I recently listened to a podcast which was a conversation between two atheists about religion in general, and Christianity is specific. They brought up two points that I think are worth discussing.
The first is the premise that “if it works, it doesn’t have to be true”, and they should be happy there is religion. They talked about studies that shows religious people as happier, and more fulfilled and treat people better than their non- believing neighbors. One said a very common comment between atheists when they are alone and nobody is listening is ” I’m glad those other stupid people believe it [religion] because it makes society better off.”
As an example they cited “The Book Of Mormon” musical, which ended with the message that if it works, it doesn’t have to be true. Same with the infamous Mormon episode on South Park, which by the way was written by the same two who wrote The Book Of Mormon musical (Trey Parker and Matt Stoner). The South Park episode ends with the little Mormon boy telling the other kids, after being teased about the crazy stuff the Mormons believe in, that he believes his religion does not need to be factually true because it still supports good family values and helping the poor. The Mormon boy then told the other kids to suck his balls!
The second idea was that if you believe 100% that Christ is the redeemer, and that your friends/family will all go to hell if they do not believe, then the end will always justify the means. One of the people on the podcast said that if he believed 100% that abortion was murder, he could see himself bombing abortion clinics. He would be forcing his religion on all his family and friends, to save their souls. He said the way around this to let in the remote possibility that they could be wrong. That allows the hardest core Christian to look at abortion, or gay marriage and say, I will speak against it and I will stay within the law and within the plurality because I could be wrong.
For this second item, Mormons have an answer in the war in heaven, Satan vs Jesus, and free agency. Mormons can believe 100%, but can keep from killing people and oppressing people if they believe Christ’s plan was to allow people to make mistakes as part of their mortal probation. This doesn’t answer all the questions on why the Church is still so hell bent on changing laws to support their theological world view.
What are your thoughts on “if it works, it doesn’t have to be true? ” How many active Mormons do you think have this belief, maybe even some in upper leadership in the Church?
What about the end justifies the means? I think the Church has stumbled down this path more than once in its history. I don’t think any of the TBMs ever entertain the thought that “they could be wrong”. I think the “free agency” clause is what lets Mormons live is society and not burn down abortion clinics.
Your thoughts?
Wheat & Tares 
I think there’s a functional difference between having a basic model or framework, that works, and actively concealing information.
Let’s look at Physics, for example. For most practical engineering applications Newtonian physics works fine. It’s only when considering things at an atomic scale or near light-speeds, that we need to be using more complicated calculations. In school we’re taught Newtonian physics, but no one is saying quantum mechanics or relativity don’t have a role to play, just that for practical purposes Newtonian physics is a model that works. Also, Newtonian physics is functionally true within its boundary limitations. And those who want to get into quantum mechanics and relativity can.
Looking at religions, there maybe a common functional core of values. Love God. Love your neighbour. Perhaps. But there is an awful lot of cultural window dressing that can then undermine those core values, and cause harm to those who don’t fit the model created by the window dressing. And the window dressing is also touted as truth. Anything that undermines the window dressing is vilified, or hidden away.
There are plenty of “end justifies the means” scenarios that are perfectly justifiable, from public policy to getting your kids to do their homework. Even in those scenarios, there are some means that are unacceptable either morally, legally, or both. You can bribe your kid to do their homework with a cupcake, but you can’t threaten them with a physical beating (that is, you can’t beat them, and the threat is ineffective if you never follow through).
So one line of thinking is what means are acceptable and which are forbidden or over the moral or legal line. And that is probably a good exercise for people to go through, especially in the Age of Trump where, for some actors, nothing is over the line anymore. It should, for example, be unacceptable to cast a vote for a candidate who themself thinks nothing is unallowable or unlawful or unconstitutional for himself or herself. But lots of voters did it anyway. So clearly people need to think about allowable and unallowable means.
The real discussion, however, is about the “do it because it is the right thing to do” cases or areas. Cases where using an incentive structure to get people to do the right thing seems wrong. Like being kind to strangers in need or giving compliments to friends or family. The Bible, it should be noted, uses both kinds of thinking. The ten commandments are simple commands without incentives: Thou shalt not steal. But there are also plenty of “great shall be thy reward in heaven …” pronouncements. Honestly, morality is just a very complicated subject that gets more complex the deeper you dig into it.
I don’t understand why it allows me to rate comments on my phone but not in my laptop.
Another test. using reply function in email.
I don’t know for sure that people really are happier who are religious. Unfortunately a big part of religion is this very idea, and it leaves people pressured to pretend they are happy when maybe they aren’t. We don’t speak up and share our genuine concerns because that isn’t acceptable in our religious society. So, if someone is studying happiness of religious people, possibly we don’t respond honestly to them either.
I am not into the true false narrative. To me, religion working to cause people to follow Christ better and to be happier would indicate truth. Unfortunately, the paradigm of the church’s teachings doesn’t work for many many people. It’s easy to blame the people, but if it were a perfect plan it would accommodate physical differences between people, without identifying these differences as sin. That’s where I get hung up. Christ did not identify physical differences as sin.
About the “if it works, it doesn’t matter if it is wrong” idea, well it doesn’t work because it is wrong. Things may work temporarily, oh, like Dave B just mentioned, you can threaten your kid that you will beat them if they don’t do their homework. It works the first few times until the kid realizes that beating them is against the law and you could get in trouble or the kid notices that you don’t follow through. Then it stops working. It is the same with religion. Take the prosperity gospel. It isn’t really true that God blesses the righteous with wealth. And so you have people being righteous just until they notice that if they are not charitable, that God doesn’t take it all away. It sometimes takes a while for people to figure out that it isn’t true, and often it is an unconscious kind of sneaking suspicion. There are lots of Mormons who really think the WoW is only partly true. Look at the Mormon health nuts who drink green tea. All the hypocrites in the world, they suspect it isn’t true so they don’t live it. The only parts of religion that work are the true parts. All the garbage of wearing burkas, garments, black at the Popes funeral, they don’t work to make anyone more loving of God or fellow man. All the dietary prescriptions, whether not eating pork or green tea, at the time they were given may have had something to do with health, but now we know that some food need to be cooked all the way, and we know that some addictions, in moderation, are actually healthy, like green tea. And God never told them some obvious health rules, like boil the water and rodents actually spread bubonic plague. Only the true parts of religion actually work.
I think defining “works” matters. What does it mean to work? Work for whom? At what cost? I’m not advocating burning it all down but I also don’t think you get a pass just because it works. Slavery worked for certain people; not so much for others.
I simply don’t buy the religious are happier schtick. These surveys are based on self reporting. Mormons are told they have the plan of happiness so it then follows they will respond they are happy. Depressant drug use in the inter mountain west may suggest otherwise.
Ironically, the Church has killed off one thing that had a proven track record of working. That was the Mormon Community.
For you see, the Mormon Community truly was a group of friends who loved to work and play together. This encompassed people with a wide variety of beliefs, because they felt they were accepted and loved.
With the abolishment of the word “Mormon” has come the destruction of the Community. There is no longer a group the genuinely wants to be together. Now, it a group of individuals who, if they come in person at all, remain separate.
The destruction of the Mormon Cultural Community was the real victory for Satan. Let us return to what we know was working.
Hopefully not too tangential here – we sang “Joseph Smith’s First Prayer” this morning and the visiting stake president bore his testimony of the Restoration including the purported visit from John the Baptist. Same SP also recalled visiting the Vatican and seeing a statue of Peter and thinking (smugly) about where the “truth” can actually be found. Nuance is dead in my neck of the woods…
If it works. Well, define “works.” It doesn’t work for me, so why should I have to be bound to it? The church leaders and church culture have always struggled with that question, insisting that it does work and has to work for you and everyone, even when it just doesn’t feel right because the truth claims seen rather outlandish.
validity Mormon: Active LDS because he or she believes the truth claims
utility Mormon: Active LDS because he or she perceives that the Church works for them and their families (community, values, etc.)
For this to be accurate, you have to make the case that Mormonism works. And given that it teaches all women that they will always be subservient to men for time and all eternity, and it teaches LGBTQ people that they are filthy if they ever find love, and it teaches people of color that God uses dark skin as a curse but (sorta) doesn’t anymore even though we haven’t discarded or apologized for the times when He did, there’s a strong case to be made that people are worse people because they are Mormon. In other words, it doesn’t work at all.
Maybe some religion “works.” Maybe Mormonism even “worked” at some point in time, or can be made to “work” again. Right now, it’s a bit of a train wreck.
The church has a history of assuming the ends justify the means when it comes to truth telling, also known historically an dcolloquially as “lying for the Lord.” One of the earliest examples is Joseph and certain insiders blatantly lying about their involvement with polygamy. More recent examples include church coverups about the amount of funding it provided for Prop 8 (for which it was called out publicly and had to refile its contribution forms) and the SEC scandal where members of the First Presidency for years filed false investment reports to conceal the extent of its wealth from the public.
I’m all for doing things that work. If we waited for things to be perfect nothing would ever get done.
The issue is that the LDS church believes in capital T Truth. You know, do what is right and let the consequences follow. Except be willing to fib or omit the messy parts of the truth to keep people in the church. If the church had said yeah he messed up x, y, z and we’re still working on it – that would be the Truth and I might still be in.
I was baptized as a junior in college 50+ years ago. For the first 5 or 6 years I was concerned with the question “is it true?” Having answered that question with a “not really,” I have since moved to the pragmatic question of “is it worth it?” (sometimes) rather than “is it useful?” (useful for what?).
I really like Hedgehog’s comparison to Newtonian physics, not necessarily being true since it isn’t compatible with quantum physics, but Newtonian physics is still useful. It still got us to the moon. Likewise, I fully acknowledge that there are many things that the church teaches that are not true, but I do think they teach a lot of truth at church, and I think that for many people it leads to good outcomes. For myself and my family it has led to good outcomes. So I guess that puts me in the camp of what Josh H. described as a “utility Mormon”.
I find it really hard to argue against the idea that the OP puts forth of “If it works then it doesn’t have to be true.” Because I’m of the opinion that everyone believes things that aren’t true, and nobody “has the truth”. Those who believe in the church are living in a world where “it works for them, even if their beliefs are false” and those who don’t believe in the church are also living in a world where “it works for them, even if their beliefs are false.” I’m not at all convinced that people who leave the church, or don’t belong to the church have found “truth” and that’s why it works for them, I think it’s likely that they just have a different set of untrue beliefs than active members of the LDS church do.
In conclusion, I think everyone who feels like their life is working for them lives in a state of “It works, even though it isn’t true” – it’s just that everyone has different untrue beliefs that are working for them.
I was a utility Mormon for a long time. The Church worked for me, though I was aware of the historical issues, and felt tension about gender and sexuality issues. It ‘worked’ in that it made my life bearable and it gave me a ready made community. I left when it stopped working. Very pragmatic. I admire all y’all who left for idealistic reasons.
Let’s go for the bigger picture — Christianity overall, rather than just the LDS Church. Has Christianity ‘worked’? Well, as Chadwick points out, that depends on your definition. How many atheist groups have founded hospitals and orphanages, in comparison to how many hospitals and orphanages have been founded by Christians? But then again, spreading the Christian gospel was one of the reasons justifying colonialism and all the associated exploitation. If you put all the good and bad done by Christianity on a scale, would it balance? And if we’re going to judge Christianity, let’s also judge Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.
Saying that truth doesn’t matter, as long as people do good things, also sets people up to feel betrayed when they realize they’ve been manipulated.
Religion is a motivation. If it motivates people to good works, hurray. Up to a point, profit motives ‘work’ too. I’ve got great health insurance and a huge network of facilities, and it’s a for-profit arrangement that somehow found the sweet spot of being profitable and providing decent healthcare. The profit motive ‘worked.’ But the profit motive didn’t ‘work’ for United Healthcare because they’ve got a track record of the highest claim denial rate in the USA. That works for their execs (except for the one who got shot with a Deny, Defend, Depose bullet) and makes them rich, but it doesn’t work for anyone else.
Most motivations can produce good works, and if taken to an extreme, can produce bad works. Churches have historically been given a special place in society (tax exemption and accommodations) because society has recognized the value Church’s have added — both in creating strong communities and in motivating good works. As religiously motivated groups are now causing harm, the fact that you can’t reason with a religious fanatic is becoming a real problem. I mean, a fanatic who wants to build a hospital and help the poor is great. A fanatic who wants to throw people on planes and ship them off to other countries without due process is a huge problem.
In my view, nearly every believer of any religious persuasion is operating 99% of the time on pragmatic truth – or “it works for me.” To me, all churches provide three basic “life hacks” (sorry) in combination that have yet to be effectively replicated elsewhere. A sense that there’s something better waiting for you after you die, a sense that an unseen force outside of yourself (at least symbolically) has your back, and a sense of community or belonging. Sure, Mormons like to talk about capital T truth, the only true and living church, and all of the other stuff (theological, historical or ethical that we think people actually care about). But the reality is, as long as those 3 pragmatic “truths” are still present in some combination, RMN could announce that God is a giant salamander with polka-dots, and the average believing Mormon wouldn’t bat an eye.
It’s a fearful thing to deliberate over whether or not the gospel needs to be true in order for it to be useful–that is, in the face of a Living God who has suffered on our behalf so that it might be useful.
I’m not sure about truthfulness being measured on a scale of utility, or utility being measured on a scale of usefulness. The Church sometimes uses this scale, as in (i) join the church and have a happy family, (ii) live the word of wisdom and be healthy, or (iii) pay tithing and never be poor. Sometimes things don’t make sense. The problem comes when people tell us that this is truth, or that is truth, but maybe it isn’t truth at all. Yes, church leaders can err. Uchtdorf, then 2nd Counselor, General Conference October 2013: “Sometimes there is a difference of opinion as to what the ‘facts’ really mean. A question that creates doubt in some can, after careful investigation, build faith in others. And, to be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine.” Perhaps Elder McConkie’s teachings before 1978 on why Black men couldn’t hold the priesthood were error when spoken or written. That said, we acknowledge that the Lord works through fallible people, such as Peter and Thomas, and Judas was also part of the initial quorum. Faith in Christ can help us get through adversity, but for too many good members, their faith really is elsewhere: in programs, in prophets, in leaders, in family, in community. And when bereft of programs, prophets, leaders, family, and community, will the members prove faithful? If all goes to pot in my life, I hope to have the faith to respond more as Job did than his wife did.
I think this is true for lots of things, but not for a church that clings so hard to literal and historical Truth with a capital T. If the church were willing to let its members belong without having to declare their belief in temple interviews, monthly testimony meetings, weekly lessons, and as part of its evangelical missionary efforts to everyone around us then maybe it would be fine if it worked but wasn’t really true.
I was at this spot for almost a decade where I felt a strong allegiance and connection with the church because of all that members had done to support my family when I was a youth. I felt like I owed a debt and I was active and dedicated to the church during this time all while worrying about harboring doubts. When I discussed this with leaders they made a similar argument. As long as I acted like it was true then it would continue to work for me and I would get answers to resolve my doubts.
But you can’t live like that forever. And the church wasn’t working for my kids and once it wasn’t working for my wife either there was just one way out.
I could have stayed but not without continually in tension with the church due to expectation that members believe that it is all True.
It wasn’t and admitting that resolved all of that tension and made my life work again.
Jack,
You are missing the point here. You are imagining people believe the narrative taught at church about Christ is “true”. While I get that is where your thoughts are, just because you are thinking something doesn’t mean others have that same thought or belief.
The point is, is this narrative helpful? Does it work for everyone?
For this narrative to be helpful, a person also has to believe in sin. What is sin? Does this just mean the church doesn’t approve? This idea that in the first place we have to feel badly about ourselves in order to feel grateful to Jesus doesn’t resonate with everyone.
As I have come to understand the fallibility of leaders and the church, I have come to feel that I can decide for myself (what? don’t I also have access to the Spirit?). I can decide what is helpful to me and what isn’t. Guilting and shaming me and then saying I can be saved from that and loved anyway doesn’t work great for me because I don’t feel a lot of guilt and shame.
For you to understand this discussion you would have to be less fused with your own beliefs, look at them from the outside and understand that other people have different perspectives and experiences you have not had. Your framing of the discussion simply doesn’t apply for all of us.
I recently heard the phrase “There are facts, and there is what’s true”. The aphorism implies the two things are different, but if they are different then religion and science are fighting about a word because they don’t share the same definition. I’m sure most people here have had the experience of riding in a car with another person. The thermostat is set at 70 degrees, which is an objective fact. However, how that objective 70 degrees is experienced is radically different. You complain that it feels like the south pole, while beads of sweat form on your partners forehead, exclaiming that if feels like an August Arizona has landed in the car. 70 degrees is an objective fact, but cold or hot is a subjective truth. Is it true that 70 degrees is freezing? To the person in the passenger seat, yes. Cold or hot however are not objective facts, they are the expressions of meaning layered on top of the facts. They are different things entirely.
Facts are useful, meaning is also useful, what is not useful is when we conflate meaning with facts. If I believe that 70 degrees is “freezing”, and believe that to be an objective fact, I will now likely impose that belief as something that should be universally accepted. Meanwhile, the other party, plants there stake in the ground with the opposing view, and the war commences over being “right”. Neither party is “right”, they both lack the ability to experience the world through another person’s senses, they both, at best, have terribly incomplete information. The blindness to the other is, IMO, the catalyst to almost every apocalyptic conflict in history. From an unknown author, “You can be right, or you can have peace”. Our need to be right coupled with the hubris to believe that we are, creates the perfect storm for “truth” to become not useful.
One of the biggest problems I believe religion has is its insistence on the truths they proclaim being objective facts. I’m not sure humans could live a flourishing existence with facts alone, we seem to also need to make meaning from those facts, which is where religion can be useful. Just because a certain map of life has worked for you, does not mean it works the same way for everyone. Johnathan Z Smith famously wrote, “The map is not the territory”.
I think that what we are really discussing is truth or the perception of truth. But what if truth is multidimensional? We know that truth can be experienced, understood, and expressed in different ways, depending on context, perspective, culture, language, and even stage of development.
With my students, I often ask them to think of truth as white light passing through a prism. The light is initially unified, but when it passes through the prism, it separates into many colors. Each color is part of the whole, even though they now appear quite different.
In religious terms, one person might experience God as a strict lawgiver, while another may experience God as a nurturing parent. Both are valid aspects of the same Divine reality—different, but not necessarily contradictory. While some might teach that God has a plan, another person might reflect on how God’s plan accommodates chaos and human agency. Both are “true” but operate on different levels of thought.
I think we can identify and experience various types of truth, including emotional truth (what resonates with the heart), moral truth (what leads to goodness), spiritual truth (what connects us to the Divine), factual truth (what aligns with empirical evidence), narrative truth (what shapes identity and meaning), etc.
It is likely that there are varieties of truth within Mormonism. The church can be “true” because of a loving and edifying community. But my takeaway is that the Church can cease to be a positive experience for some, while still remain a positive experience for others. And we should respect that.
I believe it was Ryan Cragun that published results of a long study showing that there is no significant difference in happiness between religious and non-religious people.
Sunday School last week included D&C 42, the Law of the Lord. The word law, in normal use, suggests that violators of the law are criminals and outlaws worthy of punishment, shame, guilt, and opprobrium, not only from the judge in his robe but from the citizenry as well. Maybe God’s laws should not be viewed in this manner. Maybe God’s laws, or at least some (maybe most) of them, are aspirational, and violation of the law brings not punishment but allows us to seek to improve. For example, there is probably a law of the Sabbath, which is to keep it holy, but are violaters of the law worthy of condemnation, especially by other people? Remember that Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to save it. In regular speaking, laws condemn their violators, but our God who issues laws (commandments) seeks to save us, not condemn us. Remember also that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God, so I should worry much less about the mote in my neighbor’s eye (his unlawfulness) when I have a beam in my own eye. Most people, when they think about God’s laws, seem to think about how others are doing, rather than thinking about themselves.
I wonder if fewer people would leave the church, and more people would come to it, if we as members were less judgmental of our co-religionists. Maybe obedience to the law should be dropped down in importance, and a desire to love God and to be more like him should not move up a few notches. All the law hangs on two commandments, to love God and to love our neighbor. Note that all the law does not hang on dotting i’s or crossing t’s, or in attending meetings, or shunning the unfaithful: these do, but don’t forget the weightier matters of the law. We are obsessed with obedience in our LDS culture, but why? I see a desire to be obedient as a natural disposition following a desire to love God and to love our fellowmen; I think obedience is a fruit of faith, and not the cause of it. Maybe we should rachet down the obedience talk, and ratchet up the love talk. But we can’t do it for the sake of winning converts or keeping people in the pews: love must flow from love, not from a desire to achieve some other end.
I really appreciate toddsmithson’s comment that the map is not the terrain. To be clear, the map is a symbol of the terrain. The people who put together the map sometimes make errors. or, even if the map was somewhat accurate originally, various factors change the terrain and settlements referred to, over time. On top of that, individual readers of the map will understand it in different ways at different times for different purposes, depending on their own context.
Apply all of that to narratives taught at church. They are symbolic. They contain inaccuracies. They are understood differently by different people in different situations.
Our lives are filled with symbolism. The very words I write on the page inadequately symbolize my thoughts. The individual letters symbolize sounds, which are pronounced differently by individual people, even in English. For example the word water is a visual symbol of a sound which signifies a liquid item. In other languages the symbol is different. It’s agua in Spanish. In American Sign Language the symbols are purely visual. On top of this, symbolic language changes over time. The liquid item is separate and remains the same.
As humans we communicate with these symbols. We even think and communicate with ourselves with these symbols. It’s very important to remember they are only symbols of something else; a form of communication. Our thoughts and feelings are not ourselves or our values or the actions which we will complete. Paradoxically, trying to control thoughts and feeling can bring up more of the same thoughts and feelings. Patiently accepting and observing them is more helpful.
Ritual actions are also only symbolic and not literal. For instance, a graduation ceremony symbolizes academic achievement and credentials. However, after you walk through your ceremony, you will likely find the folder they hand you doesn’t actually contain your credential. You will probably get that in the mail, if you paid your parking tickets. And what you learned as a student is a third thing that has nothing to do with the credential or the ceremony. If you are sick the day of the ceremony, you still have both the learning and the credential.
Symbolic religious rituals are similar. Being baptized is a symbolic ritual. It symbolizes your repentance and rebirth into life as a member of the church and a follower of Christ. However, there are people who complete the ritual who have never repented, and may never attend church again. Each of the temple rituals are of this nature as well, changing over time, just like words and their meaning change over time. Even the sealing ritual only symbolizes a unified eternal marriage with the husband presiding. However, completing the ritual doesn’t mean you have such a marriage, or even stay together beyond that day. In reality these rituals may encourage a real commitment on the part of the marital partners. Or not.
In the same way you can hold up a glass and say water, but there may be no water in the glass.
Thinking literally and evaluating symbolic things in a true or false, black and white way does not eliminate all the inbetweens and grays. But it can contribute to mental health problems to take things in a very literal manner. It can contribute to rigid, inflexible, even brittle thinking. It’s much more flexible and resilient to evaluate symbols based on what is helpful vs unhelpful rather than true or false or literal.
These concepts are part of Acceptance Commitment Therapy, something I have been studying this week in graduate school. I think it applies to the discussion.
May I add one thought to lws’ lovely post? Certainty is an enemy to faith. I provide below an except from a discouse by Ralph Fiennes’ character in Conclave. I think it makes sense in the LDS world, too. The ellipses represent pauses in speech, not deleted text. There’s a lot of wisdom here. I know little but I believe a lot.
Let me speak from the heart for a moment.
St Paul said, ‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.’
To work together, and to, er… to grow together, we must be tolerant.
No one person or… or faction seeking to dominate another.
And speaking to the Ephesians, who were of course a mixture of Jews and gentiles, Paul reminds us that God’s gift to the church…is its variety.
It is this variety, this diversity of people and views which gives our church its strength.
And over the course of many years in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin, which I have come to fear above all others.
Certainty.
Certainty is the great enemy of unity.
Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.
Even Christ was not certain at the end.
“My God, My God, why are you forsaken me? “
He cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross.
Our faith is a living thing, precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt.
If there was only certainty…and no doubt…there would be no mystery…and therefore no need… for faith.
Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts.
And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness, and who carries on.
I would like to say to Georgis, Amen to your quotation.
Agree with Georgis certainty allows hate. We have just had a federal election in Australia. The Labor party put forward positive solutions, the opposition spent a lot of time taunting the PM for being weak because he was caring and compassionate. They also tried some trump stuff like reducing thepublic service, and stopping public servants working from home, also put climate change on hold. They also repeatedly said does anyone believe the government can win a majority, or will it have to compromise to get green support.
We rejected extreme politics, right or left. 98% of voters voted. Still counting but Labor have 85 seats (more than 50% women) up from 76, opposition 39 down from 60, and their leader lost his seat to a young single mother. He did have the decency to congratulate both the PM, and the young woman who beat him, including that she had had a rough couple of years, with a child dying of lukimia and loosing a leg in an accident, and said she would do a good job.
Very impressed with my fellow Australians choosing caring compassion over trump lite.
Australia is way less religious than America. Why have more than 2/3 of Mormon men voted for trump? Perhaps 80%. When you had a more caring and compassionate (woke) option? And likewise for other Christians. They seem to have voted for misogyny and hate. If that is what American Christianity looks like, is it working or true?
LDS culture has a tendency of conflating “truth” and “righteousness” – at least in my family. I had family members engaging in verbal “truth” arguments as competing bids for who “was right” and wound up getting extrapolated onto the person themselves from a moral perspective. So people floundering around for facts ended up being ambushed by personal character judgements. The real problem was that each family member was “telling the truth” as they saw it – so everyone was “equally right” in competing venues. It winded up looking like an Olympic gold ice skater competing with an Olympic gold horse rider – not really comparable in a toe-to-toe way and yet very, very expert in their field.
One of the tactics that worked for us in these arguments was shifting “truth” to “accuracy” and stating pertinent expertise. Using the analogy above, the highly skilled horse rider knows a lot about horses and what winning an Olympic gold feels like in that venue. Their “truths” related to their field command merit, respect, and “righteousness” in horseback riding. Conversely, our ice skater would be the “ice expert” and is likely to have more information about blades and sharp objects then the horse rider. What mattered was a baseline level of respect and assuming expertise (symbolized by the Olympic gold adjective in this example), and questions about what was really being looked for in the conversation.
Individuals who needed the recognition of “being truthful” from an accuracy perspective got those brownie points, and individuals who needed it to “morally make sense to them” got the opportunity to find that meaning for themselves (when applicable).
@Georgis, Conclave is a tremendous movie and that part you quoted was such a powerful scene. I wish we a Q15 that normalized doubt and uncertainty and actually experienced these things for all to see.
I’ve been reading a book I recommend to everyone, it’s called How Minds Change by David McRaney. He used to be in the camp that minds could never change, but then discovered otherwise. His book (not done with it yet) dives into the science and the realities of how this happens and how to facilitate this happening. It talks about why facts just don’t work. And (in a least as far as I’ve gotten) is shows that most truth that we think is absolute is really very subjective to our specific context.
Truth has never really mattered as much as we like to think. I recently saw someone post a meme that said, “I have a mental illness where I believe that I can change people’s minds using data and logic.” Even if we know the objective truth about something, the human brain is exceptionally good at finding ways around it when it suits us.
In fact, one of the core elements of higher education is to teach people how to pick apart their own thoughts and beliefs, keep their cognitive biases in check, and question what they believe to be true. And even after years of learning and practice, we can still fall for it.
An adjacent example is optical illusions – Our brain will always make one line look longer than the other, even if we’ve seen the illusion hundreds of times and know why it works. We still have to measure each line before we can be certain that they’re the same length. We’re good enough at tricking ourselves – all bets are off when you add in things like social pressure (much less, people who are intentionally deceptive).
It doesn’t matter if it’s astrology, religion, atheism, politics, history, conspiracy theories, superstition…or Elon Musk saying every year for ten years that “fully autonomous cars will be here next year.” You’ll find a way to justify your beliefs. The internet and social media have ironically made it easier than ever to find the truth AND find people who will reinforce objective falsehoods.
The trick is to decouple your personal identity from what you believe and not to fall for absolutism. Most of the time nothing bad will actually happen if you’re wrong. You can still be a good person and leave a church (or join one). You can switch political parties and still be a good friend. It is ok to enjoy the social aspects of your ward, believe that the LDS Church does good humanitarian work, AND believe that the church is wrong in its treatment of LGBTQ people.
I’m really with John Charity Spring here though. The best part of Mormonism used to be the community, but RMN has pretty effectively gutted it. The charming chaos of Sunday potlucks and questionable hillside pageants have been replaced by the religious equivalent of fast food franchises…consistent and predictable, but lacking a soul.
“The best part of Mormonism used to be the community, but RMN has pretty effectively gutted it. The charming chaos of Sunday potlucks and questionable hillside pageants have been replaced by the religious equivalent of fast food franchises…consistent and predictable, but lacking a soul.” – The Pirate Priest
RMN might have been holding the scalpel for the final incision on “the wonderful Mormon community”, but what really did it was that the US economy made it impossible for women to afford the privilege running the of community creation system to the same degree. Also, some of these women debarked to the “greener pastures” of Girl Scouts, shelters, food banks, libraries, and school-adjacent organizations such as the PTA.*
It’s an open question in my mind whether the real question is whether the LDS volunteering community could provide service to the church community by community events such as the potlucks or janitorial services – and the question is if we had paid janitors handling baseline cleanup, we could handle church community events again.
* Some women just didn’t show up in these community spaces because of burnout and they believed that they could say “No” instead of saying “Yes” with a ton of resentment.