Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: June 05, 2020 05:41AM
Take Mormonism's origins, for example. The way the history of the church was told to me, it was the greatest story ever told that just happened to meet all my emotional needs for purpose and identity and some other things. The church was obviously the greatest institution to ever exist with the most spectacular history and would have been slated to be regarded as such by far more people... if only -- why, God, why did you command your prophet to ruin your image with polygamy? How did it serve the purpose of the restoration? I could never make sense of it. Of course, I would later figure that Joseph was just using his position late in his prophetic career at a time when he was quite literally forming a god complex to help himself with sexual access to all the women in his field of view who trusted him enough for him to groom them and keep it secret, and I let this church for years lecture me with a heavy hand and give me a crippling complex about my own sexual nature, but I digress. Mormonism's shiny story, it's purpose, that benevolent and holy feeling I got when I used to think about it, was created in editing.
Reality didn't bear it out. Well, there are some things here and there that if you chose to magnify and whitewash the rest of it could still sorta create the feeling, but I couldn't create the feeling the same way anymore when I consciously knew that I was manipulating the truth to play myself. There were a lot of reasons for wanting to try. I wanted to fit in with my peer group. I didn't want to let my father down who would never understand if I ever objected to anything about the gospel. I didn't want to give up on the gospel-depedent identity I had constructed for myself over years. Reason would dictate to just admit to all this and let it go, but as I said humans -- especially me -- are not rational creatures. We tend to tune things out, even things that you didn't think it was possible to just tune out, to avoid harsh realities that we have no coping mechanisms to accept.
The fact is that we need coping mechanisms to accept harsh realities. That may be why religion will never fully go away no matter how hard anti-theists try. They will never replace it with anything based purely on Reason or Science, because nobody wants the unvarnished truth at the end of the day, not unless you're able to give it to them wrapped in soft, easy mush that goes down smooth and leaves them feeling a little more warm and secure than before they listened to X, but when they've already found an intricate system of bullshit to believe in that checks all those boxes they're not going to give you the time of day to dismantle it. They'd sooner become flat-eathers, often literally, and for exactly those reasons. Things can change in a more reasonable direction, but their personal belief system has to collapse on its own. You can't force it. That's because it has to collapse in their heart first before their rational mind catches up to it. Everything we do is like that, even atheism and anti-religious activism.
Our reasoning faculties only serve to rationalize what we already feel. Now, we can tutor our hearts to love empirical reality if we so choose -- I'm not saying objective knowledge is impossible to obtain -- but whatever our rational reasons for believing or supporting an idea are, they are always secondary. Mormonism had to become an excruciating waking reality for me before I would admit to myself that I had indeed accumulated a lot of evidence that it was not true. What's funny is that when I finally admitted that to myself, my mind played through all the conversations I'd ever had on the subject of belief and nonbelief with all the people I'd ever patronizingly listened to in hopes that I could save their soul, and I understood their meanings for the first time and began agreeing with them, years after these conversations were had. Not all believers listen to the other side of the argument like I did, even patronizingly, so they can't even begin to construct an outside view of how they look and sound to others and what the universe appears like to other people. And if they can't do that, they can never, ever, accept the things an antimormon is telling them. They physically cannot. You are the harbinger of Satan as far as they are able to figure you out, or you're just hopelessly deluded. You are crazy. You're not crazy, but you are.
Mormons are not stupid people. There is an emotional sort of reasoning behind the intricate belief system and the rituals and the insitution, sometimes with a thin secular justification on top -- that "even if it wasn't true, I would still believe because of X, Y, and Z benefits" thinking that some Mormons display. Getting into this mindset can be hard for a nonreligious person, because it requires a sacrifice. Like Nephi had to kill a man a cold blood against the protestations of his heart because the spirit of the Lord demanded it, to entertain a Mormon mindset you've got to willing not just to suspend disbelief in Mormonism but suspend belief in a thousand things you know about that contradict it. If you can find in yourself to commit this sin against your intellectual integrity, which in other words is your heart loving and valuing empirical truth, you can taste this other world, and many choose to because it checks so many emotional comfort boxes deep down in our lizard brain we didn't even know we had. Mormons call those boxes the Great Questions, and they share them with others so vigorously not just because their authoritarian religion told them to, although it did, but because their boxes are ticked and it feels really good, or it can. When you find yourself on the left hand of your religious peers, not so much, but when things are working out, it works.
I watch a documentary about Flat Earthers, and I get the impression that Flat Eartherism is something similar to the church, something similar to Scientology. There's an emotional reasoning to it, a flare of humanity, that makes sense even if the given reasons don't. Would you rather beleive that the earth is getting small, filling up with people to fast, on the brink of annihilating itself, and etc., or would you rather believe that you are being lied to, that there is more untapped land out there somewhere, that the earth can't really be hurt by humanity? It also confirms a Biblical worldview more perfectly than most Christians dare opine for. It is that simple. Who wants to feel any of the things that environmentalists are telling people to feel? I think the only reason liberals are sort of willing to accept it is because they think they have sufficient time and resources and political will to turn it around and thus they get to play the savior, but they don't really have any of that. Of course, people don't just consciously choose what they will and won't believe. It happens in the heart first, and the head eventually catches up. And even when you're on the right track, you may not realize that it's something in your heart that spoke to you first and the reason others aren't interested is because the environment inside their own hearts is ill-equipped to follow you where you have trod, and the same may be true visa versa in some ways too. Mormons intuitively understand in their own Mormony way that the human being works this way, which is why when we leave they're always looking for the emotional reason and never listen to our stated reasons.
They're right, in a way, but sometimes one of the emotional reasons is a love of the truth, is a growing awareness that you've been lied to, and the rationalization that follows actually has a lot of evidence to feel confident in. I think everyone cares about empirical truth a least a little. It's hard to talk yourself into a completely irrational position when there are plenty of reasons to think you're being a fool. It's still possible, and many do, but it's not easy. The stars have to align in your social and emotional and intellectual life in the just right way for your heart to be willing to take that path, but once your heart is there and it feels like it needs to be there for whatever box it ticks, I'm sure the head will find a way to get there eventually. Something about the atomized and bias-feeding nature of our modern digital lives has made this phenomenon quite easier and more common.
The head is a trick. The heart is the secret. Someone can sound completely batshit, but if you can at least come to understand the things they value, the boxes their beliefs tick, you can know whether or not they'll hurt you or pose some other danger to you. You may not want to, because at some point in the process of empathy, you're going to have to directly or indirectly look at your own core beliefs objectively. We're all human. Our emotional tick boxes aren't that different, even if the way we check-mark them is unique to each person. We've all got the same basic needs, a common emotional language, a basic OS that young Mormon missionaries, if they're good at what they do, learn to tap into to make converts. Mormonism in the grand scheme of things can't help but be easily discredited by things that anyone can look up nowadays, but for someone in the right mode it will suck them in and almost never let go, because we aren't rational beings. Reason is this new toy we only discovered recently in our biological history and our brains have not switched over yet, may not for hundreds of thousands of years, and may never come to primarily use it. We may teach ourselves to value it, but even then we're working through our hearts first. This is who we are and how we are, and we just have to deal with it.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/2020 05:58AM by Cold-Dodger.