Logging

Agnostic Mom has been posting her deconversion story. It's interesting - very. But she has been distracted from her blogging by other - real-life - concerns, and her last-but-one post mostly aimed her readers at other such stories put up recently on other blogs. I read through several last night (when the hotel's router finally decided to behave itself and let me onto the Net again).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the stories Agnostic Mom pointed us at were all Mormon deconversion stories. Now, despite the occasional Pat Begley cartoon I post, I'm not, and never was, Mormon, and perhaps that's why I find them (the stories) fascinating but not familiar. Or not entirely familiar, at any rate.

I do know a couple of Mormons. They don't talk much about their religion. Oh, they talk a lot about being religious: going to church, Sunday school, classes, teaching, counseling, picnics, activities, etc etc etc. But they don't talk about their religion. Oh, a story here or a comment there, but no doctrine.

This gives these deconversions stories an exotic flavor. Rituals and oaths and complaints about the elders and the Prophet(s) - unfamiliar books of scripture and angels (or are they minor deities, demigods?) - The Book of Abraham - the angel Moroni - it's all very strange and foreign. Some of it I remember from college days when I made the mistake of accepting a copy of the Book of Mormon from a missionary (I was curious, and it's always better to own the book than borrow it, and if you can get it for free... Well, I didn't buy it, but I paid for it. Those guys were harder to shake that the Children of God (granted I didn't get a book from them) or the Hare Krishnas (I did from them... what can I say? I was curious.). The Mormons like to never stopped bothering me. My roommate was ready to commit murder, I fear... I need to extricate myself from this parenthesis. Pretend I did it gracefully.) Some of it, I repeat was a bit familiar, but I don't remember it well. It was a long, long time ago.

I do remember finding it historically implausible. Okay, not just implausible. Fantastic - as in "a fantasy". It was chock full of anachronisms, and the whole plot line seemed very Victorian and wish-fulfilling and somehow inherently unbelievable. The Brigham Young story, now - what I knew of it back then - seemed almost noble: brave, persecuted people fleeing to a promised land. Eerily familiar, too, patterns of history repeating themselves right down to the 'we deserve this place more than the folks already here because we're the Chosen of God' rationale. But as for that, I reminded myself not to judge the actions of the past by the standards of the present. So Brigham Young, then, seemed admirable, if deluded.

Joseph Smith, on the other hand, struck me as a real con artist - the L Ron Hubbard of his day I'd say now (back then, ol' L Ron was just a writer). The whole golden tablets/Egyptian papyrus - miraculous translation story was, frankly, an obvious crock, even without taking into account just how spectacularly bad the 'translation' was. The fact that they were so demonstrably unfactual was just one more proof to me that, just because the early Mormons had suffered and died for their faith didn't make it true. Or worth suffering for, let alone dying for, for that matter.

So I just shrugged and wrote the whole thing off. (Along with Hare Krishnaism, by the way, the Children of God, and the I Ching, and the rest of the early 70s college 'spiritual' search...)

Now, the above isn't meant as an indictment of Mormon history or doctrine, nor as a smug 'har, har, I'm so much cleverer than Agnostic Mom or Equality or the others.' No, my point is a lot simpler, and a lot more personal, and not nearly so flattering.

After all: I still thought of myself as a Christian.

I went to church, I went to Sunday school, I read books, I wrote articles for the church paper, I was even on the Altar Guild for a while... I stayed in the church for another twelve years or so beyond college, and for most of that time I was pretty active.

I kept reading about other religions, too (as well as a lot of other things, including astronomy and cosmology and biology). And there were things I liked about other religions, their stories or some of their attitudes towards God(s) or the world. But no matter how much I might find to like or even admire, I could still see quite clearly the foolishness of actually believing in them as truth (as opposed to accepting that they had some useful moral or lesson to teach, say). Icarus teaches us not to try to do more than our technology is able to support, but no man ever flew on wings of wax and feathers, whether too close to the sun or not, for example. Oh, maybe I wasn't always drawing the lesson they wanted me to draw (all the better, right?) - Bloddeuwedd's 'betrayal' of Llew Llaw Gyffes always spoke more to me of an essential flaw in men (their belief that they make a woman love them by command) than in women (their fickleness): after all, Blodeuwedd was never asked if she wanted to be married to Llew, was she? But even while arguing the philosophical point of the story I never actually believed in a word of it: no boy born of a virgin, incubated in a chest, cursed by his mother, married to and killed by a woman created for him out of flowers by his magician uncle, a woman transformed into an owl to never see the light of day again...

It was just a story, as meaningful and at the same time as ridiculous as any other. As ridiculous as golden tablets buried in the American midwest by the descendants of Jews who had built a glorious but doomed civilization here, tablets translated by a guy using magic stones to hear angelic voices. Just a story, and in fact a more useful one because it didn't pretend to be fact. Just 'true'.

And yet somehow... somehow... a world-wide flood that nobody noticed even when it supposedly wiped out their civilization (Egypt, anyone? China?) - a story that did claim to be fact - made it under my radar into the "useful moral lesson" category. I read Hebrew Iliad and other books that explained quite carefully how the whole construct was put together, and still I didn't draw the parallels. After all, my church had already accepted that most of the early Bible was allegory and parable. We could believe in an old earth and evolution and an expanding universe because Genesis was a teaching story. The prodigal son wasn't fact, nor the wise and foolish servants ... and the same was true of the flood, the tower of Babel... heck, even Moses was probably an amalgam of several religious leaders combined to teach the lesson of God's revelations to the Hebrews.

But I still was supposed to believe in the 'facts' of the Bible. I was supposed to believe in the history of the Old Testament and the acts of Jesus and the Apostles. In the miracles. In the walking on water and healing of lepers and turning water into wine and bringing the dead to life (the centurion's slave and the girl Tabitha)... In the Resurrection.

It became hard - heck, it was hard even in college. But people obliged me with their explanations: the apostles thought he was walking on water; people shared the food they were hoarding; they had some other skin disease; they weren't really dead, just unconscious; the groom's family hadn't in fact used up the good wine and Mary shamed them into it...

The problem with that, though, is that once you start tearing down the miracles, you're left with a big "So what, then?"

And then you start looking at the whole thing. And you start seeing things that can't be explained because they're just impossible. Some are just ridiculous (try adding up the numbers of soldiers the little nation of Israel could muster in, say, Samuel (hint: it'll be over a million fighting men). Some are unbelievably cruel (God moves David to take a census, then kills tens of thousands to throw the results off. WTF?) And some are just evil (kill everyone but the virgin girls and bring them home to rape - or worse, kill everyone, babies included). And slavery's just fine and dandy, and ... well, you know the list. And if you don't, try checking here.

And you find it hard to reconcile the psychopathic Yahweh with Jesus. But Jesus came from Yahweh, to fulfil his law. So they must be reconcilable, are in fact the same god.

And then the Church itself...

Well.

So, eventually I am forced to admit it. If I weren't a Christian, my attitude to those stories would be the same as my attitude towards Mormon stories, or Hindu, or Hare Krishna, or whatever.

I've got the proverbial log in my eye.

Or I did. But now I see clearly.

There was never any one watershed moment, one blinding light, one slap-myself-in-the-head epiphany (if I may use the word, which after all means merely "making clear"). Virtually everything I've seen or read or learned or done for the last twenty years upholds the new way of thinking, but I'm not absolutely sure when that new way arrived. It might well have come sooner if I'd been forced to choose between the facts of the universe and the "revealed inerrant word of god", but as Thomas Aquinas told us, when the facts of God's creation and your interpretation of God's word clash, it'll be your interpretation that's off, not the facts.

So it took a while to happen, and I'm not sure exactly when it did.

I'm just glad it did.

This is long and rambling (it's nearly midnight here in England, regardless of the timestamp). I hope it's meaningful. I'll probably say more some other time.