I’m back from a long hiatus and ready to hit the ground running. Sorry for the long delay, I hope to more than make up for it over the next few weeks.
This morning I agreed to meet with some Mormon missionaries — you may remember that I’d met with some missionaries a number of times before, and the last time I mentioned that I was probably finished with it. I had figured that I would be, but I got a call earlier this week and the temptation too great to pass up.
So this morning, I met with 2 missionaries and 1 other mormon (not a missionary) at the mormon institute for missionaries converting people (not the exact name). The missionaries that I had normally talked to were gone for various reasons, so I had two new people for fresh encounters. It was nice, I ran through a number of arguments that I’ve written about and a few that I haven’t yet written about.
One of the Mormons tried to convince me that God exists because we have an innate moral sense. I immediately agreed that we have an innate moral sense that we can use to determine right and wrong. I then asked, so how is it that you worship a God that commanded people to kill others with a sword? Specifically, God (allegedly) ordered people to go into a certain tribe and kill every man, woman, child, and infant. That’s clearly wrong — if our moral sense can ever give a clear answer it’s on this situation. I will elaborate on it more, but I worded the question that was for a reason — it covers all the basic reactions that you’d get (which I got). If you are a seasoned conversational atheist yourself, you may be thinking of the answers yourself:
Maybe these people were truly awful people and deserved to die
Whatever God orders is moral
How do you expect me to explain God’s actions and thoughts?
Among others.
I’ll just indulge in how I’ve responded to the second choice for this blog entry. Since we’d already established that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, I said, we can rightly judge whether the actions of God are good or evil. Perhaps they will say something as silly as “Whatever God does is moral” or something equivalent. The best question is, “Does God have free will? Can He choose to do evil?” — If He can, the question of whether He does is valid (and both answers are available). If God does not have free will (rare claim to find people making); then He is not praiseworthy for his actions, He’s an automaton that could not have done otherwise.
Anyway, I had a grand time today (too much fun). I’ll be elaborating on the discussions in the very near future. Let me know if you have any questions/comments.
Religious people sometimes complain that atheists unfairly criticize their ilk for irrationally believing in a faith. There are quite a few that think that they have come to a conclusion via some rationally defensible justification. And then there are the types that boldly proclaim to know things about external reality based off of an emotional response.
The videos that I’m pulling claim that people can gain reliable knowledge through faith. They are promoting belief in an internal warm-fuzzy-feeling truth detector.
You can discover for yourself that what you’ve been learning is true by:
Sincerely praying to your Heavenly Father and asking Him if what you are learning is true.
Continuing to study and give thoughtful consideration to what you are learning.
Listening with your heart for the Holy Ghost to whisper the truth to you.
Yes. Gaining knowledge is a three step process. In the end, the Holy Ghost will whisper the truth to you.
It gets worse. The videos are astounding examples of proud anti-thinking. Let’s look at another video:
The man claims to have conversations with God. To have dialogue with God. And lest he be unclear, to ask God things and God answers him.
I always ask: What kinds of knowledge can this warm-fuzzy feeling truth detector give you?
This truth detector only appears to works on questions that cannot be verified. Instead of a new way of gaining knowledge, it appears these people have hit upon a new way of fooling themselves.
Now, I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong, and that their feelings based truth-detector could reliably give the right answer. But I’d have to see some evidence for it reliably giving answers in reality before I’d trust the truth-detector on matters outside of reality.
Consider the kinds of knowledge this warm-fuzzy feeling has given Mormons on such topics as evolution.
Check out where Mormons rank on the following PEW result:
Perhaps the Holy Ghost whispers to the hearts of the faithful to outlaw gay marriage by voting “yes” on Prop 8?
The Organized Superstitions of the world are causing very real harm. Their warm-fuzzy-feeling truth detector gives them unverifiable answers to questions that cannot be checked, and never gives reliable answers to questions that can be checked.
Note: the video is hosted locally so that it loads faster. It is left unedited and with a link back to the original. I consider this to be a “fair use” of the footage. Please email me if you have any concerns.
I’m going to start the series by taking videos from various places within mormon.org and examining the kind of “thinking” that gets a person to become a Mormon.
You can discover for yourself that what you’ve been learning is true by:
Sincerely praying to your Heavenly Father and asking Him if what you are learning is true.
Continuing to study and give thoughtful consideration to what you are learning.
Listening with your heart for the Holy Ghost to whisper the truth to you.
Yes. Gaining knowledge is a three step process. In the end, the Holy Ghost will whisper the truth to you.
It gets worse. The videos are astounding examples of anti-thinking. Let’s look at the first one on that page:
On the one hand, it’s rare to see such honesty when a person talks about how they came to believe in the religious claims that they do. On the other hand, how bad is this?
As she talks, the number of errors in thinking stagger the mind.
It seems that she’s really happy about making important decisions without evidence.
God talks to her. (But I’d venture that He never tells her information that she doesn’t already know.)
“It wasn’t anything that was logical…” (I agree.)
“I wasn’t thinking. I was feeling.” (I agree.)
Yes. I agree. One of the main criticisms people give is that they are knowledge finding based on emotional response. I think I’ll call it a warm-fuzzy-feeling truth detector.
I always ask: What kinds of knowledge can this warm-fuzzy feeling truth detector give you?
Because this truth detector only appears to works on questions that cannot be verified. Instead of a new way of gaining knowledge, it appears these people have hit upon a new way of fooling themselves.
Now, I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong, and that their feelings based truth-detector could reliably give the right answer. But I’d have to see some evidence for it reliably giving answers in reality before I’d trust the truth-detector on matters outside of reality.
Consider the kinds of knowledge this warm-fuzzy feeling has given Mormons on such topics as evolution.
Check out where Mormons rank on the following PEW result:
Perhaps the Holy Ghost whispers to the hearts of the faithful to outlaw gay marriage by voting “yes” on Prop 8?
Let me end by giving a shout out to the information packed: mormonsfor8.com
Note: the video is hosted locally so that it loads faster. It is left unedited and with a link back to the original. I consider this to be a “fair use” of the footage. Please email me if you have any concerns.
I had a meeting on Friday with 3 Mormon missionaries at a mission-house.
I had such a good time I almost feel guilty writing about it. Don’t get me wrong, they had a good time as well, and they’ve asked me back next week (I’m going to try to make it). I mostly talked with 3 missionaries, but some elders walked by a few times and said, “that’s a really good question!”
I definitely learned a few things from the encounter. First, I was impressed with the way that they tried to control the social pressure of the room. For example, I was hammering on how they thought that they could gain knowledge by faith. And after a while, they asked very solemnly, whether I would be willing to get down on my knees with them and pray to Heavenly Father to see if I would get an answer to my questions.
I knew that once we were going down that sideshow we weren’t coming back. Another time, one of the missionaries was talking about how a friend of hers didn’t go with some other friends of hers because the Holy Ghost was giving her a bad feeling about the trip. And then two of those friends ended up dying in a car crash that night. It was a very emotional story, and it was a delicate situation to explain why I wasn’t compelled by that example. I essentially said that her friend did not have knowledge of a car accident, otherwise her friend would have called her other friends and warned them.
But the biggest breakthrough to me came from when we were circling back on arguments a few times because they were not understanding my objections to their faith as a way of knowing things.
It went something like this:
Me: I look at you Mormons, and you have a special book. And you tell me that when you read it you get a warm feeling inside. I listen to Muslims say the same thing about their book. I hear the same thing from Evangelicals, and so on. You could line up 10 people who each have a special warm feeling inside from reading their own speicial book and praying and asking if the book is God’s word. Now, to a skeptic, this looks like there exist certain books that give people warm feelings inside. I believe you when you state your experience. I also believe all the other religious people as well. This suggests to me that this warm-feeling is not a very good truth detector if people can get it wrong so easily.
One way to test whether you do have a truth-detecting warm-feeling sense inside of you would be to test it out on questions that you don’t know the answer to right now, but that we could find the answer to in a second via Google. And if your knowledge-generating truth-detecting warm-feeling never reliably gets the right answer to any question that you could ever check to see if it was right, you might have just discovered a new way of fooling yourself, not a new way of gaining knowledge.
Them: It does give verifiable knowledge to things that we don’t know the answer to.
Me: All right, you choose the subject matter and I’ll choose the question. Historical? What year was Mozart born? Mathematical? What is 1.20143^37 ? Personal? What is my license number?
Them: But are those questions really important to you? Why would you really care about the answer to those?
Me: The answers are not important. Not at all. If you could reliably answer the questions that I could come up with it would show that you have an utterly NEW WAY OF GAINING TRUE KNOWLEDGE! That is enormous. That is huge!
Them: But if we could answer those questions, would you then have faith?
Me: I’ll put it this way. You start answering the questions that I’m asking correctly, we have made a huge first step. You have a chance of convincing me that you aren’t just talking to yourself when you pray, which is what it looks like to me. Why? Because God never tells you anything that you don’t already know.
Them: Yes he does, there was a guy in Africa once who…
Me: Look, I know you have your stories and anecdotes of people who gained knowledge somehow. I can’t argue with a story. All I know is that there is a 100% failure rate for any person of faith to ever get an answer any of the questions I ever ask them. Every person of every single faith fails identically to the simplest challenge I can throw at them. You have to admit that from my viewpoint, it looks pretty bad.
Them: No. I totally get what you’re saying and what you’re having problems with…
I didn’t realize before how important it was to emphasize the point that the questions that I ask to test whether their warm-feeling detector can give a right answer, is to check the detector!
Anyway, afterward they bought me a delicious lunch, and we parted ways with smiles all around.
Look forward to future Mormon Lunch meeting updates from me!
I had a great time having lunch a few days ago with 2 Mormon missionaries and 2 recent Mormon converts (they had just become or were in the process of becoming Mormon).
It was interesting to see the little stories and other techniques that the missionaries used to try to keep the meeting on their agenda. They had definitely had training, but it was really interesting to see what happened if you got them off their script.
Part of the training, I’m sure, is that they tell stories. They started out with one about, “A young man named Joseph Smith who… prayed and God and Jesus appeared before him, and gave him a message.”
So, a simple first question, “Why doesn’t God appear that way to everyone?”
“But then we wouldn’t have faith…”
“How miserable was Joseph Smith for the rest of his life after that encounter robbed him of his faith?”
“Oh he still had faith…”
I haven’t written about it, yet, but I used the “How does that work in Heaven?” question/tactic quite a bit because they just could not respond to it at all.
It works roughly as follows:
“Why is there suffering?”
– Because God gives us free will, and this results in pain and suffering …
“And it would be a bad thing if we didn’t have free will?”
– We would just be robots, and God doesn’t want robots following Him!
“So we have free will in heaven?”
– Of course!
“How much suffering is there in heaven?”
– None. It’s a perfect paradise.
“So, we can live in a perfect paradise without suffering, ever, and still have free will?”
– Yep!
“So let’s go back to that first question, why is there suffering in the world?”
– I already said this, God gives us free will!
“But, you just said that we could live in a perfect blissful harmony forever without any suffering and still have free will.”
– Wait… I guess we don’t have free will in heaven.
“So for the rest of eternity, God wants us to be robots in heaven worshipping Him without choice?”
– ….
I really need to get around to writing up the full essay on this, but hopefully that teaser was enough to whet your appetite. I plan having a number of these lunches in the future. Look for future updates!
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