the familiarity of our theology stranger, rather than comfortably confirm what we profess to already unequivocally know. We’re way too certain of what we claim to know. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if we assume that we’re able to rise above our own broken, limited interpretations and settle the meaning of big doctrinal questions once and for all. That kind of certainty hardens into arrogance. It creates mental fortresses that prevent us from questing, wondering, stretching, maybe even overturning long held doctrinal assumptions that no longer speak to the prospect of humans becoming god-like.

An overkill of certainty, even among basic doctrines, can take God hostage to what we currently are able to comprehend, thus limiting God to our own mental images. The atheistic proclivity to doubt can be a powerful tool here to resist this idolatrous temptation. For without doubt new faith cannot be found. Without doubt we cannot let go of old ways of thinking. Without doubt we are unable to cast off flawed and immature images of God. We are unable to welcome a new wave of divine presence that is not bound by a tightly woven network of nonnegotiable beliefs.

American biblical scholar Peter Enns put it this way: “[If we resist doubt] we may actually be missing an invitation to take a sacred journey, where we let go of needing to be right and trust God regardless of what we feel we know or don’t know.” My Mormon culture’s implacable preoccupation with needing to be right, needing to be certain, needing to hold onto familiar ways of thinking and defending familiar interpretations to the point where others are patently wrong if they disagree invites one of the most exhaustingly threadbare spirits into our meetinghouses. Our inability to present the familiar world of Mormonism from an unfamiliar perspective is, I believe, a mental handicap that in many instances leads to boredom at church. Soothing, repetitive, and familiar language does well to instill devotion and retrench traditional values, but treating our religion as a tired regurgitation rather than a daring adventure may be causing us to miss much of the best in Mormonism.

The gospel revealed through Joseph Smith, for example, was grand, sweeping, and capacious, but our approach during church tends to be too narrow, safe, and conservative. This seems somewhat antithetical to the approach taken by Christ, who, as Terryl and Fiona Givens attest, presented the gospel in a way that “was spectacularly designed to unsettle and disturb, not lull into pleasant serenity.” Though the true church indeed is meant to comfort the afflicted, it also serves the purpose, as Harold B. Lee contended, “to afflict the comfortable.” I am convinced there might be a silent majority yearning for greater authenticity, honesty and raw expression during our meetings, but I’m also convinced that the temptation to be lulled into the dominant, easing orthodoxy — awash with all sorts of blithe certainties—will more often than not cause us to remain fearfully silent. If that is the case, argue the Givens, “if we allow ourselves to be co-opted by practices or attitudes we deplore, we share in the “collective guilt.””

These are powerful obstacles that the “myth of the utterly certain Mormon” present to a rising generation that won’t be stigmatized because of their doubt. Certainty, after all, is extremely difficult to maintain when conscience and experience doesn’t support it. Yet, at the same time, I should make one thing very clear: I do not doubt that members of the church have profound spiritual experiences that they are positively certain about. I, too, have been strongly affected by moments of unexpected rapture, especially while praying, temple-attending and reading the scriptures. I am certain we all have these experiences. However, I am skeptical of how we often interpret such experiences and the easy conclusions we draw from them.

I share the concern, expressed by many who doubt, that the assumptions we hold about exclusivity, authority, priesthood, gender and sexual orientation issues, traditional marriage, obedience, and what it means to properly sustain the brethren, are too often invoked in support of beliefs that are morally and spiritually idolatrous. I find this troublesome, because I believe there are powerful truths nested in these principles and doctrines, but getting at them will require we remain true to the deepest principles of humility and make no obeisance to absolute certainty. It will require us to admit that while truth can be considered absolute, our understanding and knowledge of truth always changes and evolves. As Eugene England affirmed, “However clear and unified our ultimate knowledge of doctrine will be, our present understanding of the gospel, which is what we actually have to deal with, is various and limited.”

Combat False Postures, but Stay Grounded in Christ

While there are good reasons to be strongly opposed and in doubt about specific postures we hold as Mormons, I am still of the persuasion that there are equally good reasons to embrace the faith. Let me briefly sketch some of these postures in a way that contextualizes the burden of my doubts — but also reveals the optimism of my faith. I would enjoy the challenge, in other words, to translate what it means for me to sometimes feel strongly atheistic towards my church, but still choose to be religious.

The Scepter of Exclusivity

Whenever I hear members bear testimony of belonging to “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth,” I automatically think of Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride.” In my head, I rehearse the famous line: “You keep using that [phrase]. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Many I know have interpreted this scripture to mean there is no truth or spirituality or salvation outside of Mormonism. Others have been more subtle: “Well, there’s truth to all religions, but ours is most essential.” Both attitudes are where arrogance and the sin of idolatry take root. I think the most unfortunate misperception about our claim to “the only true and living church” is that we rarely articulate the all-important paradox at play that could even make sense of such a conceited claim.

The Book of Mormon, for example, paints a different picture. 2Nephi 29 challenges the authority of the Bible by breaking its monopoly on scriptural truth, then goes one step further implying that The Book of Mormon itself (along with other distinctive sacred texts outside our canon) is but one divine record in a vast world compendium. As Richard Bushman points out, “The Book of Mormon . . . prepares the way for itself by ridiculing those who think the Bible is sufficient.” It then warns against anyone who restricts God from speaking outside of Mormon scripture, especially when God’s voice appears to go against the grain of rigid orthodoxy.

The tragic paradox of our culture is this: 2Nephi 29 teaches us about an ecumenical, generous, liberal, and almost near universal dispersal of divine power, truth and scriptural communications as belonging to everyone in general and no group in particular; and yet, many Mormons I know still narcissistically position the church as monopolizing these gifts under a traditional, institutional framing of an exclusive-organized tribe. The Book of Mormon derails this pompous posture, revealing instead that God has not spoken the final word or given the whole of divine truth to any person or people or institution. Bushman continues, “The world is a hive of bible-making, and in the end all these records will come together, and people will know one another through their bibles.” 2Nephi 29 reaffirms there are many promised lands, many chosen people, many lost tribes, and many records yet to emerge to reconcile us all. Knowing this, we can’t afford to substitute our humility with a closed, cocksure posture.

Ironically, it took The Book of Mormon to challenge us to reassess our assumptions by calling into question any vain denial of the validity and holiness of other traditions. The 1831 revelation in Doctrine & Covenants 49 further undermines this pernicious myth that outside churches and traditions are without truth or spirituality, wherein the Lord tells Joseph that nearly the entire world is under sin, “except those which I have reserved unto myself, holy men that ye know not of.” The Lord’s true disciples, in other words, are not limited to those who find themselves within the walls of Mormonism. As the apostle Orson Whitney declared:

“God, the Father of us all, uses the men of the earth, especially good men, to accomplish [God’s] purposes…They are among the church’s auxiliaries, and can do more good for the cause where the Lord has placed them, than anywhere else…God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of [God’s] great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous for any one people…We have no quarrel with the Gentiles. They are our partners in a certain sense.”

Until Mormons are culturally mature enough to celebrate and diffuse an attitude of love, humility, and acceptance of God’s work among all people of the earth — and truly accept the Divine in images other than our own — our ironclad claim to a one true church falls ineffectually short to living up to its ecumenical potential. Thank God for 2Nephi 29 and Doctrine and Covenants 49, right? We can now give up our pretensions to a traditional-exclusive church and look forward to that glorious day that Nephi portends, wherein all truth will be circumscribed into one great whole.

Priesthood Authority — Its Power is a Gift, not a Rite

Similar to the misperception about our claim to a one true church, there is a general tendency among members to reject the efficacy of any priesthood administered outside the institutional walls of the church. Good, honest, diving-seeking people outside of Mormonism have been culturally determined within as having no legitimate priesthood due to their lack of institutional mediation and ordination. This posture is misleading and non-scriptural and forgets that the priesthood was restored before the church was organized and can exist and operate independent of a formal organization. Our claim to divine institutional authorization does not need to be confused with the non-scriptural assumption that no divine priesthood or spiritual power can exist outside of Mormonism.

Joseph Smith, for example, taught that priesthood was first and foremost a divine, spiritual power inextricably tied to the Holy Ghost, and that the rights to the priesthood “are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven.” The priesthood, or any responsibility within it, cannot be purchased or commanded, but operates “only upon the principles of righteousness.” Failure to live the gospel and retain the spirit separates the rights of the priesthood from our ability to speak and act authoritatively. We may very well then believe we hold the priesthood and still not actually be empowered by the priesthood if our full-bodied desires — including our heart, mind, and might — are not in the right place.

Ordination, in other words, or mere membership alone, does not guarantee genuine spiritual transformation, nor does it guarantee the all-important power needed to sanction the priesthood as effective. What good, then, is the priesthood if it has no power? Priesthood without power is like Jesus without Christ. Without the power of the priesthood — the Holy Ghost — the legalistic function of the ordinance is dead, good for nothing. Or, as Joseph taught, we might as well baptize a “bag of sand.”

One reading of Section 121 implies that we should start viewing priesthood beyond ordination rites and more as inward spiritual power. This is not to suggest that ordination rites are unimportant, only that our preoccupation with them often swindles us into believing that priesthood can be compelled by position, office, gender, or mere membership alone, none of which are true. Priesthood power, and the ability to speak and act authoritatively, is contingent upon personal strivings, or light-of-Christ righteousness. Because this power cannot be patented except on these principles, I think it would be healthier to view priesthood beyond church governance, ordination, maleness, and the exclusive right to act for God, if only to avoid the dangerous arrogance of believing that we alone are right, that we alone can vie for God’s power, and that others cannot if they disagree. I believe that a very real form of priesthood — even if not its fullness — can exist among people outside our church who especially exhibit great “faith, hope, charity, [and] an eye single to the glory of God.” “Therefore,” the Lord says, “if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work.”

Institutionally, we are not accustomed to speaking of believers outside our faith as having legitimate priesthood because 1). it disrupts our narrative of formal ordination, 2). it makes us worried that the need for ordination is unnecessary, and 3). it opens the door for anyone to make false claims to priesthood authority. However, these beliefs do not take into account that many sincere people can and often are spiritually reborn long before a given community ever ritually embraces them. Joseph Smith and even Jesus understood that there was divine power in many of the words and works of people outside the covenant, demonstrated when they asked if a person’s spiritual acts resulted in good fruit. When outsiders are empowered by the Spirit, their fruits are empowered by God, and if empowered by God, what other priesthood could they be wielding?

What makes these points above disturbing is how quick we are to disclaim any priesthood that bears not the mark of ecclesiastical office, even if the power of God is palatably present in those without the mark. Even more disturbing is how willing we are to accept any priesthood that does bear the ecclesiastical mark, because we assume that proper ordination automatically implies a direct line to God. I find these postures idolatrous and perhaps even anti-scriptural because they place trust in the appearance of priesthood while denying the reality of priesthood whenever it manifests in non-traditional ways. Section 121 leaves open the possibility that individuals called of God but not necessarily ordained by the institution may access the power of the priesthood on mere principles of righteousness alone.

After all, there is no way to validate institutionally those who claim to speak for God except to know them by their inward, spiritual fruits. We do not often think of priesthood in terms of inward spirituality because we’ve somehow allowed outward priesthood (office and ordination) to take precedence over inward priesthood (spiritual gifts). There are reasons for this of course. My argument here is simply to invite us to accept the inward, spiritual priesthood of God wherever it may manifest, both inside and outside the church, both in traditional and non-traditional ways.

I am not inspired by narratives that perpetuate the primacy of male-dominated institutional power, nor am I inspired when we promote the primacy of Mormon-dominated priesthood power. Instead, I am moved by narratives that embrace the powers of the Spirit in conditions where males and females, members and non-members, share with God their power, profession, and spiritual mission to heal and bless human families. God’s work is not limited to Mormons, nor should it be limited to worthy, male Mormons either. As various church leaders have emphasized, “men are not the priesthood.” I would go one step further and state that Mormons are not the priesthood either, nor do they possess it when they undertake to “gratify [their] pride” or “grieve the Spirit of the Lord.”

Admitting that other religious and secular traditions can possess inward priesthood is no different than claiming that God bestows spiritual gifts and callings upon all cultures and people. It also means that if we do hold the fullness of the priesthood, both outer and inner forms, it is imperative that we forgo emotions of elitism, arrogance and complacency. As President Dieter F. Uchtdorf has challenged, “In order to exercise [God’s] power, we must strive to be like the Savior.” I would hope this “exercise” can include room for people outside our faith to do the same.

LGBT Orientation is a Given, Not a Chosen

Issues of gender and sexual identity are complex. I believe we are living in a very dark time with regard to the church and these issues. I have many LGBT friends, many of whom do not feel welcomed at church. They are extremely pained over the conflict between their conscience and the current teachings of the church. Even more, they are anguished by the many unthinking, insensitive, uninformed practices, beliefs, and attitudes we hold in our culture that dehumanize them. As one anonymous author wrote: “In a lifetime of church activity, I have yet to hear a single word of compassion or understanding for homosexuals spoken from the pulpit.” This wouldn’t be so tragic if it weren’t so true.

I disclaim any church posture that puts my LGBT brothers and sisters in the margins of a stigmatized identity. I also disclaim any posture that would make them feel that their orientation is something to be shamed.

LGBT inclinations are a given, not a chosen.

I do not believe LGBT orientation is a choice. No one willingly chooses to be gay or transgendered. And no one willingly leads a life targeted by fear, hate, intolerance, and other deplorable sentiments thrust upon them without honestly, and miserably, shouldering these crosses. In our church culture there is plenty of mythology tossed around that is frankly very destructive to our LGBT brothers and sisters, as well as their families. Just the other day during Gospel Doctrine, for example, an older man compared the LGBT community to the “wiles of Korihor.” I’ve also heard the rancorous Old Testament rhetoric of calling LGBT orientation an “abomination in the sight of God” and a “perversion of nature.” This kind of language is simply disastrous and is exactly the kind of posturing that leads to broken lives, families sundered, and even suicide.

I do not want to make it a point that having LGBT orientation is the defining characteristic of a person’s existence. We are all children of God first which means our primary identity is rooted in divine parentage. However, while I believe we choose which characteristics define us, there is something immensely disturbing about denying relations between two happy, monogamous, legally married, consenting adults, and then equating those relations with inflammatory rhetoric such as “sinfulness.” This posture is unrelentingly dehumanizing. It wants to characterize an LGBT lifestyle by unbridled lasciviousness, when in reality many people of LGBT persuasion just want an intimate, loving relationship like heterosexuals have. To insist on using such rhetoric is, I believe, to be swallowed up in the unforgiving deep of legalism. We can do better than this. We must.

Until heterosexual members — prophets and apostles not barred — are willing to bear the cross of celibacy themselves, or would be willing to stand proxy for the pain and anguish their gay and transgendered ward members feel, I find their privileged positions lacking in essential Christ-like virtues and feel no need to take their posturing seriously.

Do not misunderstand me.

I am not endorsing any sort of laissez-faire, promiscuous relations between LGBT people. I am not in support of those relations even among heterosexuals. I am merely arguing against the swaggering, puritanical certainty that exists in our congregations that compels us to reject the value of LGBT relationships, then assembles us to legislate laws through organized phone banks that deny them the same privileges that heterosexuals enjoy. I am arguing against our inability of admitting that good can come from family structures we institutionally disagree with. I am arguing against how convinced we think we are — how absolutely certain we know! — that relations between two happy, monogamous, legally married, consenting adults somehow merits our profound social and legal hostility.

I feel great compassion for my LGBT friends and will stand with them in whatever they decide to do. I will not demand that they become who they are not — nor will I guilt them with harmful rhetoric as the price of my friendship. I will look to find Jesus in them, who always stands disguised in those who suffer. I will look to them to be my teachers, their patience having been made deep by pain can impart profound lessons. I will encourage them that when their loyalty to church authority is held in dynamic tension with the demands of an informed conscience, to choose conscience. Choose the light within. Choose the still, small voice. These teachings I learned from my Mormon heritage, which I feel richly blessed by.

Wrestling with Prophets— There is Balance Between Full Assent and Full Dissent

I am not convinced that the intoxicating need to be right, to be certain, is supported by scripture. As mentioned earlier, Christ does command us “to be one” and to avoid “contention.” There are also several other passages that embolden us to “doubt not, fear not,” or when seeking knowledge to “ask in faith, without wavering.” However, I am not convinced these passages are trying to reduce the journey of faith into propositional beliefs made firm by dogmatic certitude. “We see through a glass darkly” and “Lord, help thou my unbelief” provide balanced expressions for those who live in doubt, even as they model an acceptance of mystery and surrender of cognitive certainty. Ideally, church is a place where we should feel safe to nurse our doubts in a community of saints who covenant to mourn with each other; yet, church often feels like a country club where we collectively show off how certain, with it, we are. This posture, I believe, stems from the unscriptural and dangerous assumption of infallible leadership.

Let me break this down by posing two questions: When a prophet speaks at a pulpit does he automatically speak for God? If someone doubts what a prophet says will he or she not be combatively received by their culture as subversive or apostate? Both questions reveal important doctrinal components of a lived-in faith. Mormons believe strongly in both prophetic authority and agentive authority. Put differently: How do I remain loyal to my Mormon community while at the same time remain true to my own conscience that’s been seared in the furnace of experience? Or, as Frances Menlove asked: “How free are Mormons to confront themselves? How free are they to question and analyze, to admit their strengths and weaknesses, their beliefs and doubts and problems with the Church?”

In a church where children are taught to sing “Follow the Prophet” and are assured that he will never lead the church astray, I think members harboring doubts or uncertainties are extremely limited in their ability to freely voice their concerns without being marginalized as insubordinate. In Sunday School, for example, the pervasive rhetoric of trust and certainty placed in our leaders can create tremendous fear in those who have contrary or countercultural opinions. The fear of looking disobedient offers too much friction for the soul in such daunting situations, that the options imagined are either to silently conform or leave the church.

I find this to be an extremely unfortunate position to feel pitted against, mostly because I believe there are many sincere members wrestling with doubt whose voices need to be heard. They can help us resist the temptation of certitude. They can help foster renewal and increase our humility. Sunday School far too often feels like a litmus-test of obedience, where the more conservative and squarely align our answers are to the brethren the more righteous and obedient we appear to be. If we are not completely turning over our agency to others in these moments, we are pretending to place great worth on individual revelation, but only insofar that it inspires us to follow the teachings of the brethren. I believe that if our sustaining vote is to hold any meaning whatsoever, we must be able to voice our dissent in respectful, constructive, worthwhile ways.

The choice between blind obedience to the prophets and blanket rejection of their teachings is, I believe, a false dichotomy. As I have stated elsewhere, the church is not an all-or-nothing enterprise for me. There must be a meaningful balance between full assent and full dissent, where agency is not overridden but works to our advantage as we experience, think, struggle, stretch, and ultimately make our testimonies our own — not someone else's. Anything less is just too easy, where either we’re asking for someone to keep our conscience, or, giving free reign to any impulse we feel and calling it our “conscience.” The first path is fueled by laziness, the second by ego. We are part of the House of Israel, whose name literally means “We who wrestle with God.” We do not simply acquiesce to every rigid, status-quo, stultifying pronouncement that prophets might make on behalf of God.

Like Jacob, we wrestle all night and perhaps even our entire lives with those pronouncements. And when done, we limp away, says Rick Jepson, “from the exhausting and injurious night as a new person, changed emotionally and spiritually.” We become “God-wrestlers,” confident and revitalized. This will often mean sustaining other fallible human beings while at the same time following our own inner-light that may lead us outside the comfort of traditional orthodoxy. It will mean admitting that doubt is not a final form of enlightenment but neither is sentimental projection. As Bruce Hafen admonished: “Those who will not risk exposure to experiences that are not obviously related to some Church word or program will, I believe, live less abundant and meaningful lives than the Lord intends.”

For these reasons I do not conflate my testimony of prophets and apostles with the unscriptural assumption that they are always right, or beyond criticism, or that vocally disagreeing with them somehow constitutes apostasy, or evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. My loyalty to the church is not uncritical loyalty. To be intimidated otherwise would be for me to allow obedience to trump conscience, to deliberately give consent to an action or proposition I felt was wrong. My will is mine to give to Christ alone.

I hope that we can become culturally mature enough to forgo the temptation of turning our leaders into righteous celebrities who cannot err, both individually but especially institutionally. There is power uniquely designed in admitting that our leaders are not just fallible, but sometimes make egregious institutional mistakes while serving as God’s mouthpiece. But that’s ok. That’s expected. There is sanctifying power that can enter our souls when we forgive our leaders as they forgive us. That power helps us learn and practice the grace of forgiveness. It helps heal the pain that has been so disorienting when others have tried to defend what shouldn’t be defended, but simply owned. On extremely rare occasions I have felt that power invite a special kind of honesty and soul-cleansing vulnerability into our meetinghouses. It dispels the competitive certainty of needing to be right and reminds me of what true religion looks like.

“Atheism” Moves Me Into Authentic Religion

I have trust in being religious and not becoming atheist because I can readily admit that the versions of Mormonism I’ve combated here — which currently are hijacking my experience at church — will not be sustained in future decades and centuries. I have trust that the postures that irritate, bruise, and anger me at times can ultimately be alchemized for my good, but I need to place those feelings into a redemptive context. That is, I need to continually view those things that drain, depress and disturb me — the things that make me feel strongly atheistic — as opportunities to grow and awaken into deep Christ-like character. I am convinced that were it not for these immeasurable growing pains that the divine would forever remain asleep within me. While I have many reasons to feel doubt and feel strongly atheistic towards my church at times, I equally believe those feelings can help open my eyes into becoming authentically religious.

[divinehumanism-blog]

The Myth of the Utterly Certain Mormon

By Francis Menlove

“This myth [of the utterly certain Mormon] is simply the commonly held picture of the Mormon as a complete, integrated personality, untroubled by the doubts and uncertainties that plague the Protestant and oblivious to the painful searching and probing of the non-believer. The Mormon is taught from Primary on up that he, unlike his non-Mormon friends, knows with absolute certainty the answers to the knottiest problems of existence, that in fact his search has come to an end, and that his main task in life is to present these truths to others so that they too may end their quests.

In reality, the Mormon is also subject to uncertainties and doubts. This fact derives inevitably from his understanding of free agency, his freedom to love or turn away, his freedom to choose this path or another one. “Lord, I believe. . .help thou my unbelief” expresses simply the profound experience of those who seek God. He who blots out internal awareness in order to maintain to himself and to others the appearance of absolute certainty, who refuses to examine his inner life, may all too often settle for the appearance of a Christian believer rather than for its actuality. No one should doubt that in some way, or for some reason, he is also a doubter.”

[divinehumanism-blog]

Invisible Realities

“Everyone, especially children, wonders whether there is a reality beyond what we see. Cave paintings and other archeological evidence show that tens of thousands of years ago people were already seeking to understand a reality beyond the visible. By endlessly creative means, including prayer, alcohol and other drugs, meditation, music, study, contemplation, sexual practices, shamans, priests, rituals, dancing, dram, art, and now science, people have sought to connect to the invisible at a level deep enough to trigger in themselves a sense of awe.”

–Primack & Abrams

— — — — — — — 

Nature loves to hide. There is no way the Pre-Socratics could have seen an atom. Such was beyond any technology they might have imagined. Hiding in plain sight from Parmenides were easily perceivable facts we now take for granted, like the principle of inertia or the constant acceleration of falling bodies. If nature is indeed super-symmetric, or has multifaceted dimensions of space and time, then She surely has hidden that secret well. We might bemoan the dearth of experimental explanations behind certain myths, liturgies, and theories, but we might also wonder what might be hiding in plain sight around us.

[divinehumanism-blog]

The Divinity of Humanity: Timothy Leary and “God”

“Our species is beginning to answer the basic questions [of life] as well as take over the technologies for running the universe.”

—Timothy Leary

——————————————————————————

Timothy Leary had this tenacious desire to translate the classic issues of theology into the language of modern science. He wanted to “scientize myth and mythologize science.” He wanted to activate the divinity within. Now, without focusing on his version of chemical-induced consciousness-expansion, I’d rather point out how Leary uses words to paint new pictures of “God” in our minds.

Consider this statement:

If men and women do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves.

Consider this question (posed by Leary):

“Why do Judaeo-Christian traditions continually conceive of an enormous gulf between divinity (which is “up there”) and the self (“down here”)?”

Christian mysticism has forever claimed unity with divine radiance. However, this gets contradicted when arbitrary cosmological subject/object distinctions are imposed (as seen throughout classical Christianity). Atheism, as it turns out, more so than most religions, comes intellectually closer to tapping into the truth about our divine heritage because, like many Eastern philosophies insist, the atheist refuses to bifurcate reality. Mormonism is in agreement here: There is no radical distinction between spirit and matter, owing to a point-by-point analogy between heaven and earth in its theology.

What, then, of Leary’s exclamatory claim — “You are a God, Act like one!”

For thousands of years many have believed that God could somehow be in their hearts. But because equally many people have been conditioned to respond negatively to the word “God,” a large gulf continues to separate two not-so-alien worlds from each other. Both groups tend to repeatedly misunderstand the other, failing to recall how human history, science and philosophy are but the provinces of religion.

What Leary does well in helping bridge these two groups is that he takes the dramatic advances in scientific cultures and couches them in religious terms — resurrecting them, so to speak, with a new syntactical flavor. One problem with current culture he says is “that a dramatic change in neurology must be gently introduced in the language a culture traditionally uses for those “mysterious, unknown, higher powers” which its science has not yet explained” (Your Brain is God).

The language of science, in other words, can always be mythologized inside a context of mystical-personal, religious revelation. While there is obviously a strong taboo in the science community against this sort of twisting-to-fit-religious-ends dogma, there is nothing more ennobling, I think, than developing the eyes to see and ears to hear of how these two worlds can unite and ultimately lay down at rest with one another.

Leary’s activist theology inspires: “God is defined in terms of the technologies involved in creating a universe and engineering the obvious stages of evolution.” It is of crucial philosophic importance, he goes on to explain, to understand that neurology, genetics, quantum physics and so on to the rest of the sciences, are coming to understand that “evolving human intelligence is apparently designed to shape the universe, to navigate the process of evolution, and to fabricate the structure of personal reality” (Your Brain is God). In so many words, the very process that Leary describes is but part of the divine evolutionary development that humanity is beginning to grasp.

Think of it — your destiny is unalterably divine!

Formed from mud, synthesized inside the magma of hot stars, and evolving along an unbroken chain of bioelectrical transformations, humanity is reaching a pivotal moment in its existence of now being able to engineer and create new life forms, to correct malfunctioning genes, to affect DNA repair, to understand and manage the genetic signals which cause aging and death. We are, in scriptural language, learning that “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”

In effect, humanity is awakening to its divine, immortal potential. To label-limit this potential is nothing but premature. Our divine identity will continue to be curious until we are enlarged and refined, governed and enlightened, so much until we have been quickened in all of our social, emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual attributes. And as Leary points out: “Any human being who wishes to accept the responsibility is offered the powers traditionally assigned to divinity.” I do not find it accidental that it took a psychedelic-secularist to point out this ancient, religious truth.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Mormons in Dialogue with Atheism: Ongoing Discussion with Lance Spencer

My recent conversation with Lance Spencer, an online critic of my religious views (see here and here), has provoked some really compelling insights that I feel deserve discussion. But first, I would like to thank Lance for his recognition of our agreements. Too many online religious debates contain substantial amounts of ridicule, sarcasm and cartooning that limit the kinds of conversations that are so desperately needed between theists and atheists. These debates seek victory, not understanding. They often do not render fair judgement on either side. And when intellectual empathy reaches its limits, we cocoon ourselves from opportunities to heal, and perhaps reconcile, our disastrous, fist-pumping cultural wars. We surrender chances to grow. And so, the opportunity to respond to Lance must not be missed since the issues are so many and so profound.

Lance asks, “What does faith in God mean?”

Before we bring “God” into the conversation, let’s start again with “faith.” Not religious faith, just good old fashioned faith. As I have stated before, faith in its most basic, pedestrian sense is that visceral power within us that excites us whenever we seek to secure an outcome that otherwise could not be made available to us. We do not unequivocally “know” we will achieve any outcome unless we move forward with enough assurances (“evidences”) that we will be able to materialize what had previously only been a dream. We do not “see” our dreams, our ideas, from beginning to end, no matter how much trust we have that the future will resemble the past. Things could change. Even probabilities are not guaranteed, let alone are unfalsifiable. Hume and Berkeley taught us these truths.

However, we don’t lose sleep over these things, if only for practical reasons. That is to say, we generally just trust, in the most unconsciously prosaic of ways, that we will be successful in achieving our goals. This is faith in its most secular, stripped down sense, and is exactly the kind of faith that atheists rely upon as a stolen concept when they pretend or deny they are without it entirely. It is not an “ill-defined” concept. It is so utterly banal and pandemic that even Dictionary.com calls it “confidence or trust in a person or thing.” Surely we can agree that atheists possess a form of faith, not to be conflated with “religious faith,” but I understand if our language games interfere with that compromise.

Now let’s move to “faith in God.” At the very least, “God” is a posthuman projection of human desire evolving towards super-intelligence. We know this can be reasonably argued based on how distinctively aware humans are of their freedom to desire enhanced lives, even when circumstances have painfully thwarted them. This, of course, is part of evolution. The process of evolution augmented human intelligence, and human intelligence is now designing intelligent technology with greater capacity, speed and reliability to bring human desires into existence. We are trying to make our lives a little more heavenly. A little more superabundant. We want to maximize “the good life” (which I’ll get to later) while mitigating the risks involved with others who have competing dreams of how this radical enhancement might best come to pass. All of this takes good old fashioned faith.

Having “faith in God” — that is, trust in posthuman, superintelligent potential — now leads us to make several reasonable assumptions. Let us assume first that technology will continue to feed on itself as we learn to negotiate with others what matters most to us in our lives. Assume we do not destroy ourselves in the process, but actually make it through this apocalyptic bottleneck intact by learning to compassionately harness our desires, our moods and our technology while in the service of others. Assume we will continue to develop increasingly advanced technologies to fight disease and illness, improve communications, clean and beautify environments, and integrate biogenetic engineering with information technologies to reverse age-related entropy. We can assume that, as some secularists have predicted, we “will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future.”[i] How far will we go? Lincoln Cannon and A. Joseph West have provided one possible answer:

“We may reengineer our world such that present notions of poverty, warfare, and death would no longer be applicable. We may even engineer whole new worlds and attain presently unimaginable degrees of flourishing and creativity. In doing so, we would change. We would be different than we are now to at least the same degree as we are now different from our prehuman ancestors. We would be posthuman.”[ii]

Moving towards a state of existence where we continually refine, shape and expand the reach of our physical and mental abilities will arguably make it increasingly difficult to draw any clear distinction between humans and posthumans. To understand the assumptions of this evolution, which we are already working to accomplish, is to equally understand how the ancient religious notion of theosis (also “divinity”) can be reborn, remythologized into a new secularized context. Because theosis minimally implies a transformative process brought about by small, cumulative changes in human understanding, as well as human living, the nature of this new context will be learning to negotiate the terminology used to describe this gradual, yet forthcoming, emergence of human potential.

In Christianity, this process of evolution can qualify as humanity learning to put on superintelligent posthumanity. Or in biblical language, “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”[iii] In Mormon tradition, this process qualifies as awakening to the “immortality and eternal life”[iv] of the divine nature.

It might be wondered how “faith in God,” as described above, has anything to do with faith in some ontological, glorified man we call Heavenly Father. Or glorified woman we call Heavenly Mother. I am not as interested in these questions as others are, mostly because they distract me from focusing on what’s more important. However, I raise them to anticipate Lance accusing me of ignoring how faith is generally understood in religion, and Mormonism in particular. I agree there is no hard evidence for such ontological beings. But I also concede that our universe is “old and large enough to have produced many planets capable of supporting prehumans,”[v] which means that absence of their existence logically implies that either a). we simply have not found or recognized them yet, or b). the burden of posthumanity is placed in our future without a filtered past.

If our prehuman ancestors do exist, then we can assume they are more benevolent than us on mere grounds that they survived long enough to outlast some kind of nuclear holocaust, and we should discover and join them. If they do not exist, perhaps owing their destruction to nuclear fallout or environmental exploitation, then learning to compassionately control ourselves in the presence of our technology is singlehandedly the most important moral task we have facing us in the Twenty First Century, assuming we wish to learn what posthumanity might be like. Lincoln has described what I am explaining in poignant religious terms: “To the extent God already exists, we should discover and join them. To the extent God does not yet exist, we should create and become them.”[vi]

So what does “faith in God” having anything to do with ontological, glorified prehumans? I personally believe it is highly unlikely, given that we occupy a universe with a multi-billion year past, that our human race is the first of its kind to embark on a posthuman mission. Richard Dawkins has also entertained this possibility as not only reasonable, but very probable.[vii] These prehumans may have already either failed or succeeded in becoming posthuman. Obviously, no hard evidence exists on either side of the spectrum to confirm, so at best we can be agnostic but certainly not gnostically-atheistic. Let us then channel these discussions with humility, admitting that many religious people’s “faith in God,” especially Mormons, minimally implies belief that we simply are not the first people to undergo this process.

Interestingly, this posture of being “not the first” has even more credible backing. If we can actually survive the apocalyptic bottleneck, we can reasonably assume that we will continue to acquire greater benevolence and compassionate power and control over ourselves, the elements, and our environment. We will continue to learn about, govern, organize and simulate worlds with increasing detail, and these simulated worlds (evident now in virtual game programming) will be exceptionally difficult to parse from our own “natural” world.

Simulating such worlds, says philosopher Nick Bostrom, would imply not only we are living in a simulated world ourselves. We also certainly would not be the first people to have done so, implying we would be living in our prehuman ancestor’s simulations right now. This technical argument is much more fleshed out in Bostrom’s essay, [viii] and I encourage you to familiarize yourself with it. It is not a joke, and is persuasively much more than science fiction. It is exactly the kind of argument the New Atheists are beginning to take seriously, one that even caused Sam Harris to experience “a moment’s pause.” A paradigm shift maybe? Unsurprisingly, Harris has not since engaged this argument either (at least that I’m aware of) probably because admitting its veracity would be tantamount to admitting our “cosmos might be every bit as ridiculous as Joseph Smith said it was.”[ix]

I would also encourage Lance and other atheists reading here to study Lincoln and Joseph’s essay, “Theological Implications of The New God Argument,” as found in the book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought an Engineering Vision. I have merely simplified their arguments here in a way that hopefully persuades Lance and others to recognize that religious discourse is changing in profound ways. What religion has always pointed to — namely, posthumanity — is beginning to be fulfilled through our techno-scientific endeavors.

Given we now understand what is arguably the most important moral task of the Twenty First Century, we are now better prepared to address Lance’s next question: “What is good? And how do we know?”

There can be no doubt that an ethics of compassion balanced with a sharp wit of rationality will be our two noble allies in determining what is good in our search for posthumanity. We need both, and we need to persuade people that both matter, and that they cannot be imbalanced. For example, Sam Harris certainly has a point in arguing that compassion without reason, that is, “a failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others” in the name of tolerance and political correctness, would represent a maladaptive posture towards minimizing our destructive capacities.[x] Mormon doctrine is in full agreement: Those who openly offend “shall be chastened before many” and “reprove[d] with sharpness.”[xi] Rationality, when properly used, can be the guardian against freewheeling, uncritical, anything-goes-benevolence.

However, reason without compassion is equally dangerous. Rationality devoid of charity and long-suffering typically only reinforces our competitive impulses and creates formidable team psychological barriers against those whom we’re trying to convince “are committed to silly and harmful patterns of thought and behavior.”[xii] Reasoning without empathy is, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, to “engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.”[xiii] When reason is worshipped as such, when no “increase of love”[xiv] is shown after reproving, we “are not after the truth but after arguments supporting [our] views.”[xv] We must first learn, insists Haidt, insists Mormonism, to speak to people’s hearts before trying to strategically reason with, or alter their paradigms. We must first win their trust. Furthermore, there is no evidence that even suggests “that the ability to reason well about ethical issues causes good behavior.”[xvi] This is probably true because reason can often be divorced from compassion, which has disastrous outcomes.

In our search for goodness, we cannot begin to question any morality as really good, true or justifiable before we’ve cultivated some understanding of what these systems are trying to accomplish.[xvii] Religion, as I understand and experience it, notably Mormonism, is striving to awaken our posthuman potential as described above. It is trying to get us to behave compassionately. It is trying to help us have control over ourselves, the elements and our environment so that posthumanity might be realized. Are there extremist groups that try, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out, to use divine warrant for “sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice?”[xviii] Absolutely, and we can clearly reject any counterfeit, returns Terryl Givens, that calls “forth our loyalty and devotion…without agonizing over our impiety.”[xix]

What is good? I would argue that goodness must be any philosophy, organization or liminal mindset that balances reason with compassion, invites us to cleave unto charity, and prompts us to sacrifice our lives in the service of building up others, not destroying them. I believe such selfless, humanistic efforts can count as the evidence needed to soften the heart towards what posthumanity (“divinity”) can mean. To become saviors for each other, to take upon ourselves “this vulnerability, this openness to pain and exposure to risk”[xx] on behalf of our friends and enemies, and to uplift, support, encourage and inspire in them their best selves is really the only evidence that qualifies our humanism, which in Mormonism counts as awakening our inner-god. The value and influence of this kind of compassion, that is, “the act of putting ourselves in the place of the other and seeking his or her best interest,”[xxi] would be exactly what Mormons mean when they talk about the truth value and promise of religion in general (40). These messages, whether they are religious or secular, inspire us to build posthumanity.

How do we know what is good? When we assume the awesome burden to authentically bless someone else in the form of service, becoming something more, with others, than what we were, we need little exterior verification that what we are doing is good and true, albeit divine. The verification is direct, intrinsic to the activity — we feel, experience and live the truth, which is far more meaningful than any mental gymnastics we have to do to deny otherwise. This posture has lead C. Randall Paul to announce: “So, whoever you are — atheist, agnostic, religious — you are behaving ‘like the eternal gods’ when you act on your desire to freely and creatively join in common purposes with your fellow men and women.”[xxii] Needless to say, we can also join in common purposes to destroy each other, but grasping that reality only means we have a testimony of apostate religion.

Religion then, a story that describes our posthuman-becoming, will always fuel our best and worst instincts. Religion is not a threat; we are threatened by those who use religion to deceive us. It is not religious power that poisons, but the unethical use of it. Cherry-picking the wrong uses as evidence for why we should believe in the clarion call — “religion poisons everything” — would be an obscene exaggeration that fails to acknowledge its legitimate opposite. Religious narratives have also been used to amplify people’s sensitivities towards others, who then serve with kindness, gentleness, civility, and love unfeigned. Banishing this kind of religion, says David Bentley Hart, would be a foolhardy mistake, leaving “millions more of our fellows…unfed, unnursed, unsheltered, and uneducated.”[xxiii] Hart continues: “Religious conviction provides powerful reasons to kill; but it also provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this.”[xxiv]

Lance asks, “What evidence would it take to persuade you that in fact you’re wrong, in this case about about the merits of Mormonism and, more broadly, the religious part of religious transhumanism?”

Lance, this is a very good question, even as it elucidates its own limits.

I will need to provide some clarifying context.

I should begin first by pointing out that people who view mythology as “the opposite of reality” are either delusional or at best quaint. That is to say, they must be insanely unperceptive to the power behind ancient archetypal patterns and their importance to the human mind. There is no escaping mythology either, evident in Derrida who reminds us that “any attempt to displace or erase mythos with logos is finally doomed because metaphor and myth always lurk back of our rational concepts.”[xxv] This is not an attack against modernism. It is merely a reminder that while an impressive objectivity exists in the sciences, humans seeking knowledge are not objects. Their values and stories are at work in the fabric of the enterprise, even in the types of questions that are shaped and followed.

I do not raise these issues to come across as some besotted postmodernist. I raise them because the modernist pursuit of truth as evident in New Atheism repeatedly fails to grasp what mythology can tell us about ourselves. I see this attitude in Lance, who has pointed out on several occasions the problematic nature of relying upon scriptural characters as a source of moral wisdom when there is no evidence for their existence. What is being suggested here? That truth cannot be imparted through fiction? Surely atheists can admit that fiction is where futures are imagined, contested, and brought to life. Our scientific enterprise, in fact, has been very much steeped in fiction-to-fact paradigm shifts. The so-called “fictitious” story of Christ has led countless people to turn from delinquent lifestyles to embrace lives full of love, civility, and unfathomable compassion. What does this say about the power of fiction? Kafka writes, “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” You should carefully read that sentence again with posthumanity in mind.

One reason I do not care about whether the scriptures are historically accurate or fictionally empty is that mythology has the power to transcend both. Mythology assumes both fact and fiction — it is what allows us to push the limits of what is possible. There is a delicate boundary that separates fact from fiction, too, and that boundary is largely based on how open or restrictive we are towards constructing a cosmology of what we believe is real. Technology is perfectly analogous to this boundary, as evident in Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws. Familiarize yourself with these. The entire scientific enterprise mythologically embodies them. Of course, the paradox of mythology is twofold. Mythology needs constraints to give sanity and terrestrial discourse its intelligible meaning. But, believing ourselves to be chimerically impoverished is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that denies our ability to make a better world, make better selves, and to intimately feel it within our biological makeup.

In the pragmatic tradition that has influenced my thinking, mythology holds much more interest for me than history because of its ability to yield existential transformation. Atheists will often condescendingly chalk up this posture as an act of cowardice, or an instance of Freud’s assertion that all religion is wish-fulfillment. When doing so they amputate truth from the question of how to live a good life. They ignore truth as a practical function and go chasing after the ghost of modernism which has tricked them into believing that truth in the abstract holds more promise than truth found in serving your fellow beings. I want truth that will help me be a better person, the kind that will help me uplift, support, encourage and inspire in others their best selves. I want truth that works! I am aware of the pragmatic limitations of this approach, which is why each of us needs to develop a strenuously compassionate mood on how best to negotiate with others. I want to survive the apocalyptic bottleneck to see what posthumanity might be like. And if I do not get to experience that day, then at least I want to teach my children this understanding of truth so that they might experience what I could only faintly imagine and poorly articulate.

I find goodness in the God of Mormonism. I find goodness in reading the scriptures. My experience in this faith provides opportunities for service and self-challenge, a context for me to practice posthuman charity on those who I otherwise would never choose to associate myself with. This is one value that I see in religion that isn’t necessarily continually available in secularism. That is to say, what is the continual, ongoing context that brings out a school for unconditional love in people who are without religion? I’m not suggesting people need religion to be moral or charitable, nor am I denying other contexts exist. I am simply curious to know how often others experience the social pressures needed to change, to be more loving, when they are not surrounded by a community that tests their charitable impulses on a constant basis.

I am therefore in agreement with Terryl and Fiona Givens who contend that religion thus “function[s] as laboratories and practicums where we discover that we love God by learning to love each other.”[xxvi] Christopher Hitchens would laughably try to discredit all good acts done in religion as “compliment[s] to humanism,”[xxvii] as if in pretending to instantiate a monolithic chasm between having faith in God (a supernatural and therefore unreasonable position) and having faith in Humans (a natural and therefore reasonable position) was somehow ultimately different.

The terms “natural” and “supernatural” are not static terms. They’re dynamic, ever changing with respect to how much we currently understand. And since human knowledge is ever-growing, the boundaries keep blurring. As epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend states: “The knowledge of today may become the fairytale of tomorrow and the most laughable myth may eventually turn into the most solid piece of science.”[xxviii] In the case of Mormonism, there are no ultimate chasms or boundaries extant between God and Human. The mythology assumes we are of the same species as God, if not different in degree, given one is self-realized and the other is still awakening. This is perfectly compatible with striving towards posthumanity in a transhuman context. For, as the Book of Mormon teaches: “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.”[xxix] Because there is no ultimate ontological schism between God (what we may become) and Human (what we currently are now), atheists seriously need to reevaluate their predilections when suggesting that belief in God is somehow divorced from real, everyday human needs.

How can I be persuaded that I’m wrong about the merits of Mormonism, along with the religious part of religious transhumanism?

Convince me with evidence that we are not moving towards posthumanity, but specifically not moving towards a future that counts in Mormonism as awakening to the divine nature. Convince me with evidence that Joseph Smith has nothing to say at all about human potential and posthuman potential that can’t be described in technical language today. More broadly, convince me with evidence that it is impossible to combine religious titles with secular content to describe our posthuman becoming. Convince me with evidence how “faith in God,” as I have described, and which Mormon theology inspires, is unreasonable. Convince me with evidence that religious mythology has absolutely zero correspondence with recognizing posthuman potential. Convince me with evidence that Mormonism does not reveal the Divine Humanism of New Atheism (read my paper entirely). Convince me with evidence that truth in the abstract is somehow greater than truth leading to goodness. Lastly, convince me with evidence that nothing good can come from Mormonism.

On a final note, I would like to provide Lance with a posthuman challenge to exercise some charitable impulses that most likely have been laid dormant with respects to religion. I give this same challenge to other atheists who may be reading. Consider yourself in a debate class and you’ve been given the task to defend religion, specifically Mormonism. Obviously, you are not happy with this assignment, but you agree with Sam Harris that it is possible “to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion.” [xxx] What does that “diamond” look like to you? How might it fit into your rational, modern-scientific worldview? What does it seem to be communicating about spiritual experience? Why do you think others are so pulled towards it? Remember, you are defending religion, Mormonism in particular, so you cannot criticize it in anyway. Your grade depends on a thoughtful, nuanced response. Can you do it, just as I have done for New Atheism?

Footnotes

[i] Kurzweil, Raymond. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin Group, 1999. 2.

[ii] Cannon, Lincoln. West, Joseph A. “Theological Implications of the New God Argument” as quoted in the book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought an Engineering Vision (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012). 111.

[iii] 1Cor 15:53

[iv] Moses 1:39

[v] Ibid. Cannon, West. 114.

[vi] Cannon, Lincoln. “Inspired by Richard Dawkins and “The God Delusion”” http://lincoln.metacannon.net/2010/06/inspired-by-richard-dawkins-god.html

[vii] Dawkins, Richard. Interview from “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rgtN0pCMQ The God Delusion. (London: Bantam Press, 2006). 15.

[viii] Bostrom, Nick. “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?” http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

[ix] Harris, Sam. “Should We Be Mormons in the Matrix?” http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/is-religion-true-in-the-matrix

[x] Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 39.

[xi] D&C 42:90–91; 121:43

[xii] Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2010. 49.

[xiii] Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. 104.

[xiv] D&C 121:43

[xv] Ibid. 57 — Haidt quotes Mercier and Serber

[xvi] Ibid Haidt — 103–104

[xvii] Ibid Haidt — 114–115

[xviii] Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not A Christian. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. 43.

[xix] Givens, Terryl & Fiona. The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life. USA: Ensign Peak, 2012. 15

[xx] Ibid Givens — 32

[xxi] Givens, Terryl & Fiona. The Crucible of Doubt. Salt Lake City: Desert Book Company, 2014. 40.

[xxii] Mormons Scholars Testify: C. Randall Paulhttp://mormonscholarstestify.org/358/c-randall-paul

[xxiii] Hart, David Bentley. Atheists Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. New Haven & London: The Yale University Press, 2009. 15.

[xxiv] Ibid Hart — 13

[xxv] Derrida, Jacques. White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University Press, 1972. 214.

[xxvi] Ibid Givens/Doubt — 44

[xxvii] Hitchens, Christopher. god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York/Boston: Hachette Book Group, Inc. 2007. 27.

[xxviii] Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. Great Britain: Redwood Burn Limited Trowbridge & Esher, 1975. 179.

[xxix] Mosiah 2:17

[xxx] Harris, Sam. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 10.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Don’t Aim At Religion — Look Beyond It: A Response to My Critics

It was recently pointed out to me that I had made a straw-man out of the atheistic predilection for evidence based on a previous post I had written. I should clarify in advance that it was not my intention to suggest that atheists are pretending to have religious faith (by which they mean trust in some invisible sky-master) when relying upon pedestrian faith (or “Bayesian reasoning”) to actualize their goals. I understand very much what kind of “faith” most atheists are attacking in these discussions — namely, any metaphysical proposition unverified by science or unexplained by reason. In the pedestrian sense, I am well aware that atheists generally do not demand proof for hoping that their actions will lead to desired future outcomes. This posture is true even if they call “faith” by different names (motivation, desire, optimism, etc.). In the religious sense, I am also aware that faith is not a very good epistemology, even though what it points us to can provide us with a centering mythology that awakens in us our very best selves. Allow me to unpack these statements with better clarity.

I will begin with the emperor and his nakedness.

I actually thought this was a rather clear analogy used to point out where my argument had been misunderstood. To borrow the language of my critic: 

“[Atheists are] trying to point out the emperor (religious faith as an epistemology) has no clothes (validity as a reliable epistemology) and your strawman is that we’re demanding a micron electroscope to examine the particles of the emperor’s saddle (day to day activities). Let’s focus on the emperor and his clear nakedness.”

As I have already stated, I am very much aware that there are foundational differences in the faith-claims that atheists are engaging. Drawing attention to the fact that atheists hold many unproven aspirations but do not demand evidence for their realization was simply an ironic way to illustrate how a form of faith is still being used in the very instance of denying it completely. I wouldn’t argue I had built a straw-man, but rather was pointing out how atheists are often unconsciously relying upon a stolen concept in the service of their goals, owing strictly to a difference in our vocabulary. I do not blame them for doing this anymore than I would be blamed for defining faith in pedestrian kinds of ways. It was an attempt to draw a bridge, however humbly that may have been translated in the minds of my readers. I am very much in agreement though that the “emperor and his clear nakedness” needs to be the central focus of this discussion.

Religious faith as an epistemology only fails when you aim at religion itself. For example, there clearly are whole rafts of unfalsifiable events and doctrines in the scriptures, which, if aimed at directly, have potential to distract you from more important concerns. This may sound like subterfuge, artful dodging, or refusal to engage tough questions. I will admit I feel agnostically-atheistic about many of these stories, and believe that many interpretations of them should be criticized. However, the reason I am not preoccupied with them is that I care dramatically less about whether they are historically true and more about whether they are existentially true. This posture has led many of my critics to call me a closet-atheist, a term I have warmly welcomed as a practicing Latter-day Saint. What is meant by existentially true? Dostoevsky captured the power of this question better than anyone I’ve read, and I quote it here because of its inextricable ties to why religion needs to be understood existentially:

“If someone proved to me that Christ were outside the truth, and in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”[i]

At first blush, this statement may seem to disappoint. We should, after all, include truth among our deepest values. Yet, when pursuing truth directly in the abstract, head on, by mere reason alone, and thus amputate truth from its far more pressing, humanistic concerns — “How shall I live this day?” and “How shall I treat others?” — we run the risk of using reason not in support of truth but in support of our emotional attachments. For Dostoevsky, truth was not merely a rolodex of scientific or historical “facts.” Truth gained greater, more enduring meaning in relation to the quality of being a person made manifest. And no person better personified that quality, that good life, said Dostoevsky, than Christ. The prophet Moroni in the Book of Mormon essentially illuminated this same insight of equating the quality of goodness with the concept of truth: “And whatsoever thing is good is just and true.”[ii] In other words, there is something more powerful that gives truth its meaning than mere reason alone, and that “something” may be deemed profoundly existential.

Let me break this down before I’m accused of mincing words.

Aim at religion itself as an epistemology and you will get a whole shelf of dogmatic, irrational trappings that distract you from viewing religion as it might be viewed: An existential mythology beyond itself to enact this quality of being. Like the Buddhist mantra warns, “Do not confuse the finger pointing at the moon, for the moon itself.” This is a paradox, of course, but it is precisely the kind of paradox that wants atheists to grow beyond seeing “religion [as] merely genuflection to the supernatural.”[iii] Aim now beyond religion, to what religion is pointing at, and you will rightly see religion as an existential vehicle that can point people to enact, embody and mythologically fulfill in themselves a story that describes intelligent humanity learning to put on superintelligent posthumanity.

To see how this works, consider for example the secular-scientific paradigm of New Atheism. Consider the progressive mastery and control with which it seeks over nature, evident in how technology so often “extends, multiplies, and leverages our physical and mental capacities.”[iv] Consider the gaps in the scientific record. Consider how time seals them, making all mysteries and miracles nothing more than a poetic reflection of our own god-like abilities to conquer and fathom our universe. Consider the frequency with which the New Atheism calls human beings to repentance, to wake up, to throw off the primitive superstitions that keep them from enlightenment. In comparable terms, is the New Atheism not revealing the secular moorings of an essentially Mormon mythology?

Let me turn to some telling questions raised by my critic:

“You ignore the fact that the scriptures are rife with examples of theological magic. Why does faith get bolstered by religious history, but not by current events? You also ignore the fact that many religions claim miraculous powers on at least an irregular basis RIGHT NOW. Why can’t they ever seem to pass scientific testing? Why doesn’t God heal amputees?”

These questions aim directly at religion with fundamentalist assumptions I do not share. They’re preoccupied with wanting evidence for things that ignore the religious function of what humans are doing when they seek to heal amputees themselves. They overlook what humanity is doing right now to “miraculously” engineer their own posthumanity, thus working to self-prophetically fulfill (whether knowingly or not) what ancient religious myths and liturgies have always pointed to and provoked about human potential. Again, look beyond the symbols to the mighty realities for which the symbols stand.

To the question why doesn’t God heal amputees, it may be returned, what does it mean to be human if we’re already learning to take control of our evolution through remarkable advances in neurology, genetics, robotics, bioengineering and nano-programming to heal amputees ourselves? What religious nuances are we existentially revealing about ourselves when we assume the responsibility to heal, bless, nurture and develop technologies to relieve, not inflame, the pain and suffering of others? What more is science than a reflection of our own unfinished conquest? Our own embryonic wisdom seeking omniscience? Or in secular terms, seeking “a theory of everything”? Indeed, science is allowing us to rapidly advance that we may very well one day “so radically exceed contemporary capacities that the term “human” may no longer adequately describe [us].”[v]

With such exponentially advancing technologies in place, it is perfectly reasonable to admit, as Timothy Leary believed, “that evolving human intelligence is apparently designed to shape the universe, to navigate the process of evolution, and to fabricate the structure of personal reality.”[vi] It may also mean that our universe is, as New Atheist Sam Harris brought himself to speculate, as “every bit as ridiculous as Joseph Smith said it was.”[vii]

The New Atheists are very much correct then: Science is largely responsible for cultivating within us that adventurous desire to receive yet greater and greater rational knowledge of, and control over, nature. What the New Atheists do not see, or perhaps refuse to see, is when we pursue these endeavors we are giving a body to religious dreams in a very concrete way. This has nothing to do with religion being clairvoyant or necessarily the driving force behind these decisions, but rather that we are enacting, consciously or not, the grand, cosmic narrative of what religion has always told us about ourselves. And what is religion telling us about ourselves? Richard Dawkins, another leading exponent of New Atheism, has already given his musings on such “intriguing possibilities.”[viii]

So has Joseph Smith.

Nothing I have written so far “proves” the existence of some ethereal old-man-in-the-clouds. Rather, it proves that, if we trust in our human potential to become radically more enhanced than what we currently are today, even as we trust we will exceed contemporary capacities to become more benevolent, compassionate and enlightened, then that kind of faith should lead us to reasonably have faith in a particular kind of “God.” Unfortunately, I understand why most atheists feel sensitive about that word. It carries too much baggage for them. And I would agree that egregious mistakes have been made by those who assume the divine role unethically. Naturally then, when discussing human potential (which many atheists I know readily believe in) they will automatically demythologize the divine language used by their opponents by contending we religious folk are merely talking about behavioral science, psychology, neuroscience or maybe even humanism and other secular philosophies.

I would agree with this analysis giving only one caveat: Reason gains no shame by combining “religious titles with secular content.”[ix] We need to learn how to accommodate our terminology, to combine with others for some collective purpose. While descriptions of our future ontology will differ and accommodate many perspectives, we can use religious or secular language to describe the same kinds of concepts, dreams and aspirations shared across varying aesthetic boundaries. As the Mormon Transhumanist Association explains: “What has been expressed in poetic ancient language by untechnical prophets in yesteryear often has a stunning visionary component that can be explained well in technical terms.”[x] This is the essence of cultural atonement, whereby secularists can ironically help spiritualists articulate — and by extension, arguably become — what religions have pointed to since the beginning.

Footnotes

[i] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Complete Letters. 1:195

[ii] Moroni 10:6

[iii] Cannon, Lincoln. “Post-Secularism and the Resurrecting God.”http://lincoln.metacannon.net/2012/06/post-secularism-and-resurrecting-god.html

[iv] Kurzweil, Raymond. The Age of Intelligent Machines. MA: Dai Nippon, 1990. 7.

[v] Members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, in their Sunstone essay, “Transfiguration: Parallels and Compliments Between Mormonism and Transhumanism” http://transfigurism.org/assets/60/transfiguration.pdf

[vi] Leary, Timothy. Your Brain Is God. (USA: Ronin Publishing, Inc.) 48.

[vii] Harris, Sam. “Should We Be Mormons in the Matrix?”http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/is-religion-true-in-the-matrix

[viii] Dawkins, Richard. Interview from “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rgtN0pCMQ

[ix] Cannon, Lincoln. West, Joseph A. “Theological Implications of the New God Argument” as quoted in the book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought an Engineering Vision (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012). 112.

[x] Ibid 1 — “Parallels in Mormon Thought: Physics and Engineering.”

[divinehumanism-blog]

Gods, Aliens, Mormons and Richard Dawkins’ New Atheism

In his 2008 documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, political commentator Ben Stein gently pressed New Atheist exponent Richard Dawkins to reveal a somewhat uncharacteristic testimony of the more plausible versions of intelligent design. It was the kind of testimony that made it appear as though the New Atheists were ignorant of Joseph Smith’s God. Or at least were no longer viewing theosis as the stuff of irrational, nebulous fairytales — but of “intriguing possibility”! To appreciate the depth of Dawkins’ musings, even while sensing its uncanny connection with Mormon doctrine, the passage must be provided in full:

“[Intelligent design] could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology. You might find a signature of some sort of designer, and that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously.”[i]

Keep in mind that Dawkins has only ever meant to call “supernatural gods delusional,” though this says virtually nothing about the more compatible, naturalistic, Darwinian versions of intelligent design that Dawkins here has allowed himself to find reasonable.[ii] Mormonism, as it turns out, readily embraces this same version of intelligent design. In his book, “The God Delusion,” Dawkins further cemented his belief in the “intriguing possibility” of Darwinian-like gods:

“Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century…In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense…the crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn’t start that way…They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution.”[iii]

Mormon transhumanists Lincoln Cannon and Joseph West have provided cutting analysis on the implications of both Dawkins’ brand of atheism and Mormonism’s brand of theism, and have done so in a way that further accentuates the evolving language curtain extant between both Mormons and atheists: ““Eternal progression” is what Mormons call that perhaps unfamiliar version of Darwinian evolution. “God” is what Mormons call those god-like extraterrestrials that didn’t start that way. Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably gods. So says Richard Dawkins. So says Joseph Smith.”[iv]

Footnotes

[i] Dawkins, Richard. Interview from “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rgtN0pCMQ

[ii] Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. (London: Bantam Press, 2006). 15.

[iii] Ibid (72–73, italics added)

[iv] Cannon, Lincoln. West, Joseph A. “Theological Implications of the New God Argument” as quoted in the book, Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought an Engineering Vision (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012). 119–120.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Robo-Renaissance: Ethics of the Singularity

Nothing in our digital economy has been more celebrated or damned, cast as utopian or dystopian, than the rise of modern technology. In recent years this historical narrative of promise and peril concerning the use of technology has challenged our view of who we are in ways both exciting and disturbing. Now, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, our digital nation is embarking on yet another epochal transformation characterized by things often dismissed as science fiction — things that are unreal, things that we will never experience. This new revolution is peculiar too, the kind that director of the Singularity Institute Ray Kurzweil calls a “second Industrial Revolution,” asking: “How long before we take that Bluetooth set in your ear, implant it in your brain, and give it wireless Internet, so that your brain becomes its own massively expanded and augmented search engine?” (qtd. Halpern 108).

This study is an exploration of the ethical implications of what it means to be human under the Kurzweilian “second Industrial Revolution,” where machines are no longer used to strengthen our physical abilities, but to “extend, multiply, and leverage our mental capacities” (Age of Intelligent Machines 7). With its promises to expand the reach of our minds, this new revolution will have a far greater impact on our lives than any other era and will usher forth the next giant step in human evolution as it concerns conscious machines and immortal software beings. In short, it will be a robot renaissance, one in which humans gain “immortality by becoming one with robot technology” (Joy “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”).

Questions have risen whether these robots will be smarter than humans, and if so, what unsettling or hopeful connotations will this hold for a post-humanized world. What will this mutant-transhuman status mean for a digital economy relying more and more on technology as a means to survive, and what moral boundaries are there to consider? After all, Kurzweil’s Singularity is not without its critics. Many fear that the essence of humanity may well be lost with the new robotic uprising, leading to a position of such techno-cultural dependence and possible enslavement that to ever shut it down would be tantamount with suicide. The emphasis of this study will therefore be to swim, as it were, between the ethical channels of the Singularity’s birth as monstrous, threatening, versus its promises to expand, improve human life. For as Kurzweil contends, this “[second Industrial revolution] cannot be stopped. We need to understand it, live creatively with it, and harness it constructively” (9).

For the purposes of this study, I will begin with a brief, prophetic sketch related to how science fiction literature has already begun to materialize the pipe-dreams of Kurzweil and his team of future-seekers. Specifically, I will explore the delicate boundary that separates science from fiction, reality from fantasy, by using Sigmund Freud’s theory of “the uncanny” to illuminate Kurzweil’s robo-thesis of breathing life into machines. I will then contemplate the ethical dimensions, both pros and cons, of Kurzweil’s vision of robo-immortality. Finally, I hope to underscore the significance of today’s “second Industrial Revolution,” what it will mean in terms of human identity, and what strategies can be used to “reap the promise while we manage the peril” (Kurzweil, “Promise and Peril”).

In 1974 science fiction author Joe Haldeman proposed a fanciful vision of genetic engineering in his book The Forever War, where machines are controlled by mere human thought. The characters in his book can shoot guns, drive cars, operate bionic limbs, interstellar tanks and space suits with nothing but their minds. As a matter of speculative tinkering, the world that Haldeman envisions is a world which in 1974 was exactly that — something speculative. Exploratory. Highly chimerical. The kind of stuff extant only in fictions and dime novels. Yet, in 2008, paraplegics Scott Mackler and Cathy Hutchinson were the first successful human beings to have their brains connected to a computer technology referred to as “brain computer interface,” or “BCI.” This new bioengineering device, as strange as it may sound, is a skull-cap grid of electrodes full of hundreds of tiny sensors, each which have the capacity to listen to different brain cells and record what a person thinks (“Harnessing” Article). Andy Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, explains that if “a paralyzed patient thinks to move his or her left arm…the brain fires those neurons, even though the arm doesn’t move” (“Harnessing” Article). Such a device essentially allows for mentally sharp but corporeally paralyzed persons to control anything a computer is connected to. And indeed, as remarkable as this is, BCI has already enabled Scott and Cathy to operate computers, write emails, and drive wheelchairs with nothing but their thoughts.

The fact that Haldeman’s unlikely sci-fi vision of 1974 materializes so strongly in today’s sudden leap in scientific evolution brings to mind Paul Feyerabend’s anarchic philosophy that “the most laughable myth may eventually turn into the most solid piece of science” (52). Similar fiction-to-fact paradigm shifts are evident in the sci-fi writings of Michael Crichton, especially in his book The Terminal Man (1972), where doctors insert computer chips into the brains of paralysis patients to restore their motor functions[1]. This convergence of humans and machines, animate beings and inanimate objects, represents an enchanting, aesthetic sphere for human beings to unleash and cultivate powerful creativity. By today’s digitized standards, it seems that people can already endow lifeless objects, things like silicon chips, “with the internal purposiveness, symbolic significance, and full presence of a living thing — that is to say, with a “spirit” or “soul” (Rutsky 24). The animation of technology, more specially, the bringing to life of something once considered dead, or secret, or magical, or fictitious, is frequently a source of what Freud calls “the uncanny” (unheimlich).

Freud bases his analysis of the uncanny on the German counter notion of heimlich, i.e. what is familiar or intimate, but which is also strange or concealed. He defines the uncanny as that frightening moment of when we are estranged from the familiar, or, brought face to face with the unfamiliar, “as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (Freud 244). Indeed, those instances that evoke the feeling of the uncanny — like when the primal fantasy elements of sci-fi novels become scientifically established — represent not only a push away from a rational, household sense of realism; they cause us to enlarge our narcissistic definitions of reality and thus return to a magical “animistic conception of the universe” which, for us, is either haunted or divined by living spirits (240). Thus, a feeling of the uncanny as provoked by the birth of the machine, or when technology is brought to life, can be seen as a threat that effaces the distinction between what we believe is real and unreal, heimlich and unheimlich.

For a visionary technophile like Ray Kurzweil, the uncanny will most likely be quenched by his overpowering optimism for a future of human-machine civilization. Call him crazy, call him nuts, Kurzweil and his team of cyber-techies are making remarkable headway on some rather fascinating technologies that, believingly or not, blur the boundaries between science and fiction, reality and fantasy. “Science fiction writers,” he tells us, “have long speculated on a generation of intelligent machines that set their own agendas” (Age of Intelligent Machines 18). And now, given our postindustrial status of extant artificial intelligence, along with a “characterization of the human mind as a machine, albeit an immensely complicated one,” Kurzweil predicts that the birth of sentient robots is only a couple of decades away (13).

Given the fact that Kurzweil has correctly forecast other future developments in the past (e.g. Internet explosion, wireless revolution, bioengineering cybernetics) there is good reason to consider the fruits of his mechanical philosophy. This “second Industrial Revolution,” as he calls it, also referred to as the Singularity, is based on widespread information and nanotechnologies that supposedly will marshal in the not-too-distant moment when we humans become part machine, then fully machine, and finally “immortal software beings” (Halpern 82). The basic idea behind this revolution is that we will eventually upload the contents of our minds to computers so that we no longer will have need for a corporeal existence, “no need for bodies that will eventually wrinkle, break down, and die” (82). In a YouTube conference address on the Singularity’s ever-growing, rapid expansion, Kurzweil reminds us that “these A.I.’s are not a world apart. It’s going to be integrated with us; it’s already very close to us. It’s on my belt [pointing to his cell phone strapped to his side], and it’ll eventually make [it’s] way in our bodies and brains — we will become the machines” (“Critics of the Singularity”). In a deeply provocative yet frightening spiritual way, Kurzweil suggests that this technology will usher forth the nuts-and-bolts stepping stones for which humans have forever dreamed of but have never been witnesses to — “We will live forever [on the Internet]” he says (qtd. Halpern 82). And he means every word of it too.

Kurzweil’s robo-thesis of breathing “life” into machines, making them one with humans, has engendered much criticism from the scientific community and corporate media. Aside from the fracas of academic criticism of whether a machine can truly ever “think,” there have been more pressing ethical concerns related to the unintended consequences that this technology might incur on the entire human race. As Vernor Vinge articulates, “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended” (“The Coming Technological Singularity”). Vinge’s view is that machines will eventually succeed us, that the question of whether we survive or fall victim to our technology has already been answered. Humans will lose, or rather, humans will be transcended. Such haunting words dovetail off of the claims made in Hans Moravec’s book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. As a contemporary leader in transhumanist robotics research programs, Moravec writes that “biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors… Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence” (49). An ethical question that needs answering, then, is whether the Singularity’s technological approach to Eternity is worth pursuing. The questions are, indeed, which is to be master, and which is to be slave? Our widgets, or us?

In his essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” computer scientist Bill Joy praises Kurzweil’s ability to imagine and create the future anew, but ultimately asserts that replacing ourselves with robot technology would be more destructive than beneficial. Too many scientists, he tells us, while in the “rapture of discovery,” fail to understand the consequences of their inventions, “not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own” (Joy). Once technology is seen beyond human control or prediction and appears to “take on a life of its own,” or seems endowed with a sense of autonomy, we suddenly might feel ourselves thrust back to our older, more “primitive” and “supernatural” selves that modernity, believing itself to have surpassed, harbors as patently irrational (Rutsky 18). Some have argued we would no longer feel anchored in a familiar environment, one that is steady or predictable, but would grow suddenly uneasy, fearing the position of authority that our once “dead” technological objects had paraded over us. Under such circumstances we would incur the frightening effects of “the uncanny.”

A subtext of the Kurzweilian thesis, according to molecular nanotechnologist J. Storrs Hall, is that there may be a sudden emergence of a demonic, ghastly spirit that animates our otherwise lifeless technological objects “at a superhuman level, due to positive feedbacks in its autogenous capabilities”(“Building the Brain: The Age of Virtuous Machines”). He calls such technological objects “superhuman psychopaths” — the kind without a conscience that might “appear virtually overnight and be so powerful as to achieve universal dominance” (Hall). Such a dystopian representation of technology would not only evoke the uncanny within us. It would create an existential threat of what it means to be human. In his book High Techne, R.L. Rutsky believes that such a circumstance would lead “to a repression of nature, to the alienation or severing of humanity from (its) nature” (56). Bill Joy sees the Singularity in a similar light; a project, he says, that would awaken those dystopian visions of disaster and dehumanization so prevalent in science fiction media since, after all, “if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost” (Joy “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us).

Given the incredible power of Kurzweil’s robo-thesis, other more iconoclastic scientists like Jaron Lanier have slammed the notion of a technological Singularity as “cybernetic totalism” (i.e. totalitarianism), while Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter has likened the Singularity’s aims unto a somewhat humorous analogy: “It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid” (Lanier “One Half of a Manifesto,” qtd. American Scientist “An Interview with Douglas Hofstadter”). Even the murderous actions of the Neo-Luddite Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, in his attempt to bring down Kurzweil’s campaign in the mid-1990’s, voiced cutting criticism on technology’s ability to outstrip human morality and freedom. His Unabomber manifesto was later published by the New York Times and Washington Post, in part reading:

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that if the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish to hand over all the power to the machines. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide(The Age of Spiritual Machines 121).

It is a commonplace complaint against Kurzweil’s Singularity that as technology grows in its accumulation of great power and, in tandem, great danger, that the dystopian vision so vividly described by Kaczynski will, in effect, overwhelm any streak of utility or integrity in the project and will conversely become a living, nightmarish reality. Environmentalist Bill McKibben takes the position that we “must now grapple squarely with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more” (qtd. Kurzweil “Promise and Peril”). Yet, aside from all the published Terminator manifestos, essays, books, and dissertations, Kurzweil holds firmly that technology has always been a “double-edged sword,” making the reality of our sophisticated machines both an empowerment and a salient danger. Recognition of our technology’s alarming capabilities, he tells us, is “not a compelling reason to avoid its creation.” As regards McKibben’s criticism, Kurzweil contends that his position “ignores the extensive suffering that remains in the human world, which we will be in a position to alleviate through continued technological progress” (Kurzweil “Promise and Peril”). The application of A.I. technology to assist the needs of the severely disabled has always been of personal interest to Kurzweil. In his book The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), he writes:

It is my belief that the potential exists within the next one or two decades to greatly ameliorate the principal handicaps associated with sensory and physical disabilities such as blindness, deafness, and spinal cord injuries. New bioengineering techniques that rely on expert systems and computer-assisted design stations for biological modeling are fueling new optimism for effective treatments of a wide range of diseases, including genetic disorders (8).

Written in 1990, these words have now become manifest as living realities. As a result, many have come to a greater realization that A.I. technology can be used as a force for good to solve problems that have plagued humans for centuries. It has brought us cures for many diseases, increased longevity and the quality of life, and has afforded us freedoms to reinstate life functions to the physically disabled. Where fears exist that this technology will dehumanize, outstrip or dismember the emotions that define human life, Scott Mackler, aforementioned as the first successful paralyzed-participant of BCI, claims that “his skullcap interface is a machine that has given him back his humanity” (“Harnessing” Article). Blind, deaf, and other disabled persons have equally benefitted from this burgeoning outsource of A.I. machinery, including Kurzweil’s invention of the reading machine[2]. Of particular interest in recent years has been the rising growth in genetic engineering and nanomedicine studies related to life extension therapies. A strong, healthy, youthful body that can defeat the fatalist assumption of physiological decay has long been a dream for virtually every human being. Today, Kurzweil and his team of nanogeneticists expect that in the not-too-distant future people will be able “to exert total control over [their] own biological aging” (de Grey “Living Forever”). Such biomedical technology would effectively reverse age-related entropy and, in time, eliminate even the sting of death. In his book “Ending Aging,” gerontologist Aubrey de Grey argues that the “body is a machine” that ages like any other man-made machine, but one that nevertheless can be maintained and, eventually, preserved eternally. He explains his Eternal dream in the following way:

The aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage…Just as people were wrong for centuries about how hard it was to fly but eventually cracked it, we’ve been wrong since time immemorial about how hard aging is to combat but we’ll eventually crack it too…The key conclusion of the logic I’ve set out above is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely (qtd. de Grey “Living Forever”).

At a recent Singularity conference, Kurzweil predicted that by 2050 nanomedical advances will allow microscopic machines to travel into a person’s body and repair all types of damages at the molecular and cellular level, thus preserving and even improving the quality of life dramatically (The Age of Spiritual Machines174). He describes how the “aging process could at first be slowed, then halted, and then reversed as newer and better medical technologies became available” (174). According to his predictions, the delicate boundary between humans and machines will then continue to blur and coalesce until humans fully upgrade themselves with cybernetic implants that promise a very real sense of robo-immortality. Such changes will come ever so gradually, he says, to improve still further the human race, until we are accustomed to these machines as being “aesthetically pleasing and functionally effective” (Age of Intelligent Machines 20). We will slowly feel, in other words, a sense of familiarity and “at-homeness” with these machines, and will less readily get the impression of something supernatural, occult, or uncanny. Within a matter of decades, it begins to appear that this process of technological transmutation might shed light on some of the biggest questions of our existence. And perhaps, just perhaps, we might find satisfactory answers to such questions as: “Who are we?” “Who are we going to become?” and “What’s the future like?”

Indeed, to accept the implications of this “second Industrial Revolution,” as Kurzweil sees it, is to let go of our conceptions, at least in part, of what it has meant to be human. Traditionally, since the Renaissance rise of a rationalist, scientific enterprise, the human subject has been defined as the ultimate authority of his domain — that is, by his inferred mastery over the world. In effect, the mandate of the Renaissance had called men and women to technologize the world, to reduce it into abstract, nominal, and controllable forms. All spirits which previously animated the world and its attendant objects were to be essentially stripped, killed off by this technologicalization[3].

During this process objects were rendered “dead,” superstitious beliefs were disenchanted, and all things were left subjugated to rational use and prediction. In Sophist language, the human race had become the measure of all things truthful, all things knowing. Yet, given today’s growing acceptance and rejection of where the Industrial future might be headed, admitting that our relation to technology has not yet been clearly articulated, and that scientists with mainstream credibility have failed to reach consensus of what A.I. actually is, brings the very title that we have established for ourselves as active, controlling, scientific subjects, necessarily into question.

The ambiguity of this question of who or what the human subject is has left us split between those who rejoice in technology and its ability to improve human values and those who would see it as the destroyer of human contact and community. It seems we either cling to the Renaissance mandate of having total control over physical objects and, by extension, the nature of our technology, or, we take a more existential approach rooted in the belief that our technology, at least in part, lies beyond fully rational exploration or prediction. In the latter case, we are to acknowledge the limits of our reason by not meddling with, what Rutsky calls, the “technological other”[4] (36).

He goes on to explain that “when this utopian ideal [i.e. the Renaissance mandate] comes into question [as it certainly has today under the Singularity status]…technology can no longer be subordinated to human purposes or control; it becomes an end in itself — which is to say, it comes to life” (25). As Freud has noted, the idea of an inanimate object coming to life can awaken the feeling of being robbed of familiarity, of certainty, and thereby push us back into the pre-Enlightened, “animistic conception of the universe” ruled by “other” forces and agencies. Such forces and agencies are clearly evident in the inner-workings of the Singularity, thus causing human subjects to reimagine human identity in new, unprecedented ways.

Depending on how open we are to the fluidity and mutations of what the Singularity promises will determine largely if we experience this “second Industrial Revolution” as uncanny or natural, dreadful or glorious, fiction or fact, unreal or real. Rutsky believes that “it is perhaps only by allowing ourselves to ride — and indeed, to live — within the unpredictable flows and currents of techno-culture that we can hope to learn, not how to control it, but how to hack its codes, to reroute the subroutines of its logic, in order to create new patterns of interaction, whose results we cannot yet see” (127). This statement almost mirrors exactly what Kurzweil says of the Singularity: “It cannot be stopped. We need to understand it, live creatively with it, and harness it constructively” (Age of Intelligent Machines 9).

Today’s digitized economy has almost unwittingly become a hybrid, permeable mix of humans (subjects) and technology (objects). Currently, we have been shown neither to be the masters of our environment nor the victims of it. If anything, we seem to be floating somewhere in the murky middle, surfing a kind of fortuitous, transmutational wave that is hopefully leading us to promising shores. The question of what strategies can be used in this next revolution to “reap the promise while we manage the peril” is therefore of utmost importance.

One answer of how this can be achieved is founded in our attitude towards the new. More intimately, what feelings do we have about ourselves in relation to reinventing ourselves anew? Are we satisfied with who we currently are, or do we still long to transcend our limits and explore ways to enhance our humanity, be it via our technology, our music, our rituals, our myths, or our religion? In the context of this next revolution, the question of being prepared or unprepared for its consequences has strong ties to whether our current conceptual framework of reality is malleable, like plastic, or rigid, like flint. For Rutsky, to truly be an authentic human subject is “to allow ourselves to change, to mutate, to become alien, cyborg, posthuman” (21). Underscored in this belief allows whatever to come what may and love “it.” Familiarize yourself with “it.” Evolve with “it.” Do all these things despite its otherworldly nature. Rutsky poetically articulates:

…This mutant, posthuman status is not a matter of armoring the body, adding robotic prostheses, or technologically transferring consciousness from the body; it is not, in other words, a matter of fortifying the boundaries of the subject, of securing identity as a fixed entity. It is rather a matter of unsecuring the subject, of acknowledging the relations and mutational processes that constitute it…This change it itself a mutational process that cannot be rationally predicted or controlled; it can only be imagined, figured, through a techno-cultural process that is at once science-fictional and aesthetic. It is only through opening ourselves to this kind of creative process, by taking part in the complex web of relations in which we are implicated, rather than simply trying to control them, that we can hope to imagine, to bring representation, a future that, though it may see unpredictable and alien, will inevitably be our own (21–22).

Are we accustomed to living with routine scientific breakthroughs that we welcome new revelations with warm embraces? Or do we, like some rigorous cynic, close our doors to fanciful revelations because they currently do not fit comfortably with what we believe is possible? An honest answer to each of these questions might help us manage the onslaught of techno-cultural promise and peril which surely will appear on our shores just as the seasons follow their orbits. It is for us to decide, us to discern. Thus, adapting a line from Hugh Nibley, time will vindicate the technological prophets of our day as we face the undiscovered country of our future.

WORKS CITED

BrainGate: Wired for Thought. http://www.braingate.com/

Freud, Sigmund. (1919h). Das Unheimliche. Imago, The “Uncanny,” SE. 240, 244.

de Grey, Aubrey. “Living Forever: Bootstrapping our way to an Ageless Future.” http://www.kurzweilai.net/bootstrapping-our-way-to-an-ageless-future

Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. London: Redwood Burn Limited Trowbridge & Esher, 1975. 52.

Hall, Storrs J. “Building the Brain: The Age of Virtuous Machines.”http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-age-of-virtuous-machines

Halpern, Dan. “Are You Ready for the Singularity?” GQ Magazine, Fall 2009. 82, 108.

Harnessing the Power of the Brain (60 Minutes Online Article)http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/31/60minutes/main4560940.shtml

Hofstadter, Douglas. “An Interview with Douglas Hofstadter.”http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hofstadter

Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Kurzweil, Raymond. The Age of Intelligent Machines. MA: Dai Nippon, 1990. 7, 8, 9, 13, 18, 20, 441.

— The Age of Spiritual Machines. NY: Penguin Classics, 2000. 121, 174.

— “Critics of the Singularity” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjRHwPxSCw&feature=player_embedded

— “Promise and Peril of Technology in the 21stCentury.” 

Lanier, Jaron. “One Half of a Manifesto” http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_p1.html

Moravec, Hans. Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. 49.

Rutsky, R.L. High Techne. MN: Minnesota Press, 1999. 18, 21–2, 24, 35, 36, 56, 127.

Vinge, Vernor. “The Coming of the Technological Singlarity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”

[1] At the time it was written, Crichton, like Haldeman, was merely toying with the possibility of helping paralyzed people walk again and amputees move bionic limbs. However, these things were not yet manifest as tangible realities. It would take several more decades for technology to sufficiently advance before BrainGate, a special version of BCI, would allow “severely disabled individuals — including those with traumatic spinal cord injury and loss of limbs — to communicate and control common every-day functions literally through thought” (“BrainGate”).

[2] In 1978 Kurzweil was awarded with the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his invention of the reading machine — a computer-based, pocket-sized device that reads essentially with perfect intonation printed pages aloud. It can also describe pictures and graphics. The device was created to assist the blind and dyslexic (Age of Intelligent Machines 441).

[3] While the ancient Greek world was entrenched in a rich mythic tradition using anthropomorphic gods and demons to explain the origins of the cosmos, a new and unprecedented tradition emerged that divorced from supernatural explanations and took a more rational, scientific approach to understanding reality. This new approach banished (or “killed”) myth altogether and began a rich philosophical tradition of criticism and individual discovery.

[4] Rutsky uses this phrase to elicit the dark side of technology; the fully autonomous, psychopathic kind represented in German Expressionistic films likeMetropolis (1926), where machines threaten to “take the place of the truly living” (36). “It evokes the fear,” he says, “that human beings will themselves become mere objects or tools: slave to technology, cogs in a machine, technologized zombies” (146). As an end in itself, technology thus creates its own agenda that lies beyond human prediction or control — it becomes a living thing.

[divinehumanism-blog]

Understanding the Religious Mind: Engaging Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt on Religious Ethics

A couple years back I read two crosscurrent studies on the controversial nature of morality. One book was by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt titled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The other was by neuroscientist Sam Harris called The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Each book was exceptionally well written, well researched, even while not always well argued. Yet both were conducive to an important conversation that is very well needed in the world at large today.

How powerful or limited do we believe the moral capacity to reason is, and reason well? This question finds Harris and Haidt, both self-proclaimed atheists, fundamentally at odds with each other with respect to this sacred and cursed gift. And how they perceive this gift explains a lot about the primacy of their goals to effectuate positive change in the world.

Let me briefly sketch each thinker’s thesis, then move to compare/contrast, applaud/criticize their views.

Haidt believes we must first understand why people tend to follow certain patterns of thought (however silly or dangerous they may seem) before judging their moralities as wrong, or casting away those we don’t like. Conversely, it is a mistake, he says, to question any morality “as really good, true, or justifiable” before we have “cultivated some understanding of what such moralities are trying to accomplish.” Moral diversity is to be empathetically explored first, carefully judged second (Haidt 114-115).

Harris argues that this sympathetic approach is irrelevant, saying that the most important task facing humanity in the Twenty First Century is to change people’s ethical commitments through scientific persuasion. There are objectively right and wrong answers of how to maximize human well-being, he says, whether we know these answers now or not, and that we not only are able to ascertain these facts through reason but should also “convince people who are committed to silly and harmful patterns of thought and behavior in the name of “morality” to break these commitments and to live better lives” (Harris 49).

On these grounds, the chasm splitting Harris and Haidt is entirely the chasm splitting moral descriptivism from moral prescriptivism. This chasm, based on David Hume’s famous “is/ought” argument, entails that no description of the way the world is can ever tell us how we ought to behave morally. A large gulf, therefore, is said to separate facts from values — a gulf that Harris tries to reconcile in his book.

Where Harris leans on the belief that there are facts to be known about human-flourishing, and that we should persuade others to accept these facts, Haidt temporarily sets aside these prescriptive questions in favor of us first coming to grips with a descriptive understanding of why we behave the way we do—what our goals are, in other words—and it is here that I find his moral priorities generally more enlightened than Harris.

If people do not feel that we first “get them,” or if they sense that we don’t care enough to illuminate their beliefs in the best light possible, then chances of us collapsing the gulf between descriptive and prescriptive ethics (what Harris wants to enact through persuasive reasoning) will be highly unlikely. Harms are bound to compound when we apply our competitive impulses to social conversation (in team psychology this is referred to as the “We’re right, you’re wrong” mentality). Problems occur when we seek to persuade others in the absence of our empathy, even if “we” really are right and “they” really are wrong. We must learn, as Haidt insists, to first speak to people’s hearts before trying to strategically reason, alter their paradigms. We must first win their trust.

A lack of empathy seems to underscore the biggest flaw to Harris’ Persuasion Project (see “Harris” points 2 and 3 on pg. 49). Granted, he does make it rather easy for us to agree with him by condemning certain systems of morality, like religious fundamentalism, to the extent that they are often cruel, harsh and to some degree autocratic. I would hope few people would doubt these systems as less desirable for the world. And yet, while I do not deny that religions do, at times, deserve these criticisms, such caricatures do not “render a fair judgment about religion” as a whole (Haidt 288). My brother Trevor agreed to this point when he recently stated: “Atheists consider it a waste of time to try and understand religion and religious believers. They believe a “I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s why” tactic will save them the trouble of having to invest time into really understanding the religious perspective. As you said, it lacks empathy.” Of course, the same can be said of religious people who use this same tactic to deny the burgeoning growth of scientific knowledge.

Harris tries to deny his cartoon-portrayal of religious beliefs by demanding that he, as well as the rest of his atheistic horsemen, takes “seriously” the “specific claims” of religion, yet this can hardly be trusted in the wake of his own logic that people will often “choose to focus on certain facts to the exclusion of others [like choosing to see nothing but evil in religion], to emphasize the [bad] rather than the [good]” (Harris 139, reversed “bad” and “good”). Harris no doubt has a testimony of apostate religion. His fixation on pointing out where religion goes wrong makes sense, too, given that he isn’t a moral descriptivist, like Haidt, and therefore feels no need to describe religion accurately. But does this mindset not have disastrous consequences for healing our present day culture wars? Do people really respond better, as Harris seems to believe, to systematic reason over empathetic emotion?

According to Haidt, no. If we want to change people’s minds about morality, reasoning is not the way to do it. At least not initially. We first have to address people’s emotions, see the good in their intentions, and convince them that we’re trying to identify with their thoughts and feelings even if we don’t completely agree. This is the first step towards dissolving barriers and putting down guards. People respond first to their moral intuitions, says Haidt, and “if you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion” (Haidt 59).

Ironically, even Harris seems to admit the truth of these claims yet still continues to worship reason as the arbiter of all moral change when he states: “There are, in fact, people who will not be persuaded by anything I have to say on the subject of [morality],” no matter how reasonable it may come across (Harris 203). Haidt suggests this is because reason is typically not used in the service of truth, but instead to construct post hoc justifications for our feelings (86). The “rationalist delusion,” he calls it, is the belief that reasoning is our most noble attribute and that doing it well about ethical issues inspires better behavior. “But if this were the case,” he asks, “then moral philosophers—who reason about ethical principles all day long—should be more virtuous than other people. Are they?” (Haidt 103, 104).

Haidt is skeptical, and so am I. This isn’t to accuse him of being a moral relativist, as Harris mistakenly does, but instead makes him a little more reluctant to label morally ambiguous beliefs and behaviors as objectively right or wrong. That said, I do believe Harris is on to something important when he argues for the objectivity of moral truths—“objective” not because there are truths that exist outside of our conscious experience (like Plato’s ethereal realm of the forms), but “objective” because there really are “right and wrong answers to moral questions, whether or not we can always answer these questions in practice” (Harris 30).

As stereotypes about atheism go, it being a bitter, immoral, relativistic philosophy, this sort of argument shatters those antiquated myths ten-fold. Harris contends that in principle, science can tell us what we should do and should want, insomuch that the goal of morality is to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures and minimize suffering. This is the loftiest push away from the current vogue of multiculturalism, political correction, and moral tolerance that admit to no objective answers to moral questions. Harris is able to put forward a persuasive case to the extent that he says that goal-directed behavior—that is, if we are to achieve A, we reasonably ought to do B—plays a crucial role for us either moving up or down the “moral landscape”—a metaphor he uses to express the fact that some people have better lives than others, and that these differences are lawfully connected to states of the brain that govern behavior (Harris 15).

A fascinating question from this thesis emerges.

If Harris is, in fact, correct about higher and lower states of human flourishing, and that these states admit to right and wrong answers about life’s most pressing questions related to things like health and happiness, what purpose would religion serve in our lives if science can contend for a better framework for moral wisdom?

It is clear where Harris stands on this question: religion would serve no purpose. Haidt, to the contrary, does not dismiss religion as swiftly but instead seeks first to understand it by explaining its function. Religion, first and foremost, he states, functions as a commune of individuals bounded by norms, relationships and promises that help them “to achieve together what they cannot achieve own their own” (Haidt quotes E.O. Wilson on pg. 303, 313). These communes adhere to strict external constraints in the form of laws, commandments, group cohesiveness, etc. While Haidt admits that these constraints sometimes lead certain religions to demonize other groups (and in extreme cases, leads them to moralistic killings), such constraints operate for the most part to “link people together into healthy, trusting relationships,” to curb selfish behavior, so as to improve the ethical profile of the group, and by extension, the individual (339).

A large, complex discussion can open here regarding the efficacy of sociocentric versus individualistic moralities; the former argues that people flourish best in the context of groups, relationships, and institutions, even if individual needs get dismissed a long the way; the latter replies that any tolerance for personal harm is unacceptable, that the needs of the individual must be placed above the needs of the group, thus suggesting that “any rule or practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned” (20).

Each of these moral paradigms no doubt have their challenges, but for the purpose of answering the question about the role of religion, that is, if it should serve any real moral function in the world at large, Haidt argues that we must first see the benefits of what sociocentric morality tries to accomplish for religion, and the human family generally, even if it isn’t always perfect at doing so.

For religious communes, Haidt draws upon the work of conservative sociologist Emile Durkheim to show that the effect of sociocentric rituals, laws and constraints work best to “socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures” (192). The basic social unit of society is the family, he says, not the individual, for without the hierarchically structured family to help build strong constraining relationships that foster values of self-control over self-expression, the social fabric that holds nations together begins to unfold. In 1897 Durkheim wrote: “Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.”

This may seem like a pessimistic view of human nature, that if left to ourselves we will begin to cheat and behave selfishly, yet Haidt’s entire book shows through myriad case studies how there’s much truth to consider here in relation to what human flourishing might mean. The 1960’s and 70’s, for example, representing not a “peak” but a “valley” on the moral landscape. He argues that there’s actually a great deal of evidence suggesting that religions do help groups to cohere, cooperate, and survive much longer than those who live in looser communities with a less binding moral matrix (298-313). The “secret ingredient” to a religion’s shelf life, he says, is based on the amount of sacrifice demanded of its congregational members. The more sacrifice demanded, the longer the religion lasts. The more control over human passions, like giving up certain base appetites, the less delinquency on the streets.

Haidt’s studies show that religions do a better job at binding people together, suppressing their selfish motives through sacrifice, more so than secularly liberal societies typically achieve, so much that the very “ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship” (Haidt 299). Irrational beliefs, in other words, help religions function more rationally—that is, they function to create a strenuous mood among individuals who, in turn, help build communities of cooperative souls. This is evidenced by belief in God, which Haidt argues is a very effective means of social control to “reduce cheating and oath breaking,” and to bring about a stronger moral capital for society at large (Haidt 297, 342).

Secular liberals may find in religion a perfect target for their criticism, calling into question the predations of the communally elite, the margin of victims who often get abused in large groups, etc. These are important concerns that conservative institutions need to evaluate and get better at minimizing. However, because looser communities rely more readily on internal compasses (e.g. reason, personal judgment) as opposed to stricter social pressures that reshape and refine lone bias and egoism, they’re also more likely, according to Durkheim, to devolve into “normlessness” (313). Haidt expounds further: “We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago” (-).

Haidt argues that where secular liberals go wrong is linked to their devaluing the purpose of what sociocentric morals serve, wanting change and reform too quickly, and not taking into consideration the effects that such changes will have on moral capital at large. Harris is in full agreement here with Haidt against the tides of liberal doubt, only he doesn’t believe that religion is a better or even legitimate answer for how to effectively create cooperative groups. There are better reasons to be moral, he says, than to believe in God.

I can accept Harris on this point to the extent that the kind of religion he attacks is based on a set of beliefs about supernatural agents that incite people to do good or quell evil on the principle of divine commands, which I believe is preliminary but eventually misguided. More naturally-inclined religious paradigms see magic and superstition merely as preparatory elements for future, more erudite awakenings, which is to say that mature religious people may initially behave ethically in order to obtain divine merit (duty based ethics) but will later be moral for its own benefits without need of metaphysical grounding (love based ethics). Doing good should be its own reward.

Furthermore, it is true, as Harris argues, that the spread of prosperous, stable, and democratic societies has greatly diminished the need for religious belief in the world, and this phenomenon makes most sense, I believe, in the context of how secularists envision the god-of-the-gaps theory. Carl Sagan sums up the theory as follows: “As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do; that is, whatever it is we cannot[currently] explain is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm” (The Varieties of Scientific Experience, 64). And yet, after innumerable philosophers and secular thinkers predicted the demise of religion in the glowing light of modernity, religion still stands.

How can this be?

I conclude now with a few personal thoughts.

The question of religion’s continued existence in the wake of modernity is a question teeming with moral significance, not because it isn’t possible to be moral without God or religion, but because choosing to view religion as something other than conservative dogmatism, or something other than mere superstition, can promote a particular mood about what it might mean to be human. No one yet really knows what it means to be human. We are still in process. We are beginning to control our own evolution through emerging technologies and becoming empowered to control which direction we want to go. Harris argues that we can move “up” or “down” the moral landscape, “that there must be frontiers of human well-being that await our discovery” (Harris 206).

To understand that we are evolving, that change is inevitable, allows for the exciting potential of what we may become. For me, this excitement is based on the reality that as science improves our condition to the required degree, we can more readily abandon religion yet without abandoning the religious aesthetic. Do not misunderstand me. While I believe religious fundamentalism has no place at all in the moral sphere, there are many religions that do promote a mood of unfathomable compassion, and this compassion is what is greatly needed during a time when we have the nuclear power to destroy ourselves but could choose otherwise. Science doesn’t promote compassion. Religion does. Science doesn’t speak to our heart. Religions does. As Haidt argues, we are emotional creatures first, rational ones second. Science can inform our morality for how we should behave and can help give us an objective sense for what is good for humanity, but it lacks the strenuous, narrative power—the mood—to bring about radically compassionate ends.

To argue, like Harris and Haidt do, that as societies become more industrialized, stable, rich and democratic, and therefore feel less and less a need for religious mysticism, is not at all a smack against the normative power of religion itself. It is a testament that religion is becoming fulfilled in humanity. It is a testament that all of those ancient, scriptural myths about men becoming gods were but training stories, or vehicles, to help keep us moral. These stories are now being resurrected with a new syntactical flavor. They are being expressed in symbols that communicate, in a very visceral way, the biologically human aspect of what was once deemed mystical. To grasp the power behind these ideas is to grasp the moral significance of today’s culture wars. It is to see the longstanding war between religion and atheism in its proper light. It is to see this superfluous war of words as a dialectical distortion of what it means to be human in relation to an even stranger concept—the divine. Put differently, God is not losing his place in the universe, as Sagan believed, but to the contrary men are becoming Gods themselves.

[divinehumanism-blog]

No Soul Left Behind: The Compassion of the Three Nephites

I am convinced that the Book of Mormon has a way of imparting profound commentaries on our social lives. I have found this to be true whether we view its stories as spurious fiction or historical fact. Mythology, after all, has the power to transcend both. One story that has always held me in deep suspension occurs during Christ’s ministry to the American continent when He selects 12 disciples to lead His sheep after His ascension. Before leaving them the text mentions He granted their desires. Nine of them desired to separate themselves from the earth, to “speedily come” to heaven to enjoy a place apart from their earthly work.[i] The remaining three “sorrowed in their hearts,”[ii] for they desired to tarry with their people on earth in hopes to minister unto them. Christ sanctions both sets of desires as “blessed,” but calls the three disciple’s desire “more blessed.”[iii]

The reason this story intrigues me is that it asks me to inhabit the same world as the authors telling it. It wants me to reflect upon its emblem as a deeply personal choice, to ask, “When am I motivated to separate myself from others to reach peace? And, when am I motivated to stay with others to help them reach peace?” These are profound questions teeming with sociological significance. We are, whether we realize it or not, answering these questions everyday of our lives by how we choose to interact with others, whether at work, at home, online or abroad.

There will be times in our lives when we are like the nine: Our empathy will reach its limits, we will grow tired of persuading others, of convincing them to our cause, and we will desire our work with them to come to an end. We will desire peace apart from those who drain our charitable impulses. We will want to live in a world hallowed out from all that silted, outside terrestrial debris. Online intellectual battles convince us of this truth, as do foreign and domestic wars, conflicts and disagreements. There are times when we will simply close the doors. And there will be nothing inherently wrong with this desire either. As Christ approves, there clearly can be something sacred about the choice to separate from others, especially after a lifetime of dedicated service, fellowship and sweat equity.

Yet, there is also a desire that will make us “more blessed.”

There will be times when are like the three: We will feel the life-pulse of our people, our friends, family and those we esteem as enemies, and our emotions will press upon us like electricity crackling through our nerves. We will be moved by sorrow, by tenderness, to suffer so that others might not suffer. We will desire to sacrifice our existence by consecrating our lives to others so that they might be happy. We will want to tarry behind. Our bowels will be “filled with compassion,”[iv] as the scripture says, and we will experientially know what it means to partake of the atonement at a very local level. We will be “more blessed” not because we are somehow superior, but because we were willing to make ourselves inferior, to put aside our comforts and assume all the doubts, pains, grief and frustrations that might be heaped upon us by our fallen family left behind.

When will we ascend and when will we condescend? These are the two great questions of our existence, for they apply directly to the two great commandments. We are justified when we have done all we can do in spite of our best efforts, but how great will our joy be if we tarry behind and bring many souls unto Christ?[v] As a narrative creature living in unfolding time, I hope that I might be continually endowed with enough strength and power to endure the illnesses of my people. For I, too, am spiritually sick, and would hope my people would tarry with me. I desire the gift of the three Nephites, not because they are innately better than the nine, but because heaven would not be heaven unless my entire family was there to celebrate it with me. The story of the three Nephites, therefore, is a central metaphor for the Christian life. Entering this story and being transformed by it can allow us to be overtaken by its grace, making heaven a practical, everyday choice for how we treat others and hope to be treated in return.

Footnotes

[i] 3Nephi 28:2

[ii] 3Nephi 28:5

[iii] 3Nephi 28:7

[iv] 3Nephi 17:6

[v] D&C 18:15–16