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Liminal Blather (10 unread)

Progress?

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:09am EDT by Ujlapana

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Last week my wife and I had a very long talk about where I stand on the church. I haven't really come across anything in the last few years to make me think its claims of moral and authoritative superiority are true, and she, despite disagreeing with the recent actions against homosexuals and other issues, continues to fall back on "but it's true." We're both even-tempered, so while these can be animated, passionate discussions, they're (happily) not real fights.

Nonetheless, this one left me particularly frustrated. Perhaps because it's been such a long time since our last one.

The next night she said, "If you don't want to go to church you don't have to."

Wow. I never thought that that day would come. My mind raced--was this my one chance at "freedom?". Was I looking at a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape from endless, mind-numbing Sundays? The door to my prison left ajar by a thoughtless guard?

"Really?"

"Yes. I don't want to be a controlling wife or anything."

I took one last look out of the prison door and turned back.

"I want to be where my family is. I'll keep coming with you."

What can I say? I know my attendance makes her happy, even though I complain to her about all the crap that gets taught. And I see so little of my kids, I'd rather play quietly with them in Sacrament Meeting (or in the foyer!) than stay at home.

Strange, really. I feel like some progress has been made, even though nothing's changing outwardly. One never knows what to expect, here on the middle way. But I was careful not to lock the door when I closed it behind me.
NOM Movie Review

Posted: May 12th, 2008, 10:00am EDT by Ujlapana

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Last night I watched My Kid Could Paint That. I highly recommend it to people who've found a way out of a prior belief system. Watching the progression of the film maker, both in the movie and in the DVD feature Back to Binghamton. It's fascinating to see the human drama of preconceived notion collide with raw data, then to watch some people cling to beliefs in the face of that evidence, while others begin to question and doubt their fundamental assumptions. It's clear that it caused the narrator an all-too-familiar internal turmoil.

When I first set out on my journey from belief to agnosticism (or, more candidly, outright disbelief) toward Mormon teachings, I felt very alone. It was as if I was struggling in a darkness that surely no one had been through before, save the "offended or unworthy." Having done considerable reading on religiosity since then (and even in seeing movies like this one) I find it fascinating that my experience is, essentially, a core part of the human experience. That many people go through these wrenching changes and emerge with added light and knowledge on the other side.

So then, tally ho!
Do I come out or not

Posted: March 3rd, 2008, 11:42am EST by Ujlapana

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I recently discovered a fellow ward member on NOM. This was somewhat exhilarating, because even though I knew he was redefining his relationship with the church, I am completely "in the closet" in my ward; yet I could now interact with a local fellow member without blowing my cover. Mind you, in real life people see me wearing non-white shirts and such, and I certainly make nontraditional comments, but I still go to most meetings. And have a very "high" calling in the ward. I've been debating "outing" myself to this guy for some time, but I'm not really sure how that would play out. Given the negative reaction that often follows overt questioning, I'm interested in carefully controlling how much information I share with people who are basically acquaintances (i.e. fellow ward members). Ah, life in the liminal lane!
Monday Night Services

Posted: January 15th, 2008, 8:41am EST by Ujlapana

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I sing in an amateur choir, which my wife and I auditioned for about a year ago. I've never really done anything like it before, and, frankly, I'm a little out of my league surrounded by so many experienced singers. But I really enjoy the weekly chance to step out of the daily punishments of life and just create beautiful music.

We've just started working up our spring repertoire, and one of the pieces we're doing is Morten Lauridsen's Sure On This Shining Night. I have a hard time singing this, even though it's still in "practice mode" (I can only imagine where we'll be in two months!) because it is so spiritually moving to me. I literally choke up at certain points. Yet the lyrics are completely secular, based on the poem by James Agee--

Sure on this shining night
Of star-made shadows round
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground

The late year lies down the north,
All is healed, all is health
High summer holds the earth,
Hearts all whole

Sure on this shining night
I weep for wonder
Wandr’ing far alone
Of shadows on the stars.

I don't have a good place to recommend for a professional recording of this, but YouTube has a pretty good recording of a Taiwanese group performing it. It doesn't do it justice compared to performing it, but I just find this a truly beautiful piece of poetry and music.

When my Sunday's leave me feeling frustrated and generally unfulfilled, it's nice to know I communion with God (to the extent an agnostic can) every Monday.
More Musings on Racism

Posted: December 26th, 2007, 3:42am EST by Ujlapana

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I just had the chance to spend lots of quality time with my devout in-laws for the holidays. I love them a lot. They are great people. The parents know my current views on the church, but the siblings do not (although I come off as very heretical to them, I'm sure). We talked about lots of things, both religious and secular. Here's what I learned in one poignant conversation that flowed from a discussion of presidential contenders:

1. Oprah Winfrey is anti-Mormon,
2. the church was never racist (but it's complicated to explain that to journalists), and
3. suggesting that the church may have been mistaken prior to 1978 is disloyal (and therefore bad).

Have to admit, I felt like #1 came out of left field. After establishing that there was no good evidence for the assertion, I suggested that if it were true, it might be because she's black, and the church has a less-than-stellar record with its teachings on race. That led to the next two observations. At that point, tension building, we changed the subject.

These two observations by my family really bothered me because I've been thinking a lot about the recent article in the Wall Street Journal on racism in the church. Since the article came out last Friday, I have been increasingly agitated by the continued belief among the vast majority of Mormons that racism was okay prior to 1978 (or that whites withholding power from blacks, when so directed by God, is not racism). I even had a dream on Friday night that I was acting as a racist, even as I found my behavior offensive at the same time. Not a pleasant dream (particularly as it led to violence against me) but a clear reflection of how I am thinking about this issue these days.

I'm as close as I've ever been to writing a letter to a particular apostle who I understand actually reads his mail (rather than sending it back to a bishop or SP). I just feel that my integrity is demanding that I implore the leaders of the church to see the evil that is perpetuated by not officially forsaking pre-1978 "doctrine." Not that I expect the church to apologize on account of my humble letter, but then I can at least say that I've done something to further what I believe to be the best course of action for the sake of the many members whom I love.
A Spirit by any other name

Posted: September 17th, 2007, 8:08pm EDT by Ujlapana

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What really did me in, in regards to the church, was realizing that the spiritual experiences I considered noetic were 1) experienced by other people in relation to mutual exclusive ideas and 2) replicable using psilocybin.

I've told this to a number of still-believing Mormons. It doesn't phase them at all. I find this very curious. To me, it is like growing up in a family in which we call a certain color red. As I meet more and more people, I find them referring to other colors, such as my yellow or green, as red. At the end of the day, I have to question what it means for something to hold the property of redness. I will certainly reject that an objective redness exists.

So, too, goes the Spirit. I have come across so many recorded instances of people having "spiritual" experiences, I have read testimonials from participants in the Good Friday Experiment (who's drug trips were profoundly meaningful decades later), I have felt similar feelings when passionately discussing humanist principles. People use the same words and describe the same things as a typical Mormon speaker in F&T meeting. I cannot discern some consistent difference between what Mormons (including myself) appear to be describing and what others are describing.

Some people have suggested that I weight my own spiritually noetic experiences (of which there have been several over my life) with more significance. That seems distorted to me--when I think about those experiences, it wasn't that I knew something as much as I felt a profound sense of love. That's a great thing, to be sure, but doesn't have anything to do with knowledge. At least not in any way that I can tell.

I certainly don't think that personal meaning has to coincide with objective reality. It's similar to how my love for my wife and kids is real, but doesn't tell me the state of some extra-subjective thing. They're important to me but they're obviously not important to most people in the world (who are unaware of their existence), so to state that the universe somehow dictates their importance is a great myth (which I subscribe to!), but that's all. I can see the boundaries on the myth without deflating its personal meaning. I can confidently say, "I matter," or "My wife and kids matter," as a statement that transcends myself. For some reason, God doesn't work like that. If I think that God is just my God, but not other people's God, then it doesn't seem like God's really THE Judeo-Christian God anymore. Same for the truthfulness of a church that claims other churches cannot by true.
I'm sorry...not!

Posted: September 13th, 2007, 10:12am EDT by Ujlapana

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Since "coming out" to my in-laws I have been corresponding with my FIL on all things philosophical, ethical, spiritual and religious in an attempt to be better understood. I think this has gone fairly well (as he has since acknowledged that I didn't stop believing in order to commit whoredoms), but sometimes we get somewhat snippy with each other. In his last missive to me, he referred to the September Mountain Meadows Massacre article in the Ensign and asked if I was disappointed that the church was handling it so well.

Goading attitude notwithstanding, I was actually quite pleased as I reflected on the article. It's a pretty honest account I think--you really can't definitely pin it on BY, and I don't think you have to in order to learn valuable lessons about the dangers of obedience.

Then I heard about Henry Eyring's remarks on the anniversary of the event: We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today.

I was pretty proud of my little church...a growed up! I realized he didn't say, "we're sorry," but organizations so rarely do. This seemed like an apology to me, so I was going to respond to my FIL that I was, in fact, quite pleased with the church's apparent progress from Hinkley's weasely: That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment of the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day. I was really happy.

So, I'm all the more disappointed (slightly angry, even?) to find out that a PR hack, Mark Tuttle, had this to say in response to Eyring's (apparently uncorrelated) apology: We don't use the word 'apology.' We used 'profound regret.' It's like seeing your brother come out of rehab and go straight back to the needle! Why, oh why, must they act this way? The organization is at fault, and it is the same organization that existed when the atrocity occured. Was nothing learned from this mistake? Apparently not. For although "regret" can be construed as an apology, it can also be spoken generally, as in, "We regret the Holocaust." Regret doesn't explicitly invoke responsibility. So now, unfortunately, the bar is raised--"regret" won't cut it anymore because you (through your PR guy, no less) have made sure we realize that you're not accepting any responsibility for it. How sad. How truly sad.

But of course, it's not "the organization" deciding not to apologize, it's the leaders. So the finger of blame does have somewhere to point. Who has not learned the lessons of warning from the actions of President Hale and Bishop Lee? Who has not taken corrective actions to ensure that the organization could not facilitate future moral missteps? Who has decided that "being right" is more important than "being loving" to the survivors, some of whom clearly still feel emotional pain over this past event?

The answer is obvious. And how inspired could such people be by a God of Love?
My Great Shame

Posted: August 28th, 2007, 11:09am EDT by Ujlapana

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I will now openly admit the sin that led me away from orthodox belief in the church: thinking.

Okay, that's a little antagonistic--let me put it another way: intellectualism. But what is intellectualism? And why is it so frightening to so many people?

As long as I can remember, I've considered myself an intellectual. Why? Because I have always enjoyed thinking about things, connecting disparate ideas, and evaluating existing "knowledge" with a critical eye. Study, reflection, and speculation--these are the words in my dictionary's definition of "intellectual," and I think they sum it up quite nicely.

Study, reflection, and speculation. What exactly is wrong with those? The problem is that they are not outcome focused. Instead, they are focused on the process. An intellectual (when engaging in intellectual pursuits--after all, intellectuals believe and act frequently without complete analysis), absorbs as much information as possible, then tries to weave it all into a coherent myth (anthropologically speaking). When new, conflicting information appears, it must be incorporated as non-judgementally as possible, even if that means the old myth was wrong. Learning is its own reward--one never asks, "Why should I bother to think about this?"

Anti-intellectualism, often inappropriately described as faith (for everyone has faith), is focused on the result. Someone posits a myth, and it is everyone's job to accept it. Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus, as two embodied beings--accept it. The Old Testament is full of literal stories about language confusion, global floods, and divinely sanctioned genocides--accept it. You can accept this by what you feel--accept it. Inputs that do not align with these myths are not allowed to reshape it; they are only to be rejected as lies, half-truths, or misunderstandings. Joseph usually didn't tell the story that way? Other accounts are incomplete. God seems to be acting immorally? Who are you to judge God? Others describe the same feelings when testifying of diametrically opposed beliefs? They must not really be feeling what you feel. To focus on the intellectual process instead of the proscribed outcome is to cast doubt on the myth, and to the non-intellectual this is highly offensive, morally dubious, or just plain dumb.

Of course, many religious leaders want it both ways--study, reflect, speculate, etc., just make sure you get the right answer! And if that's too much work, guess what? The right answer is still the same! Isn't that convenient?
Opening a Little Wider

Posted: August 23rd, 2007, 10:24am EDT by Ujlapana

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Last weekend my entire family went to a wedding out West. We stayed with some relatives who are extremely intellectual, and a generation ahead of us. It was great fun for someone like me--every night (and during the days if we were together) we discussed the church, politics, or general philosophy. We got into an extended debate of theodicy, which one of them was struggling with. I freely defended my own ideas, although not by explicitly saying, "God doesn't exist." I merely pointed out that if God does exist, God doesn't go meddling in people's affairs--otherwise God is clearly capricious and possibly sadistic. (Check out God's "rejoicing in suffering" in Deut. 28!) It was great fun and left me mentally exhausted.

Unfortunately, they are perceptive people, so they could tell my positions on fundamental doctrines are, shall we say, unorthodox. They immediately had a phone call into my parents, who confirmed the same. So, now I've become an object of pity in two more people's eyes. Future conversations will almost certainly be more polemic, as they strive to "defend the Church" or "save me from myself." I sure hope not, but that's the way it's gone with others--they used to talk freely about their gripes about Church, but now it's all "true and living" all the time. It's an unfortunate wall they choose (subconciously, I'm sure) to erect.

It's made me think about how some believers regularly accuse me of thinking I am smarter than they are. I try to point out that I can (as can they) disagree with someone whom I consider a peer or even a superior intellect. Factual disputes are not contests of intellect in my mind. I discovered what I did because of a fair amount of lucky timing--meeting the right people at the right times, or reading the right articles at the right times. On the other hand, as I usually do not point out it response, they now consider themselves morally superior to me. Even if I do "good works," I am an apostate and bound for much suffering. People can't be morally "different but equal" in any type of moral reasoning that I understand. So now that I've played out some of the steps expected of an apostate, I am clearly morally inferior. It's a little depressing to have yet two more family members feel that way about me.
Disaffected with disaffection

Posted: July 27th, 2007, 3:51am EDT by Ujlapana

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In April of 2003, Hinkley said:

Each of us has to face the matter—either the Church is true, or it is a fraud. There is no middle ground. It is the Church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing. -- Gordon Hinkley, Loyalty, April, 2003

For a long time, I thought that was a weird thing to say. Could he be that shallow in his thinking? I doubted it--I figured he was keeping it simple for the masses. A couple of days ago I read the Oaks and Packer interviews from the PBS documentary. I was quite surprised to find almost the exact same declaration from both of them. I have decided that I will have to believe that Hinkley is being completely honest when he says things like that.

So, here's a great example of why I disagree. I had a very interesting experience reading the latest (or possibly one earlier) edition of Dialogue. I was flipping around when I came across a short essay about the recollections of a woman whose sister died of polio in her youth. I read it standing in my kitchen and openly wept.

A minute later I noticed it was in the Fiction section of the journal.

I was furious.

I felt like my emotions had been jerked around. Like I had been used or manipulated in some way. Here I was, emotionally connecting with a phantasm, a figment of someone's imagination!

But it was well written, so a couple of nights later I read it aloud to my wife. I couldn't get through it because, again, I wept. (But less than the first time--I'm not hopeless!) I found this fascinating in a new way--knowing it was fiction, and that I had been annoyed by that, I still was emotionally connecting with the characters in the story! That's the great thing about fiction--it tells truths in a way that simple facts cannot. An author can write, "I am sad," and that may be a fact, but it is nothing like writing an essay about the trials of a fictitious character (or a metaphorical poem). By doing that, I will actually feel what the author is feeling.

So, I can accept the Book of Mormon as fiction and still find value in it. At the moment I don't find much, mainly because I'm also in a state of rebellion against the literalism that is "required" by the church, but if I were having a conversation with others who also approach it as fiction I think I could find more to value. It becomes a commentary on 19th-century America and Joseph's (and/or a co-author's, if that's your fancy) interaction with that society. It's just set in a fictitious pre-Columbian society (which is yet another commentary on 19th-century America!)

There clearly is a middle ground--I live in it, and so do many people that I know and love. It's not the easiest place at times, but ease has never really been my top priority in life.

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Liminal Blather (10 unread)

Posted: October 6th, 2008, 11:09am EDT by Ujlapana

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Posted: May 12th, 2008, 10:00am EDT by Ujlapana

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Posted: March 3rd, 2008, 11:42am EST by Ujlapana

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Posted: January 15th, 2008, 8:41am EST by Ujlapana

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Posted: December 26th, 2007, 3:42am EST by Ujlapana

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Posted: September 17th, 2007, 8:08pm EDT by Ujlapana

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Posted: September 13th, 2007, 10:12am EDT by Ujlapana

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Posted: August 28th, 2007, 11:09am EDT by Ujlapana

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Posted: August 23rd, 2007, 10:24am EDT by Ujlapana

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Posted: July 27th, 2007, 3:51am EDT by Ujlapana

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