Inside Mormonism:
A Deconstruction and Psycho-Social Assessment of the Mormon Faith*
Thomas Riskas
* This article consists of copyrighted material excerpted from the Introduction, Foundational Preface, Chapters 1, 3, and 8, the Epilogue, and the Personal Postscript of Deconstructing Mormonism: An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith by Thomas Riskas, published by American Atheist Press, 2011.
Contents
I. Preface
II. Deconstructing the Concept of the Mormon ‘God’
III. Psycho-social Assessment of the Mormon Faith
IV. Personal Postscript
Bibliography
I.
Preface
Perhaps in no other faith, save perhaps fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, is the psychological price of membership and belonging so high as it is in the Mormon faith. For honest, informed, and committed Mormons intent on truly living their religion according to the dictates of their scriptures, Baptismal and Temple covenants, and the doctrinal teachings and counsel of their leaders, nothing or no one is truly ever good enough.
Specifically, Mormons are bound by the Baptismal covenant to keep all the commandments of their god, stand as a witness for their god at all times, in all places, and to all people at all times, and bear the burdens of others. They are also bound by their Temple covenants (if they are “worthy” to receive their Temple “endowments”) to: (1) obey the law of god and keep his commandments; (2) sacrifice all that is possessed, even one’s own life if necessary, in sustaining and defending the Mormon faith; (3) avoid all light-mindedness, loud laughter, the taking of the Lord’s name in vain, and every other unholy and impure practice; (4) have no sexual relations except with one’s husband or wife to whom one is legally and lawfully wedded; and (5) consecrate one’s time talents and everything one possesses or may yet possess to the Mormon Church as might be required. Moreover, Mormons are exhorted to always strive for ‘greater light and knowledge’ and ‘greater righteousness and truth.’ And they are to avoid complacency and ‘moderation’ and be always ‘anxiously,’ ‘selflessly’ and ‘zealously’ engaged in good causes and good works that ‘bring to pass much righteousness.’
Even the stalwart, righteous and faithful Paul in the Bible and Nephi in the Book of Mormon were shamefully self-critical of their own humanity, thereby making self-derision and continual repentance of their own natural imperfections an indicator of their personal righteousness and spirituality. (See Romans 7: 14–24 and 2 Nephi 4: 17–19 respectively.)
In this regard, the most righteous, faithful, and ‘blessed’ among the so-called prophets and ‘latter-day saints’ fall short of such draconian demands. Consequently, and in spite of denials, appearances and rationalizations to the contrary, they are continually weighed down by the burden of guilt and the shaming judgments and criticisms that are implicit in the moralistic core of their faith, and all too often explicit in the authoritative teachings and admonitions of Church leaders.
In the end, and notwithstanding statements to the contrary, the words of James Joyce ring true of Mormonism as they do with all other theistic institutions: “There is no heresy or philosophy so abhorrent to the Church as a human being.”
At a social level, the price of believing is divisiveness and the very real threat to human life. This social price for religious belief is exacted by those conservative, fundamentalist believers of all theistic faiths who hold that their god’s existence and mind and will have been revealed to all mankind in the inerrant ‘Word of God,’ and that such believed ‘Absolute Truth’ — allegedly ‘confirmed’ by the ‘Spirit’ (or, alternatively, mere self- or other-induced and subjectively experienced and interpreted emotions) — is binding on all mankind as ‘The Law,’ or as ‘The Way, The Truth and The Life.’ Such a price includes the social intolerance of religious doubt, nonbelief, wrong belief, and disbelief, as well as the at least tacitly intended and desired oppression of free thought, moral imagination, human instinctuality and dissent through the imposition of guilt and shame, and the threat of social isolation and eternal damnation (or the forfeiture of eternal ‘blessings’) in order to establish and maintain mind-control and social conformity of thought and behavior. Religious belief requires by its very nature obedience, sacrifice and consecration as the price for the sought for blessings of joy, peace, abundance, and divine deliverance in this life and salvation and eternal happiness in the life to come.
But religious belief, as we know so well, also exacts a price on society through the political activism of religiously indoctrinated and motivated fundamentalists — and also through secular law-making and policy-making by our religious elected, appointed, and hired officials. Such societal laws and policies, and the activist forces which influence them, define and dictate what is to be regarded as right or wrong, good or bad, or permissible or forbidden in the ‘eyes of the law’ — which are really believed to be the ‘eyes of God’ according to the different believed books of revelation and their accepted authoritative or personal interpretations.
To those of more moderate or liberal religious persuasion who might argue that their faith and that of others brings to pass much good in their communities and the world, I would argue that such an argument is a non sequitur and ask why such religious faith is necessary beyond natural human compassion, empathy, and self-interest, and how it is that nonbelievers or even militant Atheists can perform such social goods without any faith in gods? And to those same believers who might also argue that such a steep social price need not be exacted by religious beliefs on the basis that secular matters can be separated from religious concerns, I would counter that not only does history seem to confirm that just the opposite is the case, but that it is not coherent — given what we know about the nature of belief and how our beliefs work in our lives — to argue that we can entirely (or even at all) separate our most fundamental beliefs and corresponding judgments and motivations from our decisions and actions.
Metaphorically put, our beliefs are the lens through which we interpret and justify personal experience and action and interaction, as well as natural events, situations, and circumstances in the world and in our personal lives. They are also, together with their related values and felt certainty, the basis of human motivation and action. As Sam Harris articulated so well in an interview with Bill Maher on the program Real Time, “Religious beliefs cannot be kept separate. They intrude in public policy, [in education,] in politics and in science. Insofar as somebody believes something, it inevitably shows up in the world. Beliefs are the means to organize behavior and emotion” (8/23/2009; transcript and interpolation mine).
Clearly, when we learn of leaders of the world who interpret world events through, for example, the immoral lens of the Old Testament and the apocalyptic lens of the New Testament or other believed sacred texts, we are in danger. We suffer when leaders legislate secular laws in a religious context that subordinates human rights to what is believed to be ‘God’s Law.’ We suffer when they legislate the teaching of religious non-science (or nonsense) in our schools as though it were science (or even sensible), in order to uphold the scriptural versions of the creation of the world and religious beliefs concerning the origin of life and man on the earth. The consequences of religious belief in our world are significant indeed, and can and do threaten scientific progress and personal and social well-being, if not our very existence as a human race.
This is not mere hyperbole. When religious dogma and believed prophesy become secular laws and self-fulfilling prophesy, and when leaders and people of authority and influence in our society consider their sacred books as the literally ‘revealed word of God’ to all men, and see themselves moreover as instruments in the hands of their god and as having been called and chosen by their god to spread his word and do his work to realize his will on earth, then we are, to be sure, all in very real danger.
We cannot take comfort in the practice of religious moderation. For while the social price is perhaps not directly exacted by the simple, moderate, harmless believers of a self-constructed liberal faith of unconditional love and free salvation for all, the social price is nonetheless paid by them — and by others, believers or not, in some measure because of them.
The problem with desiring or calling for social tolerance of privately held religious belief on this basis is that the private, moderate believer must also at least implicitly tolerate, if not tacitly support, the privately held religious beliefs of others, including the beliefs of more fundamentalist and extreme religious believers. Even if private, moderate believers eschew the actions, behavior or viewpoints of certain religious fundamentalists or extremists, they do not — cannot — dare eschew these extremists’ fundamental (as distinguished from fundamentalist) religious beliefs in ‘God,’ revelation, and faith. To do so would necessarily bring their own fundamental beliefs into question. But, as we have learned and been repeatedly reminded, such fundamental religious belief is at the heart of the problem. To sidestep or fail to critically confront such a problem (and even harshly so, where indicated) — i.e., the problem of fundamental belief in a god, revelation, and faith — so as not to invoke personal doubt or direct social criticism toward all such fundamental belief, including one’s own, is essentially and actually to enable the very religious extremism eschewed.
Those who therefore challenge religious beliefs or are critical of them — or of those who hold them as truth — are not being mean. Nor are they inconsiderate or intolerant of either the human right to think, believe, or speak as one will, or the human need for purpose, moral guidance, and comfort in the face of life’s vicissitudes. On the contrary, as I see it, Atheists are pointing to the only reliable resources we have in these consequential matters and troubled times. That is to say, the natural resources of reason, common sense, imagination (including moral imagination), psychological honesty, science, and the scientific method unfettered by denial, superstition, and wishful thinking — and uncorrupted by the pursuit of riches, power and political advantage. They are challenging believers to realize that by uncritically, unquestioningly, and stubbornly holding to their beliefs and corresponding meta-beliefs out of superstitious fear and misplaced loyalty, they are, in a very real sense, not only being irrational and epistemically irresponsible (which have their own very real personal and social consequences), but are complicit as well in exacting the steep price for holding and tolerating such beliefs. They are helping to extort a price for something that yields no real returns of any real value in the physical or social economy of human existence.
Harris, I think, said it well in the concluding remarks of his previously referenced interview with Bill Maher: “We are in a war of ideas that needs to be prosecuted. We can be intelligent, educated people and still believe religious bullshit because nobody challenges it. … Religious belief is a social disorder; it’s a conversational disorder”… and “we need to [face the fact that] we have a problem of good ideas vs. bad ideas… [and] overcome…the real double-standard that religious ideas can’t be criticized.”
***
Turning more specifically to the Mormon faith, I will say up-front that at its darkest, most fundamental level — which is not, incidentally, the public side (or persona) of Mormonism which is presented to those inside or outside the faith — I think the Mormon faith, like the Catholic, Islamic, and all other fundamentalist, authoritarian faiths, is paradigmatic of what I consider to be the very worst in all theistic religions. To be sure, all faith- and revelation-based theistic religions are in my view an affront to man’s rationality and intellect – and therefore his dignity – as incoherent belief systems built on superstition and metaphysical nonsense.
All theistic religions are also an affront to man’s humanity. Because of the irrational faith they require and the inhuman, performatory and behavioral demands they make, they shamelessly and shamefully exhibit a disguised disdain for human reason, human nature, and human dignity through various forms of abusive boundary violations, including mind-control and the moralistic intrusion into the personal lives and choices of its adherents in the name of love and concern for their temporal and eternal welfare. Moreover, all theistic faiths are, in addition to being utterly absurd in content, ultimately regressive in nature and tend to weaken and disempower believers. They stultify, to one degree or another, their naturally mandated individuation and the necessary integration of their personality, keeping them dependent on Parent-Gods and parent-religious leaders, priests, or ministers — and thereby stuck at a low level of psychological maturity. Such, in part, is the personal price believers pay for their ersatz or illusory happiness, meaning, guidance, comfort, and peace — counterfeit personal goods derived from projections, hallucinations, and illusions that become delusions to those who are conditioned to accept such illusions or wished-for beliefs as literal and absolute truth. These counterfeit goods moreover are given form, legitimacy, and force through religious indoctrination and the self- or other-induced and affective dissociative trance-states which define their faith.
All of these characteristics and problems are, it seems to me, endemic to theistic faith in general, as are the innumerable abuses and atrocities performed in the name of a god, or according to a god’s will, by religious zealots or extremists of all the different faiths. The fact that such abuses and atrocities sometimes are committed by atheistic ideologues as well is irrelevant. All moralistic ideologies which are either explicitly or implicitly built in error on the meta-belief of objective, absolute truth, and which establish the notion that its adherents are a chosen or superior people, are ultimately religious ideologies, whether theistic or not. Pointing to Atheist despots or non-theistic fanatical ideologues and their like abuses and atrocities is nothing more than a red herring which neither nullifies the indictment against theism, nor lessens its severity. In fact, I think it can be and has been reasonably argued (and to my mind decisively so) that all theistic religions, including the Mormon faith, net of any putative personal or social benefits they might boast are more or less a blight on all societies.
But the Mormon faith, as it is (again, apart from its persona), and as I know it to be from the inside, multiplies both actual and potential harm, abuse, and danger in at least four rather significant ways.
The first way is through its false or incoherent meta-belief that its claim to be the only true Church of Jesus Christ, literally restored by its inventor and founder Joseph Smith through divine revelation, is an objective and ‘eternal’ Truth. On the basis of this meta-belief the Mormon Church, and its official teachings, policies, programs, and practices are eo ipso legitimized – without the need for reason or evidence – as being authoritatively founded on the ‘rock’ of direct and progressive revelation. This unique meta-belief is what I regard as the first multiplier of negative effects. As such, it in turn falsely and incoherently reifies (makes real) all the sincerely held beliefs of Mormons who consider their beliefs to be likewise founded on the same ‘rock’ of continuous and progressive revelation from god.
The second multiplier is the unique and effective system of Mormon indoctrination. This system, like all other theistic religions, promotes and fosters mind-control, intellectual atrophy, and epistemic irresponsibility by regarding faith as a legitimate way of knowing. Relatedly, it also undermines reason and intellectual integrity by establishing the regarded ‘blessedness’ (or pleasure) of subjectively interpreted feelings as final and authoritative arbiters or confirmation of truth or falsity.
The third multiplier is the Mormon recapitulation of the patriarchal family system, together with its abusive code of patriarchy presented below, and the unique Mormon system of social commitment through the induction of children into the nuclear ‘Mormon’ family as ‘Mormon’ children, and both indoctrinated members and seduced adult converts into the larger ‘Mormon’ family of the Church through ritual covenant-making and continual sacrifice designed to psychologically bind members to the faith. Through such social strategies the Mormon hierarchy ensures the loyalty of its members, even to the point of self-sacrifice and self-abandonment, and even at the risk of family discord and alienation through inactivity or defection from the faith.
Finally, the fourth and last multiplier, which is also common to all theistic faiths, is what I term the moralistic core of the Mormon faith itself, a topic also treated in some depth below. This moralistic core shamelessly, though effectively, keeps Mormon believers in line with the Church program through what Stricker (2000) insightfully refers to as “the pattern of the double-bind in Mormonism” and the authoritative imposition of performatory, behavioral, and attitudinal requirements for both earning praise and reward, and avoiding shame, guilt, the forfeiture of blessings, and ultimate rejection and isolation in this life and/or the next. Moreover, on the basis of this moralistic core, believers in the Mormon faith are conditioned to experience the inflating effects of unwavering faith and obedience, and the depressive and shaming effects of doubt and disobedience or lack of commitment invoked, in both cases, by the at least implicit approval and/or disapproval of the parent-God and parent-Leaders of the Church, or their implicit and/or explicit authoritarian judgments of worthiness and unworthiness.
Each of the above unique multipliers essentially multiplies the effects of the others and they all together produce, to a greater extent, the potential, if not actual, harm and dangers inherent in the Mormon faith. Such is the foundation of my general case against Mormonism. Such an indictment, well-deserved as I consider it to be, therefore warrants and demands, in my analysis and assessment, the need for thoughtful, critical inquiry at least. In certain aspects of the faith it may warrant impassioned exposure, harsh criticism, and outright renunciation and denunciation as well.
Given the above, and for other reasons that will become evident below, I have concluded that the very concept of a ‘Father/Mother (or ‘Parent’) God’ – institutionalized or not – is, from certain psychological perspectives, a very bad idea. When belief in the literal existence of such a Parent-God is coupled with the religious concepts (and doctrines) of revelation, faith, ‘chosenness,’ divine acceptance and approval, and ‘praise and/or blame-worthiness,’ then such a faith, or religion, makes a very bad idea even worse.
In this regard, I have also concluded that not only is Mormonism, like all other theistic faiths, ultimately an incoherent, irrational, and harmful belief system, but that at its darkest and most fundamental core, it shares and represents what I consider to be the worst in all theistic faiths. It is potentially, if not actually, one of the most personally damaging and socially dangerous and destructive theistic religions of all.
II.
Deconstructing the Concept of the
Mormon ‘God’
It seems self-evident that all the claimed truths and related facts about reality as we know them are entirely language dependent. So too, necessarily, is the entire conceptual framework and affective justification of all forms of theistic religion. This is so, I would argue, even if the justification of such conceptual frameworks and religiously interpreted emotional experiences is not dependent on the existence of hard empirical evidence or is elusive of empirical hypothesis testing. The Mormon faith, of course, is no exception to this basic fact. Like all other theistic faiths, the very conception of Mormon reality, Mormon religious experience, and the Mormon ‘eternal’ worldview is entirely language dependent.
More specifically in this regard, and apropos to any analysis of the Mormon faith, it can reasonably be asserted that without language the receipt, interpretation, and communication of propositional Mormon revelation would not be possible. Relatedly, the translation, interpretation, understanding, and communication of Mormon scripture and doctrine would not be possible without language. Nor would it be possible without language to interpret and testify of the interpreted subjective feelings associated with putative personal revelation or spiritual experience. Additionally, the preaching and teaching of the Mormon historical narrative and Gospel Plan is dependent on language, as is the performance of the Mormon rites, rituals, and ordinances of salvation.
Given the above, it can then also reasonably be said that the Mormon faith as a religious belief system consists of those declarative and indicative statements or truth claims about the Mormon god, and all that such god has allegedly revealed to Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his successors. These statements, which are embedded in the larger Judeo-Christian life-form and language-game, comprise again the conceptual framework of the Mormon religion as commonly understood by practicing Mormons. They serve moreover as the hermeneutic lens for all Mormon religious experience and therefore, in virtue of the testamentary function of such experience, as the very foundation of the testamentary statements of faith (or testimonies) of all Mormon believers.
It is, of course, certainly the case that physical and even theoretical realities actually exist in the world (or universe) independent of language. It is, however, also true that we would not and could not know anything at all about such realities or existents without language. In this sense, our knowledge about any and all of existence is entirely language-dependent. For such stated knowledge to be considered actually true as stated, it must, if it is not self-justifying, be justified.
Such, however, cannot be the case with the stated fundamental constituents of developed, metaphysical, and nonanthropomorphic versions of theistic cosmology and theology. Nor can it be the case, or so I argue, with the stated fundamental constituents of Mormon metaphysical and quasi-anthropomorphic cosmology and theology. Such fundamental constituents of the Mormon faith include, for example, the putative literal (material or physical) realities of procreated and/or eternal spirits (or spirit procreation); eternal spirit matter and energy; infinite and eternal spiritual consciousness; eternal intelligences; eternal laws; infinite and eternal exalted beings; the infinite and eternal transpersonal omnipresence of exalted beings; sanctification (or purification) of the spirit of man by the Holy Spirit by virtue of the literal shedding of the blood of an alleged man-god (Jesus Christ); the literal resurrection of the decomposed physical body to a glorified, immortal (non-biological) state; and the exaltation (or deification) of the soul of man, which consists of the glorified resurrected body and sanctified and exalted spirit.
For these believed infinite and eternal and biologically and spatiotemporally transcendent realities (which are not even theoretical realities) to be considered actual facts as stated, they must meet at least three basic or commonsensical requirements. Firstly, they must, at minimum, be nondeviantly represented linguistically in a way that is widely considered to be intelligible. Secondly, as factual propositions or truth claims, the literal existence such stated facts must make sense, or fit with and not contradict, what we actually know (albeit provisionally and fallibilistically) about the natural realities of the world and the universe and how they work. Finally, such truth claims must have truth-conditions which can, at least in principle, be directly or indirectly (i.e. theoretically) identifiable and verifiable or falsifiable as being true (or probably true) or false (or probably false).
But the metaphysical realities of Mormon cosmology and theology cannot possibly satisfy these basic requirements for establishing them as actual facts. They are not intelligible as stated to those outside the Mormon (or theistic) life-form. They are not coherent in relation to what we know. They have no truth-conditions that can be pointed to or otherwise identified, verified or falsified. Neither directly by valid empirical evidence or hypothesis testing, nor indirectly, as with the theoretical existents in the sub-atomic realm, can they be tested by the confirmed realization of predicted empirical consequences in causal relation to other known realities for required confirmation or disconfirmation — even in principle.
With such metaphysical realities, therefore, Mormons (as all theists) must necessarily and very problematically rely primarily, if not entirely, on certain non-justificatory measures for the justification of their beliefs. Specifically, such measures include the use of modified or more familiar religious language, false analogy, and invalid analogical predication to communicate such ideas, and the mere question-begging assertion of truth through the appeal to scripture and logic based on scriptural premises.
Moreover, it is equally problematical, if not more so, for such believers (especially Mormons) to rely on the experience of purely subjective feelings (a.k.a. ‘personal testimony’) for their acceptance as truth. Such assertions, inclusive of their ersatz-justification and testified acceptance, can only be made and obtained with and through the use of language, consisting as they do of declarative and indicative statements about believed reality.
In the end, when it comes to acquiring religious knowledge or establishing religious assertions about ‘God’ as knowledge or truth, language is all there is. There simply is nothing else. There is no knowledge by ostension or in virtue of hard, objective, verifiable or falsifiable empirical evidence — neither direct evidence nor indirect evidence through predictive empirical consequences. Even religious experience is totally language-dependent for inducing conversion (by the ‘preaching of the word’) and for interpretation and communication.
Given this seemingly irrefutable fact, if there is a problem with religious language — or in this case the intelligibility, coherence and factual significance of first and second order Mormon ‘God-talk’ — then there is necessarily a serious problem with the truth claims of the Mormon faith or any theistic faith or religion. Simply stated in relation to Mormonism: if we do not know what it would actually mean, or be like, to actually confront or in any way empirically confirm or disconfirm, in principle, the truth (or probable truth) or falsity (or probable falsity) of non self-justifying truth claims such as ‘eternal and/or procreated spirits exist,’ or ‘eternal spirit matter and energy exist,’ or ‘eternal intelligences exist,’ or ‘infinite and eternal exalted beings exist’ etc., then we cannot say that such statements are actually true and can be known to exist or be true. That would be to make an unwarranted assertion that is neither justified nor justifiable at any time and in any world. In other words, we cannot say — and therefore justifiably claim to know — what specifically such putative existents would or could possibly stand for or actually mean.
If this is the case, then inasmuch as the Mormon god’s primary attributes, as conceptualized in the Mormon faith, consist of such literal existents (or other metaphysical existents, whatever they might be), then the claim that ‘the Mormon god (actually or factually) exists’ would necessarily be considered a priori incoherent because factually meaningless. As such, this alleged entity would necessarily be a factual non-reality. In other words, the concept of the Mormon God, having been found unintelligible and incoherent would therefore and necessarily make any claim of such a god’s literal existence factually vacuous.
Simply put, if something allegedly known to exist cannot possibly be known as fully conceptualized either directly through objective and controlled observation or indirectly through either the controlled observation of confirming predictive (and predicted) empirical consequences or at least by specific reference through literal description or valid analogical predication (not merely imagination), then such a putative existent — in this case the Mormon God — simply cannot be known to actually exist. Moreover, because of the language-dependent nature of all we know about reality, such a being as conceptualized cannot possibly exist period if the language describing it is either nonexistent (because ineffable), or is utterly unintelligible, incoherent, and factually meaningless as stated. To insist otherwise, i.e. to insist that such a being actually exists in spite of the inability of any language to tell us anything cognitively descriptive or meaningful about its metaphysical or supernatural attributes and qualities, is to do so by mere subjective and unwarranted assertion. Clearly this cannot actually or necessarily make it so. Such truth claims cannot possibly be justified as such by any means, least of all by mere assertions based on subjective, personal religious experience and hoped-for existence.
It seems fitting, then, in the absence of any airtight logical proof or valid confirming or disconfirming empirical evidence that might conclusively prove or disprove beyond at least a reasonable doubt the claimed actual existence of the Mormon god (however it might be conceptualized) that the best way — and perhaps the only way — to effectively and definitively test the validity of shifting Mormon truth claims would be to submit such stated claims to rigorous conceptual analysis. Any other approach from outside the faith that would employ, for example, the scientific method and inductive reasoning to empirically verify or falsify Mormon or any theistic metaphysical truth claims, or an approach from inside the faith that relies on authoritative pronouncements, believers’ subjective feelings or reported faith-promoting outcomes would necessarily fail — either through linguistic and methodological reductionism or through circular and self-referential argument and invalid appeals to authority and testimony.
With this perspective as context we are ready to better understand the analytical task at hand and what such analysis involves or amounts to. Therefore, as I understand and apply it here, such critical, conceptual analysis involves the methodical deconstruction and evaluation of Mormon “God-talk” and theological (doctrinal) statements about ‘God,’ that god’s alleged ‘Plan of Salvation,’ the existence of ‘Revelation from God to man about God’ and the epistemic legitimacy of ‘Faith in God and Jesus Christ.’
The purpose of evaluating such declarative, allegedly true, or factual, first- and second-order sentences as, for example, ‘God lives and hears and answers my prayers’ and ‘God is the Supreme Ruler and Governor of the Universe,’ respectively, is – consistent with the naturalistic view of reality espoused – to determine whether or not such non-foundational truth claims are intelligible. It is to determine if they have truth-conditions, or are, in principle, justifiable as statements with cognitive meaning and therefore, not irrational propositions or beliefs. In other words, by conducting this analysis we want to know whether or not Mormon believers are justified in believing that the putative truths and related facts asserted in their religious discourse are actually — albeit fallibilistically and therefore provisionally — true and factual as the best justified knowledge we can get on the subjects involved and assertions made.
The implications of our analytical deconstruction of the Mormon faith are, I think, far-reaching, significant, and stark. Imagine the surreal and deeply disconcerting experience of taking apart — with a strange sense of urgency and foreboding — a familiar, highly valued yet mysterious ‘object of great price’ piece by piece — only to discover that once the object had been entirely dissembled and subjected to critical examination to determine its nature, it no longer existed! Such an occurrence, if experienced as a disturbing, perhaps recurring dream, might reasonably be broadly interpreted as the manifest representation of a troublesome latent reality in the dreamer’s life. The reality might be perhaps that the dreamer is deluded and self-deceived regarding some crucially important and consequential matter which is not what it appears to be and needs to be taken apart, critically examined, and exposed for what it is — a harmful and potentially dangerous illusion. This is essentially what we will be doing, why we need to do it, and what we shall experience, though not surreally, as we methodically deconstruct the core theological concepts and beliefs of the Mormon faith by subjecting them to critical analysis and assessment. Arguably, it is what we would also experience if we were to likewise deconstruct the concepts and beliefs of all other theistic faiths as well.
The Concept of the Mormon ‘God’
With the above as a foundational preface, let’s consider the following descriptions of the Mormon god that are derived from various sources, including the Standard Works or Scriptures of the Mormon Church and the generally accepted teachings of Church founder Joseph Smith and certain other notable Church General Authorities. From such sources we glean the following alleged facts, as doctrinal referents, regarding the allegedly true nature of ‘God.’ Specifically, we learn that according to established, orthodox Mormon doctrine, it is considered a literal fact that ‘God’ is primarily, secondarily, and relationally...
•the One Supreme, perfect and absolute (i.e. infinite and eternal) Being; the Supreme Governor and Ultimate Source of the universe and the Eternal Father who is the Creator of this world and ‘worlds without end,’ and who exists as the head of an infinite and eternal tri-theistic ‘Godhead’ consisting of three separate and distinct personages, including, as commonly understood, the Father (Creator), the Son (Redeemer) and the Holy Ghost (the Testator);
•an Eternal Being who is “from everlasting to everlasting, the same unchangeable God” who was literally procreated and born to heavenly parents as a spirit person somewhere at a point in time, who then lived as a mortal man born to a mortal mother with mortal parents on another planet somewhere in this or another universe and progressed “line upon line” throughout his mortal life and afterward to Godhood and yet who always existed as an independent, eternal (self-existent) intelligence of the highest order;
•an Infinite Being consisting of a finite, exalted spirit (and eternal intelligence) housed in a finite tangible, bloodless, resurrected and exalted body of flesh and bones that is animated by spirit element and who possesses spiritual passions and infinite (i.e. limitless) love, goodness, mercy, and wisdom, as well as the absolute or unlimited power to do all things which are lawfully possible to do and either the absolute and limitless knowledge of all things (i.e. truths, thoughts, intentions, actions, events, and states of affairs) past, present, and future; or, alternatively (and not currently and officially accepted by Church Authorities or widely accepted or believed by Church members), all such things only past and present with perfect knowledge of all possible future outcomes (not actual thoughts, choices, or actions to be taken);
•a Holy Man who exists in space and time within his own sphere or dimension (i.e. Kingdom) of existence, yet who is transcendent to both the space-time dimension of this world and to (biological) human life; who is at once a finite, physical and spatio-temporal being and an immanent being who is everywhere present (or immanent) with divine power, knowledge, wisdom and love in this and every world and in personal relationship with mankind by the trans-personal light of his spirit, or the “Light of Truth (Christ).”
These foundational, doctrinal descriptions of the Mormon god are, to quote Nielsen, “metaphysical blockbusters” with at least “distinctively metaphysical strands.” They are not, at their nonanthropomorphic core, empirical claims subject to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. They are not, therefore, hypotheses to be tested. “It is senseless,” Nielsen asserts in this regard, “to talk about waiting for evidence for god so conceived. We have nothing here for which to understand what it would be like to have evidence. We literally do not understand what we are trying to assert when we say such things [as, for example, the list of metaphysical descriptions of the Mormon god above] and the ‘we’ here ranges over believers and nonbelievers alike. And this is not,” Nielsen insists, “an a priori claim or the laying down of ‘a meaning rule.’ It is rather, an empirical claim about our use of language (2001, 275).” How, after all, can we possibly make sense of, or objectively test for, the existence of ‘beings’ with the italicized modifiers, or attributes such as ‘infinite’ love, goodness, mercy, wisdom and ‘unlimited’ knowledge and power, or for the existence of the above italicized descriptive referents, such as ‘Supreme Governor,’ ‘Ultimate Source', 'Spirit', 'Intelligence',
'Light of Truth,’ ‘spirit element,’ 'spiritual passions', ‘Holy Man’ or ‘Immanent Spirit?’ They are (pace Hook, Stenger, and Dawkins, et al.) scientifically or otherwise untestable as parts of a ‘God Hypothesis.’ (Stenger 2007; Dawkins 2006; Hook 1975)
On an interesting, and perhaps ironic, historical note, the above doctrinal description of the Mormon Godhead was not always so. In the initial 1832 version of Joseph Smith’s putative ‘First Vision,’ Smith writes of only the resurrected Christ appearing to him and forgiving him of his sins, with no mention of ‘God, the Father.’ The later, revised and final, official version in 1838 refers to the visitation of two separate and distinct personages: God the Father (i.e. ‘God’) and the resurrected Son of God, Jesus the Christ. Later, in 1842 and 1843, the Holy Ghost was added as the third and final member of the Mormon Godhead who, unlike the Father and the Son, is said to have a spirit body in the form of a man, but not a tangible, resurrected body.
At a Church conference in 1844, Smith completed his innovation of the Mormon god by declaring that he was not only a supernatural, finite being, or ‘Holy Man’ (whatever that means, if anything) but was also, most fundamentally, an ‘eternal,’ or ‘self-existent,’ ‘intelligence’ which became ‘God.’ The irony here is that Joseph Smith allegedly began his religious career as a young boy troubled and confused by the incoherent teachings of various Christian sects and seeking a clear, coherent, and true conception of ‘God.’ He ended his career as a self-appointed Prophet, describing his version of an equally unintelligible and incoherent god while professing that his “incomprehensible ideas to some” were nonetheless “simple,” “good doctrine” and “good logic” (Joseph Smith’s “King Follett” discourse, Smith 1976). They are, of course, neither simple nor good logic. Nor are they intelligible, coherent, or factually meaningful.
This evolution of the Mormon doctrine of deity interestingly began with a weak anthropomorphic conception of ‘God, the Father’ in 1834–35. At this time the Mormon god was characterized as a “personage of spirit, glory and power in the shape, or form, of a man, possessing all perfection and fulness.” From here, the Mormon doctrine of deity evolved to a purely physical, or strong anthropomorphic conception of the Mormon god in 1843, where the god was characterized primarily as a physical being with a material, non-biological, “body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” Finally, in 1844, Mormon doctrine evolved to its fulness as a quasi-anthropomorphic conception of a god. That is where it stands today. In this final conception of deity, the Mormon god was and is primarily characterized as a dualistic, physical, and metaphysical being consisting of both a tangible, resurrected body of flesh and bones and a procreated spirit (and intelligence) in the form of a man.
What’s interesting here is the progression of Mormon theology from the weak and then strong versions of anthropomorphism to the quasi-anthropomorphic version of the Mormon god. This is perhaps a very natural progression, given the evolved, human dispositions to unconsciously anthropomorphize (Guthrie 1993), naturalistically produce supernatural agents, or ‘gods’ (Atran 2002), project and attach to forms of ‘internalized parents’ (Faber 2004), externalize mental phenomena as external realities (Steele 2008), and seek after satisfying explanations, certainty, and Absolute Truth. Unfortunately, it is a road that leads, as it always has, to an intellectual and conceptual dead-end. In an effort to avoid the falsity and absurdity of pure, superstitious anthropomorphism and fill-out the concept of ‘God’ to close all the intellectual gaps while remaining true to biblical narratives, Joseph Smith and subsequent Mormon leaders and religious innovators and apologists have moved the patently superstitious — and therefore false — grossly anthropomorphic Mormon concept of its god toward metaphysical nonsense.
An Instructive ‘Deconstructive’ Conversation
Perhaps we might gain, up-front, a better sense of such analytical work by framing it as an instructive
‘deconstructive conversation,’ and by participating passively yet thoughtfully and honestly in both sides of this conversation. In participating in this instructive conversation, I invite you to first imagine in earnest that you are an intelligent, rational person from another world who has a mastery and understanding of all languages and scientific knowledge of the earth as one of innumerable natural worlds within the universe. Yet, for purposes of this particular experiment, you have no familiarity with God-talk of any kind and are utterly without any concept of, or belief in, any god in any likeness to what religious believers on earth think they understand ‘God’ to be.
Imagine also that while in this role you, as this non-religious objective outsider, are engaged in a mutually respectful exploratory conversation with a well-informed conversationalist on earth who is a committed theistic believer. The two of you have met together to help you better understand human culture and history in this world. Finally, as you assume this role in the beginning, and then reverse your role to that of the theistic believer at the end, you are asked to allow — again as a passive observer — the conversation to unfold as it does and follow along thoughtfully and self-reflectively in whatever role you are in, taking honest note of your thoughts and related feelings as you do so.
During the course of this imagined, exploratory conversation your earthly conversationalist has occasion to share his belief in the existence of his god. After sharing his belief, you, as the non-religious outsider from another world, recognize the term ‘God’ as used as a referring expression and curiously ask this person what specifically he is referring to when he speaks of ‘God.’ His reply, if he is a Mormon, is that “God is the Creator and Supreme Governor and Ultimate Source of the universe,” and that he is also the literal “Father of all the spirits” of men on earth whose ultimate concern and greatest desire and purpose — his “Work and Glory” — is to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
Although this instructive conversation will involve a representative Mormon believer, it is nonetheless a paradigm conversation that could involve representative theistic believers of all other faiths and all believers regarding their respective concepts of ‘God’ as believed to exist. Whatever the reader’s faith might be, if indeed he or she is a theistic believer, this experiment would apply. The same conversational construct could profitably be used to test the conceptual intelligibility, coherence, and factual significance of the theistic beliefs in question.
Putting aside for a moment what you consider to be a premature scientific inquiry into the implied naturalistic implications of such a cosmological claim, you stay focused on the believer’s language and what such an indicative, descriptive statement about ‘God’ might actually mean. Accordingly, you then ask the other person if he is representing and regards such a ‘God’ metaphorically or as an actual being that literally exists. You also curiously ask, regarding this god’s alleged “Work and Glory,” what the term ‘eternal life’ means. His reply, again as a Mormon, is that he believes his god to be an actual, physical being, or “personage;” a “Holy Man” with “body, parts and passions” in the shape of a man who literally exists and resides temporally in another world or universe, or in another dimension of space and time. He defines eternal life as “the kind of life God lives; a godly life enjoyed by exalted men and women in the next life.”
Intrigued yet still unclear regarding what such a being would be like, and hence, by association, what eternal life would be like, you, as an otherworldly outsider, take your inquiry further by asking this Mormon believer about the fundamental nature of his god. You start by enquiring into his god’s primary attributes, asking what specifically — besides a tangible body in the shape of a man with body, parts, and passions — his god fundamentally consists of as a “Holy Man.”
“I’m not sure I know why you’re asking such a question or what you mean when you speak of primary attributes,” he asks. “Are you asking about God’s character traits and capabilities, and his ability to interact, affect, or be connected to man in this world?”
“Not quite,” you reply. “What you are referring to would be what I regard as your god’s secondary and relational attributes. By ‘primary attributes’ I am referring to the fundamental character of your god — his basic nature or what specifically such a being actually is, or would consist of as an actual being.”
Pausing to think for a moment, and recalling the teachings and believed revelations of the Mormon faith’s founding ‘prophet’ Joseph Smith regarding the Mormon doctrine of deity, the well-informed Mormon believer replies that fundamentally, or primarily, “God is a sentient, non-biological being who consists of infinite and eternal spirit matter and intelligence of the highest order, organized through divine procreation and perfected over time to become a finite and exalted spirit personage and intelligence clothed in a glorified, tangible body which is animated by spirit element.”
(Take a moment now and try to imagine how you, again as an intelligent, rational outsider from another world, who is completely knowledgeable of the natural realities and laws of this world, might react to such a statement. And remember in doing so that you have no familiarity with God-talk of any kind and are utterly without any concept of, or belief in, any god in any likeness to what religious believers think they understand ‘God’ to be.)
Puzzled, yet still curious, you temporarily set aside the at least apparent unintelligibility of the above stated primary attributes of the Mormon believer’s god or what, if any, possibly satisfiable truth-conditions might apply to such asserted referents and, realizing that such stated attributes must at least be cognitively meaningful for the existence of secondary and relational attributes to even be possible, you nonetheless grant for a time — in hope of contextually gaining a fuller conceptual understanding of the basic nature this being — that they are, and now proceed to ask about its believed secondary and relational attributes. “What,” you ask, “are the related abilities and character traits of your god and how is it that such a transcendent being can interact with, affect, or connect with man?”
The Mormon believer responds again from the authoritative teachings of his faith by stating that his god is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, all-good being who is perfectly just, merciful, and truthful. He says that relationally, beyond being the literal ‘Father’ of all the ‘spirits’ on earth, he knows and loves each person — each of his spirit children — perfectly or completely and hears and answers their prayers according to their needs and the righteous desires of their hearts. Moreover, by the power of his spirit, or the ‘Light of Truth’ which emanates from his presence to fill the immensity of space, ‘God’ is present personally and in all his knowledge, power, and love everywhere in the universe, to organize and govern or rule the universe and all his creation, and to reveal to each of his children personally, and to all his sons and daughters collectively through his servants, the prophets of his restored church, his mind and will, and all truth which is necessary for them to know to have joy in this life and enjoy salvation and eternal life in the next life.
(Once more, try to step outside the familiarity of the Mormon believer’s words and honestly and objectively put yourself in the place of this curious and respectful, yet naturally and reasonably skeptical, outsider who is utterly without any familiarity with God-talk, or any religious belief, and who is really trying to understand this apparently open and well-informed Mormon believer as he speaks with such certainty and conviction of his faith’s concept of ‘God’ — a god that he sincerely believes to be an actual, literal being as described. As such a non-religious outsider what might you be thinking at this stage of this imagined conversation?)
Summarizing in your mind what you have heard from this person so far, you say to yourself: “Here is a sincere and otherwise seemingly intelligent and rational person who talks of a god who is believed to be the literal Father of man’s spirit, whatever that might actually mean or literally entail, and who is himself, in his basic nature, a finite and exalted spirit personage and infinite and eternal intelligence of the highest order, whatever such apparently contradictory referents could actually mean as well. Moreover, such a being, according to this person, is clothed in a physical, non-biological, immortal and glorified body in the shape of a man — which body is animated not by blood, he says, but by spirit element, whatever such ‘spirit element’ could possibly be or consist of.
Finally, this supernatural being who is allegedly ‘all-knowing, powerful, loving and good’ — and who is not physically in or of this world — is yet everywhere present in the universe and to all his creatures through the ‘light of truth,’ whatever that could actually be or mean. He has, moreover, as a finite, spatio-temporally transcendent being, a personal relationship with all who believe in him. He communicates directly with all mortal men in this world — in word or by vision, dream or inspiration — through his spirit, whatever, again, such term could actually mean or imply. “What on earth, or in any world,” you would no doubt ask yourself, “could any of this possibly mean, and how can I possibly make any rational sense of it?”
Determined to understand, you put aside, as you did earlier your scientific concerns regarding the naturalistic and cosmological implications of this alleged being’s role as the ‘Creator’ and ‘Supreme Governor and Ultimate Source of the Universe.’ You put aside your doubts regarding the existence of a ‘next life,’ or afterlife. You defer judgment of the at least apparent contradictions between this god’s putative secondary and relational attributes and qualities and certain seemingly irresolvable contradictions — including the existence of widespread nonbelief and disbelief in the world (even among believers), and the existence of so much senseless, gratuitous suffering and premature death caused by preventable or at least reducible and relievable human and natural evil. Instead of pursuing such problems, which you regard as very troubling yet still premature, you continue your analytical inquiry. Now more deeply and incisively, you seek some cognitive understanding of what has been stated regarding this alleged being’s basic nature.
“Regarding the primary descriptive referents of your god,” you ask, “can you first explain to me what specifically these stated primary referents — i.e. spirit matter, intelligences, spirit element, glorified matter, the light of truth, etc. — themselves actually refer to and what the truth-conditions are of their asserted existence? Then, can you tell me what it would actually mean for a ‘finite, tangible being’ to be an ‘exalted spirit’ and an ‘infinite and eternal intelligence’? And also, can you tell me what it means for such a being’s physical body to be ‘glorified’ and animated by ‘spirit element’?
Listening intently and respectfully to the questions asked about the stated Mormon concept and doctrine of ‘God,’ the Mormon believer sits back, ponders the questions asked separately and as a whole, and then leans forward and says: “God in his wisdom has not yet seen fit to reveal the answers to such questions to man. Simply put,” he continues, “I do not know the answers to your questions, and I would venture to say that no one does or could know. Any attempt to answer such questions would entail mere speculation at most, and would be foolish and futile at least. Ultimately, beyond the general statements made, and informed theological speculations made about them, the fundamental nature of God is inconceivable to the human mind and is beyond human understanding and knowledge.
“What I do know, however,” he continues, “is that such questions are ultimately not important to our salvation and that God’s existence cannot be empirically or analytically known as you might expect or require. Rather, what is important is that God can only be known to man by faith, through revelation. In other words, it is only through spiritual experience that we can know, as I do, that God does in fact exist and that we as his literal spirit children can have a personal relationship with him.”
“But respectfully,” you continue as the objective outsider, “I think such questions do matter if, for example, it is your sincere desire — and the sincere desire of all like believers — to in fact know your god actually exists as you say you do. Such questions would also matter if you desire that others, like me, who are not of your faith, or any faith, at least understand what you actually mean by the term ‘God’ or the statement ‘God exists,’ or — even more desirable still — accept as actually true that which you claim to be true regarding the alleged actual existence of this literal being you refer to as your god and our alleged relationship to him.
“Now you say that you know by faith through personal revelation that your god actually exists, and I assume that you believe that I can likewise know of your god’s actual existence and have a personal relationship with him as well, correct?
“Yes, but only if you humble yourself before him in prayer and ask God with a sincere heart and real intent to know if these things are true.”
“Fine, but even with an attitude of humility – which to me is a deference to reason and an acceptance of fallibilism – how can I do what you say is required if I have important questions (at least to me) and real doubts regarding even the possible existence of your god as described and believed? For without a clear, cognitive understanding of what you actually mean when you speak of your god, what exactly would I be praying to except perhaps some wished for fantasy or imagined image of a father-like person in my mind? Further, what would it actually mean to either of us — or to anyone for that matter — to have such a transcendent being reveal itself in person, or ‘through the spirit’? What would it actually mean to have a personal relationship with such a being?
“As a relevant aside related to the stated importance of having such a relationship with your god, what could it actually mean for a finite and tangible being as conceptualized in your faith to be fully present everywhere in all its personal attributes and qualities through the ‘light of truth’? Further still, what specifically would such sui generis omnipresence be like?
“Finally in this regard, how, given our best knowledge of this (or any) world and universe and how they work, and assuming we understood what the ‘light of truth’ actually is and could objectively and reliably isolate and confirm its actual existence, could such believed literal omnipresence be possible, or even conceivable?
“My point is this: if I, as an outsider to your faith, cannot make sense of the concept of your god, or what it would actually mean to literally encounter such an unintelligible being as conceptualized in your faith, either through the spirit, whatever that means, or in person, how could I accept even the possibility that such a being actually exists as claimed — much less the possibility that I could have a personal relationship with it?
“Moreover,” you continue, “your statement that your god can only be known through ‘revelation’ or ‘spiritual experience’ raises to my mind more questions than it answers. First, if you were to argue for the existence of your god on the basis of receiving a confirming revelation from your god, then we both know that such a circular, or question-begging, argument would be invalid. But putting that aside for now, what can you tell me about what you call revelation?”
“Well,” he says, pausing for a moment and then recalling the words of Mormon Apostles Boyd. K. Packer and Dallin Oaks, “revelation is both a process and an event which can be explained through the experiences one has. While revelation can be subtle, yet potent, as a feeling or impression, it can also come in more obvious and dramatic ways to the recipient, as in a voice, a vivid dream or vision, or even, as with Joseph Smith, a visitation by heavenly messengers or even God and Jesus Christ. In most cases, however, revelation is typically experienced as an impression which imparts information, communicates restraint, or impels one to do something, or as a confirming feeling or a prompting that is good, and that makes one happy or gives one a feeling of comfort.”
“Interesting,” you reply, “although your answer seems again to beg the question at issue, which is how an objective and naturally skeptical outsider like me can know of the actual truth of your claim that your god literally exists as fully conceptualized in your faith. You seem to be saying, essentially, that the only way to know if such a claim is actually true is to experience those unique feelings that come from your god — who, to you, is the only true god — and that those feelings therefore reveal to one’s mind and heart that he exists. But your assertion of the existence of revelation from your god necessarily presupposes the existence of your god — which is the question at issue.
“Moreover, your implied criteria for distinguishing a confirming revelation from your god regarding his existence from otherwise identically described common and natural feelings or experiences does not, I’m afraid, get us any closer to understanding what it could possibly mean for ‘an infinite and eternal spirit and intelligence to be revealed by the spirit of truth.’ More on that later, but for now, given that you admittedly cannot conceive of the basic nature of your god as fully conceptualized in your faith, how would you explain what specifically caused such a so-called ‘spiritual’ or ‘revelatory’ experience — beyond asserting again that it was your God, which of course would be unwarranted and explain nothing? How, for that matter, could you or anyone possibly know that what actually caused one’s experience was a being at all, much less the being you regard as your ‘God’? It would seem to me that the most one could rationally or credibly say regarding one’s experiences in this regard would be that one simply had a real and personally impactful, yet precisely indescribable human experience which cannot be explained, and that something somehow caused this experience which also cannot currently be explained.”
“In this life, the Mormon believer retorts, “we walk by faith. But in the next life we shall all know with a perfect knowledge that God exists as we stand before him and see him with our eyes and hear him with our ears and touch him with our hands and in sacred embrace. In this life we see through the glass darkly, but in the next life we shall see him face to face.”
“Your reference again to faith intrigues me,” you reply, “but let’s first play out your line of thought about knowing of ‘God’s existence’ in the next life and suppose, solely for the sake of furthering our conversation, that we find ourselves actually in the presence of a physical being in the shape of a man who introduces himself as your god. How, in such a case, and beyond the mere assertion made by such a being regarding his identity, could we or anyone independently and objectively know that such a perceived transcendent being is in fact a being with the believed and assumably necessary primary and secondary attributes you ascribe to your god, and which you admit are inconceivable or beyond human understanding?
“To say in this regard that we would somehow know then what we cannot know now would be to raise the obvious question, know what exactly? ‘That this being is God, our Heavenly Father,’ you might say. But how, I would ask, would we actually know such is in fact the case if not through language? You might say ‘By recognition through prior association or some spiritual faculty and experienced affect.’ But again, recognition of what specifically? What, in other words, would we recognize — assuming again for the sake of our conversation that there was any existence before birth and after death and that we as physical, thinking, feeling ‘spirit beings’ (whatever those are) were in the presence of some other being? What could we perceive beyond merely the physical presence of a human-like being with certain accentuated human-like qualities and apparent super-human capabilities? Moreover, how beyond mere assertion would we know that such an alleged ‘experienced affect’ was caused by anything other than merely a hypnotically induced projective transference, or that such a putative ‘spiritual faculty’ actually exists as even a theoretical faculty or attribute?
“‘I cannot answer such questions,’ you might once again reply. But your hypothetical replies would essentially ask me to presuppose as true - or accept merely on the basis of your assertion or some positive feeling - the actual existence of the very being, and also some spiritual faculty, whose claimed existence are now both in question.
"For me to understand or appreciate that what you are saying could even possibly be so, you will have to very carefully explain things to me in terms I or anyone can understand. How, in virtue of specific objective and widely accepted human criteria, could we differentiate such an alleged affect-laden recognition from, say, a powerful projective transferential experience? How, empirically or otherwise, could we know that the appearance of such a being — whether in this life or (as you believe, the next) is in fact an ‘exalted spirit’ and ‘infinite and eternal intelligence of the highest order’? How could we know that his body is ‘glorified’ or likewise ‘exalted’ and animated by ‘spirit element’ and that he is, moreover, ‘all-good, knowing, powerful, loving and perfectly just and merciful’? How could we know it is not merely a powerful, hypnotically induced dissociative hallucination? Such a thing can also seem real or substantive to the touch. Alternatively, how could we know it isn’t an immensely powerful, knowledgeable, and benevolent being from another world or universe who was somehow able to present himself to us as your god?
“You see where this is going, I’m sure. Without an intelligible, coherent, and cognitively (or factually) meaningful concept of your god, and without objective, widely accepted and verifiably reliable human criteria for differentiating natural from so-called ‘spiritual’ experiences and phenomena, there is no possible way, as I see it, for anyone to ever know, in any sense or in any world, that such a putative being, as fully conceptualized, could even possibly exist. There is no possible way to tell that what one has experienced is anything other than, at most, an unexplained natural or neuro-psychological phenomenon.
“What you are claiming to be a true though ultimately inexplicable, revelatory experience — in somehow knowing that you know your god exists without being able to explain exactly what or how you know — is clearly not self-evidently true to everyone as such. Nor are such alleged ‘spiritual’ experiences, in fact, properly basic in parity with other basic experiences common to all people — such as, for example, the experience of knowing what pain feels like or what salt tastes like. Therefore your claim in knowing that your god literally exists in virtue of some confirming revelatory experience from that god must be, with all due diligence and to the degree possible, objectively justified to be regarded widely as knowledge — particularly by those outside your faith whom you might seek to convince or convert. For this to be so, your statements regarding what your god is and what revelation is, as distinguished from merely neuro-psychological experiences, must also be justified. Justification in both cases would of course require much more than mere assertion — or even sincere assertion made with felt conviction. You cannot responsibly or believably assert that you somehow, inexplicably know your god exists because of a special feeling or some other purely subjective (and subjectively interpreted) experience you refer to as a ‘confirmation’ or ‘special witness.’ Indeed, as we both know in relation to any other truth claim, merely saying something is so, and feeling that it is so does not, in either case or together, either necessarily or actually make it so. It is curious — if not suspicious — that one should think that only religious claims can violate this rule.”
“When you speak of a truth claim being justified,” the Mormon believer asks, “what specifically, from your perspective, would such justification entail to establish knowledge or warrant an assertion that something is actually known or true?”
“As I understand it,” you reply, “justification would require a priori - through wide consensus established through direct revelation - that your god be sufficiently conceptualized so as to specifically, unambiguously and intelligibly establish its primary and secondary attributes and their referents sufficient to be identified or objectively known as such. Moreover, both the conceptualization of your god and the direct revelation from it must, in principle, be justifiable as claimed or stated.
To be justifiable the statements of your faith regarding the alleged revealed nature of your god require that such statements or beliefs have specifiable truth-conditions that can at least in principle be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed as being actually or even theoretically true (or probably true) or false (or probably false). Finally, to be justified as actual knowledge, the stated facts of your justifiable truth claims would need to be broadly or widely regarded — on the basis of established common knowledge, valid argument, and/or rational demonstration — as legitimate facts that sensibly fit or cohere with all that we actually know about the world and the universe and how they work.”
At this point, and now changing roles in this exercise, imagine how you as a Mormon believer might reply to such a barrage of sincere questions, concerns, and criteria for justification in making legitimate knowledge and truth claims. Chances are, you would most likely admit again that neither you nor anyone has answers to such questions. You would also no doubt inform your otherworldly conversationalist that his ‘way of knowing’ or 'justification' does not apply to the realm of spiritual truth, reminding him that knowledge and understanding of God and a saving belief in God’s existence can ultimately only be received and experienced by revelation from God through faith. You would then likely inform him that such faith is a gift from God, received through study and prayer, and is a sacred trust in God’s existence, goodness, and purposes for our life based, again, on special feelings experienced when praying to God for a witness of his existence and when living his gospel as restored in these latter days.
Finally, and without further recourse, you would likely conclude by bearing your solemn “testimony” in hope that the Spirit would attest to your words and deeply touch the heart of your distinguished guest.
Accordingly, in this last regard, you sit up, look the skeptical outsider in the eyes, and say with resolved and sincere conviction and emotion, that you know by faith, through personal revelation and sacred, spiritual experience, that God lives; that Jesus is the Christ; that Joseph Smith is the Prophet of this, the last dispensation of the fulness of times; that the Book of Mormon is the word of God; that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon faith) is the only true Church of Jesus Christ on earth which is recognized as such by God, and that, therefore, its teachings and doctrines regarding God’s nature and existence are true.
Imagine now our objective outsider with a troubled look on his face and a furrowed brow, as he listens intently to your words, after all that has been discussed, admitted, and asked to this point.
Collecting his thoughts, he finally speaks and says to you — who are now in the role of the Mormon believer — “I truly appreciate the sincerity of your heartfelt convictions and certainly respect your right as a sentient being to feel and believe as you do. But again with sincere respect, none of what you have just said makes any sense to me. You speak again of revelation through the prayer of faith as the only way to know of the actual existence of your god, but again the very concepts of ‘faith in God,’ ‘prayer to God’ and ‘revelation from God’ necessarily depend on the existence of the being whose existence is in question. And they also depend on the actual existence of the ‘spirit of God,’ or what you refer to as the ‘light of truth’ — which also depends for its existence on the actual existence of your god.
“How then can you or anyone justifiably or even reasonably claim to know that you have faith in, pray to, and receive revelation from a being that cannot even be known to exist — a putative being that is, on the basis of the inconceivability or unintelligibility of its primary, secondary, and relational attributes, factually meaningless or at least nonsensical? If the fundamental nature of your god is, as you admitted earlier, ultimately inconceivable as metaphysically conceptualized, then, it also seems to me, the assertions of having faith in, praying to, and receiving revelation from such god would, again, necessarily be incoherent.
“But even if,” the outsider continues with an afterthought, “and solely for the sake of argument, your god is given to be conceptually intelligible and known to exist as fully conceptualized (which is admittedly not so in the first case and therefore necessarily cannot be so in the second case), how can you or anyone honestly make any sense —given all we know about this or any world and universe and how they work — of actually communicating with a transcendent, finite yet infinite and eternal being who physically resides in another world in this or some other universe or alternate dimension of space and time?
“From a like perspective, what could it possibly mean or how could you or anyone honestly make sense of a being that could be fully present in personality and with all knowledge and power everywhere in the universe and be accessible to everyone individually and collectively in worlds without end? How could that being be ‘the light, law, and power which animates, sustains, and orders all life’? It would seem that even analogy or analogical predication could not possibly help us here. Quite honestly,” he states reflectively with a sigh, “I simply cannot conceive of any of this. It is all to me a mass of confusion that would be impossible, without self-deception, for any rational person to believe or accept as even probably true.”
With this said — and still in the role of the Mormon believer — you reply: “Perhaps so. But I cannot deny what I know to be true.”
“And this allegedly sure knowledge consists of your personal experience of sure feelings which confirm the truth of your beliefs, correct?”
“Yes,” you reply, “it comes from the sure feelings which arise through fasting and sincere prayer and which attend so much of what I do and experience when I am living my faith. I cannot deny what I have felt, and what I am feeling even now as I say these words to you.”
With these final remarks, our skeptical conversationalist from another world sits back and looks first closely at you, then pensively into the distance. Then, after a few moments of silence, he finally leans forward and speaks again, saying: “I certainly would not ask that you or anyone deny that they have experienced something, or that they have experienced certain feelings. Clearly that you have had such feelings must be accepted as fact at face value, and accepted moreover with certainty by one who has actually had such affective experiences. Still, and with respect, it nonetheless seems quite self-evident that while having such experiences is one thing, explaining, characterizing and interpreting them is, for all intents and purposes, quite another.
“It would seem therefore that from my now more informed perspective as an objective and I think empathic and reasonably skeptical outsider (I do, after all, acknowledge the importance of my own and others feelings and the possible or actual truth of many things which seem at least to probably or self-evidently exist as claimed), you and like believers have made the category error of a priori or presuppositionally considering your concept of ‘God’ as being cognitively meaningful and objectively and literally true.
“It also seems — and significantly so on the basis of all that is known in the biological and social sciences — that you and like believers have understandably yet mistakenly discerned supernatural agency (and therefore a supernatural parent-agent) where none actually or possibly exists, and have moreover regarded purely naturalistic, self-induced and subjectively interpreted feelings and emotions as evidence of the wished-for existence of such a supernatural agent or being in the image of an ideal, perfect parent.
“So your religious language, or ‘God-talk,’ might have personalized and imagined meaning to you and other like believers perhaps in unconscious relation to primary biological relationships and how you have individually and collectively been conditioned in your families and by your religion to believe what you believe, explain, and interpret your experiences, and live your lives. It might even have some lexical meaning to others on earth through mere linguistic and cultural exposure and familiarity. But your metaphysical declarative and indicative statements about your god — or I would venture to say any like ‘God’ of any faith — are nonetheless at least apparently incoherent, without cognitive meaning or factual significance, and in error when represented as literal, objective, and absolute or eternal truth. There is, in fact, simply nothing to believe in relation to the alleged existence of your ‘God’, and I fear that your sincere assertions or protestations to the contrary are more indicative of wishful thinking (or worse, delusion) than a mere difference of opinion.”
***
This abridged, illustrative conversation is far from over. Even so, it provides a basic sense of the core analytical task of deconstructing the Mormon god, or any of the thousands of other gods all believed to exist. It also provides us with the central analytical argument that beyond its limited boundaries as a life-form, and because it is an entirely language-dependent belief system intended to be regarded as literally and objectively true, the Mormon faith, like (again) all other theistic religions, is conceptually problematic and therefore deeply problematic, if not utterly false and incoherent at its metaphysical core.
This central argument is an a priori argument made through analytical inquiry to determine what it makes sense to claim and believe as true (or probably true) or false (or probably false) given what is or, in principle, can be known. It can therefore be envisioned, engaged in, and experienced as a rigorous and difficult deconstructive conversation at different levels. At an intra-personal level it is a conversation between a former believing and committed insider and now disbelieving outsider of the Mormon faith. At another level, it is an exploratory conversation between a Mormon believer and an investigator of the faith. And at yet another level it is a confrontive conversation between devout Mormon or other theistic believers and an impassioned Atheist intent on not only discrediting all theistic beliefs and “breaking the spell” of theistic faith, but of exposing the real harmfulness, abuses, and potential social dangers inherent in such faith.
At whatever level this conversation takes place, it is, in its most fundamental form a therapeutic conversation which can be productively imagined to take place to some degree within the mind of the reader. It is, in this sense, a type of inner conversation that would account for the real doubts that consciously or unconsciously affect or afflict believers, in spite of their denial. Figuratively speaking, it is a conversation between the believer’s stated beliefs and his unstated, perhaps even unconscious, albeit real doubts. It is, moreover, an inner conversation that might take place with awareness, even though for many devout believers it will very likely take place beneath the surface of awareness.
Beyond the above ‘instructive deconstructive conversation’ and perspective, it is important to note up-front that while the underlying theological propositions of many beliefs expressed by various indicative statements in Mormon discourse might, in a certain minimalist or purely semantic sense, have ‘truth-value’ in the sense that they are statements that can be either true or false, such truth-value does not establish the statements' actual truth or falsity as propositions or beliefs.
It does not even establish probable truth, much less ‘Absolute Truth’, which is itself an incoherent notion. For a statement of belief in any god’s existence to be considered an actual truth, the alleged fact that such ‘God exists’ would need first to be intelligible or coherent so as to actually fit or make sense with what we actually know about the world and the universe and how they work.
Additionally, such a stated belief would need to have specifiable and determinative ‘truth-conditions’ which would be widely regarded by believers, disbelievers, and nonbelievers as being empirically satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt. These conditions are, of course, a tall order that simply cannot be filled for metaphysical conceptions of deity at the core of theistic belief; a fact that makes all gods, as so conceptualized, factual non-realities, and all assertions of their literal existence cognitively meaningless, and therefore wholly unwarranted as truth claims.
So where does all this leave us? It would seem, appropriating the words of Wittgenstein, that our investigation or analysis of the Mormon faith and all theistic faiths gets its importance from “destroying” that which is “nothing but houses of cards, and…clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.” Accordingly, we are left, at the end of our analysis, with the destruction of the Mormon concept of ‘God,’ the way ‘God’ is used in Mormon God-talk, and with it the entire Mormon faith — the entire “house of cards.” Such in part is the therapeutic value of the deconstructive, or analytical, work we have done — a work which is done by the authority of reason and common sense. It is a work, moreover, that in Wittgenstein’s view is stated elsewhere. Perhaps in the end, “All that philosophy can do…[is] destroy idols.”
III.
Psychosocial Assessment of the Mormon Faith
There is a reasonable and I think compelling and sufficient basis for abandoning religious belief entirely. This is not merely because of the lack of proofs or evidence in support of such beliefs, as some Atheists argue, or, more significantly, because such beliefs are a priori false or incoherent and without factual intelligibility, as is also arguably the case. Rather, – and here I find myself in agreement with Tamas Pataki (2007, 2009) – religious belief in gods and revelation should be abandoned primarily, even if exclusively, because of the psychological reasons for such beliefs, and the consequences of such belief on the individual believer and (perhaps more importantly) the children of religious believers and society at large.
As I think Pataki correctly states in this regard, “Even if there were cogent arguments for the existence of a deity [which there are not], they would in all likelihood remain disconnected from the main causes why the vast majority embrace belief. … [T]he most fundamental issues,” in Pataki’s informed and professional judgment, “turn on the psychodynamics of religious mentality, on the unconscious motivations to religion” (2009, 206). And, I would add, on the psychosocial implications – in principle and in fact – of theistic belief and practice vis-Ã -vis the mental health and well-being of religious adherents.
***
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th Century concluded that “Religion is a disease.” Bertrand Russell wrote likewise, following Lucretius who, in Russell’s words, characterized religion as “a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.” Freud (1961) characterized religion as “the universal obsessional neurosis,” (55) and while it might be so that, as he also wrote, “devout believers are safe-guarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses” on the premise that “their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one” (56), it is clear from extensive clinical case studies documented since then that religion in general, and theistic religion in particular, is associated – motivationally and causally – with certain unconscious dispositions and various psychiatric symptoms and syndromes of mental illness.
Three examples of unconscious dispositions “in the religious domain” presented by Pataki (2009) include, “in terms of a broad psychoanalytical character typology… [s]ome obsessional dispositions – which generally arise from the need to control sexual and aggressive impulses toward objects (i.e. significant others);…[h]ysterical dispositions, to separate or split off the lower (sexual, profane) aspects of the personality from the higher (moral, spiritual) ones;” and “[n]arcissitic dispositions, which involve more or less unconscious needs to feel special, powerful, superior…[to be] Elect or Chosen [by ‘God’]” (207).
According to Pataki, these dispositions and others, and the desires related to them, account at least in part for the “unconscious or other extrinsic motives for holding [religious] belief…[and for] our tendency to wishful thinking and self-deception” (207). In Pataki’s view, “religious beliefs, practices, and institutions can indirectly satisfy (or pacify) – ‘substitutively or symbolically’ (208) – enduring unconscious desires and other dispositions” (207). Moreover, and of primary significance, psychiatric symptoms including anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsivity, and dissociation, and psychiatric syndromes such as bipolar disorder, OCD, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizphreniform disorders, and somatization disorder, etc. have all been causally connected to religious belief. (H. E. Jones 2006, 58-102).
There are in fact a significant number of psychiatrists and clinical psychotherapists who, on the basis of personal experience and documented clinical case work, would concur that religion is causally related to mental illness. (See, for example, E.D. Cohen (1988), H.E. Jones (2006), Wendell W. Watters (1993), A. Ellis (1971), and “Psychiatrists’ religious attitudes in relation to their clinical practice: a survey of 231 psychiatrists.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 88, 420 –424.[Medline]) And while there are various studies that suggest a positive relationship between “intrinsic” religious belief and mental health (Allport and Ross 1967; Bergin 1991), such studies are very problematic for various reasons and are at odds with other studies that do not, and find instead an inverse relationship with religiosity (Watters 1993, 153-61; Batson and Ventis 1982).
Also, the reported salutary effects of religion (e.g. sociability, happiness, physical health, positive attitude, ability to cope with stress, and a sense of security, belonging, and meaning or purpose in life, etc.) also reportedly ensue in the lives of well-adjusted or resourceful adults who are utterly without religious belief.
Significantly, the reported beneficial psychological effects of religious belief are contingent on a baseless and irrational belief in the literal existence of a god that is both scientifically and analytically nonexistent or incoherent as hypothesized and conceptualized, and on related ersatz assurances of this and next life ‘blessings.’
This would bring into question the actuality of such alleged psychological benefits. For if the perceived or believed benefits are gone when the spell of magical and wishful thinking is broken, then there weren’t any real psychological benefits to begin with; only the illusion of well-being – or worse, delusion. How, in the end, is that different than a baby sucking on a ‘binky’ and believing at a primary level that it was being nourished? Just as the assurances and so-called blessings of religion are bogus, so are the believed and asserted positive, psychological effects. They are arguably manufactured, self-induced, and reinforced by mental conditioning and mass delusion. And they are believed in spite of the persistence of real questions and doubt suppressed and denied through fear and anxiety by self-deception.
Moreover, reported salutary psychological effects of religious belief are also reportedly offset by arguably greater social and personal psychiatric concerns, including closed-mindedness, moral rigidity, delusional and smug certainty, self-deception, denied guilt and anxiety, toxic shame, ersatz self-effacing humility or self-righteousness, narcissistic grandiosity, neurotic one-sidedness and conflictedness through suppression and compartmentalization, and the perversion of motivation and cognition which all lead to self-hatred and self-sacrifice and their various psychiatric symptoms and syndromes (Jones 2006, 16-93).
Also, there is substantial and reliable historical evidence to suggest that religious belief – and religious fundamentalism in particular – is a social disease connected to incidents of authoritarian child abuse, spousal abuse, and various other forms of damaging, destructive, and anti-social behavior.
In this psychosocial assessment of the Mormon faith it shall be argued that Mormonism, as well as all other theistic faiths, is a toxic faith that, if lived as scripturally and doctrinally required, results in mental illness and, to a greater or lesser degree, personal and social harm. This is not to say, of course, that all devout Mormons (or other theists) are manifestly symptomatic from a lay perspective or to the untrained eye, although many are, and admittedly and diagnostically suffer from a variety of psychiatric symptoms and disorders as a result of their religious beliefs, practices and upbringing. And it is not to suggest that the Mormon faith (or other theisms), as practiced by all its believers, is necessarily or actually dangerous or destructive to society, although it shall be argued (and I think compellingly so) that it is at least potentially and even likely so, given the fact that alleged and believed revelation from its god is considered to be the ultimate source of Truth, or the mind and will of ‘God,’ to all Latter-day Saints, as well as indicative of their personal righteousness.
To get to the root of the problem in this psycho-social assessment, we must focus on the very real damage inflicted on the believer by the underlying abusive dynamic at play within the social system of all hierarchical, authoritarian, faith-and revelation-based institutions and belief systems, including Mormonism. This dynamic is tacit and likely operates for many, if not most, in positions of ecclesiastical authority without awareness or any deliberate intent to inflict harm. Nevertheless, the actual harm done, as evidenced by extensive empirical evidence, and the deep cultural embeddedness of such a dynamic as an essential and fundamental practice, would seem to make its use (or at least its persistent use) suspect — notwithstanding adamant denials, and sincere, justifying rationalizations to the contrary.
Regardless of the actual intentions and motives of the abuser (which are neither relevant nor definitively determinable), the psychologically abusive dynamic at play seems to be inherent in the patriarchal world-view dominant in all forms of theism. Specifically, and for purposes here, it seems moreover to consist of what has been introduced and referred to earlier as the fundamental moralistic core of such authoritarian belief systems, and its related control strategies and derivative set of rules, or code of patriarchy. These related aspects of what I regard and have referred to above as the abusive dynamic of all theistic religions, constitute a learned and conditioned, or programmed, way of controlling and manipulating others to maintain power, control, and homeostasis or stability in an authoritarian, theistic social system. They work to preserve, protect, and perpetuate the particular death-defying, ‘anti-self,’ and ‘anti-life’ morality and dogma of that system.
The Moralistic Core of Theistic Faiths
The moralistic core, as I consider it to be, consists of those moral demands and performatory requirements rooted explicitly or implicitly in the religious belief system. These moral demands and requirements essentially direct and govern the lives of believers and define their state and status with their god and their relationship with self and others in and outside of their particular faith.
What makes such a moralistic core potentially damaging and dangerous to believers is not only the particular belief in a particular god held by members of the faith, or the unconscious desires and dispositions for holding such beliefs. Nor is it solely the nature of religious beliefs and practices adhered to, or the exercise of authoritarian control by religious leaders and parents (although that alone could be quite damaging). Rather, and of additional and perhaps primary significance, it is all of the above in relation to the conditioned meta-belief that this moralistic core of their faith (including its moral demands and performatory requirements — i.e. ‘shoulds,’ or ‘shalts’ and ‘shalt-nots’ — and its derivative code of patriarchy) is an objective and eternal reality regarded falsely and incoherently by believers as ‘Absolute Truth’. This meta-belief is most likely legitimized to the minds of believers by the corresponding, primary meta-belief in the objective existence of their eternal ‘Father-God’ and the eternal family.
Such meta-beliefs are both arguably false and/or incoherent. (Riskas 2011, Nielsen 2001, Mackie 1991, Joyce 2001) Moreover, the projected parent-child dynamic and experienced ‘eternal family reality’ — regressive artifacts of the “basic biological situation” (Faber 2004, 2010) and “evolved deep structure” of the brain (Slavin and Kriegman 1992) operating without regard for reality through the governing “primary process of the unconscious” (Kahn 2002) – are merely conditioned and reinforced psychological constructs of the evolved human brain which are hard-wired and culturally conditioned to affectively respond to and produce such constructs. Neither Parent-Gods nor the reified family system (and corresponding family relationships and religious ‘code of patriarchy’) are “eternal” in the sense believed by theistic believers of the Mormon faith. As with all religious or so-called spiritual experiences, the experience of such an ‘eternal’ and subjectively ‘real’ and ‘true’ quality is naturalistically explained without the need to resort to or believe in nonsensical metaphysical speculation.
When the moralistic core of a particular faith is implanted and activated in the brains of believers by the authoritative (and authoritarian) employment of the various mind-control strategies and devices employed, it can afflict the believer with a variety of emotional problems and psychological maladies. Such maladies include, but not limited to, anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsivity, and self-alienating guilt, shame, conflictedness, and one-sidedness. Such is the case, I shall argue, with the Mormon faith and all theistic religions that have as their center this moralistic core and its code of patriarchy, and that tacitly employ those human mind-control strategies and devices designed to subjugate Church members and their children to authority and keep them in line with the moral and performatory code of the faith.
Through the use of such mind-control strategies and devices, religious leaders and parents belonging to dogmatic religions authoritatively teach and impose, regardless of intent, certain shoulds and oughts in relation to believers’ thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, beliefs, motives, actions, attitudes, and behaviors. They enforce compliance with such moral imperatives by connecting them to a putatively revealed doctrinal foundation of obedience and sacrifice, sin and sinfulness, worthiness and unworthiness, righteousness and unrighteousness (or wickedness), blessedness and barrenness, chosenness and unchosenness, spirituality and carnality, and salvation and damnation.
The mind-control strategies referred to above translate in the Mormon faith to five primary imperatives, as follows:
•First, believers are taught to accept as Absolute Truth the existence of the Mormon godhead, the Mormon ‘Plan of Salvation,’ and their relationship to their Father-god as his literal spirit children. They are also taught to accept as actual truth the existence of revelation from their god to man, and to regard such revelation from the Mormon god, through both the authorized channels of the priesthood and directly to faithful believers, as Absolute Truth for the Church and for them personally as, in both cases, a necessary requirement for salvation (and damnation).
•Second, Church members are instructed to regard faith in the Mormon god and in the truthfulness of the Mormon faith as a necessary requirement for salvation and the avoidance of damnation, and as an irreversible decision. They are also taught of the necessity of faith-testing and of enduring to the end in ‘righteousness’ and ‘Truth’ to prove themselves worthy of the highest blessing of “eternal life.”
•Third, Mormons are implicitly “encouraged” to facilitate the construction and confirmation of a personal reality which conforms to, and necessarily confirms, the Mormon “gospel reality” of the Church, and are explicitly required (as a condition of salvation and acceptance by God) to be (and remain) “humble, meek and submissive” (or “childlike”) before the Parent-God, both through participation in all prescribed religious ordinances, rituals and practices, and through continual repentance.
•Fourth, Church members are counseled to live a Christ-like life in humility and submissiveness to divine authority; to obey all the “commandments” of ‘God’ (including the counsel of Church leaders) and eschew doubt in the revealed truths of the Church, and in the divine authority, teachings, and counsel of Church leaders.
•And fifth, Church members are called upon and expected to establish and strengthen their commitment to Church growth, solidarity, and survival, and to loyally defend the Church and follow, obey, and sustain the General Authorities and local leaders of the Church.
The problems and concerns related to the first two theological imperatives are beyond the scope of this paper, but are addresses in some depth in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively of the Author’s book Deconstructing Mormonism (2011).
The third imperative involving the induced or facilitated construction of desired personal ‘reality’ and a regressive dependence on ‘God’ employs two specific conditioning programs. The first entails the indoctrination of children and converts to regard the teachings of the Mormon faith as true primarily (if not exclusively) on the basis of positive (or ‘good’) feelings, and criticisms or refutations of the truth claims of the Mormon faith as false primarily (if not exclusively) on the basis of negative (or ‘bad’) feelings. The second program is the “infantilizing process” introduced in Chapter 6 of Deconstructing Mormonism and presented in some depth in Appendix A in relation to the author’s Mormon conversion experience. This process entails the repetitive, suggestive (hypnotic) induction of a regressive, dissociative, and hallucinatory faith-state (and the associated affects and feelings) through the required practice of prayer, the systematic use of familiar, evocative language, music, literature and art, the appeal to tradition, and expected participation in religious disciplines, programs, rites and rituals (Schumaker 1995; Faber 2002, 2004, 2010; Stromberg 1993; Watters 1992; and Cohen 1988).
The fourth imperative to live a Godly or Christ-like life and eschew doubt involves creating and repeatedly presenting as true a purely speculative and fictitious historical account of Jesus’ life and teachings as the literal Son of God and as the head of his restored Church on the basis of alleged revelation. This imperative, of course, appeals to the believer’s ego and regressive need for recognition, acceptance and approval, and essentially commits him to a repressed, one-sided, conflicted, and inauthentic way of life. It also effectually keeps believers bound to the faith either by keeping them, through the “religious guilt cycle” (Ray 2009), in a perpetual state of dependence and guilt, shame, and repentance for doubting or not living a self-sacrificial Christ-like life, or by keeping them, through the psychological mechanism of the conditioned fear response, in an inflated delusional state of self-righteousness, undoubting belief, and ersatz humility for believing they are doing so. Either way, control is maintained by requiring self-hatred and self-sacrifice, and by invoking humility and submissiveness to divine authority to obtain and sustain the acceptance and approval of peers, parent-leaders, and the Parent-Gods of the Mormon Godhead.
Simply put, the injunction to be like Jesus, or to ‘do as Jesus would do’ — i.e. be perfect, even as the Mormon god is perfect by submitting one’s will to the Father — is the assurance of emotional control and bondage.
The fifth imperative regarding the building and strengthening of believer (member) commitment and loyalty to the Church and its leaders involves the institutionalization and reinforcement of certain effective social commitment mechanisms. These include sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence (Tice 2001). This institution of social commitment mechanisms is essentially accomplished in two ways.
First, it is accomplished through the ceremonial and ritualistic establishment of a covenantal relationship between the Mormon god and mentally competent members of the Church. This is done initially through baptism, then (for male members twelve years of age and older) through the conferral of the priesthood, and finally, for ‘worthy’ men and women, through the Temple endowment. Secondly, it is done through the operant conditioning of children and adult Church members. This, in turn, is done in two ways. First, it involves the repeatedly stated and implied threat or concern of alienation from the Mormon god, self, and Church in consequence of unrepented personal sin and, in more serious cases of transgression, formal Church disciplinary action resulting in ‘disfellowship’ and ‘excommunication’. Secondly, it is done through the repeated promise of security, love, esteem, happiness, and fulfillment through Church fellowship and the acquisition of Church status, ‘priesthood power,’ and ‘eternal reward’ on condition of eventual and sufficient faithfulness, righteousness, and worthiness as prescribed and adjudged by Church leaders.
For the above mind-control strategies and devices to work effectively or at all, a trade must occur. Essentially, this trade is initiated by Mormon missionaries, member-parents, and ecclesiastical parent-leaders first manipulatively offering to their children and to Church investigators and members an illusory and factually vacuous promise of ‘joy’ in this life and ‘eternal life’ (or the avoidance of damnation) in the next life. Then, once this seductive offer and promise is accepted by trusting and vulnerable, naïve, or innocent listeners, the hidden requirements for receiving the promised ‘blessings’ are disclosed.
The trade therefore, consists of the promise of illusory supernatural protection, healing, and deliverance, as well as yearned-for earthly and otherworldly blessings (such as divinely bestowed esteem, power, health, and prosperity in this life, and immortality and eternal life with family and loved ones in the next) in exchange for a Faustian abdication of certain human goods. These ‘goods,’ which are essential to their well-being, include their intellectual integrity, the integration of their personality, their moral imagination, their right to free-thinking, doubt, dissent, the challenging of authority, and conscientious disobedience, and their right to pursue non-sanctioned, or officially disapproved, yet personally desired or necessary living options, orientations, and preferences, whatever they might be.
This exchange effectually and often results in self-betrayal through the subordination or abandonment of one’s wants, needs and internal authority to externally imposed or authoritarian ‘oughts,’ ‘shoulds,’ and ecclesiastical authority. It is a trade or exchange that is made in order to avoid conditioned guilt and shame and to acquire peer and parental acceptance and approval.
Such an exchange is made possible, from my perspective, by the vicissitudes of life and the fear of separation and death which set up or invoke the regressive yearnings and accompanying unconscious recapitulation of a submissive and regressive parent-child dynamic (Faber 2004, 2010). Such a primal dynamic, common to us all, is induced, at its most basic and compelling level, by a hypnotic, dissociative transference actualized through language, music, symbol, and ritual. The transference is then characterized as a ‘conversion through faith,’ and the affect-based ‘faith’ (experienced as a primal trust and commitment) is then effectively reinforced through on-going facilitated belief formation and systematic indoctrination and operant conditioning within the culture.
The cumulative incidents of self-betrayal very likely will eventually — even if unknowingly or unadmittedly — take their toll on both the accommodating and the committed believer. At a basic level, such an exchange will likely impair psychological individuation and integration and promote psychological one-sidedness, obsessive-compulsivity, and inner conflict in the personality to a greater or lesser degree. Moreover, the repeated acts of self-betrayal resulting from such an exchange can ultimately foster deep resentment toward oneself (for repeatedly selling-out to one’s commitments, fears, and insecurities) and direct or displaced resentment and anger toward those in authority.
As a result of such resentment and suppressed anger and guilt, some degree of self-loathing and self-alienation will likely ensue, resulting at times in withdrawal of commitment or Church activity and perhaps even some form of self-defeating reactivity, intrapersonal acting-in, or antisocial acting-out. All these contribute in the end to the social, psychological, and even possibly physical detriment of believers and others. These potential, if not likely, consequences are very real and, I would argue, even predictable in the lives of those affected by this inhuman exchange.
Accordingly, believers or believing investigators of any faith or religion might know that a particular faith is toxic if its beliefs, values, language, and authoritative requirements tend, in practice, to…
•require faith in and revelation from an infinite, eternal and supernatural being as a necessity for divine acceptance, approval and salvation;
•require faith as an unquestionable, irreversible decision based entirely on a feeling (or revealed ‘confirmation’ or ‘witness’ from the Holy Spirit);
•promote the duality of the self as spirit and body, where the spirit-self is godlike and the body (“natural man” or biological-self) is “carnal, sensual and devilish” and an “enemy to God,” and require accordingly that believers “put off the natural man” (or one’s biological instinctuality and related needs) and live Godly or Christ-like lives; to do what Jesus would do, and to follow the admonition of Jesus to be perfect, even as ‘God’ is perfect;
•require obedience to revealed commandments, performance up to revealed standards, expectations, or authoritative ‘counsel’; the sacrifice or circumscribing of certain human appetites, desires, passions, and needs ‘within the bounds the Lord has set’; the consecration of time, money, and talent for the building of the Church; and the suspension of doubt, skepticism, and dissent to obtain and retain favor, acceptance, and approval from the particular god and from those in authority, and to obtain ‘blessings’ (and ‘blessedness’) in this life and salvation and eternal life in the next life;
•separate reason from faith and subordinate knowledge through justification to knowledge by revelation confirmed by ‘testimony,’ or a feeling of the Spirit;
•dictate to believers (by directive or ‘counsel’ or scriptural admonition and explicit/implicit warning) how they should live their lives;
•implicitly or explicitly advocate or require the subordination of personal conscience to the ‘revealed will of God’ on the basis of the belief that whatever the god requires or commands his children to do is morally right;
•promote one-sided living by proscribing certain feelings, attitudes, life-choices, and human rights and values for living as sinful and wrong on the basis of ‘God’s Word’ (or ‘will’), or Church policy;
•frame hardships, suffering, loss, and required sacrifices of time, talent, means and possessions as necessary and required tests of faith imposed or allowed by ‘God’ to prove worthiness and loyalty to him and his ‘anointed’ or ‘chosen’ leaders;
•foster superstitious, magical thinking in supernatural agents, rites, and rituals as indicative of a ‘saving faith in God’;
•ensure belief in the unbelievable by mandating the imperative to believe and not doubt;
•foster, by expectation and authoritative imperative, a perpetual or life-long child-like dependency on a Parent-God and parent-Leaders;
•require believers to essentially abdicate the burden of their own freedom and responsibility to fully and conscientiously engage life by submitting to ‘counsel’ or ‘commandments’ regarding what is right and wrong, i.e. what should and shouldn’t be done or experienced, or how life should and shouldn’t be lived;
•require binding commitments to the particular god and, by association, to a way of life which essentially forecloses on certain forbidden possibilities and the right and obligation of believers to ethically choose those possibilities and experiences, or that course of life or action which might be necessary for, or merely preferred by, the individual;
•promote or provide a sense of being ‘special,’ ‘favored,’ and ‘chosen’ by the ‘one true God’ as part of the one and only true faith, religion, or church;
•set up or implicitly condone or tolerate allegedly benevolent authoritarian control;
•either explicitly or implicitly set up, or foster and perpetuate, through its belief in ‘continuous revelation from God,’ the potential or actual compulsive acting-out of self-righteousness and religious extremism or fanaticism in the quest for divine approval, favor, and special blessings;
•implicitly, if not explicitly, require conformity to established standards of appearance, behavior, thinking, language, and belief at the expense of one’s uniqueness in order to fit in or be accepted or regarded worthy or appropriately representative of a desired image;
•impose guilt, shame, and — in cases of disobedience — condemnation and the forfeiture of blessings as punishment in this life (by censure and disciplinary action) and/or the next (damnation) for ‘sinning’ by disobeying the commandments and expectations established by scripture and authoritative counsel, or by doubting, questioning, or conscientiously dissenting from authority or authoritative pronouncements, doctrines, and counsel;
•advocate ‘free agency’ and lead people to believe that they are free to choose how to live their lives while simultaneously governing such putative freedom through a variety of different strategies designed to control such agency, and by warning believers that their ability to ‘choose the right’ (i.e. their ‘moral agency’) can be lost by exercising their free agency in opposition to their god’s commandments or the counsel of Church leaders.
Certainly most if not all of the above criteria apply, to one degree or another, to the Mormon faith. Many no doubt also apply to some degree to other theistic religions as well. Regardless of intent, the criteria apply. Even soft or subtle and ‘benevolent authoritarianism’ can be (and often is) insidiously abusive, or at least potentially so. With ‘authority’ — particularly when it is believed to come from a god — authoritarianism is very likely if not inevitable, given the moralistic core at play in all dogmatic theistic belief systems and the code of patriarchal control embedded in it.
The Mormon ‘Code of Patriarchy’
How is it then, if Mormonism is such an irrational and toxic faith, that it — as with all theistic religions — attracts and has such a hold on otherwise rational believers? And what is the personal cost of allegiance to such a faith that otherwise admonishes its adherents to live moral, wholesome, productive lives?
There are, of course, different answers to these questions that have been offered from different perspectives within different disciplines. From my perspective, and on the basis of my particular orientation, assessment, and experience, the Mormon faith, as a relational or social system, recapitulates the authoritarian Western family system. Specifically it is a patriarchal family system characterized generally by various forms of parental control and manipulation, as well as child-sibling posturing for power, status, acceptance, approval, favor, and attention. It is a family system, moreover, where differentiation or separation from the system toward individuation is tacitly discouraged if not forbidden by those in authority. This makes such separation and individuation very difficult for some and next to impossible for most — even if the actual parents are dead or absent.
It seems rather self-evident, from a naturalistic perspective, that what attracts, or ‘hooks,’ a person to such an ideal and eternal social system (which the Mormon Church is ideologically and theologically set-up to be) is the deeply embedded and emotionally charged idea of ‘family,’ and the regressive, dissociative transference or projection of the internalized family imago to the Church. As Darrel Ray suggests in his provocative book The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (2009), “…religion is the infection of the mind by a religious idea [which, I would add, appeals to, and interacts with, the ‘personality characteristics’ of those in a given environment who are naturally conditioned and vulnerable to such an idea by upbringing, human need and circumstance]” (165).
The fundamental (and invented) religious idea at play in Mormonism is the ‘eternal family’ in general, and a heavenly ‘Father (God),’ ‘Mother,’ ‘Elder Brother (Jesus),’ and ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ in particular. This idea is, metaphorically, the virus believers ‘catch’ because of their human condition and conditioning, and their personal needs and neediness. In other words, people get ‘infected’ (or psychologically hooked) by the ‘Mormon virus’ through, in effect, a participation mystique at play which projectively makes the Mormon community identical with the believer’s unconscious family imago. By joining or committing to the Mormon faith the believer psychologically becomes part of an illusory, or regressively wished-for, ‘eternal family.’
Accordingly, it seems reasonable to suspect that what holds the patriarchal Mormon social system together, in spite of its imperfections and abuses, is, in part, the believer’s cathexis — or investment of libidinal (erotic) feeling or energy — accompanying the also binding participation mystique. This cathexis onto the ‘Church family,’ which comes about through the above-mentioned dissociative transference, is reinforced first by the familiar moralistic core and its related authoritarian mandate for obedience and personal sacrifice in return for authoritative acceptance, approval, and promised joy in this life and eternal life with family and loved ones in the next. Secondly, it is reinforced by the employment of social conditioning and mind-control strategies and programs designed to create and reinforce the delusion of absolute truth in the divine origin, restoration, and administration of an exalting, death-defying faith.
The “patriarchal” social system and its various recapitulating relational systems are inherently abusive because they are implicitly or explicitly governed by what can be referred to as the fundamental ‘code of patriarchy,’ a code that is grounded in, and derived from, the moralistic core of the system itself. Each member of the family painfully understands from childhood — on the basis of indoctrination established by edict and reinforced by consequential actions taken, attitudes discerned, and real feelings felt (not just imagined) — that this patriarchal code must be complied with by those who ultimately desire to be regarded as members in good standing and be considered to be (by external and ultimately internalized authority figures) worthy of love, acceptance, approval, respect, esteem, and ‘blessings.’
This moralistic code of patriarchy transcends gender and is comprised of a set of implicit or explicit principles, values, and rules we are all familiar with. These principles, values, and rules include the following:
• “Families are divinely sanctioned and must stick (or stay) together — at all costs — to survive and ensure happiness.”
• “Always put family first.”
• “The authority figures (parents, caregivers, leaders) truly care for you, know better than you what is best for you and are always right;”
• “Trust the authority figures and always do what you’re told. Follow counsel and obey the rules, or commandments.”
• “Don’t believe, feel, or act in ways the authority figures think is inappropriate.”
• “Don’t learn, think, communicate, teach, or do anything that might weaken your faith, commitment, or trust —or that of others — in the family or the authority figures. Do not threaten or embarrass (expose) the authority figures or otherwise undermine their authority.”
• “Don’t question, doubt, disagree with, dissent from, or disobey the authoritative pronouncements, commands, or counsel of the authority figures.”
• “If, while doing what you’re told (or not), anything should go wrong, mistakes are made or ‘sins’ are committed, blame yourself, repent, and remember: the family always comes first and the authority figures care for you, will make you ‘right’ with them (and/or with ‘God’) through the ‘loving’ administration of ‘appropriate’ disciplinary action, and they are always right.”
Through indoctrination and operant conditioning by the promise, threat, and administration of forgiveness, rewards, and punishments, authority figures are enabled to effectually (although perhaps not always consciously or intentionally) control and manipulate members within the system. These members, as with children in a patriarchal family, function unknowingly, and to some degree, as ‘narcissistic supplies’ to the authority figures. They also, or instead, function to preserve the balance of power and relational dynamics in the ‘Church family system.’
In doing so, they also function as necessary, albeit unwitting, accomplices in preserving and perpetuating the lived lies of self and immortality inherent in the system. The underlying, implicit and overarching objective of the aforementioned code of patriarchy — beneath the surface of espoused and perhaps even genuine, benevolent concern — is essentially to maintain the bonds of dependency and subordination to preserve order and homeostasis in the system. By doing so, the authority figures and co-dependent members of the patriarchal Church system effectually preserve — again through control, manipulation, and suppression — the death-denying illusion and thereby they collusively serve, directly or indirectly, their own and others’ unknown or unacknowledged survival interests and corresponding needs for power, status, security, esteem, and belonging, as well as the approval of, and acceptance by, their authoritative Father-God.
Both the malevolent and allegedly benevolent exercise of authoritarian control in any patriarchal religious setting essentially extorts obedience, sacrifice, and the consecration of time, talents, money, and possessions through illusory threats and promises, and fosters a morbid, regressive dependency on the authority figures of the system to ensure that such threats are avoided or forestalled and promises (or ‘blessings’) are realized in this life and the next. Further, such control tends to reopen or deepen — intentionally or not — those typical narcissistic wounds that are prevalent, to one degree or another, in all who have been raised in authoritarian family systems. Such wounds are caused by various forms of authoritarian abuse. More specifically and categorically, these include deprivation (being insufficiently esteemed, accepted and respected), deprecation (being used, objectified, shamed, belittled, or disapproved of), isolation (being misunderstood, wrongly judged, cast out or overlooked), stultification (being traumatized, controlled, smothered, or stifled) and rejection (being shunned, abandoned, neglected, or unappreciated).
The narcissistic wounds inflicted by such abuse cast a long and dark shadow. Counterintuitively yet in fact, they tend to keep those who are thus wounded pathologically bound in blind, perverse loyalty and obedience to their trusted caregivers or leaders. They also tend to recapitulate the control cycle by eventually making the controlled the controllers, and, therefore, the abused the abusers. Additionally, they dis-empower those who are wounded and keep them, through the control mechanism of the ‘religious guilt cycle’ (Ray 2009), enslaved to their faith. They are neurotically stuck at an undifferentiated level of maturity as a result of repeated ‘transgression’ or ‘imperfection,’ and they seek relief from the tension, guilt, and shame resulting from it through the emotionally exhausting process of continual ‘repentance.’
As referred to earlier, such wounding, and the pathology it causes, invariably creates a conditioned fear response. This unconsciously alters the fearful, difficult, or painful truth of the believer’s condition, experiences, and doubt into an acceptable lie which allows him or her, as with the mechanism of the aforementioned guilt cycle, to persist in the faith and continue to function as a believing or faithful member of his or her religious community. Such consequences, resulting from various overt and often subtle, or insidious, forms of authoritarian abuse, have been validated and confirmed in my own life, and no doubt repeatedly in the lives of countless others. (For a representative sample of documented case reports regarding sexual and authoritarian abuse in the Mormon Church, see Anderson and Allred 1995 and 1997, respectively.)
So it seems to be with the repressed and inseparable authoritarian dark-side of Mormonism and all patriarchal theistic religions or belief systems. Their theologies require the worship of a Parent-God (more specifically a Father God) and they promise, with one hand, divine goodness through mediated and earned salvation, beatific love and joy as part of an eternal family, and the acceptance and esteem of ‘fellowship in the household of faith’ for the worthy, righteous, repentant, and obedient. This they promise while threatening and delivering, with the other hand, divine retribution through damnation, rejection, condemnation, and the wounding, rejection, and shame of unblessedness, disfellowship, or excommunication for the actual or would-be unworthy, “sinful” and unrepentant doubters, dissenters, and disobedient ‘children of God.’
None of these religions can satisfy the criteria for rationality. Further, the dissociating transferences they engender (the family trance or ‘spell’ they cast) through their language, doctrines, rites, and rituals are — as are all unresolved transferences — regressive and pathological.
Finally, the package of ‘blessings’ offered come, as we have learned, with serious risks of personal harm and danger. They trap the unwitting investigator or member in a two-part double-bind where, in the first part they are taught and conditioned to believe that if they join the Mormon Church they will receive the promised blessings of the Mormon Gospel, but if they do not join the Mormon Church they will not. Then, in the second part, they are told that if they do join the Church and do not receive or enjoy the promised blessings — for example, forgiveness, prosperity, health, peace, acceptance, deliverance, sanctification, and the ‘gifts and fruits of the Spirit’ — it is because they are either unworthy because of their lack of faith or disobedience, or because they are worthy and are being tested for even greater blessings.
Either way, or in any case, investigators and members must accept without doubt or reservation that the Church is true and they will suffer hardship and loss if they do not join the Church. Even if they do join but later sin, doubt and/or leave the faith, they will suffer. Clearly, sincere and committed (or ‘active’) adherents of such likely (if not actually) harmful illusions are deluded and trapped by their own pathology and denial of death in an authoritarian, patriarchal system which is difficult if not impossible to escape without crisis or psychotherapeutic intervention, or both.
Religious Values and Mental Health and Well-Being
To be sure, many, if not all, devout believers credit their belief and ‘faith in God’ as the source of their character strength, courage, comfort, and hope in the face of adversity and death. For these believers, their religious beliefs allegedly provide security in the face of uncertainty, as well as comfort, peace, serenity, and happiness in the face of the hardships and vicissitudes of life. They also allegedly provide them with a sense of meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence, and esteem and self-regard in the face of human limitation and imperfection. Last but not least, their beliefs are, for them, an alleged motivational force for good in an otherwise immoral world.
Such putative benefits are formidable indeed. However, it would certainly be false and prejudicial to suggest that only those with belief and faith in a god can and do enjoy them. It would also be a non sequitur — and a post hoc argument as well — to argue that such benefits and conditions necessarily follow or are caused by belief and faith in a god. Even so — and even if, solely for the sake of argument, it is granted that such benefits are, in fact, experienced and necessarily and exclusively follow faith in a god (which they do not) — I would argue, primarily on the basis of my own and others’ personal experience, that these benefits enjoyed do not compensate either believers or humanity for the real damage done and losses incurred to themselves and others who have suffered at their hands as a result of any or all of the religious beliefs and practices listed above.
I would also argue, again on the basis of my own and others’ personal experience, that many believers with so-called ‘faith in God and Christ’ do not truly enjoy such benefits consistently, if at all. In fact, as suggested earlier, it can be argued that such putative benefits do not – and could not – actually exist as such, because they are not anchored in reality. They are instead based entirely on a believed, illusory reality; a sort of ‘virtual reality’ which is factually meaningless and created entirely by the wishful, magical thinking at play in the self-or-other-induced dissociated mental state (i.e. faith-state) of the believer. Finally, it is arguably the case that many disbelievers and nonbelievers actually and reportedly do in fact enjoy many if not all of the above benefits, solely on the basis of their own natural, psychological resources and the meaningful lives they live in virtue of their commitment to a realistic, ‘reason-driven life’ (Price and Sweeney 2006), their life work, their integrated suffering, and their relationships with others.
To my mind, the risks and losses associated with toxic religions like the Mormon faith are considerable. They far outweigh any putative or actual salutary benefits and perceived or alleged happiness or self-satisfaction and sense of well-being that allegedly accrues to believers. Specifically, I consider all scripturally-based, or orthodox, authoritarian theistic life-forms, as religious belief and value systems, to be fundamentally harmful to believers and society, and life-denying or life-negating by design. This is particularly so in relation to various core “theistic values” presented, for example, by renowned Mormon psychologist Allen Bergin (1980).
Bergin, whom I know personally, proposes a “spiritual alternative” (whatever that could actually mean, if anything) to what he terms “clinical-humanistic” values. He suggests that such an alternative – which he incorrectly contrasts to an unrepresentative set of opposing values and not to what, for example, Albert Ellis (1980) refers to as a more accurate set of “clinical-humanistic-atheistic” values –might be called “theistic realism;” a designation which could correctly be regarded as an oxymoron. But what are these preferable alternative values Bergin proposes that I consider being psychologically harmful and dangerous? They include, in my words and in summary, belief in a supreme god, obedience to god and his chosen leaders, acceptance of absolute moral values (and presumably Truth), the necessity of self-sacrifice, commitment to heterosexual marriage and procreation, acceptance of guilt, suffering, and contrition for wrong doing (as defined primarily, if not exclusively, by the faith and its “absolute,” “universal” moral code), forgiveness of those who harm or have harmed you, and making faith and “spiritual insight” inseparable from reason and the intellect in attaining knowledge, meaning, and purpose in life (6).
Such values and beliefs, and the religious “conception of human nature,” “moral frame of reference,” and set of therapeutic “techniques” which serve as an “orienting framework” to their understanding and acceptance as truth, are derived from what Bergin refers to elsewhere as a “spiritual perspective” that “there is a spiritual reality and that spiritual experiences can make a difference in behavior [; that the] spirit of God or divine intelligence can influence the identity, agency, and life-style of human beings” (1991, 398-9). This perspective and all its related derivatives are implicitly and, as we have learned, invalidly presented as actual truth at parity with analytical and scientific truth. Such a move on Bergin’s part tacitly condones the acceptance of such unwarranted assertions as truth or probable truth when it is neither prudent nor possible to do so without self-deception. His views are, to be blunt, utterly absurd on the basis of their necessary dependence on the believed literal existence of a factual non reality (god), and on the basis of asserted and believed “spiritual” experiences from god through the believed medium of the ‘Holy Ghost’ or ‘Light of Truth’ (which are likewise factual non realities as represented linguistically). Such non self-justifying views, in part and as a whole, are false or incoherent, and factually vacuous as truth claims. And they are incoherent as well in relation to the only reality we can actually or objectively know as mere, fallible human beings; a purely naturalistic reality without metaphysical foundations.
From my perspective, and as a relevant aside, for any psychotherapist to propose such a perspective and set of values and beliefs not only betrays his professional commitment to foster mental health and well-being, it exposes the need to sustain and legitimize his own religious faith. Moreover, such a position and proposal is professionally irresponsible. It essentially amounts to tacitly condoning epistemic irresponsibility, and professionally regarding an irrational, dissociated mental ‘faith-state’ and its related regressive, delusional acceptance of false or incoherent, and harmful and potentially dangerous and destructive values and beliefs, as indicative and characteristic of, and even necessary for, mental health and well-being.
Pace Bergin and other psychologists of like mind and faith, the aforementioned primary imperatives of the various mind-control-strategies and devices of Mormonism’s moralistic core and code of patriarchy, along with the implicit faith-imperatives to conform one’s personality to religious norms (or “theistic values”) and submit to the dogmatic mandates of faith in god, repentance of sin and sinfulness, and obedience to authoritative “counsel” and “commandment,” can – and likely often do – result in both the suppression of human need fulfillment and the stultification of character development. Both of these outcomes are interrelated and inevitable on the basis of fundamental beliefs that are in some fashion, and to a significant degree, common to all theistic faiths; beliefs, in the end, that promote the conditions of self-hatred and self-sacrifice that are the root of mental illness. What do these two conditions entail in the Mormon faith?
Self-hatred entails “putting off the natural man” (or the biological, instinctual self) as “carnal, sensual and devilish;” the “natural man” who is an “enemy of God.” This is done through continual repentance (remorsefully acknowledging, confessing, forsaking, renouncing, and making amends) for all human imperfections and sins of commission and omission, where ‘imperfections’ are personal shortcomings in relation to god’s expectations, and ‘sins’ are transgressions – by thought or action – of the commandments and requirements of god as revealed in the scriptures, by priesthood leaders or by one’s conditioned conscience.
From H.E. Jones’ perspective as a psychiatrist, “Self-hate is the natural consequence of the evil morality of human sacrifice, of self-sacrifice” (2006, 38). Self-sacrifice entails the creation of what Jones terms a “pseudo-self,” which is the “false ‘religious self’ [that] is…a phony, contrived, inauthentic…perfect, selfless, goody-two-shoes [self;]…too good to be believable” (36). This, again, is done in the Mormon faith in four ways. First, by committing to sacrifice all that one possesses, even one’s own life if necessary, in sustaining and defending the kingdom of god. Second, by “circumscribing all appetites, passions and desires within the bounds the Lord has set,” and avoiding every ‘unholy’ and impure practice (i.e. those practices considered profane or unseemly in the Mormon culture, such as masturbating, watching R-rated movies, telling risqué jokes, engaging in sexual fantasy, colorful language or loud laughter, making light of ‘sacred’ subjects, using recreational, mind-altering substances, etc.). Third, by refraining from engaging in sexual relations outside the bounds of legal and lawful marriage, i.e. marriage between a man and a woman (or women, in polygamy) established and sanctioned by civil law and god’s law. And finally, by ‘consecrating’ oneself, one’s time, talents, and everything one owns for the building of the Mormon Church and the establishment of ‘Zion’ (or the ‘United Order’ of god).
Together these two conditions of self-hatred and self-sacrifice effectually stunt or abort personal individuation and integration through the fostering of regressive dependence on a Parent-God and parent-Church leaders for moral direction, acceptance, and approval. Moreover, such a cult of conformity and obedience can — and likely often does — result in the proscription of certain personally necessary experiences through the consequent (and psychologically coercive) foreclosure on many of life’s possibilities.
In this last regard, I would argue that Mormon religious dogma — perhaps in part as a defense against the threat of espoused personal revelation run amuck — too often reduces and confines the complexity and profundity of human experience to binary (either-or) moral categories, value judgments, and categorical imperatives. Such dogma, in my experience and judgment, cannot accommodate the demands of our humanity for the necessary degree of psychological individuation and development required in dealing more effectively with the complex personal and social problems which confront mankind today.
Additionally, Mormon religious belief too often circumscribes life’s meaning within narrowly conceived ideals or prescriptions for living derived from doctrinal interpretations of the putatively revealed ‘Plan of Salvation’, thereby foreclosing on the analytic and imaginal creation of personal meaning. Finally, authoritatively imposed religious dogma and morality foreclose on the necessity for moral imagination to creatively or ethically resolve the moral tension inherent in life’s numerous collisions of duty where the inconceivable and forbidden is mandated conscientiously as a necessary course of action for personal individuation and well-being (Neumann 1969). Such creative, ethical resolutions are too often blocked at the expense of those necessary (and religiously discouraged or forbidden) natural, human experiences sufficient in themselves to provide all the depth, mystery, drama, tragedy, comedy, and adventure necessary to live a profoundly rich and meaningful human life without the need for any gods.
When the possibility for experience is foreclosed by dogma, commandment, or authoritative counsel — or by the related threat of shame and guilt through parental censure or chastisement, disfellowship, excommunication, and damnation —following Freud, we simply do not know what we are missing. Subjective and often self-deceptive assertions of happiness and fulfillment are, by definition, both limited and limiting. They are limited by what is given or believed to be the good life (or putatively ‘acceptable life before God’) and what is rationalized in the face of intimations to the contrary. They are limiting through their self-sealing and self-referential reinforcement.
It seems to me, on the basis of contrasting personal experience alone, that human life (and living) is much more profoundly complex and meaningful than what a one-sided, moralistically dogmatic, religious life can offer.
The affective demands which express our deepest, unconscious instincts, or needs and desires, as distasteful to our civilized or idealized sensibilities as they might on occasion be, define the heights and depths of our very humanity and the vast possibilities of human experience and human life and living. A life-affirming moral belief system is, following Freud, simply, commonsensically, naturalistically, and necessarily based on the conscious and ethical satisfaction of human needs. Such a moral belief system, if such it is considering the fact that all humans are biologically evolved to act empathically (or at least considerately) in their best long-term interests, tends, ironically perhaps, to be somewhat iconoclastic and liberal rather than traditional and conservative in nature. It gives ear to and honors all human demands and possibilities for individuation, development, and personal pleasure and well-being. It requires only the more conscious and mature, or responsible, exercise of ‘free-thinking’ and ‘moral imagination’ (Johnson 1993, Beebe 1995) in the creative, considerate, and rational pursuit of personal happiness through need gratification.
In summary, any religious tradition or belief system which holds that there is a supernatural, Parent-God who directly or through others reveals his will to man and tests the required faith of believers, expecting and rewarding faithfulness and obedience and disapproving of and punishing disobedience, is at least potentially, if not actually, dangerous to believers and society. Furthermore, any religious tradition or belief system is harmful which: (1) holds that believers are chosen and favored by god, and that nonbelievers or less valiant believers or disbelievers are not, or are cursed; and/or (2) holds that an all-seeing and all-knowing god judges (or will finally judge) the thoughts, actions and behavior of human beings, judging believers as worthy or unworthy of acceptance, approval and salvation on the basis of self-sacrificing faithfulness and righteousness; and/or (3) holds that god rewards with recognition, acceptance, privilege, and ‘eternal life’ or ‘salvation’ obedience and faithfulness to commandments, personal revelation, counsel and other implicit (cultural) or explicit (doctrinal) attitudinal and behavioral standards, and excludes, forbids, discourages, and punishes — through the consequential infliction of shame, guilt, and anxiety, and the withholding or revocation of privilege or membership — conscientious dissent, disobedience, and the responsible and ethical pursuit of free-thinking, free-expression, and alternative life preferences or choices, is, on the basis of my analysis and personal experience, actually detrimental to the psychological well-being of believers, and leads ultimately and inevitably to mental illness.
In my informed and considered judgment, the Mormon religion is on balance and at bottom not only an irrational faith (because unintelligible, incoherent, and either factually meaningless or false), but a toxic faith as well. This is so, I suspect, for all believers of all theistic faiths. But in my experience it is especially so for those Mormon believers who take their faith seriously and literally. For those, in other words, who strive to live the religion primarily and strictly (or with ‘exactness and honor’) according to its theological and scriptural requirements, and not merely according to the less exacting and demanding cultural norms of the local church community (Ward or Stake) of which they are a part. This conclusion, as I see it, is unavoidable to those Mormon believers who look critically at their faith, with the presumption of skepticism as an outsider. It is unavoidable even if their faith is considered on balance with the acknowledged salutary personal and social benefits derived from it — benefits incidentally which are reportedly enjoyed by many believers of other faiths, as well as by Agnostics and Atheists.
***
In the end, I am not convinced of the need for any transcendent theistic, spiritual, or psychological mythology or illusion — particularly any which foster or require belief and faith in, or obedience, commitment, sacrifice, and consecration to, some transcendent, perfect, and authoritative being, agency, archetypal affect, force, institution, moral code, characterological ideal, plan or purpose to ensure meaning, salvation, perfection, goodness, or immortality. I am, rather, personally and psychologically inclined toward humanistic, Atheistic values, and a morality that is neither a set of principles or code of rules (or ‘moral imperatives’) to live by, nor a ‘selfless’ commitment to others or a prescribed way of life. Such values and morality are, as I see it, naturally rooted in the mature, or individuated and integrated personality. And they are likewise naturally manifested in the authentic inclination or disposition to act (not act-out) reflectively (or ethically) – and at times even strategically – in one’s best interests, or according to one’s needs and related desires (not neediness and related impulses), and to do so by naturally taking every precaution not to carelessly or thoughtlessly hurt or alienate others, or deprive them of their right to act likewise in their best interests.
The humanistic, Atheistic values and morality I embrace and advocate necessarily, and again naturally, reject all gods and religion, and advocate the mature cultivation of moral imagination and internal moral authority. They also endorse the importance of critical thinking, the commitment to intellectual integrity and epistemic responsibility, the eschewing of irrational guilt and toxic shame (and shaming), the importance of treating others with due respect, compassion and empathy as human beings, and the right to accept or reject social norms, traditions and institutions on their merits or demerits for personal and social well-being, while being personally responsible for the consequences for doing so.
Further, I am, as a hard-determinist, of the mind that questions concerning the purpose of one’s life, and/or the meaning of life, are themselves meaningless if not unintelligible and incoherent. I am also of the mind that mythologies or transference-established illusions (or delusions) are unnecessary and, to the extent they fit the profile presented above – and reflect or recapitulate, in form, tone, or content, the authoritarian or narcissistic, family system of the believer – they are injurious to our well-being as well. Nevertheless, as Piven reminds us, “confronting paralyzing truths or the fictitiousness of our sacred illusions may only be minutely possible.” Still, Piven suggests and then asks, “If our goal is not ego-support, but profundity, not mere normalcy or happiness [whatever that means], but self-truth, then one makes a career of that. Can we live artistically, prepared to accept the world as illusion without despair but with our own art? Are we prepared to live a ‘neurosis of health’ for the sake of intellectual honesty, profundity, and generation?” (2002, 246)
Such questions and above preferred values and perspective can only be offered for deep, personal reflection. There are no easy or right or wrong answers. What we do know, again from Piven, is that “We cannot simply will a belief and then make of it [as Becker wrongly suggests] a ‘freely chosen dependence.’ This is neither belief nor faith” (242). Nor can we, again following Adler, believe the unbelievable without cognitive dissonance and self-deception (2006). Finally, as argued above, we cannot simply resign ourselves to such “sacred (theistic) illusions” without compromising our own intellectual integrity and credibility and incurring an even greater cost than the loss of “mere [so called] normalcy and happiness;” the cost of personal well-being and, ultimately, life itself. All said, I tend to agree with Yalom, who writes:
"I believe that we should confront death as we confront other fears. We should contemplate our ultimate end, familiarize ourselves with it, dissect it and analyze it, reason with it, and discard terrifying childhood death distortions.
"Let’s not conclude [as Kierkegaard and Becker do] that death is too painful to bear [without ‘faith’ or illusion respectively], that the thought will destroy us, that transiency must be denied lest the truth render life meaningless. Such denial always exacts a price — narrowing our inner life, blurring our vision, blunting our rationality. Ultimately self-deception catches up with us.
"Anxiety will always accompany our confrontation with death. I feel it now as I write these words; it is the price we pay for self-awareness. [Nevertheless,] raw death terror can be scaled down to every-day manageable anxiety. Staring into the face of death, with guidance, not only quells terror but renders life more poignant, more precious, more vital. Such an approach to death leads to instruction about life." (2008, 276)
I endorse the above-quoted ‘existential worldview’ and the related human need to more modestly and consciously cultivate physical and psychological well-being without faith or commitment and surrender to any gods or men and women in authority — and without creating some substitute illusion or external, absolute, and authoritative 'plan,' ‘purpose,’ or ‘morality.’ This alternative would, as suggested earlier and in Yalom’s words above, necessarily entail the mature acceptance of our condition and the progressive disillusionment and ‘normal unhappiness’ that naturally attend it. As noted earlier, it would also necessarily entail an ‘analytic attitude’ which values the moral and ethical pursuit of personal well-being through the psychodynamic creation of ‘resonating’ personal meanings, perspectives and narratives, as well as honest, empathic and erotic human connection in the face of the stark realities of the natural world.
Such an attitude, as I interpret and embrace it, calls for neither commitment nor obedience to either an external or internalized-external authority, ideology, or moral code. And while, through its application in the psychodynamic therapeutic process, the analytic attitude opens all options for living to the analysand through fantasy or opportunity, and it does so without moralistic judgment or shame — by correctly differentiating legitimate guilt from an illegitimate and irrational sense of guilt — it strives only to increase the personal capacity for moral and ethical choice on the basis of the psychodynamically developed capacities for empathic consideration of others, moral imagination, and the more conscious determination of reasoned, informed, and analyzed self-interest in the context of the reality of personal limits or limitations.
Beyond such a modest goal, the analytical attitude — and the psychoanalytic process which channels it — promises nothing, least of all the realization of some (illusory or delusional) transcendent purpose or destiny, or a transformational cure and its concomitant and illusory goods of hope, happiness, comfort, security, and salvation. Moreover, the created narrative of our life that comes from it simply explains and makes sense of what is, neither moralistically prescribing nor advocating what should or ought to be or prophetically assuring what will be. Such a narrative is merely a personally meaningful interpretation of our suffering, actions, and choices made honestly through the particular hermeneutic of our own psychoanalyzed experience.
Subjectively created personal meanings, perspectives, and narratives, as developed analytically by therapeutic talk and resulting reflective insight and corrective emotional experience, because of our experienced emotional resonance with their personalized, interpretive content, would seem (to us) to accurately reflect and perhaps enable the cybernetic shaping (or perhaps even re-shaping) of those ‘hidden agendas’ (neuronal pathways) in our brains which account for our individual patterns of relating with ourselves and others in the world.
As Joseph Campbell insisted, these hidden agendas are effectually “running the show from way down below.” Further, they would serve to help us make reasonable, earthly sense of our lives in the context of a naturalism without supernatural foundations — a naturalism which holds that all living (biological) organisms seem naturally to individuate and fill the measure of their natural existence. Such naturalism provides an ‘earthly sense’ which acknowledges moreover that our psychological wounds and physical limitations are never fully resolved or eradicated, but rather can be understood and thereby they can make us stronger, becoming as well the impetus of our vocational and ideological passions in life which give us personal meaning in our life, even if not an illusory meaning of life.
Such created, personal meaning in the context of a pragmatic, historicist, nonscientistic, and non-metaphysical naturalism would attest to us, by experience and rational thought, that a positive, or life-affirming, relationship with the world and others cannot be achieved by incoherently attempting to creatively transform the ‘natural’ world into a ‘supernatural’ world, or even an idealistic christianized world. Rather, this must emerge through analytic interaction and guidance — by making of our life a meaningful work of art. Moreover, through the more conscious exercise of ‘moral imagination’ we shall open ourselves up to potentially new or different types and forms of essential experience.
Finally, such personal, fictional meanings and narratives would at least seem to lend anecdotal, albeit non-factual support to the perhaps necessary social illusions of personal, indeterministic self-control, responsibility, and contribution — even as we are nonetheless deterministically (not fatalistically), cybernetically moved, as parts of an interdependent web of life, to live and die at the right time and in our own fashion.
IV
Personal Postscript
Being a Mormon was never easy for me, even though I lived it faithfully for over twenty years. It certainly was not worth the personal price I had to pay then, as an active, faithful believer, or the price my children had to pay (with my help) and are still paying now as a result of the real and isolated damage inflicted by the teachings, conditioning, and culture of the Mormon faith and community in which they were raised, and of which three of them are still actively a part. This damage, of course, now extends naturally and inevitably to my grandchildren, as my “Mormon” children keep the destructive cycle going with their “Mormon” spouses and “Mormon” children.
The persona of Mormonism as a faith that embraces wholesome family values is more than a distortion, it’s a lie. So too is the image of Mormon parents who allegedly or seemingly put family first. In reality, the “Mormon family” is, at its core, a fraud when it comes to accepting, respecting and fostering the autonomy, individuality, and psychological development and well-being of its members. And, as we have learned earlier, it is also a fraud inasmuch as it makes the acceptance and approval of its members conditional on the basis of self-sacrifice and the subordination of personal freedom to the authoritative collective demands, interests and expectations of authoritarian parents, parent-leaders, and an illusory parent-God.
The damage Mormonism inflicts on the family and its members occurs subtly, and can easily go unnoticed to the naked eye or unreflective family members embedded in the faith. In a crucial way, Mormonism, like Christianity, has contradictory values when it comes to family and faith. In one sense these two fundamental values are deeply connected and interdependent. In another they are opposed and antagonistic — even mutually destructive. Where they paradoxically converge and diverge is in the loyalty of individual family members to the faith.
The fly in the ointment is the individual family member. For Mormonism to work as a family system fostering genuine love, acceptance, and connectedness all the members of the family must remain at least in the faith, even if not in with total commitment. To ensure this outcome all family members must be deeply conditioned to believe that the only way to happiness is living as a Mormon. But what happens if a member of the Mormon family is unhappy as a Mormon, or questions the veracity of Mormonism? As Worthy correctly writes in this regard, “Sadly members are taught to believe that Mormonism is right for every single human on the planet — that the Church is perfectly compatible with every person who has the good traits of human nature,” and that “[i]f a person has trouble fitting in, therefore, there is something seriously wrong with that person. If a member is unhappy, unmotivated, or if their life seems meaningless or unfulfilling, the solution is always the same: they need to [repent and] be more diligent in obeying the commandments and carrying out their Church duties. This is the only path to happiness, they are told. The irony, however,” Worthy rightly concludes, “is that it is the same path that led to their unhappiness” (50–51). In other words, the conditioning must reframe unhappiness as rebelliousness or sinfulness, or as the result of a way of life which must be repented of to restore the natural happiness lost.
Regardless of what might be said to the contrary, and contrary to its espoused values, Mormonism can and does divide and damage family relationships. This it does by making the family identical with the faith, and then subordinating family relationships to the faith. In his afore-referenced book Becoming God’s Children (2010), Faber accurately addresses the subordination of the family to the faith when he writes: “Jesus makes it very clear to His devotees [(Christians and Mormons alike)] that… [they] do not merely owe Him their absolute allegiance. … they must substitute Him for their own real mothers and fathers. They must ‘love’ Him more than their own parents, and if they are parents, they must love Him more than their own children:
"I come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother. … He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." (Matt. 10: 35, 37; see also Luke 14: 26)
“Jesus declares in effect that He’s the crucial one, not the parent or the child [or siblings]. … So much for familial loyalty, familial order” (14).
This subordination of family to faith has been experienced in numerous cases, notwithstanding the sincere professions of love and acceptance by those family members still in the faith toward the family member who is no longer in the faith. How could it be otherwise when, in any case, the ‘differentiated’ family member who has conscientiously or otherwise ‘left the fold’ (not merely become ‘less active’ or ‘inactive’) was once a faithful believer, or at least somewhat active in the faith? Such a person, as a nonbeliever or disbeliever, is now at least tacitly or subconsciously considered to be a misguided, faithless outsider, particularly in families which have tacitly if not openly defined themselves as a good Mormon family and are identified personally and as a family with Mormonism, as being ‘Mormons first.’ With the departure from the faith of any member of an entirely Mormon family the family system is disrupted and is no longer in balance (abusive or dysfunctional as such a ‘balanced family system’ might be).
The Mormon faith is designed to create and sustain such identification and cohesion where the very idea of family is made identical, through relentless doctrinal conditioning, to Mormon family, and where the primary Mormon value for the family translates to the primacy of the Mormon family. As a natural outcome of such conditioning the insiders experience ambivalence toward the outsider, who, while remaining a ‘loved’member of the family, is also a threat and painful reminder to the insiders that belief is not always protected by faith; that faithfulness is not always sufficient to protect against the commission of ‘sin’ or loss of faith; that something is or might be seriously amiss or broken in the family (and therefore, by association, in all its members); and that the outsider is, lamentably and necessarily (by definition), an unrepentant ‘sinner’ who is a negative reflection on the Mormon family and a social blemish on its status in the Church. Furthermore, when the outsider has joined another faith or has, as I did, returned to his or her natural Atheism in opposition to all theistic faiths (including Mormonism) and their teachings and practices, the experienced ambivalence and sense of disconnectedness is even more pronounced. Strong family attachments and loyalties now conflict with Church attachments, loyalties, ambitions and commitments, and the strain on once intimate relationships can be palpable, and unavoidably divisive and damaging.
Of course the Mormon faith provides its own solution to the problem it has created by deliberately making family and Mormon family identical. The ‘Mormon family’ can be restored to a ‘fullness of joy and happiness’ if and only if ‘wayward outsiders’ (or inactive insiders) repent and actively return to the fold. In this solution, coming back to the Mormon faith as an active member in good standing with the Church is identical with coming back to the family in ‘full fellowship.’ And what is the duty of the ‘faithful insiders’ in applying this solution? Seek to get the wayward or departed family members back in the faith where they belong, so everyone can all be happy again (if they ever truly were) as a good Mormon family. How? By praying for their return and ‘loving them back’ to the fold.
This solution, similar in intent and form with prescribed ‘friendshipping’ and ‘fellowshipping’ practices in the Mormon Church, usually comes with a hidden agenda, some specific and typical counsel — and implicit, parenthetic (and of course denied) qualifications. First, accept wayward family members as ‘children of God’ and valued members of their ‘Mormon family’ of origin — but not for who they are or have become as individuated individuals, and not the ‘inactive life’ they have chosen, or worse, their decision to leave the faith. Also, continually invite them to be an active part of your life and the Mormon family to which they belong — but do not consider yourself a part of their non-Mormon lives or family. Finally, and importantly, keep the lines of communication open, but do not seek to really understand why the departed left the faith or are not actively involved. Above all, do not open your mind to their questions, doubts, or views and arguments against the faith. In other words, love them with the conscious, tacit — or perhaps even subconscious — ‘collective motive’ to get them back in the faith and therefore restore balance to the destabilized Mormon family system. This of course is how all co-dependently enmeshed patriarchal family systems work, where members have not individuated or differentiated from the system and are conditioned by the system’s dynamics and code of patriarchy not to do so. The fact that the Mormon faith exploits such a pathological condition (knowingly or not ) is, in my view, deserving of exposure and criticism — if not contempt.
At a personal level, what is so sad and regrettable to me is that as a once religiously committed Mormon believer, father, member of the priesthood, and local priesthood leader, I allowed myself to suffer for so long, without question or objection, the systematic insult to my intellect, personality, and fundamental nature inflicted by the authoritative (and authoritatively administered) expectations, prohibitions, and judgments inherent in the moralistic core of the Mormon belief system. By so doing I essentially abandoned myself and condemned myself to a life of servitude to an illusory Parent-God in pursuit of illusory or wished for promises of redemption and divine power, acceptance, and approval.
Moreover, I was certainly complicit, as a father, church member, and missionary, in the perpetuation of this harmful, damaging, and potentially dangerous faith. I was, as alluded to in the previous section, shamefully among those of whom Christopher Hitchens writes (2007) who “beguile[d]” and “terrif[ied]…children…with [illusory promises of unintelligible and factually vacuous ‘blessings’ and] horrific visions of apocalypse, to be followed by stern judgment from the one who supposedly [loves us and] placed us in this inescapable dilemma to begin with” (58). Perhaps even more egregiously, by practicing such faith I, no doubt like so many other devout believers, became one of the offended who becomes the offender. The more faithful and zealous I became in the Mormon faith, the more critical I became toward myself. The more extreme I became in my behavior, the more judgmental, critical, controlling, and at times shaming by attitude and words I became toward others — including my own family — because of my judgment of their lack of faith and faithfulness.
That I did what I sincerely believed to be right and true at the time is of little consolation for the sadness, regret, and shame I feel at times. Nor am I consoled by knowing how ‘human’ it is to be superstitious, or how ‘natural’ it is to believe in gods and care enough about one’s children to ‘raise them up righteously before the Lord.’ After all, there are many natural and very human acts (including all social taboos) that are considered in Western civilization to be immoral, inhumane, and criminal in nature, and avoidable through reason and self-restraint by all but the utterly insane. Moreover, such harmful, hurtful and dangerous acts are often accompanied by harsh criticism and social consequences. At very least we angrily chasten those who irresponsibly engage in such behavior with disapproving words such as “Shame on you! You know (or should have known) better!” We all know this and likely consider such chastening appropriate. Yet we consider those who believe in a god and practice their religion to be different, and exempt from similar social criticism and chastening when they commit acts of authoritarian abuse through mind-control and other forms of oppression. But why is this so? Such violations are likewise harmful, damaging, and at least potentially dangerous and destructive to self and others.
Those who are epistemically irresponsible misrepresent the truth to their own or others detriment or harm. They do not exercise intellectual due diligence and are therefore guilty of at least gross incompetence and negligence. They too know better. The fact is, in my case, I wanted and needed to believe in the Mormon god and in the Mormon narrative of restoration and exclusivity as the only true Church. I did not heed my real doubts or think critically or morally about what I irresponsibly accepted and asserted as ‘True,’ or practiced as ‘right.’ Moreover, I wrongly and selfishly put my own commitment to the faith ahead of my own children — ahead of their welfare and mine. The fact is, I irresponsibly represented to my vulnerable, impressionable, and intellectually defenseless children (and many others) the harmful, damaging, and potentially dangerous and destructive beliefs of the Mormon faith as Truth, and I did so repeatedly, with the sincere and at times severe exhortation that they hold them as such without question or doubt.
It is true that such believing, teaching, and exhorting is natural to the Mormon or theistic form of life. And it is also true that such religious practice is part and parcel of being human. Even so, it is epistemically irresponsible, and therefore inappropriate, to represent as truth (or worse, ‘Absolute Truth’) consequential beliefs which are not only false and/or incoherent, but are harmful and potentially dangerous and destructive to the believer and society. The fact is, I should have known better. I should have listened to myself, to my own questions and real doubts. I should have been more critically reflective and skeptical about my religious beliefs and the teachings of the faith. And, I should have kept my beliefs to myself and kept my mouth shut until I could make rational sense of my beliefs and analytically resolve my doubts as a reasonably skeptical outsider, just as I would normally do in considering non-religious truth claims that didn’t make sense or seemed too good to be true. But I didn’t, and for that I am guilty as charged.
Of related sadness is the profoundly troubling realization — that came to me, as perhaps with others in a like situation after ‘breaking the spell’ of my faith — that in looking back over the many years I was active in the Mormon faith, and notwithstanding all the pleasant, comforting, and even, on occasion, inflating and ‘ecstatic’ feelings I experienced in virtue of my own conversion and indoctrination, I truly cannot recall how much of my life I truly enjoyed. More specifically, I cannot recall how much of what I did in my ‘duty to God, family, and Church’ I truly wanted to do (as opposed to believing I wanted to do), instead of doing it out of some sense of duty or for self-approval and the achievement and preservation of acceptance by, and approval of, a Parent-God and parent-Church leaders.
Clearly my painful and difficult experiences in the Mormon faith — both as the offended and as an offender — are likely more representative than many culturally conditioned and self-deceived believers would care to admit. But our condition, while often not consciously acknowledged or confessed for what it is until after the fact (and even then often only through facilitated insight), is nonetheless betrayed, as Freud and many other renowned psychodynamic psychotherapists affirm, in innumerable ways. It is betrayed through our experienced anxieties, doubts, dreams, fantasies, wishes, and slips of the tongue. It is betrayed by our words, jokes, and what we laugh at or cry about. It is betrayed by our moods, feelings, emotions, behavior, physical and emotional ailments, and relationship problems. It is also betrayed in our compulsions, reactions, projections, and defenses. It is betrayed by our resistance to self-analysis and our evasions of truth regarding our beliefs and the existence of our real doubts.
All the indicators of the harm done through a given theistic faith or belief system are plain to see with a trained eye or by those with the proverbial ‘eyes to see.
Dismissing (even with apparent sincerity) the honest, analyzed account of a former believer’s experience in their faith as merely sad and misrepresentative (or perhaps as indicative of unrepented sin) is, in my view, psychologically suspect — given, at minimum, the established commonality or universality of all that is suffered personally.
It is suspect as well, given any anxiety that might be experienced by such sincere, dismissive believers when reflectively hearing or reading of such accounts, or when challenged directly regarding their own doubts and ambivalences in relation to their own faith and church leaders.
Such anxiety, if honestly acknowledged, would likely also be indicative of the aforementioned conditioned fear response. The conditioned fears associated with the threatened mortal and believed eternal consequences of known and/or suppressed or repressed doubts and ambivalences (or feelings of offense, anger, disappointment, and hatred) would be triggered by such anxiety. They unconsciously would alter or convert in the believer the feared and painful truth regarding such conditions and affects (as well as the underlying truth of the hurtful acts which caused them) into the acceptable lies of personal exception or exemption, of warranted and benevolent chastisement or character building, or of necessary faith testing sanctioned by a loving Parent-God.
In fairness, there is to be sure much to positively acknowledge about the secular achievements, characteristics, and commitments of many Mormon believers, including their industriousness and commitment to formal education, welfare, thrift, preparedness, service, and family values. Nevertheless, I would argue that all of these values, commitments, and related achievements are naturally accessible to and can be experienced by all people without religion. They pale in significance as compared to the insidious harm inflicted by the doctrines, beliefs, and practices that shape the culture. Through the culture, they weigh upon the minds and lives of believers and nonbelievers alike.
In reading the above retrospective, it is important to note that while I readily acknowledge that I am, for all the reasons articulated throughout this book, indeed a harsh and at times angry critic of all religious belief, particularly the Mormon faith, it would nonetheless be incorrect to conclude that I blame the Mormon Church or certain people in the Church for my woundedness or loss of faith. It would also be false to assume that the personal abuse and indignities I suffered at the hands of certain Church leaders or the Mormon faith in general was intentionally inflicted, or is the sole or even primary reason for my writing this book. Nothing could be further from the truth.
On the contrary, I want to be clear that I do not blame the Mormon Church or people for my own pre-existing woundedness or the wounds incurred during my years in the faith. As I see it, although the Mormon faith is at least implicated in the authoritarian abuses inflicted post conversion on its adherents through its teachings and practices, I was admittedly wounded before I joined the Mormon Church, and I will carry with me the effects of my woundedness to some extent throughout the rest of my life.
From my psychoanalytic perspective there is no ‘cure’ for such wounding, only the modest possibility of analytically developing an increased capacity for doing less harm to myself and to others as a result of my woundedness, and for dealing with the effects of my woundedness more productively. Accordingly, I no longer seek such cures, or illusory transformations promised by any ideology, discipline, or commitment therapy. My life is what it is, and it could not have been otherwise than what it is — all things considered. As a hard determinist, I try (with far less success than I would like at times) not to blame or praise anyone for anything, including myself. I also hold, following Pereboom (2001) and others of like mind, that the incoherence of blame and praise in a hard-incompatibilistic or deterministic context does not remove the coherent fact that we are all ultimately responsible for the choices we make and the actions we take, and that there are actual and natural physical, psychological, and social consequences for our determined choices.
***
As must be clear by now, I neither advocate religious belief in any form or for any reason, nor do I hold in respect or esteem educated and otherwise reasonable and intelligent religious believers in virtue of such beliefs. On the contrary, and at the very least, I regard such beliefs as pure folly. Those who unquestioningly accept and live by them as truth I consider foolish as well as epistemically irresponsible.
Instead, I advocate an analytic way of life — a way of life that characterizes and eschews faith defined as ‘trust in God’ as being a paranoid delusion and considers the religious illusion of salvation-as-forgiveness, protection, and deliverance as a defense against more life, and death. In this sense, to quote Mogenson once more from his provocative and profound book God is a Trauma (1989), “Theology [including Mormon theology] stands as a shield between mankind and trauma. A compromise with the trauma [the trauma of birth, of loss, of abuse and suffering, and of existential Angst], theology is a return of our exterior surfaces to the inorganic world, that is, to the spiritual world, death. To operate optimally, to protect mankind adequately, religion must be a dead [and deadening] shell — mere lip service, Sabbath after Sabbath, mere duty” (96). Religious man, in his religious ‘shell,’ is like “[t]he tortoise in its shell, the fish in its scales, the rhinoceros in its hide — all creatures great and small — [who] live by virtue of a protective outer crust of dead matter. The purpose of this protective crust or shield,” Mogenson asserts, is, “according to Freud…for protection against stimuli” (99); for protection against experiencing the traumas and “little deaths” (97) connected with more life. As we learned in the Epilogue, it is for protection as well against the natural instinct to live and therefore to die in our own fashion.
I am also an advocate for children — for the preservation of our children’s and grandchildren’s natural Atheism and for their right to a fullness of life. In this regard, I am reminded of an unforgettable experience with one of my grandchildren. It involved my granddaughter Codie when she was seven years old. One day she came home from her first-grade class where she and her classmates shared their favorite Christmas family traditions. When we asked her if she had any questions about other traditions she admitted that she did, and then asked — with honest puzzlement at her little classmates’ talk of their Nativity traditions — “Who the heck is baby Jesus?” Having raised my children in the Mormon religion and taught (indoctrinated) them all at a very early age the Christian meaning of Christmas, I couldn’t help but reflect on how refreshing Codie’s innocence and honesty were and how fortunate and free she was — at least for the time — from the influence and effects of theistic beliefs. This child, like her sister Chloe and all of our other precious grandchildren, was — as we all are at birth — a natural Atheist — a person without any belief in gods or saviors.
My fervent hope is that parents will think long and hard about indoctrinating their children into any form of theistic belief. Such indoctrination can cripple young and questioning minds with theological nonsense and dogma such as ‘God,’ ‘duty to God,’ ‘obedience to God and to Church authorities,’ ‘faith in God,’ ‘chosenness on the basis of belief in the only true God and Church,’ ‘sin against God,’ ‘worthiness (unworthiness) in the eyes of God,’ ‘righteousness (wickedness) as judged by God,’ and ‘salvation or damnation as decreed by God’ on the basis of behavior and ‘works’ in this life. It can also weaken their will to more fully individuate by keeping them superstitiously and codependently or regressively attached to a ‘Father God,’ a ‘Savior God,’ and a ‘Mother Church’ — including its surrogate-parent-Leaders. Finally, it can foster psychosis through the concept and expectation of revelation and ‘spiritual experience,’ and neurosis through deeply conditioned inner conflict and one-sidedness in virtue of an insufficiently integrated personality due to authoritarian parental and institutional shaming. The possible psychological hazards of theistic belief (and particularly Mormon beliefs and practices) are extensive and very real, not the least of which are religious addiction and extremism.
More generally and in principle, I have come to think that parents do not have a right to indoctrinate their children in any form of religious belief. In this regard I therefore agree wholeheartedly with the strong words of psychologist Nicholas Humphrey delivered in his Amnesty Lecture in Oxford in 1997 and quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:
"Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas — no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the strait and narrow paths of their own faith.
"In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible [or other scripture] or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon." (2006, 326)
Joshi puts this matter in an equally strong and characteristically blunt perspective. “To my mind,” he writes, “the inculcation of religious belief into the young — a process that can scarcely be termed anything but brainwashing — is religion’s great crime against humanity. Billions have been prejudiced in favor of one religion or another by its kind of indoctrination, and it requires a tremendous strength of mind and will to overcome it in later years. … One would suppose that religionists would wish their adherents to have come by their beliefs freely and of their own accord; so why do they insist that religious training begin at an age when the child is not able to think for itself and is incapable of questioning the authority of its parents or other adult figures? As H.P. Lovecraft states:
"We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value. … If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon [or brainwash] their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to [reason and] evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honorable course [which is certainly the case in the Mormon religion], but cheat at their game by [shamefully] invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis [and psychosis], is enough to destroy their pretentions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.” (17)
Children of Mormon or religious parents are not ‘Mormon children’ nor are they any particular religion’s children. They are children of parents who have been indoctrinated — by choice or upbringing — in the Mormon faith or in some other religion. If we truly love our children and desire ultimately that they make those choices in their lives which will result in their greatest well-being in this life (which is the only life they or we have or know of), then it seems reasonable and moral to me that we not presuppose that what is presumed to be in our best interests regarding our religious beliefs is, in fact, also in theirs.
Nor need we presume that our choices (and how we might have made them) regarding how we have chosen to live our lives are best for them as well. Rather, it seems most reasonable, sensible, and moral to me to focus instead on the emotional and physical well-being of our children by appropriately educating them in the facts of life (i.e., those naturalistic facts pertaining to our knowledge of physical, social, and economic realities) and to the ability to function morally, effectively, and responsibly in the world — to love well, reason well, interact well with others, work hard, and make the best decisions they can. None of this requires religious belief. Much of it, from my perspective, is actually impeded by religious belief. Still, this most reasonable, sensible, and moral path is one that cannot be taken by religious parents still rooted in any faith. It would seem that the only hope for the young children of believing parents is the parents’ ultimate and informed return to their own natural Atheism — and to rationality.
Notwithstanding the above, I do not think it is possible in religious cultures to avoid exposure to or infection by ‘the God virus.’ Still, I do think it is possible and advisable, as individuals and parents, to strengthen our resistance to it, and perhaps even eradicate it over time. To do this would perhaps minimally require, following Freud, learning how to meaningfully differentiate actual guilt from the irrational sense of guilt resulting from instinctual gratification, ambivalence, and doubt, and returning to the modest and realistic goal of well-being and ‘normal unhappiness’ by engaging in earnest in an analytic process which, as understood by Greg Mogenson (1989), would return us to “the creative burden of [our] own existence” (84). It would also require, following Loftus (2008, 2010), Harbour (2001), and Nielsen (1996, 2001, 2006), the outsider test for faith from a meritocratic worldview with an analytical, philosophical methodology consistent with a non-scientistic, contextualist, and historicist naturalism without metaphysical foundations.
After much reflection and introspection, I am left with the rather sobering and self-evident realization that among all the evolved species of life on this planet, only we human beings are capable of inventing and narcissistically and superstitiously worshipping supernatural gods created out of our imagination and shaped in our own image. Moreover, only we humans — regardless of our intelligence and rationality in all other areas of endeavor — can be stupid, pathetic, and pathological enough to irrationally believe in the actual existence of such putative beings. Only we humans cling to those beliefs in spite of their inherent and utter incoherence and absurdity — even to the insane extreme of self-abandonment, self-destruction, and utter annihilation. Given this, it would seem that in the words of the late Zen Buddhist Nanrei Kobori, “God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of man.”
Still, where there is consciousness, the capacity for reason, and the possibility through experience, influence, insight, and corrective emotional experience of cybernetically altering the brain, there is, at least for me, a very small hope that, in the end, reason, rationality, and sanity will prevail. More and more theistic believers may eventually disabuse themselves and the world of their religious nonsense. Even if such hope is, because of human weakness and stupidity,itself based on a mere illusion with no possibility of realization, there is for me still the pressing need and desire to personally expose and depotentiate the ‘god virus’ wherever and however I can. Openly and boldly (even if necessarily angrily and offensively at times) I must eschew and speak out against superstition, theistic belief, and authoritarian religious dogma and abuse in all their forms and all their places. There is as well a very personal need to reclaim at least some of the integrity, self-respect, and human dignity I lost by superstitiously, needily — and, yes, stupidly — chasing after, believing in, and worshipping different gods throughout my life, and subjecting myself, my children, and those I have influenced while in the faith to demeaning and dehumanizing authoritarian mandates and judgments to my own (and their) detriment and shame.
Perhaps in the end, apart from my very modest hope that reason, rationality, and sanity will ultimately prevail over the sway of irrational religious feelings and beliefs, the pressing needs and corresponding desires of which I have written constitute my primary motivation and justification for writing this book — along with the accompanying desire to persuade others to attend therapeutically to their real doubts by more critically and skeptically testing their religious beliefs and commitments as objective outsiders.
To this end I will close with the words of Alexander Saxton quoted by Victor Stenger in his fine work The New Atheism (2009): “The truth – the hard core, ‘get real’ kind of truth – is that somewhere down under, by some sort of subliminal awareness, every human being really knows that believing in belief…is ‘nothing but make believe.’ The atheist’s mission is to nourish the seed beneath the snow; to seek not escape but survival” (228).
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The Standard Works (Scriptures) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Including the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants (D&C), and the Pearl of Great Price)
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