Over at Triangulations, Sabio Lantz has had several posts about declaring oneself. While I was definitely taken aback by the daunting philosophy declaration table (and felt too “alien” from the Christian one), I decided to take a go at the atheist one. And it seems that it’s becoming quite popular these days to put the table in new blog entries, like is done here.
So, what about my atheist positions?
Click on to find out.
In discussions about authenticity and (more often) ethics or morality, people try to raise up objective morality systems. They bring up truly egregious and atrocious actions in an attempt to get others to sympathize that these actions are just “so terrible” that their wrongness must be etched into the universe somehow.
These people want to propose some kind of argument against subjective morality and/or relativism, and/or personal authenticity, or whatever else. After all, what do you do if someone authentically wants to rape children?
Most answers to this question are pretty damaging. Some answers make you look absurd. Some make you look heartless. Others yet make you look as morally bankrupt as the child rapist him (or her)self.
Perhaps I’ll make a case that’ll paint me as the third kind.
When I was writing the post about my strengths, I was also thinking about my weaknesses. I have quite a few of them.
The interesting thing is is that my weaknesses generally never played out like people normally assume, so for a while, when I was growing up, I thought I was so ahead of the game. (Now, I realize that unfortunately isn’t true.)
What do I mean? Well, what are vices that most people assume from teenagers? I think most people — especially in the church — are on the lookout for law of chastity violations, word of wisdom violations, and those things. I did not and do not have a problem with those…didn’t even come close.
But if I could summarize some of my weaknesses and character defects, this is probably how I would put them:
In the LDS religious tradition, we are often told to “liken the scriptures” to ourselves. Scriptures and prayer and so many other things in the church have a use as being tools to find personally insightful revelation for ourselves. This concept is beautiful, theoretically.
Unfortunately, for me, I just couldn’t get it to work out so well. The scriptures didn’t and don’t speak out to me. I am well aware of the “stupor of thought” with prayer, and of deafening silence, but not so much of a burning in the bosom. And putting myself in the scriptures makes me feel like I’m acting incredibly artificially in a bad play (OK, I’m ok with being born of goodly parents…but I think that my goodly parents taught me a little better than to kill a man for long-held family records. Maybe I should’ve likened myself in Laman and Lemuel instead…)
So, for a while, I wasn’t even aware that things could speak out to me. I wasn’t aware that there could be something that fits me, that seems to give me true insight. I didn’t get what people meant when they described the phenomenon.
But then I took the Clifton Strengthsfinder.
I am used often to hearing two kinds of stories. I hear stories of ex-Mormons, ex-Christians, and ex-theists who talk about how theism was so stifling. I hear stories of how people saw a reality with God as being hopely devaluing and depressing, or in some cases, how their belief in God reduced us all to pawns (not an empowering thought). Or perhaps they saw forcing a belief in deities as utterly incongruent with the way they saw the world/universe actually works, so they always felt drained trying to reconcile the two.
Some way or another, this gnawing doubt managed to become a throbbing pain. So these people are ex-whatever they were.
I see such stories as being stories of authenticity and inauthenticity. These people are raised in ways that are inauthentic to them…they are told and trained to believe something that to the core feels wrong. And their bodies, at every step of the way, seeks to reject such foreign invaders. If they cannot cast of these viral cells, then they will grow sick (at least internally) and may die (at least internally). But if they can cast off the pathogens, they will become well and vibrant in an authentic existence.
The problem is that things aren’t quite as simple. To people who experience this, it seems clear: theism or Christianity or Mormonism or whatever was the pathogen, the disease agent. An objectively bad thing. But things just don’t bear out that way.
For a while now, I’ve been somewhat blind and deaf to the entire concept of “cognitive dissonance.” I have understood the basic concept, but I guess it has been time in the ex-mormon community that has deafened me to its nuance. Cogdis this. Cogdis that. TSCC. These seem more like buzz words.
There was a guest speaker in my accounting ethics class this morning (err…it’s past midnight, so…yesterday) who focused on the concept (and its role in rationalization). I couldn’t begin to grasp the richness of his message for the past twelve hours because I was still stuck in the specific ex-Mormon connotation of the term.
But as I’ve been thinking, I realized that yes, the term reaches farther out. I can look at my own last post here for evidence.
I guess it’s pretty coincidental that John G-W’s latest entry has to do a bit with anger, but tonight, after going into a rage in a huge gym that made me look like a totally uncouth and undisciplined spaz in front of everyone, (and then leaving to avoid the further awkwardness), I had a lot of time to think about rage.
I can’t say there’s much in common beyond that though. My anger really works in a different way, I think. Just to go through the “checklist,” 1) I have been well-rested for the past few days (basically being in a coma to recover from a cold. Today’s been a smashing recovery day.) 2) I have been having a healthier than normal diet (to recover from the cold…man, orange juice is so good. So are bananas. Ever just have a few bananas?) 3) Well, today’s explosion was at fencing practice, and I’ve been going to that for the past few days (had a tournament this week).
Continuing…
I remember one time hearing a man at church bear his testimony about journal writing. While he wasn’t as diligent in writing in his own journal, he relayed a story about his wife who, after hearing about journal writing (and the virtues thereof) when she was a little girl, wrote in her journal every day for the past 40+ years. Never a day went without his wife writing something down in her journal.
I have sometimes heard the explanation that the scriptures were like journals…so for our latter-day, the end-of-times (it’s always the end of times these days…)…our journals have the potential to be living scripture. We owe it to our future progeny (wait…but isn’t this the end of times?!) to write so they may have even more latter-day revelation.
…Quite frankly, such stories never really got to me. I have written intermittently in journals, but never with such a zeal or a drive. I just did it because I liked to get my thoughts out. But now, even though I have great gaps between entries, I’m glad I’ve written.
In looking at the case of several “new order Mormons,” “middle way Mormons,” “stayLDS” participants, or whatever they can be called, I have noticed that one of the most pressing reasons to stayLDS is family. The desire to keep family together can be an incredible bonding agent, it seems.
I have been incredulous, however, of other reasons to stayLDS. I don’t mean to say I am incredulous of reasons that people stay LDS (note the difference with the space). This is not a post to suggest that people who stay LDS are blargl fargles (TM). (I did have a commenter swing by with approximately such a comment. I was not amused, but some of my other commenters seemed to salvage that discussion.)
What I mean is…when someone has something about them that makes them the less-than-orthodox LDS member (however we define orthodoxy…or if we can even come to a conclusion about orthodoxy at all), they face social pressure as a result of this sticking point. They are different. They don’t fit in. So, why do they stay in? It’s painful.
Today, in my international accounting class, my professor invited a couple as guest speakers. I was initially wary, because this couple is a team of long-time Christian missionaries to Papua New Guinea…and the only thing I’ve seen regarding missionaries to Papua New Guinea is this. They weren’t with the same group though; they didn’t focus on the same project, and the presentation, while still bearing religious experience, wasn’t a complete proselytizing recollection. Rather, I thought it bore some pretty interesting sociological differences between the Gapapaiwa people and us here. The speakers presented their background as Biblical translators in a way to show differences in business communications, as well as personal and religious communications.
When they said that they went to Papua New Guinea for something like 23 years and took their kids with them for the greater part (I still don’t have the details, because apparently, the kids got to see US high schools and the culture shock therein), I began to have a different “sense” about them. No longer did I “imagine” them to be envoys of something like New Tribes Missions, but I got a fuzzy reminder of the book The Poisonwood Bible.
