God and our moral sense

If God exists and has the power to intervene in nature, and on occasion apparently uses that power, they [critics of religion] ask, why does God fail to intervene in so many other cases of horrific injustice, cruelty, and suffering? Why, for example, did God allow Agatha to be tortured, abused, and mutilated before miraculously healing her through a vision of St Peter? Why would god allow some to be killed by volcanic eruptions and plagues, while bestowing special protection on the inhabitants of Catania? Why, in any case, does God need to use the powers of an object such as St Agatha's veil to achieve this protection, rather than acting directly to prevent the eruption or the disease in the first place? More generally, why is one person miraculously cured while another of equal faith and virtue suffers and dies? We might say that God moves in a mysterious way - which certainly seems to have been the case if we are to believe the many religious tales of wonders and miracles through the ages - but is that a good enough response? If God created us and our moral sense, then why do God's own ways of acting in the world seem to us not to meet our own standards of what is just and good?

Thomas Dixon Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, pg. 56.

Keeping on the sunny side

Mormons desperately want everyone else to see how happy they are with the True Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by the One True Church, covet that boundless happiness, look into Mormonism, decide it's true, and join the fold of the most intensely happy religious practitioners in the world. There are, however, reasons to doubt Mormon happiness. The two biggest in my mind have to do with Utah's extremely high consumption of antidepressants. Naturally Mormons will deny there's any connection of the state's depression to Mormonism stating that Mormon women claim to be happy (so they must be), or that it's probably the Mormons struggling to live the lifestyle who are depressed, or maybe Mormons are more responsible about getting help than people in other states. The counter is that Utah is not the only state to boast both high religious fervor and high antidepressant use.

Utah's new state song.

We might also want to ask just why it is that Utahns are number one for porn subscriptions when the LDS Church specifically prohibits pornography and why it is that Salt Lake City is one of the top U.S. cities for cosmetic surgeries and Utah is 8th for plastic surgeons per capita.

Why wait until the Resurrection to have a perfect body?

Do these look like statistics of a happy people? How might Mormonism be contributing to the pain and rejection people feel? To their secret habits? The desires to be more perfect? Isn't it possible that Mormonism has some seriously ugly side effects on one's mental health?

And what about the kind of self-interrogation designed to make believers feel like utter shit? I couldn't help but wonder.

Libido

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