Transcript of the podcast Mormon Expression Episode 177: The God of the Lost Keys—Featuring John, Zipha, Jared, and Randy.
John: All right, welcome back to another edition of Mormon Expression... wait, wait, I was going to do that differently! I told you this afternoon...
Zilpha: What? you were?
John: Yeah, yeah. I was listening to... what we were listening to? KSL?
Zilpha: I must have been asleep.
John: Welcome back to another edition of Mormon Podcast... even Mormon Expression. [Laughter]
John: I don't know why the word "even" is so important in Mormon discourse and dialogue, but it is. Sitting next to me is my lovely wife, even the talented Zilpha. Hey Zilpha.
Zilpha: Hey everyone.
John: And as Randy told me to say, I'm sitting on the left of Zilpha.
Zilpha: As it should be.
John: This studio audience can indeed confirm that she is sitting on my right. I don't make stuff up, right? Yeah! And then tonight we brought two heavy hitters for this discussion. First of all, I think, Jared, you've been on Mormon Expression before, but never with me. Is that right?
Jared: I haven't, I'm part of projects related to Mormon Expression, but I haven't been on a podcast.
John: We have projects related to...?
Zilpha: What would those be exactly?
Jared: Well, we have a podcast in the works I'm working on, but I have not been on one yet.
John: Oh, okay, okay. All right, well, welcome! Welcome. We'll be gentle for the first five minutes or so. Welcome. But you're no stranger to Mormon podcasting. You've been on several Mormon Stories podcasts, and I think you've appeared on Mormon Matter several times, is that right?
Jared: Correct.
John: Okay, good. Good.
Jared: So now I have another podcast under my belt. I have a full set!
John: Right, it's sort of like the three kingdoms of glory, the Mormon Stories, Mormon Matters and Mormon Expression... I'll leave it to the audience to decide which one is which.
John: And returning in his triumphant glory is Randy! Hey, welcome back, Randy.
Randy: Good evening everyone. I did count it up today and this is my eighth Mormon Expression podcast. So I believe a free sub is in order. [Laughter]
Zilpha: At least a bio on the webpage.
Randy: Well, I'm not real comfortable with the moniker of "heavy hitter." I'm an orthodontist a who likes to read, so I'm, just not comfortable with that.
John: Is heavy hitting not a positive in orthodontics? I'm not real familiar with your religion, so whatever you guys, you know, however you guys operate... [Laughter]
John: All right, tonight is a topic that has been bouncing around in my for about 9 or 10 years or so, and I don't really have a destination. Oftentimes I know the way—for all you budding podcasters out there, the way I plan a podcast is I figure out the first five minutes and the last five minutes and then I let the middle take its course. And this one, I don't know what the last five minutes are. So we're all in anticipation.
John: Of course, there's a lot of debate out there about God and the nature of God and what God wants us to do and who God supports and which are his true churches and all that sort of stuff. And I kinda said before, those questions aren't very interesting to me, at least not the question of the existence of God. I don't find that to be very interesting.
John: But one thing that I do find to be rather interesting is "What can we infer about this character we call God?" Based on the attributes his adherents claim that he has. And tonight I want to engage in a discussion or a meditation on what that is.
John: I have sort of flippantly named this podcast "The God of the Lost Keys," which Zilpha doesn't like.
Zilpha: I don't like it because it sounds like the keys of the Priesthood or something like that. For Mormons, "keys" means more than something you just stick in an ignition.
Randy: It almost sounds like a bad Indiana Jones movie. [Laughter}
John: Well, yeah, I guess that's what I was going for!
Zilpha: I think it should be, like, "The God of the Lost Homework," or "Why does God only answer ambiguous kinds of prayers?"
John: Well, I don't even want to go down the path of why does he only do that. I'm saying that according to his believers, that's what he does. So let's frame the question.
John: Now, if you go sit in your average LDS Fast and Testimony meeting and you sit through several of these, you'll start hearing about small miracles in people's lives. And "The Lost Keys" is one you hear about all the time. Somebody is in a hurry to go somewhere, and they say a prayer, and suddenly they find their keys in an unexpected way. And for believers, this is a small but significant manifestation of divine intervention for good in their lives.
John: And for a lot of believers, they see the interaction of God and the Spirit happening and influencing even the most mundane aspects of their lives. And indeed, there are many who would argue that this is the way that God operates, that God does not do huge, big miracles. Those come about every once, every 2 or 300 years and they're recorded in the scriptures that covered thousands of years, but they're not a pedestrian sort of thing. They don't happen all the time. But for a lot of believers, today, they believe that God is influencing and metaphysically mucking in their lives, on a daily basis. Is this a fair characterization of common LDS views?
Jared: I think so. Metaphysical micromanaging. That's how a lot of people expect God interacts. I think maybe it's because God is on a sabbatical or something, and there's only like a lower clearance deity, and so they only have authority to do the little stuff...
Zilpha: But Mormons wouldn't believe that. Mormons wouldn't believe that.
Jared: No, no! That was joking.
John: I should put out there that in my mind, there's two models that get floated in church and they're actually not compatible, but you'll hear them in the same meetings. The one is of the Grand Watchmaker, which is an old deist view. God set everything in motion, but God is so smart, being omniscient, that he knew, 7,000 years ago when he was creating the world, what would happen to you on Wednesday. So he knew that, in our example, you would need to find your keys and he intervened with the very fabric of the nature of... well, not intervened, it's in the blueprints, in the long strings of causality stretching way, way back to the creation. He planted the seeds of you finding your keys through natural means.
Jared: Do you really think that's in Mormonism? I've never really come across that. We have such an immanent God in Mormonism.
Zilpha: I would agree.
John: I would say it's sort of like the proletariat and the party members, I guess. I think there's this 80% that follows the, “Hey, God is miracle-ing the world through his servants or whatever...”
Jared: He's in bed with me. He's in my... he's everywhere.
John: Yeah. And then he can go change that. He could physically move your keys from underneath the cushion and put them on the side table. But I think the intelligentsia set is more likely to dismiss that sort of model and go for one that's the Grand Architect. I've heard them both. Nobody stated it as succinctly as I did, but I've heard both those models come up in church from time to time.
Randy: Well, people in the church have to model God in different ways all the time. Because, in the Mormon theology, you have the Book of Mormon, which is very, uh, deuteronomistic—did I say that right?—in its idea of why bad things happen to people, why good things happen to people, because of sin or because of righteousness, right? But then they look around, and they go, "The world doesn't work like that!" And I remember as a believer going, "Yeah, the world doesn't work like that!"
Randy: But I remember teaching the youth—because that's mostly what I did, my adult life was teaching youth—that, okay, yes, the world doesn't quite work like the Book of Mormon does, but you gotta remember the Book of Mormon was a special place. So they had special rules because they were allowed to be in that special place. So you're always kind of doing this ad hoc stuff as a Mormon, to get the theology to fit.
Randy: And then you've got the apocalyptic part of Mormon theology, you hear it every General Conference, that the world is getting more and more evil and Satan is loose and the end times are near. And so sin is because of the evil in the world. So, they're always flipping back and forth between the nature of their guide in my opinion.
Zilpha: Well, you know, in the last General Conference, the talk about... I can't remember his name, but he was a physician and when he was in medical school, he was on his way home riding his bike, and he was really hungry, and he didn't want to get back to his wife and kids—
John: —The miracle of the chicken thigh?
Zilpha: Yeah, he didn't want to get back in a grumpy mood. So he wanted to get some chicken that was on sale for like 29 cents and he only had a nickel in his pocket. And so he said a prayer. Didn't he say a prayer?
John: I think so, yeah.
Zilpha: That he'd be able to find a quarter. And he started looking around, and lo and behold, there was a quarter not very far from the chicken place and he was able to get his chicken. So thinking about what you were saying, John, did God set up that quarter to be there because he knew that faithful dude would be in that place at that time wanting chicken?
John: Well, I think there's three possible models. One is that God, ex nihilo, created something that looked like a quarter (thereby devaluing the currency).
Zilpha: What, you mean like he made the quarter?
John: Yeah, he miracled a quarter into existence. This quarter did not exist prior to this. Or, I mean, you could have a sub-stroke A of that, which is he went over to the mint and disappeared one and put it over here. Well, I'll get back to that in a second.
John: The other one is he made somebody—he tampered with somebody's free will in such a way that he made them drop a quarter. Now I guess you could argue that he might've cut open their pants or something through a miracle, so it fell out... but either way, the person was free to spend the quarter before God dropped the quarter out of his pants.
John: The third example is that God happened to notice there was a quarter on the ground, so he planted the idea of saying the prayer.
Zilpha: 'Cause he knew he could come through!
John: Are there any other metaphysical models I'm missing here? I mean, there's subsets of those stories, but those three are like the main ones. And maybe even Jared can give us the Latin name for each of the theological...
Jared: Well, it's a subcategory of the third option and I think it's amusing to frame it the way you have, but I'll say right out—and this has concerns, but I think it also has strengths—the best theologies are the ones where there is no God required. Meaning that the most useful conceptions of God are ones where they work whether or not he's around.
Jared: What I'm thinking is, most people, most Mormons would—because we have a saying, "a quickening of your intelligence," right?—so I think the way a lot of members would credit, and a lot of religious people in general would credit God's hand in their lives, is to say, well, God helped me remember. God quickened my memory so that I thought of exactly where the keys were. I mean, I think that we're not really doing justice to the way that Mormons see the world when we're, like, "he was a trickster who made the quarter fall" or "he created one out of nothing."
Zilpha: Well, then, where did it come from?
Jared: It was around; God knew it would be there.
John: God knows where all quarters are. God loves all quarters equally!
Jared: A quarter does not fall, without.... [Laughter]
Randy: I don't think any Mormons who believe this ever have taken those logical steps forward. I think where it comes from is that they're in a religion that teaches that miracles happen. That's one of the foundational principles of Mormonism. And they look around and didn't see anything supernatural happening. And so they need something supernatural.
Randy: And secondly, I think what's working is that, when I think about myself, when I was a believer and I was on my mission, I had kind of a panic attack that first night when I was in Phoenix. I was just freaking out. I didn't really think I wanted to do this. And I remember it was comforting to think that God knew me personally, cared about the little things in my life so much because I was a child of God. And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. And, from what I remember, I felt comforted and I was able to go to sleep and the panic attack passed. And so I think there's this intuitive "feeling special" that that's comforting to Mormons. I don't think they think it to the levels that John took it to.
John: You know, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. And I like the idea of God. I wish I could believe in God. I honestly never show, like said, "oh, yeah, that'd be cool!" But I did take those paths down, and my stance—I'd be happy for anybody to prove me wrong—I can't find a theological description of God—and this is John talking—that I don't find ridiculous when it's taken two or three leaps.
John: And that's part of the genesis of this discussion, because I wish somebody could show me one of those! Because yeah, it's nice to talk about how I was hungry and I found a quarter or somebody came and they changed the tire on the side of the road or did these great things. But I have trouble going past, you know, two or three propositions deep and understanding why that event occurred. But I think, Randy, you're absolutely right in terms of the way people frame those things.
Jared: I think there are different categories of miracles. There's the tabulating of coincidences, where anything good God gets credit for and then anything disadvantageous is just kind of ignored or whatever. I think one of the most telling miracle stories is "God blessed the surgeon, so the surgery went well."
John: I think surgeons should sue God. Collectively, a class action.
Randy: That's how I would give my blessing to people before they went into surgery! I mean, as an orthodontist, you want to share the liability with other professionals, to help protect yourself! So I'd always have the surgeons share the liability if it didn't go well. In case I didn't have enough faith! [Laughter]
Jared: Yeah. We have to acknowledge that there are occasional very unlikely things that happen that could be called miracles. We've all heard the anecdotal stories about people who weren't expected to live. And I understand that can still be tabulating coincidence.
John: But you said "unlikely." Maybe you're right, but it can't be based on the word "unlikely." Let me give you what I'm talking about.
John: So when I was a kid—I was born in 1973, so in the late seventies, early eighties—there were still veterans left over from World War II in church. And we had a guy in church who was a bomber, who flew missions over Germany. And for those of you who know your history, it was extremely deadly, those bombing runs over Germany. They'd fire the flak up there and they'd have to stay in formation and they were just these great big flying death traps.
John: So let's go through a hypothetical situation. Suppose 100 bombers take off from England and fly over France and start bombing, and two of them are shot down. Everyone's going to go back and feel bad for those two. But you know, they're not gonna... you know, everybody landed. Now we start going down this curve where more and more planes were shot down. Now look at it from the perspective of the Germans. The probability of shooting down all 100 planes is close to zero. It's very difficult to do. But from the perspective of the Americans bombing the targets, the more of their compadres who gets shot down, the more they're going to look at their own situation and say, "the probability that I survived is smaller and smaller." Although the probability that anybody survived is high. So it's a game of numbers.
John: So you have this conundrum where the worse the situation is, the more devastated the American troops were in my little scenario here, the more bloody that attack was, the more hellacious it was... the more likely they're going to come out thinking they had a religious experience. Because if only three of those bombers land on the ground, they're going to be like, "We must be touched by the hand of God because how could we possibly have made it through all that flak?"
John: And the answer is, well, somebody probably would, right? It's the fallacy of a lottery ticket. You know the probability that you win the lottery is very low. The probability that somebody is going to win the lottery is either 100 percent or very high depending on the type of lottery. So, I take exception if you just say, "hey, there's this unlikely occurrence of events, therefore there's a miracle in there." I don't see any sort of connection.
Jared: Let me reframe that. I think that there are coincidences that fit into the more dramatic narrative of "miracle" more easily than others.
John: Okay.
Jared: Here, can I lay out my defense of the standard Mormon position for a bit and then we can engage with that?
John: Please, please.
Jared: I teach world religions, so I'm familiar with a lot of different conceptions of God and I have to say, I think that Mormonism does theodicy really, really well. I think that the Mormon conception of God handles this question better than most. So first, I'll come at this from a couple of different ways. Zilpha, maybe you'll like, better than "The God of the Lost Keys," I call this argument against God the "Butler God" argument.
Zilpha: Well, it has 'butt' in it, so that's a start!
Randy: Is his name Jeeves?
Jared: So I'm not in any way making light of or minimizing the horrendous tragedies that happen in life. I mean, we really need to deal with those, so I'm not being flippant here.
John: And no one gets out alive!
Jared: But in in essence, I think a lot of people who argue against the existence of God are saying, "if a Diet Coke with lime does not appear in my hand this minute, there is no God!" (Or he works for Pepsi, one of the two.)
Jared: But this basic idea of "I have a certain conception of what God is like, what God should do, and God is concerned with my comfort. Therefore, if everyone is not comfortable, there is no God." This is how I see the argument of, like, "Well, why are there amputees? Why are children raped and killed?" And it's an extremely poignant question if we frame it this way: "Well, what does it say about God, if God is helping find car keys or win football games, but does not heal the child dying of cancer, or prevent rapes, devastating natural disasters and so forth?"
Jared: Here are the elements of where I think the Mormon theology of God is very high and does theodicy really well. First, we have a limited God. We do not have an omnipotent God in Mormon theology. God is limited by their rules that are bigger than God is, in Mormon theology.
Randy: Yeah, but he's still superpotent because he can part the Red Sea, no problem.
Jared: Right. And it is useful to tease out well, under what circumstances is God allowed to act and in what circumstances doesn't he? But I acknowledge upfront that why I think this works so well is because I think the Mormon theology works well whether or not there is a God. I see that as a good thing.
Jared: But anyway, in Mormon theology, our purpose in this life is to become like God. So we are here on earth not to be comfortable, but to learn to be godlike. So it makes sense that we would have a reality where we would have the most opportunity to be gods to each other and take care of each other.
Jared: So there are two main sources of trauma. There's manmade trauma and natural trauma. So there are the rapes and murders and all the terrible, horrendous things that we do to each other as a rule.
John: I don't want to interrupt you too much, I like everything you're saying, but we have to put a third one in there, because believers believe that there's God-induced trauma too. So manmade, natural, and then God.
Jared: Like Maxwell's talk. Yeah, right. The flood, it would be a God-induced trauma. Okay, I'll give credence to that. I find that very unpleasant, but yes. So God, the Abrahamic trials or whatever, I'm thinking of Maxwell's... and then the other one would be trials that come from our own sinfulness.
John: Those would be the same for me, because it's usually in the scriptures, "repenteth God, that man is so wicked, so he's going to give them boils or something."
Jared: Yeah. The whole Bible is a mess. But anyway, to me, the question is not whether or not God steps in and fixes all our problems, but whether God metaphorically holds our hand, gives us comfort, love, helps us, is there for us as a parent would.
Jared: The analogy that I think of is, I am physically able to go to school with children and do all their schoolwork for them. And I think this fits really well with the Mormon conception of God because we have this "God as parent" in this school learning type type situation. And so I think that explains why, as we seek God's help, he's there for us. So that allows God to be both present in our daily lives but also limited in a sense.
Zilpha: So he's a butler...?
Jared: No, he's not a Butler in the Mormon concept. He's a parent who has our best interests in mind and gives us ample opportunity to be gods to each other. Oh, go ahead.
John: So I agree. I agree with everything you said. I like this as a solution to the theodicy and I think that was an early motivation for Smith in shaping his theology with a common sense sort of solution. And I think it's very similar, you might disagree with me on this, but very similar to older forms of Buddhism where they talk about gods and they talk about heaven, but that was always sort of an optional thing because you had direct access to the Dharma—you could become a Buddha yourself and in fact you had to. That was a path you ultimately had to travel on your own. There were saints who might help you along that path, but you ultimately had access to "the good" as they might say it. And Alma really lays this out in the Book of Mormon when he says, you know, if God does not obey the Dharma, if God does not be good, he ceases to be God.
John: But let's go back to our friend Socrates who laid this whole thing bare 2,500 years ago. The problem, that he pointed out in the Euthyphro, is, if gods are gods because they recognize and follow good, gods are superfluous because all they do is just get in the way and muck things up. You should just access the good yourself. There's no reason to muck around with the gods because they sometimes have problems.
John: You saw those in Greek mythology, you know, they would come and get really horny because some woman was bathing, and you see the problems in the Bible, that God gets jealous of the guys next to his chosen people and tells them to go slaughter all their goats and sheep. And so the problem is when you get a god in there, he sometimes leads you down down paths. So, as sort of an atheist, I would say we all have the same religion, Mormons and the atheists! We all believe in good.
John: Now, I'll tell you what the Mormon response is. Well, you guys probably know it already. And I think it's actually a clever response. It's a clever theological response, but I think it's problematic. The modern Mormon response to their problem with the theodicy is to say that mankind, although the offspring of God, is by their nature evil. And they're so evil and so corrupt, they can't even recognize good from bad. Humankind cannot tell the difference, humankind has no morality whatsoever. We're just like animals and we can't recognize that.
John: So there's two things that we were given. One is the light of Christ, but that's not internal! I think a Mormon who is following the theology would say people aren't moral at all. They're only moral inasmuch as Jesus Christ gives them the light of Christ. It's very Calvinist. And in that sense, you can argue that if there's somebody who's evil out there, a serial killer, that's just because Jesus withheld some of his light from them. And then of course when you're baptized, you have the gift of the Holy Ghost.
John: But a Mike Tannehill type individual would argue that the only way out of that conundrum is by obedience to church authority. So morality does not matter at all. The only thing that matters is obedience to church authority. Because rather than make miracles, what God has done is he has put in his Priesthood and his leaders.
John: And you're immoral! You have no idea what morality is! You can't tell the difference between Lot sleeping with his daughters or cutting off Laban's head or doing your Home Teaching. So you have to do whatever you're told. Ergo, modern Mormonism, where the only thing that's moral to do is obey the authority.
John: Thank you. I'll be here all week.
Randy: Maybe I'm going in a different direction. But I wanted to talk about what Jared said about, the Mormon purpose of life is to become like gods or become gods. And I'm just like... that works well when you live a relatively comfortable life in this bubble of the United States that we live in... I think the Book of Mormon Musical song Hasa Diga Eebowai juxtaposes the two sufferings very well. They had the Elders saying, "Someone took our luggage away, our bus was late, the plane was crowded..." and then on the other side, people are starving in the streets, the women's clits are getting cut off, maggots in the scrotum, 80% of us have AIDS...
Randy: Most of the suffering outside of this bubble that we live in, in the world, is debilitating. It's awful. I mean, what is it in God's plan for a kid in Africa to be trained at six to kill? And so the rest of his life, he's a killer. How does that give him any opportunity to become more godlike?
John: We had the missionaries over this last week, I think we sent them the last podcast, and they answered that question!
Randy: I want to hear it.
John: Well, there were choices made in the preexistence...
Randy: Ahhh! See, this is the hand-waving Mormonism does to get around these problems.
John: They trotted that one out. Um, so... [Laughter]
Zilpha: Well, I thought it was more the fact that God had never chosen to deal directly with people in Africa, but he had chosen to deal with, say, people in America. So obviously the Americans are going to be much more moral than the Africans because the Africans had never really dealt directly with God.
John: That's my light of Christ Calvinism thing! That, for whatever reason, Christ is withholding more of His light of Christ, he's giving it all to the Tea Party members and things like that, and Africa suffers from want of clean water.
Zilpha: Because God blesses America.
Jared: This is a problem with Christianity in general, because once Jesus is the answer, you need a hell of a problem. And the problem is that we're all lost, you know, we're damned and lost and terrible without Jesus. So, I think that we have, you know, "we are children of God..." And aren't there places in Mormon, theology and Mormon thought where we are kind of good in and of ourselves? And we certainly try to like, save ourselves and save Jesus the trouble, but...
Zilpha: It sort of doesn't really make sense because it's like... we are helpless without the help of Jesus, and we are evil by nature. So I don't know how we're expected to save ourselves even though we're told that we have to save ourselves.
John: It's a conundrum to say that we are the offspring of God, the literal offspring of God in his literal image... and that the natural man is an enemy of that. What does that say about God that his natural state is evil?
John: So I think, to Jared's point, you have those two threads in Mormonism, that we are gods in embryo and we have a divine nature and were princes and queens and princesses and stuff like that., but at the same time, natural man is an enemy. We're going to get to the devil here pretty soon, but maybe not just yet.
Jared: Oh, I had a question for Randy. One of the things that frustrates me, from a humanist point of view, is I think that this is the first time in the history of the world where we really could, if we had the will, take care of pretty much everyone.
Randy: Oh, I don't think that's even a question. There's enough. Especially with the farming technology, we have enough food...
Jared: We have transportation technology. We have information technology, we have medical technology...
Randy: We have enough wealth to go around as well.
Jared: So on one on one hand I would say, well this is great because, it's just our will. I mean, the classic theological issue with theodicy is that once God creates us, humans with agency, God allows that creation or children or whatever to act against his will. There's no way around that. And so most evils fall under the category of, "God does not practice his power to prevent that free will." That was Satan's plan according to Mormon theology, Lucifer's plan.
Jared: Of course, the opposite side of the argument is, how much of the history of humankind has that been the case? And then everyone's just screwed. You see what I'm saying? It doesn't look very good for God if, in 100,000 years of history or whatever, oh, in that last little bit we can take care of each other. Not that we will, but we could. I really think there's something to this idea of "what kind of helps are we expecting from God?" But that leads us away from miracles.
John: But we're also talking about God's identity. And I think that this idea of this comforting, supportive God is tremendously important. It's not only not only theologically, but practically. I think it's one of the most important functions of God.
John: This goes to something Randy said to me a couple months ago, which is basically that Atheism is a privilege of the rich. Of course, all of us in the middle class are, in a global historical perspective, extremely rich, right? If you're slaving away in sort of a hellish existence of, you're going to get your 30 years before you're all worn out, and suffering from malnutrition and stuff, which is the way most of our ancestors did, you don't really have the luxury to say, "Hey, this is it! Live the best life you can live!" Because most people who have been on this globe really had zero choice in terms of what kind of life they had.
John: It's like the rich people's gout of the mind. I was reading something posted on Facebook and they're talking about regrets at the deathbed with people saying, well, I could have done this and I could have pursued these dreams. And I thought to myself, "what a privileged state! How few people in the history of the world have ever even had the privilege of looking back on their life and saying they had any choice at all!"
John: So, I think that speaks to what religion did and why Christianity was so successful. There's a reason why Christianity took off among the underclass in Rome, because if you're living this existence that's not real great and not real rewarding, to have rewards in the afterlife is a motivator to be tolerant of your current position. And that's why Christianity was so utilitarian for monarchs. I mean, to be blunt about it, there's a reason why slave owners in the South taught the slaves Christianity! It pacified them!
Randy: Well, even before that, the seeds of Christianity were planted during the apocalyptic movement when Israel was under control of Syria, somewhere like 160 BC. What had they been taught by the prophets? If you read Amos, Isaiah, they've been taught that we are oppressed by others because of sin. Well, now they got Syria who's saying, "if you obey the law of Moses, we're going to kill you." And so, it flipped it around where they had to reject the message of the old prophets.
Randy: Because their life was shit! They were in tremendous suffering. Their children being hung in front of them because they were practicing the law of Moses. So they had to come up with something that would make this bleak existence more tolerable and not only that, the justice, because they wanted to live their religion and they couldn't, so they needed to create a God that would bring justice to their enemies.
Jared: It is what Randy's talking about. It was very grim. This isn't the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, it was the background of the book of Daniel, and if women would circumcise their babies—this is all in the book of Maccabees—if they chose to circumcise their babies, they would kill the babies and hang them around the woman's neck, the corpse of the baby. So it's an extremely, extremely grim time.
Jared: And there was also this other prophetic tradition in addition to the deuteronomistic theology that he's talking about, where, if God beats you up—if your husband beats you, I mean—if God beats you, it's your own damn fault, you know, because you didn't have dinner warm or whatever. But that's the basic idea, it's your own failings of worthiness, or really, it's fidelity. That you did not worship Yahweh adequately and therefore Yahweh used other nations as a tool to beat the crap out of you.
Jared: There's this other prophetic tradition which is called the day of the Lord, that there is going to be this this day of the Lord. And that is what morphed or evolved into apocalypticism, which is the idea that, for whatever reason, God allowed the powers of darkness to be in charge, but any minute now he's going to fix it. He's going to fix everything and the hungry and the poor and the persecuted, it's all going to be better. And there's gonna be a big old barbecue of the powerful.
Randy: And we're kind of seeing that today, even in Mormonism. I mean, Glenn Beck, you know? "End times are comin'! Just hang in there a little longer! We don't need to fix the economy because Jesus is going to come fix it all, but just hang in there a little longer!" And that's why I think Mormonism has a lot of apocalyptic tendencies.
John: Yeah, they've been cultivated by the brethren and still are.
Jared: Packer did make that really... ...but that's kind of off topic.
Randy: Sorry, I derailed a little bit
John: To tidy that, it's not just Christianity. Hinduism, Buddhism, all have these sort of...
Jared: ...Caste systems, right? That's a really, really big one.
John: And it's a really powerful idea as far as controlling the masses and keeping order in society. Your lot in life is determined by external factors and whatever your part, be a good one. And that theme is through religion all over the place. And that is such a useful idea to humankind that that's why religion stays so strong, partly. What will happen, and I'm throwing this question out to the universe, if this trend of, of humanism or atheism tends to grow and it starts to become a majority position? People will probably be less tolerant of things. You'll have a more revolutionary society.
Jared: We're already seeing that thing of the Arab spring.
John: But at the same time, there's another interesting dynamic there, which is atheists are less likely to throw their lives away. You see this in terms of volunteering for military duty or getting thrown in prison.
John: Our missionaries again at the house, we were bringing up these horrific things, saying, well God does this and God does this. And they would say, “You can only understand that if you have a timeline in which life is just a blip and it doesn't even matter.” So their answer was, basically, you can understand the Bible and Christianity because human life is meaningless in an eternal scale. And this I hate, this drives me crazy.
John: But I mean, from their point of view they're right! If this is just a distance, a chapter in a book, a very short chapter in a very long book, then yeah, it doesn't matter! You can throw your life away, you can fly into a building, you can kill people because you know God's will will be served.
Randy: Well, not only is it easier for soldiers to fight, but it's easier for presidents like George Bush to send soldiers to die for a cause, because he believes in an afterlife. Whereas someone who is thinking about sending thousands of kids to go off in a foreign land to die, and he has this humanistic values system, I think he's going to pause a lot longer before he makes that decision.
Jared: If I understand right, during the Iran/Iraq war, teenagers were sent with plastic keys to paradise while they ran into the minefield and blew themselves up.
Zilpha: What?
Jared: Yeah, um, it was really, really bad.
Zilpha: Americans?
Jared: No, this is between the Iran and Iraq war. When Iran and Iraq were beating each other up, they would send young people with plastic keys to paradise, to run into the minefields and blow themselves up.
Jared: Uh, this is one of the greatest advantages... I had a proud moment in Sunday School where I very carefully suggested to the class that they should contemplate, how did I put it? I said, "This is not an anti-testimony, and I am not saying anything about the afterlife, but we should contemplate the question of, what if you knew that your existence would end at death? Would you live your life differently? And if the answer to this question is yes, then you probably should." And it went over pretty well, but I think that's fantastic.
Jared: And when people think about this a lot... you know, with religion being my career, you know how some people are like, "Well, the religions that demand a lot of you, those are the ones that are flourishing and those are the ones that are doing really well!" And those are the ones that foster the most happiness and whatever, and have the greatest level of commitment and so forth.
Jared: And I frankly, temple covenants not withstanding, I don't say that too lightly, but I don't think it's good to be willing to give anything for your religion. To be like, "I would die for my religion." Of course I don't think the same thing about the country either, but that's a bit of another fun tangent.
Randy: Well, the stoics have a philosophy where they, I believe—I'm kind of shooting off the hip here, I just read this somewhere—that they have an exercise where they visualize that all their loved ones have died so that they can then have a renewed appreciation for them.
Randy: And I've found myself—because I almost lost my son, he was two at the time, is now three, in a pool accident where he could've died three feet from me in the pool, because there was a lot of chaos in the pool. But we pulled them out just in time. He didn't breathe for like 10 seconds. So I still have that image of his face where he's not breathing in my mind. And now, because I heard about that stoic philosophy, I do that exercise, I remind myself of Grady's face when I pulled him out of the pool. And my love for him is so intense right after that. And I spend more time with him.
Randy: So, even if you are an atheist, and you think this life is all there is, you still get complacent and you still take things for granted. So I think constantly reminding yourself, look, you know, do you want to live another 10 years? Maybe you should start exercising, maybe you should drink less.
John: Easy there. C'mon, none of your fundamentalist extremism here! [Laughter]
Randy: I know, I know, I'm talking about myself! But, it's still important to constantly remind yourself this life is precious. This life is precious.
John: So let's go back and talk about miracles a little bit more. I want to talk about evil for a few minutes. So, we mentioned the amputee problem. And the amputee problem, I mean, to state it more clearly is—and there's a great website out there, if you type in "why doesn't God heal amputees," you'll, you'll find it—the problem is this:
John: From a religious perspective, from fundamentalist and other religious people, they are touting miracles all the time. We've talked about it from a more liberal perspective, but for true believers of Mormonism and other religions, they will give you example after example after example of miraculous intervention. But the question of why God doesn't heal amputees is this: if you were to do a big venn diagram of "supposed" or "probable" or "candidate" miracles, and you were to overlay that with a circle of things that could be naturalistically explained, and then you would draw another circle of things that can't be naturalistically explained, they're only miracles... there's nothing in that third chart.
John: So, if somebody was in a hospital, the Priesthood brethren were to come, they had a double amputation, there was a blessing and bang, the legs pop in! ...That's never happened. That we know of. And somebody can prove me wrong, but anything that can happen that's ambiguous with something that naturally happens... I've mentioned on the podcast several times that there is a spontaneous rate of remission for cancer. It just happens. So, so those people tend to believe they're miraculously healed, but there's a possibility that it could be through naturalistic means.
John: Now, for somebody like myself who rejects all supernatural, I would say there's never been shown any element in human history that couldn't also be given through naturalistic means. Occam's Razor would tell us that those things don't exist.
Zilpha: ...That we have good evidence for. Like, splitting of the Red Sea, couldn't really be natural.
John: Right. Then you're talking about things that are long in history; they're unverifiable.
John: So the question comes: why doesn't God, since according to believers, God does very miraculous things, but why does God choose to always cloak his miracles? He only deals with the problems that are ambiguous with God not existing. Why does God choose to operate in such a way that can always be confused with God not operating at all?
Randy: Another one of my favorites is that people love to tout near-death experiences. Well, show me someone who died on Tuesday, and came back on Thursday in the morgue.
John: Right. We need less near-death experiences, and more death experiences!
Randy: Right! They're not dead. And it falls right into that category of "it could be explained." A lot of things could be explained through naturalistic means, but yeah, I guess you get into the philosophical question, why does God take such pains to hide himself so carefully?
Zilpha: Mormons would say that it all has to do with free will. I've heard Mike say that God can't do some super miraculous thing right in front of our eyes because then we would have to believe in him and then our free will would be taken away.
John: Let's be careful, because this is another podcast, but there are some differences between the Mormon concept of free agency and the generalized concept of free will. Let's stick with the Mormon concept of free agency. And they don't call it free anymore, they just call it agency because it's not free... you have to pay 10%. [Laughter]
John: So, we have the Mormon concept of agency, which leads us into the devil...
Jared: Well, let's go ahead and talk for one more minute about that because I think it's not a terrible answer. You know, this idea that the purpose of this life is to exercise our agency, to choose on our own, to kind of fight the good fight, to be in the midst of the game, mixing my metaphors here... and if there was this unambiguous, Jesus appears right there, we would lose our chance to grow and progress. It's not a terrible answer.
Randy: Well, you also have the example of the moronic and bumbling idiot brothers Laman and Lemuel, that even though they saw an angel, they still didn't believe! I remember this being part of my theology, that the senses dull over time. So even if you saw something, over time, the memory would fade.
Jared: I think it was Joseph F Smith who said that like, "The witness of the Spirit is stronger than if you saw something with your eyes."
Randy: Right. And you've always got Laman and Lemuel to point to! So, I think one of their answers would be that too. But I don't understand: why not now? I mean, the walls of Jericho came down when they blasted the trumpets. There's no other explanation for that to happen.
John: The problem is in the past, there's always over-the-top miracles. And to be fair, there's a lot of fundamentalist sort of people who will tell us that we're just a bunch of skeptical morons, and if we were better believers, we would be seeing that stuff all the time too. So our lack of seeing miracles more speaks about us than the lack of them being there. That's what they would say.
Randy: I remember a story a General Authority told once, where there was this woman, she was in some small European country like Belgium and the missionaries found her miraculously and they baptized her. And her comment was, she was really surprised at how nobody else in the Mormon church had seen an angel because she sees an angel all the time.
Randy: And at the time I'm like, wow, that's amazing, we just don't have enough faith, that's why we're not seeing the miracles! And didn't realize that she was probably having delusions with schizophrenia or something. But yeah, I've heard that argument as well, that we become a cynical world, not just not just the world in general, but even it's crept into the Mormon church and because of our lack of faith, we're not seeing the kind of miracles they saw even in Joseph Smith's time.
Jared: Well, it's because we don't drink on an empty stomach.
John: Speak for yourself!
Jared: I think that there is something to be said. I really liked the way you framed it about a lack of ambiguity. That all of this miracle discourse can only really function with ambiguous circumstances. And of course, we're getting into perceptual miracles now. Where it's like, "well, I believe I saw the Virgin Mary. I believe I saw angels" and so forth.
Jared: And I do think that our experiences are conditioned by our expectations. We really can't experience things that were not ready for. It’s demonstrated that in cultures where they believe in dreams, they have dreams, they have these prophetic dreams or whatever you wanna call it. And if you believe in speaking with your dead ancestors, you'll speak to your dead ancestors.
Jared: So I think that there is something to be said for the fact that we live in such a modernized world that our expectations for miracles are, "wow, that surgeon did an extra special good job," or "the cancer went into remission," or things like that. There's someone in my ward who just has this thick book of medical problems. And he has had these experiences, just that low probability, where like, he's able to talk, and he wasn't supposed to, and all these different things.
John: I'll make my last comment before we move on to Satan. You hear these stories all the time about, basically, bumbling doctors. Now I've been around the world long enough to know that doctors really aren't that much smarter than the rest of us, which is saying that they're not very smart at all.
John: You hear people all the time saying, "the doctor gave me six months to live and here it is three years later and I'm still here, brothers and sisters I tell you that—" It's like, I listen to that stuff now and I'm like, there is no human way possible for a doctor to know how long anybody has to live at any time. So that's the most common medical miracle I've heard of, is doctors saying you've got X amount of time to live and they live longer than that.
Jared: Well what about the stories—I think it's equally common, maybe not equally common, but more memorable—where, I think you know where I'm going, where they're like "The doctors did a test on this day, and then we have the ward fast, and then the in the next visit it was gone!"
John: And you know, I want to get up and give a lecture on type 1 and type 2 errors and testing. The tests are designed to have more people show up as positive because you would rather have somebody have a false positive on a test! You'd rather have somebody that says, "oh my God, you might have cancer, you need to get in and get a deep test" than to miss it. So tests are, by design, set up to promote that miracle because there are going to be more false positives than false negatives. At least ideally.
Jared: Praise God.
Randy: What is it about fasting that makes Mormons think it sharpens your chances? I really was trying to go into this podcast—because I always mention my mom, but I can't not mention her here because you you just described what happened. She was given six months to live in 1988 and she went on to live for eight years and that was our family miracle. And so we had the ward fast right before her surgery when she was diagnosed at six months, and then they found out it was a different kind of rare cancer that is a slower killer. So we thought the ward fast had really sharpened and increased our chances for the prayer to get answered.
Randy: And then, you get to when she was getting closer to die for sure, my mom has seven brothers and so my dad drove her all the way to Utah so that her seven brothers, all of them who have been bishops, and my dad could give her what they called a "power blessing." They were going to give her a super duper blessing! Like God would require this stupid extra inconvenience to my dying mother and then maybe he'll answer the prayer?
Randy: And of course it didn't work and she died. But there's something about them thinking that, there's these little extra steps that you can take to increase your chances.
John: Well, Jared can can comment more on this, but when I went my anthropology 101 class, the difference between religion and magic was religion is asking a God to do something for you, and magic is doing it yourself.
Jared: Magic is coercive, religion is supplicative.
John: And there's a continuum, and people oscillate back and forth between that. And there's a psychological game we all play, or we all played as believers, where if I just do this one more thing...
John: Well, I mean, it's not just religion. Look at baseball players. They love this sort of stuff. They wear the same underwear, they'll tap their thing that same way and it's just something in our nature that is really superstitious that way. So we start heading down that path of "I have to do step XYZ," and then they get codified into ordinance or practice or tradition or whatever.
Jared: And it works with magic too, actually. There's a reason why the magical rituals are so extensive; it's because you can blame failure for any given point of that. Oh, I didn't say the invocation right. I didn't do this right. I danced wrong.
Jared: So we all know the standard Mormon explanation for that. One friend told me once that "a Priesthood blessing takes chance out of the equation." I think it's very much worth playing out, teasing it out there. I think the standard narrative is that the more we practice our agency, the greater God's ability to bless us, right? Because, like, our lack of faith is what's preventing him from acting, so...
John: And let's be clear. "Practicing Agency" is a Mormon euphemism for "obeying."
Jared: I think this is one reason why fasting “works.” The logic behind fasting is it shows sacrifice. That's why there was human sacrifice, because they're like, "Whoa boy, you know, I am so serious about this God that I'm going to kill my firstborn son." Like a 2 Kings 3, one of the craziest stories in the Bible. The Moabite king kills his son on the wall of the city, and it works. The Israelites are driven away. It did work! According to 2 Kings 3, the Israelites were drawn, were blown away by this, this forest, and they had to run away.
Jared: But the idea is that the more we exercise faith—and fasting is evidence of that faith—the more God is allowed—because we have, you know, this limited God—to step in. And then what happens if we exercise tons of faith and, and we still don't get what we want... well, it's because it was the will of God, right?
Zilpha: I thought it was more than just, "he was allowed to." Like you were actually... he was bound to help you.
Randy: I think, I think a lot of this is born from the frustration of reading something like in Moroni 7:26, where Moroni says, "Whatsoever thing ye shall ask in faith, uh, which is good..."
John: Ah, there's the kicker. There's gotta be a back door in every one of 'em.
Randy: Yeah, there's a little qualifier, right? But still, it's like, what is bad about my mother living? That's a good thing!
John: I think that's an interesting question because you hear in church all the time... it's a beautiful story that's been constructed in Mormonism of this "doing work on the other side" because it has such explanatory power for all sorts of really bad things and it's so comforting. Why did this 16 year old kid die of leukemia? Well he was called to be a missionary on the other side. That's a very beautiful thing to say and that's why religion is so powerful, because it gives us these narratives that contextualize the randomness of existence.
Zilpha: Once you get through the most traumatic part of losing a loved one, you can look back and say, you know, I am a richer person. I understand things better. I appreciate life more now. So you can always say, well, you know, God did that so I could learn something.
Jared: Do you remember in Faith Precedes the Miracle when Kimball was talking about, "if I had absolute power, I would work these unwise miracles... I would save the life of the child whose time was appointed..." Do you know the quote that I'm talking about?
Zilpha: That sounds familiar.
Jared: This basic idea that God has so much more wisdom and that we need to surrender and submit to his wisdom, but we can do our part so that maybe, if it's his will, we can get what we want.
John: And that's not just a Mormon idea. I mean, that's what Bruce Almighty, that's what that whole movie's about, right? When the guy gets the God powers and he screws everything up. And this is basically the idea that Leibniz came up with however many years ago, that this is the best of all possible worlds.
John: And this will lead us into our problem of evil again, but the solution to that problem is—and this plays out in Mormonism all the time—that the reason things are happening to us is because this life is a test of our agency and a test of our willingness to obey and become godlike. Therefore, somebody might get leukemia or suffer from unemployment or all these things because they're supposed to learn lessons. And so things that are on the surface level might seem evil, even things as heinous as murder or getting beat up on the street or dying in a war, are there for our betterment.
John: So it's really a resurrection of Leibniz's argument that this is the—it was Leibniz, right? Am I mixing my philosophers?—the best of all possible worlds. So basically, the Bruce Almighty problem that if you start messing with the equation, and even if you think more people should win the lottery, once you start giving that to them, the world will turn into a more wicked place. And Joseph played that out in the Book of Mormon with Laman and Lemuel, that here Laman and Lemuel keep getting good things, and they keep making stupider and stupider choices. It's like we mentioned before, it's a backhanded argument for "God shouldn't have have shown them an angel because then they might have been more obedient." I dunno.
Jared: Another factor to plant is again, this idea that our role is to become gods. And this is standard Christian theology, the sanctifatory power of suffering and hardship. So there's all sorts of solutions to this. You know, the more you suffer, the richer your reward in heaven or whatever.
Jared: I'm pretty sure this is a story about Neal Maxwell; I think this is another church leader telling this story to illustrate his great faith. He said Maxwell was like, "Even though this is so hard and it hurts so much, I am grateful that I can learn from this process and that I can be sanctified from this process and that God has not called me home earlier because then I would not be as sanctified as I am." So we have this, even though it's not standard theology, that we all need to become Christs or something. Which I think is fascinating, is this idea that we need to become gods. So the basic question of "all of these things can give you experience and be for your good."
Jared: But this is still a privileged teaching, to go back to Randy's point from a couple months ago. The response to Leibniz's problem was, Voltaire addressed that in Candide, which is that argument is ridiculous because you can make the world a little bit better in teeny tiny ways.
John: And I think there was an early episode of Mr Deity where they were planning the world and his assistant is going through and saying, "oh... so you want, like, Down's Syndrome in the world?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Include that." "And you aren't... you know, we can leave that thing out! We don't—" "No. It's gotta. It's gotta be in there."
Randy: He dialed it back at "Can people kill each other just by looking at each other?" That's where he dialed back the evil at. [Laughter]
John: So if you're like Neil Maxwell, and you're a very successful person who's got a lot of great relatives and friends and then you experience these sort of minor setbacks on the path to your own death, that's fine. But if you're a person who's born on, I've used this example before, what's the thing called where your internal organs develop outside your body and you're born and you can only live like four or five days...
John: There's just some really, really awful shit out there. It's easy to extend that argument to people who are generally successful in life and then experience some bumps along the road, but if you were an orphan, born in Calcutta in 6 BC, your life would have been awful from the moment you started to the moment you ended. And it's hard to make an argument that that somehow betters humanity.
Randy: I have something to say about suffering too, that hasn't been brought up... I honestly think that the idea of the Refiner’s Fire is kind of a myth. I think that there's no way you can really test this, or quantify, "because I suffered this loss. I've now 17% more patient." I think that there's a part of our psyche that's like, "Man, I really suffered a lot the last 10 years... I hope it's not for nothing." And so then you create this narrative that, oh, well now I'm stronger! And everything happens for a reason! It brings order to the chaos, and it also brings validation to your suffering, so it wasn't just a shitty time to go through.
Zilpha: Sometimes it just is a shitty time you go through when you end up all scarred up and damaged for the rest of your life.
Randy: Yeah, I think most suffering in the world is more damaging than it is character building.
Zilpha: But, if you could take a horrible experience and twist it, and try to see some kind of good from it, then that's probably more psychologically healthy. So in that sense, having the attitude that there's something God has up his sleeve for you in having that bad thing happen, can be beneficial, psychologically.
John: I think that's all true that we, obviously, as humans, have this great ability to contextualize and synthesize data and make meaning of it. And that has propelled us along this evolutionary path of growth and intelligence. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it's intrinsically right, these narratives. We want to see meaning in our lives. That doesn't mean we actually have any meaning in our lives. We're just hyper able to construct that sort of meaning.
Randy: One of my favorite villains in all the movies was the Joker, a complete psychopath in The Dark Knight, played by Heath Ledger before he died. And do you remember what his motivation was in his psychotic mind? His motivation was to get these guys who had all kinds of power in this world, that thought they had control of the world, and to show them they have no control. That they still live in a chaotic world just like everybody else, and I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you that that's true.
Randy: I think that the chaotic nature of this world, that we all kind of know is there, is a scary thing. And knowing that, or having the idea that someone is in charge of it all, and it's all part of a plan, and everything happens for a reason, does kind of calm the nerves, if you think about that too much.
John: That's a great segue to our last chapter in this discussion, which is evil. You talked about the problem of evil and now it's time to talk about the devil. I had it pointed out to me a month or two ago, something that I never really quite understood, which is in religion—and people may disagree with this theory, but it's a theory, nevertheless—the bad guy is actually more important than the good guy.
John: Because God is good. Yay, God. And we know we're good, right? We all know we're basically good. What evil does, and the devil, and those sorts of things, is it allows us to externalize our bad. Human beings have an evil nature and they have a good nature, and those two natures are playing out in us all the time, both collectively and individually. But what the devil does is allows us to take our evil nature and put it somewhere else. We're to blame for following the devil, but we're not really the source of evil. We're deceived. "I partook because I was deceived," and not, "I partook because I was horny." The Garden of Eden, that's another. That's a whole 'nother thing. So the devil becomes almost more important in theology than God, because that externalizes evil. Thoughts on that before I move on?
Zilpha: I'm trying to think if it actually is more important.
John: I'll explain to you why I say that. So we go back to the Mormon concept of "agency" and this plan, and one of the things people explain to say, okay, why doesn't God intervene? Why doesn't God heal amputees? Well, God is bound because we have agency and we have to do this. If God was to muck with it all the time, then we wouldn't be able to exercise our agency. He would be undermining this whole plan.
John: And in Mormon theology, we talk about the plan of salvation that was laid out from before the foundation of the world. And Satan's plan was to restrict people's choice so they had to do good. But no, we wanted people to exercise their agency such that they chose God's plan intrinsically and not because they were compelled.
Zilpha: Wouldn't it almost be more powerful if you threw out the devil concept altogether and not the God concept? So this is my argument that God is more important than the devil: so you throw out the whole idea of the devil and you can say, well, we're fighting against our animalistic nature because we evolved from animals. That's the way God designed us and now we have these animalistic tendencies and imperfections due to our evolution and we still have to find a way to the good to return to God, to get to heaven. Like, you don't need a "devil."
John: I think Unitarians and more liberal theologians would buy into that, but it still implies a direction for evolution, that we're heading to some point that's guided by God. The devil, I say, solves an immediate problem of explaining evil and explaining why things happen and why people behave certain ways, especially really terrible people, but it introduces a higher problem, which is: if God can't interfere with this world, if God can't heal amputees because it messes with our agency, how does the devil, which according to fundamentalists is mucking with everything all the time, not also mess with agency?
John: It's sort of like your parent watching your kids play a game of Risk. You've got like four kids. They're playing a game of Risk, but you've also got this cousin Larry and he keeps sneaking in and messing with the game all the time. He's cheating. He's throwing the rules off. And you say, "No, no, I want a fair game of Risk so I am not going to intervene. Even though I could stop cousin Larry from doing it." And this game just gets more and more f'd up with each round, but you're saying "No, because I need them to learn the game, I'm going to allow Larry to interfere with it." ...?!
John: It makes no sense whatsoever. This is probably, in my mind, one of the biggest problems with Mormon theology. If this life is a test and you are supposed to be measured in obedience to God's will on your own so you can see if you are going to be that type of person or not... you can't let the devil be constantly messing with it!
Randy: And not only is he messing with them, but he has better tools! I mean, on one corner, we got God with his... whispering still small voice... and on the other side you've got the guy with all the porn! That's not a fair fight! [Laughter]
Jared: Well, let's think about this. That was my problem with Dead Like Me as well. If God couldn't interfere, why could those little light gremlins? In what ways does the devil do devilish miracles? I imagine it more like the movie Constantine—I like all the popular references, I love how in Constantine he tricks Satan into saving the world, that was fantastic—anyway, you know, where neither can involve directly.
Jared: So I ask you, we've already established that Mormons perceive of God being there, always present, always helpful, but not in any way that could not be explained in any other way. In what ways does the devil act that are more direct than God does?
John: I would say if you read Conference talks and just pay attention to the prophets, seers and revelators, they give the devil a huge amount of power and influence. If you especially read old Mormonism, it was like everything. There's a reason that, in the temple, all preachers were symbolically put as being in the employ of the devil. For Mormonism, up until the last 20 or 30 years, all the religions, Catholicism especially, were seen as demonic churches. And I would think that the early people, especially like Orson Pratt and Parley Pratt and Brigham Young and Kimball and those guys, saw the whole entire world as completely dominated by this grand demonic conspiracy. Just everything. You couldn't trust anything.
John: And you will still see that in why you can't trust evolution. I heard that at BYU, talking about the devil manipulating rocks to create fossils and stuff like that. The amount of power the believers ascribe is huge.
Randy: That was not on South Campus, man. [Laughter]
Zilpha: Something that has bled over to modern days is the thing that Joseph said, the devil riding in the water? There are Mormons who believe that; missionaries can't go swimming. My family would go on hikes and have picnics and stuff on Sundays, but never could we go in the water.
John: "If you do not live up to every covenant you make in these temples this day, then you will be in my power!" And Mormons believe that literally... that if you stray from the path even the slightest bit, you are completely... it's like possession.
Zilpha: Because if you don't have the spirit, then it's not like you're guiding your life. No, the devil is guiding your life.
John: This goes back to my point from before, where as a Mormon, you theologically dismiss the ability to discern right from wrong. You can't tell. You have no moral compass. You're under the power of Satan.
Jared: I heard some terrible stories from my mission where two missionaries were killed. They were hit by a train a couple of years before I went. And they were like, "Well, you know... they did buy something on Sunday." That is a terrible, terrible way of looking at things.
Zilpha: It is horrible.
Jared: There's also another missionary who was eaten by a shark.
Zilpha: He wasn't even supposed to be in the water!
Jared: He was on a cliff and a big wave came up and knocked him off.
Zilpha: Holy crap. What did he do that was so bad?
Jared: He got too close to the edge. [Laughter]
Randy: Tempted Satan!
Jared: I don't mean to make light of it, but, wow.
John: Well, we had the same thing when I was there. The guy from the fleet, the one who managed all the Toyota Corollas that the missionaries drove, came and gave us a fireside or whatever as missionaries, and he told the story about a missionary getting in a horrific accident and dying and they had to call his mother and stuff, and then he made the point that the missionary had left his companion to drive out by himself, and the implication was this horrific, terrible car accident happened as God's will as a punishment for not being with his companion.
Zilpha: Was it God's will, or was it Satan intervening?
John: Well, there's always that flip side. The two theories are, that God comes in and kicks you in the butt. The other theory is there's all this butt-kicking that's about to happen at any given time, there's all these demons surrounding you and it's just God staving it off! He's like a tackle on the offensive line who's pissed off at the quarterback. He's gonna let that blitz come through just to show him who's really boss.
Jared: Well, let's be fair to the Mormon view. I don't really, it's unpleasant, but I think the idea is that as long as you stay within the nice Romper Room of obedience, you're protected. Unless it's God's will for something bad to happen. But if you step out of there, there's going to be a whole lot of hurt that's just ready to slam into you.
Randy: So many times you hear in church, people telling stories that they—again, they're not thinking it through—where, like, they're in an intersection, and they just left the intersection, and there was a big T-bone crash right behind them. And then they do kind of a confabulation and say that they think that they had an impression that they needed to move out of the intersection. And they're telling the story but then it's like... there could be someone in the congregation whose son got T-boned at an intersection and it's like, well, why did God bless you but not my kid? And then you just made someone feel like crap.
Randy: So again, I don't think they think these things through. I think these things make them feel good and make them feel special. And it made me feel good. It made me feel special. I'll speak from my own experience, but God seems a little bit random with his picking and choosing, or with his not picking up the blitz and letting Satan come in and beat the crap out of you.
Jared: That's an interesting category of miracles that don't happen. Like once I got my hair cut and I went in my car and my car would not start for like five minutes. It just would not start. Nothing wrong with the car. And then it started. And my wife and I had this whole discussion about how, you know, something terrible would have happened.
Jared: It's an interesting narrative. It's really interesting how that works, that God gets credit even for the things that don't happen. We have these like invented miracles that God gets credit for.
John: I had that. There was a woman in the ward I grew up and every fast Sunday she would get up and, very teary-eyed, give her testimony of the miracle that didn't happen for the week. And it was usually something like this: she normally takes, you know, Elm Street, home, but today she had an impression that she should go the other way, and I don't know what would have happened—this where the tears break out—I don't know what would happened if I'd gone down Elm, but I'm glad. I'm thankful that I listened to the Spirit on this one. And every week it was one of those.
John: And, yeah, if you want to be a believer in miracles and you're willing to take those sort of things... man, they're happening all the time! You know, anything positive that happens to you!
Zilpha: And, you know, they start inventing them! Because if you have any kind of thought that's different from the ordinary and you follow it, then you're like, oh, well that must have been from God because who knows would've happened if I did what I normally did.
John: I remember, Zilpha, once, I can't remember what exactly happened to us, but we had some kind of boon, like I got a promotion or some good thing had happened, and my mom was talking to us and she goes, "Well, that is a tithing blessing." And we both smiled and nodded because we'd quit playing our tithing a year before. So, for her it was a manifestation of paying your tithing, but, we didn't pay any tithing, so...
Randy: Those are the best miracles. I actually went to church last Sunday for solidarity with my dad, I was visiting in LA for a football game, and so I went to church with him. And both talks were on tithing and those kinds of miracles were just being just ripped off, you know, they were just one after the other of these banal stories of just having that money here and there. "The numbers didn't work out, but we paid tithing first and, and somehow we had enough money for all our bills..." One of the ladies had to go back like 40 years for some of her stories! Tithing is the perfect example of the little mini Mormon miracles.
John: So, science has been robbing us of great stories... you know, 200 years ago, it would have been the witches that didn't hex you and 700 years before that the trolls didn't smash you when you're crossing the bridge and now it's like, yeah, I was only in the ICU for four days. We're taking all the fun out of it. Like, what will be the miracles that didn't happen 100 years from now?
Jared: Taking all the fun out of it? Have you been to church lately? They took all the stuff that wasn't fun, and embraced it, and made that church. I mean, church used to be exciting in the 19th century.
John: To take it full circle, I think what we do see with the changing attitudes, and we've seen this for the recorded human history, God is always a reflection of our conceptualization of humankind and our status and things like the patriarchy and the matriarchy and authority and our place in the universe. And you can almost reconstruct the people's attitudes about themselves by seeing what they say about God.
John: So, the God of Lost Keys, I think, tends to be a reflection on where our stresses are these days. We don't really worry about witches that much, or we don't really worry about our Pagan neighbors doing whatever they're gonna do to us, because we live relatively safe.
Randy: Casting out demons, that used to be common...
Zilpha: It doesn't happen very often, but it does still happen in the Church.
Jared: It does. I have mission stories.
Zilpha: I don't have mission stories, but I have BYU stories... [Laughter]
Jared: I have a proposition about one thing that we can tackle at the end of this...
John: Okay.
Jared: Can we critically discuss how this theology can be beneficial? How can someone get the best of all worlds? You know what I mean? We're in a place where we can say, oh, that's not healthy or that's healthy or that doesn't make sense, but I still think it's worthy of respecting the fact that this idea of God does a lot of good. I think that there can be a win-win situation where you fully accept responsibility for your life, but you still have that kind of comfort of the miraculous in your life. I don't think it's a bad way of living.
Zilpha: Can you have both? Can you be really, fully responsible for your own life and yet have supernatural things going on?
Jared: I think so.
John: Well, here's my question to that. I personally think religion takes a lot of credit for things that people do naturally. And there's a lot of people in church who get up and say, you know, if wasn't for the Mormon Church, I'd be out raping 7-Elevens or whatever they say. [Laughter]
John: The fact is, there's nothing in church that really stops you from raping. You don't rape because you're not a rapist. I'll give you an analogy—what is this without John giving a couple analogies?—it's like high school. There are people there who make this argument saying, we have to have these bonehead classes that are completely unchallenging, because if these kids weren't just sitting there picking their nose in high school, who knows what terrible things could happen?
John: It's an interesting question, but we have to have the null case, right? We have to compare it to something. And the problem with religion is we don't have the null case to compare things to. So it's easy to say, well look at all these good people that go to church and there's these good things that happen! And now we're starting to get more humanists and atheists who we can compare them to. And they say, well they're just as good but they grew up in the church or whatever...
John: But before we give credit to religion, don't we have to establish, first of all, what religion does? So I think, to your point, Jared, I think there's some really great things about religion and most of them have to do with social need. Of taking care of one another, of having people talk to one another. We're social animals. We don't do well locked up in boxes in the suburbs. So religion has been wonderful for people to bring communities together. But I would dare say all this metaphysical nonsense they've been spouting for for thousands of years... I don't know if I see a lot of benefit to it.
Jared: I agree with what you said, but you did not address my point at all. I am talking about the sensation of living in a miraculous world where God takes care of you. That does not have anything to do with sociality, even though I agree that a lot of what religion does has a social function. But what I'm talking about, this idea of the miraculous, what's really going on with the "found keys" is this sense that someone is watching out for you. I don't know if it'd be too flippant to call it an invisible friend, but God as an invisible friend—like this idea of God taking care of you—can be extremely beneficial.
Jared: And, usually, where other social supports fail. I think that there are a lot of people who say, "The only reason I didn't kill myself, the only thing that got through got me through this difficult, difficult period where there was no one else..." Where family, friends fail, I think this idea of God watching over you can be extremely beneficial.
Randy: I'd like to talk about my dad a little bit. My dad's really an awesome guy and he's a true believer seminary teacher. And obviously he's a widower, but he's remarried. He's been just amazing. He'll talk to me about all my issues, he'll listen to me. I try not to push too far. When I see his face start to get a little bit too pained, I back off.
Randy: But what he told me is, "Son, I know you've got a lot of good reasons to leave the Church and I respect you and I love you, but for me, I just need to stay worthy so that I can go to the Celestial Kingdom and see your mother again." And like, what am I going to do, try to take that away from him? I don't want to take that away from him. It gives him him drive and meaning to continue on in his seventies, to live a happy life. So yeah, I have to acknowledge that.
John: And I feel the same way about my parents. You know, we don't talk about religion and I don't bring it up and I don't send those letters because they seem to be happy. But the way I see the world, is there's a whole bunch of people hobbling around on crutches. And they're saying, "These crutches help me get around. If it weren't for these crutches, I'd be in bed." And my answer is, "Your foot is not broken! Throw the damn crutches down and you can run!"
John: And I think the reason that folks like my mom and your dad feel that way is because they've had that stuffed down their gullet, to make this fragrant foie gras of religion... [Laughter] but they've had that. They've been told that their whole life that they can't survive without it, that they are broken people without religion, so that they're reflecting that back. But really I think most people are much more dynamic and capable and sensitive and good than the religion cripples them to think.
John: Now, I believe, totally to your point, Jared, there are people who do better in religion with that belief, that metaphysical belief in specialness. But I'll give you my own example. I mean, I'm still fat now, but I go to the gym three or four times a week and I lift weights all the time and I run. So I'm sort of a healthy fat guy. When I was in the church I was just a fat guy. Because I thought, well, taking care of my family and doing my callings and doing my home teaching were more important, and that God was in charge of everything, and he would bless me with health.
Zilpha: Save you if you had a heart attack.
John: Right? And I of course never connected the synapses that clearly back then, but that's really what was going on in my head. So there's an example of where it can be dangerous, because you think if God intervenes in health, then actually taking care of your health isn't as important.
Jared: I'm very sympathetic to the view that religion is a good thing to grow out of, but we can't, and you alluded to something that I think is powerful, this idea of conditioned helplessness. This idea that we are conditioned to think that we're much less able than we are. In my world religions class, toward the end of the semester. We were talking about the disadvantages of religion, and I think that it can be summed up in one word and it's "disempowering." Yes, religion is tremendously disempowering, but I still hold that this idea of a magical world... that you can have both, not in the full fledged pentecostal glory, but there's a way.
Jared: This is one of the motivating things for me in religion, is I just want to encourage people, as much as possible, to maximize the benefits and minimize the harm, and if they want, maintain distinctiveness. I really think it can be done. I think that people can have their God and eat him too. [Laughter] Sorry, especially if you're Catholic!
Randy: Trans-substantiation.
Jared: Yep! I'm impressed, Randy, by all these religious terms you're throwing around!
John: I love that idea and I'm glad people are working out there, but I guess I'm just a little bit more cynical and I just, the main difference between you and I is, I don't believe it can be done. But I am cheering you guys on in the stands. I hope you can do it.
Zilpha: I have something to say about what Jared said, and what you said too, the learned helplessness kind of thing. And I think religion can do that to people. But I also think that there are people who, even if they weren't raised in religion, they feel so helpless in their life. Maybe they didn't have a good family structure or bad things happen to them as a child or something. They feel helpless. They already feel helpless. And so in that sense, religion actually gives them a more, um,
Randy: Surrogate parents?
Zilpha: Yeah! A sense of security that they couldn't have otherwise. And they are broken. Their foot is broken.
John: Prison is the same way. There are people there who, they need that structure. But for most of us, it's not the case.
Randy: John, you said that there's people that do better morally in the structure of religion. That sort of cuts both ways. There are people that are less moral because of their religion. The perfect example that I like to come up with is when John Dehlin did a live call-in show during the Prop 8 thing. And this beautiful—and I'm saying beautiful just because of her personality, she was just naturally empathetic, loving—young woman who befriended all the gay guys in her high school because she just had so much love to give, and she was not judgmental...
Randy: And then she just started crying, and she said, "But the prophet commanded that we are to vote for Prop 8, so I'm going to follow my prophet." And she was just bawling. She was totally going against her natural moral instincts. And in that instance, religion made her less moral in her decision.
John: Well, and religion, to be fair, is not the only human institution that has these problems. I mean everything from higher learning to nationalism to the bowling league can make us do immoral, wrong, sick things.
Jared: John, one thing as far as like, where you're applauding from the stands and cheering from the stands... I think that we need to give a lot of weight to the fact that we are made differently. We all have different needs and different makeups and we respond to situations and stimuli in different ways. And so there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I make no promises about where I'm going to end up, but one reason why call myself a religious humanist is because I really do believe that religion has value. That's one thing that I will fight for. And so, the meaning that I find in my life is: how can we make religion the very best it can be?
John: I'm actually more sympathetic to that idea than I sound on the podcast... you know, Zilpha and I, we were Unitarians for four or five years, and we still work, a lot of effort, to build those community structures and those support systems that I think religion provides. I'm atheistic and humanistic, but I think that my group of people there have failed to provide any reasonable alternative to religion at this stage. Because it's a game of the intelligentsia who have, like I said before, Randy originally said it's the privilege of the wealthy to be able to reject these things. And until we can provide a reasonable alternative that provides the same benefit that you're giving—not only materially, but psychologically, in terms of providing meaning and structure to the events of our lives—religion's not going anywhere.
Jared: Right? And I think it's one thing important to remember with this whole discussion of God is—and I'll unpack this if I need to—is something like, God does not need to be real to have benefits. Meaning does not need to correlate to reality in order to save someone's life or make them do good things. So this is what I like thinking of: pragmatic truth versus correlational truth.
Jared: I think that it's really, you know, "by their fruits you shall know them." I don't care if someone is like, "Ever since the Smurfs started talking to me a month ago, I have been a better husband and father, my job performance has increased!" I'd be like, more power to you! That's awesome.
John: Oh, all right, I haven't called bullshit yet to this, but if they really said that today, you'd be like, "Uhhh, all right..." You'd be backing away slowly. I really think there would be part of you that would say, "Uh-oh... better keep an eye on this one."
Jared: Nope!
John: I understand where you're coming from and I'm empathetic to it, but I still think that there is a danger. There's fundamental danger in believing these things that aren't real, that aren't realistic. The problem with both nationalism and religion is they are almost universally used—in instances, not all the time—to subjugate, and make people flip morality, and do things that they would individually reject morally. And I think that's the big danger.
John: So the question, I think, is not if you're right or if you're wrong, but does that benefit outweigh the potential social harm that happens? And that's the question. Where does that balance go away?
Jared: Yeah... And I think one of the key distinguishers between a religion and a cult—just to throw it out really quick, I know it's a messy, messy situation—is I think that there's a continuum, but the degree to which is the group description of reality is supposed to trump the individual description of reality and the individual freedom to choose and think and be ethical, the more like a cult it is. And I agree with you completely. I think all healthy religions need to have those checks and balances where the individual can say, "Well, no, I don't think this is right, and God dwells within me."
Jared: I think the Israelite tradition of prophets is fascinating. The fact that the society had tolerance for any sort of crazy person to get up and condemn the king, and say "These institutional power structures... Occupy Wall Street!" or whatever. And that's pretty impressive! I'm just saying that religion has benefits, it has harm, but I really think that we can work, from the inside, from the outside, and encourage religion to be as beneficial as possible.
Jared: And I have hope and optimism that it is evolving in that way. Let me tell you really quick why: I think that more and more we are going to have a free market of religion because authoritarian and exclusivist claims just will not compute with the younger generation. And so every religion is going to need to say, "This is the good that we do. This is the value we bring. We're worth belonging to."
Randy: You just gave me the image of Lehi being pepper sprayed by a UC Davis Cop.
Jared: Awesome! I'm glad!
Randy: You compared the prophets to Occupy Wall Street, and that's the image that came to my mind. [Laughter]
John: All right, Jared, we'll give you the last word on that one. So it's been a lot of fun talking to you guys about these concepts, and Mormon theology is a fascinating thing. I invite people to explore it more. Maybe we'll have to come back and talk about the difference between free will and free agency.
Zilpha: [Long sigh as everyone else chuckles]
Zilpha: No, It's fun.
John: All right, Jared, Randy, thanks for coming on.