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Last night, while unwinding for a few minutes before going
to bed, I stumbled upon and watched about half of "The Battle for the
Bible", a PBS production that can be accessed through battleforthebible_2007-04-26 It did not present any
information that was new to me, but did synthesize a lot of information in a
helpful manner. And yet again, I was struck by the way in which so many of
us who are now stumbling out of the Mormon cloister are merely going through
the process that most of the rest of the Western world went through with
Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther and the rest of the great reformers. Our epiphanies
are 500 year old in the Western world. Another reason to give “Praise to
the man who communed with Jehovah" who Jesus anointed Prophet and Seer.
So, thanks for that Joe, and you too Brig.
For example:
• Back when the Bible was written in Latin, it was illegal to possess even
fragments of it in English, or to communicate about biblical contents in
English. The first English Bibles were translated and copied by hand, and
then circulated illegally. Tyndale and many other leaders in this regard were
burned at the stake. Countless others were put in jail or punished in severe
ways.
• We owe to Tyndale and his illegal Bible much of the language that was
incorporated into the King James version of the Bible, and has shaped the
English language. Tyndale was one of England’s finest scholars at the time,
and left England in order to produce the translation and publish it, since
this would have been punishable by death had he remained in England. Parts of
Europe were more enlightened, including Antwerp. After the Tyndale Bible was
published in Antwerp, it was smuggled back into England one page at a time,
interleafed within larger books. The pages of the Tyndale Bible were
purposefully made small so they could be smuggled in that way. And then, the
Tyndale Bibles were reassembled in England, and sold at a high profit on the
black market there. It was largely the profit motive of Antwerp printers and
publishers that enabled the circulation of the English Bible in England.
Tyndale lived in hiding in Antwerp for years, but was eventually discovered
and turned over to the authorities by a zealous Catholic Englishman. He was
in prison for a couple years before being executed. Ironically, a short time
later, the Anglican Church started to come into being and the Tyndale Bible
was legalized in England. It became foundational to the Anglican movement.
Tyndale was a posthumous English hero. He is now ranked with Shakespeare
among the foremost creators of the modern English language.
• The controversy with regard to the English translation of the Bible was,
pure and simple, a power struggle. Information is power. As long as the
people did not know what the Bible said, they were much more easily
controlled by the Catholic hierarchy. The movement that produced the English
Bible sought to overturn the Catholic hierarchy, and place worshipers in
direct relationship with God in more the fashion indicated by the New
Testament. This was a simple question of how much power institutions would
have, and how much individuals would have.
• An important precursor to the English and other translations of the Bible
that eventually had such a profound influence, was the identification by
scholars (many of them Catholic clerics) of older and more reliable Greek and
Latin documents relating to the Bible. The New Testament was originally
written in Greek, and accordingly when a new Greek New Testament was
assembled, and then translated into Latin so that was accessible to educated
Catholics, it produced a shock wave within a relatively small but influential
group, as a result of the stunning differences between this believed to be
more accurate version of the New Testament and what had accepted as God's
irrevocable word. The creation of these works was part of the legal,
scholarly enterprise, conducted primarily by those who were aligned with the
hierarchy. However, they stimulated people like Wycliffe and Tyndale to
rethink their theology, and engage in acts of heresy and sedition, as then
defined, in order to do what they believed was right. They and their
followers acted at great personal risk. We are not talking about shunning or "mere"
social isolation. These were matters of confiscation of property,
imprisonment, torture and death. And yet, thousands upon thousands took these
risks over and over again. Such is the driving force toward human individual
liberty.
• Prior to the English and other translations of the Bible, the Catholic Mass
and other ceremonies and the individual and community experiences they
produced were the core of religious experience. With the production of the
Bible in English, history (as dimly perceived through the Bible, but history
nonetheless) and the ideas transmitted by that history became foundational to
the Christian religious experience. This produced a plethora of Protestant
faiths, as a result of the Christian community’s newfound ability to read
their history, and draw different conclusions from it. The attempt to discern
history, and later the natural processes that lay behind it, trumped dogma
based religious authority.
• The Catholic Church in England than the rest of Europe violently resisted
production of the English and other translations of the Bible, for the
reasons just indicated. This included regularly imprisoning people; taking
the property away; burning leaders at the stake; etc. And yet, the English
Bible multiplied like rabbits in the black market, and spread throughout the
population. Over the course of a few centuries, it fundamentally changed the
relationship between Europe's peoples and it's religious authorities.
• However, the religious institutions in question still remain powerful as a
result of the massive properties they accumulated during their periods of
dominance, while their members remained for the most part ignorant. So, you
have massive social institutions that are not vibrant influences in most
European communities, but are still serious forces to be reckoned in some
ways while being ignored (or paid lip service) by the vast majority of
European populations. As they say, Mormons and Catholics believe opposite
dogmas. Catholics dogma says that the current Pope is infallible, but no
Catholic really believes that. Mormon dogma says that the current Prophet is
fallible, and no Mormon really believes that.
• I will leave it to you to draw parallels between this history and recent
Mormon experience.
• After leaving European history, the documentary brought religion into the
Americas with the Puritans. They wanted far more reform than was occurring
within the Church of England, and brought their religious zeal to North
America in the early 1600s. However, after a number of generations this
fervour waned, and then in the 1700s a” Great Awakening" occurred (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening)
This introduced a new level of emotional experience to the American religious
landscape, which has to an extent characterized it ever since. Mormonism was
a product of the "Second Great Awakening" in the early 1800s, as
were countless other tiny religious sects, a few of which have survived to
become significant. The Seventh-day Adventists are probably the best-known
among those. Powerful individual and group oriented emotional experiences
commonly, within religious groups at this time, anchor and "emotional
knowing" that in an odd way renders history, scientific and other
information irrelevant. Authority established on the base of this kind of
emotional knowing, accordingly, is much more resistant to the kinds of
historical and scientific acid that dissolve the foundation of Catholic
authority during the Reformation.
• This brings us to the topic of social evolution. I was chatting with a post
Mormon friend a little while ago on a related topic, so I will record that
here as well. He wondered out loud why Mormonism (in his perception) is
becoming increasingly defensive in a time of such great liberty. His wife and
family are still active members, and hence he is in regular touch with what
is going on from a social psychological point of view within his Mormon
community.
• At that point in the conversation, he and I had already discussed some of
the concepts described above. I then outlined for him some of the reading I
did a while ago with regard to complex systems theory in the biological
world, and we discussed parallels between biological and social evolution.
• Both of these types of evolution are based on information transfer.
Genetics has enabled the most helpful analysis with regard to biological
evolution. Our genetic codes are copied from one generation to the next, with
mutations of various sorts sneaking in that enable organisms, over
generations, to adapt to the environment. Accordingly, the most capable
organisms survive and pass their genes along, while the least capable do not.
The important point is that biological evolution is based on a genetic
information transfer mechanism. In fact, there is some reasonable physical
theory around these days to suggest that all reality -- the very foundations
of physics -- is based on information transfer as opposed to any kind of
matter.
• In any event, social organisms are also created, maintained, and evolved on
the basis of information transfer. At the moment, the social organism that is
Mormonism is under ferocious attack because of the Internet and other
communications media that make it impossible for authorities to control
information flows in the way they did in times past. Think of a walled city
whose walls suddenly fell down. The authorities in the city are scrambling to
rebuild, and finding that the old stones will not stick together.
• There is a violent, mostly invisible, battle going on at the borders of
Mormonism. Mormon apologists kick up as much dust as possible in order to
create confusion, since this is one way of slowing down the transmission of
information from the outside to the inside. Pleas from the pulpit to avoid
the Internet, stay away from free threatening materials, etc. are all
likewise efforts to maintain the increasingly porous information blocking
boundary around the Mormon organism. This performs a function similar to the
human skin, or the boundary around a cell -- it is supposed to keep certain
things out while allowing certain things in. When the information coming in
changes in a significant way for a long time, the nature of what is on the
inside (the social organism itself) eventually changes too. That, is one of
the Reformation's greatest lessons.
• However, the builders of new religious institutions in the United States
stumbled upon a powerful new defence mechanism -- a new kind of wall. That is
the substitution of faith based on emotional knowing for dogmatic faith in a
certain kind of authority. No one sat down and figured this out. Rather, to
use the analogy to biological evolution, various new social organisms were
produced during the first and second great awakenings in North America, and
those best suited to survival in a new social environment have survived.
Emotional knowing is it that is at the base of most of these. These social
organisms now use sophisticated mass media combined with aggressive personal
sales campaigns to push emotional buttons as a foundational part of their
recruitment techniques. When we study the cognitive bias research in the
context of marketing in general (See Robert Levine, “The Power of Persuasion”
for example), we conclude that marketing campaigns are designed to touch
buttons related to authority, moving with the herd, etc. that have been shown
to be systemic cognitive weaknesses in most human beings. When that analysis
is then carried over into the systems used to recruit new members to various
religious institutions (including the Mormon), and then shape those new
members into functioning parts of the hive, we find precisely the same tools
in use, and in many ways more effectively than virtually all commercial
organizations use them (see http://www3.telus.net/public/rcmccue/bob/documents/rs.mormon%20use%20of%20persuasive%20technique1002365.pdf).
• It is interesting to note the parallels between the "feeling is
knowing" force within modern North American religion in particular, and
the ritual based power of the medieval Catholic experience. In the Catholic
case, the worshipers had virtually no information with regard to the history
of their faith, what the Bible said, etc., and were shaped into a community
by the perceived authority given by God to the Catholic priests, and the
impressive rituals those priests directed. These were the community's heartbeat,
as well as punctuating significant life events such as births, marriages, and
deaths. As that heartbeat faded and intellect began to shape belief and
behaviour, ritual faded from view. In fact, most of the Reformers were
allergic to Catholic ritual and all of the pageantry that went along with it.
The pendulum accordingly swung to the opposite end of the spectrum until the
Great Awakening, and events that followed. As a result of that process,
church meetings are now often held in elaborate, massive auditoriums with
cutting-edge audiovisual systems that facilitate displays of pageantry that
dwarf anything the medieval Catholic Church could have produced. These
presentations are designed for maximum emotional impact. Focusing on the test
groups are used to measure the impact of these presentations right down to
the physiological level. And, while believers have access to overwhelming
amounts of information with regard to the Bible, the history of their faith,
the interface between religious belief in science, etc., for the most part
they do not take advantage of that. First of all, there is so much; second of
all, it is so complicated and third, once you’ve had the right kind of
emotional experience, it just doesn’t matter.
• In short, the "feelings" barrier is formidable. However, it still
has its limitations and vulnerabilities. For example, it does not function
well when new potential converts consider Mormonism. You've got to give
people the feeling before they get the information. That is hard to do with
the most potential converts in an Internet age. And, increasing numbers of
those who were raised within Mormonism and finding an inadequate in various
ways, and beginning to look for reasons as to why this may be. Many of them
eventually Reject their emotional experience as a reliable means of
knowledge. A crucial factor in this regard is often information with regard
to how many other religious groups use precisely the same anchor
(emotion-based knowledge) to defend their authority; how people within these
groups have almost precisely the same experiences as Mormons have; and how
those people would use their experiences as authority for radically different
and often bizarre (from a Mormon point of view) beliefs. The more widespread
information of this type becomes, the more Mormons tend to question the
reliability of their own beliefs. Accordingly, this type of type of
information is being carefully defended against at the Mormon borders right
now. The primary defence is massive amounts of dust kicked up by Mormon
scientists and historians attempting to defend their faith. Many of these
people are fine scholars in their own fields, who embarrass themselves by
venturing into the apologetic free. I count Richard Bushman, Davis Bitton,
Hugh Nibley and many other Mormon scholars in this group, though they deserve
great respect for work they have done in other fields.
• It is also important to note that the communications media is, in a way,
just getting going in terms of producing information and sorting that into
more usable forms that might be called wisdom. Wikipedia is a prime example
of this. More recently, youtube and various other powerful data sharing and
sorting devices have mushroomed into existence. And, most importantly,
generations of young people are now rising for whom it is instinctual to use
the Internet as a means of finding out what is going on, while they
participate in the creation of wisdom (see http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html
for some very insightful comments along these lines).
• Some believe that the Internet will be usable by authoritarian groups to
further narrow the information to which the masses have access. In some cases,
this is likely to be the case. But again using history as our guide, the
general rule is that as more information becomes available, a democratization
of power occurs. Not an absolute democratization, but the spread of
information tends to force those who have power tend to give up at least some
of it. The Reformation might be used as exhibit number one in this argument.
What happened in the Soviet Union might be Exhibit 2. What is happening
currently in China is a fascinating Exhibit 3.
• As information of the type I've described circulates broadly within the
Mormon group, what will happen to its leaders? Using history as our guide, we
note that in many cases the leaders of the failed social ventures are
violently deposed. However, in today's more humane world (see http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html),
it is more likely that they will be simply ignored. Think of a family that
has changed radically in terms of values and religious beliefs from one
generation to the next. In most cases, at least to an extent the kids and
grandkids still hang around grandpa and grandma, but the kids make sure to
teach the grandkids that what grandpa and grandma have to say along racist,
misogynist, literalist religious, and other ignorant lines should be politely
ignored. In countless communities where literalist religious beliefs still
have significant influence, this is just what happens to old folks like grandpa
and grandma. We love them; we respect what they did for us while raising us
in the best way they knew how; we want to remain connected to them; but their
values differ radically from ours, so kids, smile and ignore what they have
to say.
• Along this road now walk the Mormon prophets with regard to many church
attending, and even a temple recommend holding, Mormons. Many of these people
have corresponded with me, and hence I speak from first-hand experience. From
what I can tell, this group is significant, and increasing. They cannot pay
the social price to break with Mormonism, but they are not prepared to take
Mormonism seriously anymore.
• One of the difficulties with using biological evolutionary models to
understand cultural evolution is that the information transmission and
receipt mechanisms at the cultural level are so difficult to pin down. A lot
of this depends upon human perception, and we all know how unsystematic that
is. Accordingly, we are still guessing with regard to many of the important
mechanisms that underlie social evolution. We are at about the same level
there as we are with regard to understanding economics. Similar dynamics
shaped both areas, with economics being the more simple of the two since it
is a subset of social behaviour.
• However, we can observe social behaviour (if not the information
transmission that produces it), and that the observed behaviours can be
modeled to a significant degree using the same kind of models that are used
to explain how new species emerge, for example. This means that scientists
are probably on the right track, but have a long way to go before reaching an
understanding of how cultural evolution works.
• That having been said, we don't need to understand any more than we do
right now to accurately observe that social organisms like the Catholic
Church at the beginning of the Reformation, and the Mormon church for the
last couple of decades, are under severe threat as a result of information
that will radically change their nature once it is permitted inside the
organism, and has a chance to circulate.
This is all good, as far as I'm concerned. That does not mean we will
experience only beauty and light during the course of this process. Again,
consider the Reformation.
Those of us who are involved in a difficult personal situations that relate
to our changing beliefs can take comfort from the fact that we walk a road
that has been well used throughout all of known human history. We can simply
accept its difficulties, while enjoying the miracles that have come into our
lives. And most of all, we can be satisfied that as time passes, our small
efforts will contribute toward lives that involve more consciousness, more
freedom, and more fulfillment for our children, grandchildren etc.
Often, ironically, this also means more pain. If you want miss both the pain
and the joy, take the blue pill.
best,
bob
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