Pity the poor theologians! They are faced with a seemingly impossible dilemma when it comes to making sense of divine action in the world. If they affirm that God does act through miraculous interventions in nature, then they must explain why God acts on these occasions but not on numerous others; why miracles are so poorly attested; and how they are supposed to be compatible with our scientific understanding of the universe. On the other hand, if they deny that God acts through special miraculous interventions, then they are left with a faith which seems to be little more than Deism - the belief that God created the universe but is no longer active within it. If God is real, should we not expect to be able to discern at least some special divine acts? The theologian seems to have to choose between a capricious, wonder-working, tinkering God and an absent, uninterested, undetectable one. Neither sounds like a suitable object for love and worship.
The Daily Beast had a good article the other day questioning the ethics of a new reality TV show featuring gay men married to straight women. Read it up. The brief summary of homosexuality in Mormonism is worth it.
"The biggest lie Satan can sell you is that he doesn't exist!"
I know you don't have to sit through LDS meetings to hear this frightening warning. No matter where you hear it, the point is clear: you had better not stop believing in Satan. That muthafuckahz the real thing! And he's scary as shit!
The horns are maybe more symbolic than literal, it's true, but let's just take a moment to recognize that many, many people have had visions of a Satan with horns and wings. They're tradition at this point, and Lord knows we Mormons love tradition.
And the folks who love Satan most really prefer this more traditional approach.
Now consider for just a moment how badly Satan wants you for himself.
Terrifying! Of course, Mormons know better than the Church of Satan (those satanist assholes have totally been deceived), they know he doesn't look like a goat or have horns or wings. He looks like us, for he is our spirit brother born of our Heavenly Parents. Some say he looks a bit like Barack Obama. Others think he's white.
More important than what our fallen brother looks like is what he wants. Satan wants you to suffer, brothers and sisters. He wants you to be fucking miserable for all eternity because that's exactly the kind of heartless, bodiless bastard he is (that's right, he was too rebellious to be given a body). He tempts and torments you at all times setting traps and waiting for you to fall into sin. I don't even like to think about his evil ways.
"Taste my happiness, y'all mothafuckahz! We got this!"
Good thing other people have thought about it for me. Take Bible scholars for example. These dudes have looked very carefully at the use of the Hebrew word satan (שָּׂטָן), which means "adversary", to understand where Satan comes from. As it turns out satan is a term that describes a variety of human and celestial beings who in some way create opposition for someone else. The Devil (meaning "slanderer"), Great Lucifer the Fallen, the Father of All Lies, doesn't come onto the scene until hundreds of years later on in the tradition of satans when the Hebrew tradition was able to absorb more of the dualism from surrounding religious traditions, at which point Satan, Yahweh's mortal enemy, was born into the world. Here's a brief explanation in video form:
So where does this leave us with regards to a scary bogeyman named Satan? Do we trust Joseph Smith's tweaking of the Christian tradition or do we recognize the tradition has untenable origins and that we've been caught up in one of the longest running ghost stories on earth today?
Pay attention to how frequently our prophets, seers and revelators use the "because Satan" argument. Why should we find that argument convincing?
According to popular wisdom, a good father is the person his children turn to when things go wrong.
Mormons believe that God wants to truly and completely comfort us. Through the Holy Ghost, God's love can fill us and makes us better. I agree that people who find themselves in horrible, terrifying, intimidating, and desperate situations tend to turn to God. "God, help me, no one else can!" I've been there, but I have serious doubts about the comfort I received.
Plenty of people blame God for their hard times and turn away from Him. And plenty of people don't give two shits about God to begin with and learn to deal with their problems on their own or with actual living beings like their earth dad, other family, friends, pets, coworkers, therapists and therapy groups, etc. We don't need "God" or a holy spook, we need each other. *These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre
as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.
Who do you trust more, someone who says "this is what I have observed through a series of careful experiments" or someone who says "this is how it is because I say so"? Do you feel more comfortable with someone who says "I can show you how I reached this conclusion" or someone who says "I'm related to the man at the top, so trust me"? Who's the bigger asshole, the person who says "we have no clear evidence to go off of, so I wouldn't be so sure" or the person who says "God told me personally, so I'm right"?
As odd as it may sound, I never really thought about these questions until my early twenties when an email from a disaffected sibling mention the conflict between empiricism and authoritarianism. To my embarrassment, I wasn't even entirely sure what empiricism was.
It got me thinking. Perhaps not surprisingly I thought of Alma 32 and the request that the reader "experiment upon my words". I really wanted faith to be an empirically testable thing, just like the seed analogy. Did this experiment of faith work the same way as planting seeds in various soil? Was it reliable? And what about verse 32? "Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away." How many people have not experienced any growth from their seed of faith? How many people have experimented only to watch the experiment fail?
I began to think about my life a little differently. How did I want to see the world? Who did I want making decisions for me? Who could I trust most? How could I trust myself? Was I going to behave in a certain way simply because someone told me that that's what God wants me to do? Wouldn't it better to weigh all my options carefully and trust collective experience?
