Thor's Day: Glimpses of Jesus in Salt Lake City

The Beehive House, 67 E South Temple St

Why the tour was free

By Morris Dean

My wife and I returned to Salt Lake City on April 30, hoping this time to have no problems with that city's street nomenclature. I had its coordinate system securely installed in my head this time, the x-axis being South Temple and the y-axis Main, and my mind was clear this time that South Temple (and all streets named South or North) run east-west, not north-south, which I had been confused about last October and was forever spinning my head over ["How long does it take to become fluent in Salt Lake City's street nomenclature?," October 29, 2014].

Thirst Satyrday for Eros: Erotic complications of a polygamous household

A product of Wasatch Brewery

A view from Salt Lake City

By Morris Dean

[Like Wednesday's column about Salt Lake City's street nomenclature and yesterday's limerick, playing off "Deseret," today's column was conceived in Salt Lake City, during our visit to Temple Square and admiring the two principal houses lived in by Brigham Young (1801-1877).]

My father-in-law told my wife when she was young (and years before I met her) that in a hard-scrabble economy such as he had experienced in Indiana and Missouri during the Depression, a family needed lots of children to work on the farm.

Thor's Day: Why I am not a Mormon

By Kyle Garza

I suppose I should begin in a way that lets you see my worldview as best I can explain it, just so you know where I’m coming from. I will try to go from broad to specific. I originally intended for this to be a very different post, but it took a turn I didn’t expect mid-way through.

Thor's Day: What’s wrong with Mormonism?

Or Scientology?

By Paul Clark 
(aka motomynd)

Moristotle recently published an article on Mormonism that was so well written by an obviously devout and well-informed Mormon, that I emailed the link to several people with whom I regularly discuss various views on religion and philosophy. To my surprise, they responded with feedback that was far more strident and negative than I expected.
    When I offered what mild defense I can muster for any “official” religion, one of my friends asked “What next? Are you going to start defending Scientology?”
    Which made me stop to think: Why is Scientology any worse than any of the other religious contrivances?

Political half-gainer

After ridiculing yet another of the myriad rationalizations he exposes in his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens states unequivocally on p. 379: "I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind."
    The statement could be this blogger's motto, called upon as I am, in my own small, self-respecting way, to expose religious absurditities and theological half-gainers.
    During the Republican presidential primary debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, Mitt Romney responded to comments about his religion's being a cult. He is reported by The Washington Post ("Mitt Romney takes on Mormon ‘cult’ comments, takes fire from GOP rivals") to have said: "That idea that we should choose people based on their religion is the one that I find to be most troubling."
    Rick Perry was one of the rivals present. He's the governor of Texas. Article 1, Section 4 of the Texas state constitution states that

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments....

    Pretty good, eh? You might not have thought that one of Romney's opponents had such a convenient rug for Romney to pull out from under him.
    Oh, but wait. The passage from the Texas state constitution specifies a provision:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being [emphasis mine]¹.

    Hey, come on, Rick, Mitt passes that test.

The trouble here, of course, really is that business about acknowledging the existence of a Supreme Being (a Supreme Being?—aren't we monotheists, here in America?). You do pretty much have to do that to be electable to higher political office anywhere in America, and not just in Texas.
    Or at least you have to not deny it—if you can avoid being asked where you stand in the first place. But what are the chances of that in an American political campaign?
    We have every reason to doubt that Romney's self-serving response doesn't mean that if he were to be chosen, he would oppose "the idea that we should choose people based on their being religious."
_______________

1. I didn't find this passage myself. A skeptical reader questioned one of my Christopher Hitchens quotes yesterday and did some fact-checking. Hitchens had said, "[Texas has] laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff." My skeptical reader reported that "The Hitchens quote is very close to the truth."

Moristotle and Sheepandgoats: A friendly set-to

Tom Sheepandgoats's February 4 post, "Elijah Crashes the Atheist Hall of Fame!," sparked an extended dialogue between him and Moristotle—all conducted in comments on that post and concluded yesterday by mutual consent.

The gist of "Elijah Crashes" is Tom's friendly contention that in the debate between atheists and theists, it's no contest, the theists (ably represented by Tom himself) will always win. The post wittily likens their debate to some ancients' pissing contests over whose god was the better. Tom rhetorically identifies the Biblical Elijah with the atheists in mocking the heathen followers of the god Baal. You might start by reading Tom's entertaining post. You can follow the debate either through the comments there or in what follows here:

[Posted by: Moristotle | February 5]:

The relevance of the mormu

The reporter from The Des Moines Sentinel stood up quickly and glared at the other reporters to warn them back. "Mr. Romney," he began, "do you wear a mormu?"
      Romney appeared stunned for a beat. "Mormu?"
      "Precisely. Do you wear one or not?...It's relevant."
      Romney didn't seem to know which way to go with this. He decided to go lawyerly. "Whether it's relevant remains to be seen...What is this mormu"?
      "Come, come, let's not play cute, as though you didn't actually inhale or something. Last week, you said—"
      "Wait a minute," said Romney. "You're talking about the Mormon
undergarment, aren't you? I'm on record that that isn't anybody's business."
      "You may be on record, but in 1980 it was people's business whether Ronnie relied on Nancy's astrological forecasts...."
      "That's preposterous!" Romney sputtered.
      "You have no argument there, sir...but the question, with all due respect of course, is: If you were elected president and happened not to be wearing your mormu when the red phone rang on the Armageddon box (or whatever of grave national import), would you be able to function?"
      Romney stared at the reporter from the Sentinel as more time went by than any presidential primary candidate would like in a tense situation like this.
      "What's wrong, Mr. Romney," someone in the back yelled, "aren't you wearing your Mormon magic underwear today?"

Truce to the preposition war

That the First Amendment calls for a truce is obvious. When it comes to religion (and non-religion), there are many potentially warring factions, for even though there is essentially only one non-religion, there's a big raft of religions. And the first clause (the one that guarantees freedom from religion) doesn't protect just the non-religious (from religion generally); it also protects the followers of the various religions from each other's religion (from religions particularly).

Episcopaleans, for example, are fully as happy as I am not to have to indulge Evangelicals or Jehovah's Witnesses (or anyone else who "reads the Bible literally"). And the really true-believing religionists, of course, are generally happy not to have any truck with those agnostic or (horrors!) even atheistic Unitarians and Episcopaleans. And many Americans, including religious Christians and Jews as well as the non-religious, are a little jumpy right now about Muslims, not least because many of even the most religious-sounding Christians don't really take their religion quite as seriously as really believing Muslims do (probably not even Mitt Romney). (Islam after all means "submission [to God]," and Muslim "one who surrenders [to God].") And, of course, American Muslims are reciprocally a little uneasy living in a country whose current "president" (born-again, no less) talks about crusading in the Middle East. (Muslims who aren't Americans are a little uneasy about that too. Bush of course would remind us—since he no longer has Gonzales to do it—that those Muslims aren't protected by our Constitution....)

So, the first clause protects everybody (who is covered by the Constitution).

Whom does the second clause protect? It says, "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." Since the non-religious don't "exercise religion," they have nothing for the second clause to protect. (Their interest in the First Amendment comes back into play in the third and following clauses.) So, the second clause is there to protect the religious, that they may go about "exercising" their religion "freely."

But what does "free exercise" mean? It must, of course, at least exclude actions that nullify the first clause....

Mormonism's prophet would be proud of Mitt

The first time I read Richard Dawkins's 2006 book, The God Delusion, I think I must have missed his reference to Mitt Romney. But I got it the second time around:

Joseph Smith, [Mormonism's] enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-centure English. Mormonism, however, has evolved since it was fabricated in the nineteenth century and has now become one of the respectable mainstream religions of America—indeed, it claims to be the fastest-growing one, and there is talk of fielding a presidential candidate. [emphasis mine; p. 201]

Smith too had announced for President of the United States, in 1844, a few months before a mob invaded the jail in Carthage, Illinois,

where Smith and some of his followers were being held, and shot him and his brother to death. Not even the First Amendment of the United States Constitution could protect the charismatic inventor without competent, dedicated support from the local authorities.

Mitt Romney gives still others pause, but some not

Mitt Romney also gives pause to a couple of op-ed columnists, David Brooks and Gail Collins of The New York Times. Brooks (a Jew, and politically conservative) expressed his pause on December 7:

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not....

Collins expressed hers the next day (December 8):

The peak of my sympathy for Mitt Romney came when he was being battered on one side by Christian fundamentalists who think his faith is a cult and on the other by fellow Mormons, who were irate when he fudged the fact that they believe Jesus will return to earth and build a new Jerusalem in Jackson County, Mo.

This week, Mitt made his much-anticipated religion speech, and stood up for his rights not to be discriminated against for his beliefs, and not to have to explain the part about Jackson County. Good for him on both counts.

... Except that you have to wonder why he felt compelled to dip into dogma just long enough to assure voters that he believes “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.”

Romney’s message, which boiled down to "let’s all be religious together," was certainly different from the John Kennedy version, which argued that a candidate’s religion is irrelevant. But then Kennedy was speaking to the country, while Romney had his attention fixed on the approximately 35,000 Iowa religious conservatives who will tip the balance in the first-in-the-nation Republican caucus....

Of course, some were not given pause by Romney's speech. Here's one Mormon's assessment of it:

From what I heard, I see no reason that anyone would feel that Romney tried to separate believers from non-believers. Non-believers are just those that have not yet seen fit to believe. Hopefully all will believe prior to their judgment day.

Leaving aside the question whether I will ever again believe (whatever efficacy that could possibly have), I told her about some of the pauses that I and others had gotten from Romney's speech. She seemed incredulous, and I was surprised that she seemed much threatened by our reservations:

I cannot understand how any intelligent being can deny the creator of our universe. Refusal to do so seems to me to be following the devil, who got kicked out of Heaven because he wanted to force everyone to do his bidding instead of using his right that God gave him to make his own choices to do right or wrong. The people who choose not to believe should stop trying to force others to lose their right to believe....Why are the non-believers trying to destroy all evidence of God from our buildings and money? If the name is so bothersome, why don't they just stay out of those buildings and not spend any money that has "In God we trust" on it? I find the pressure to remove all trace of God from America shortsighted and repulsive. I am not going out of my way to change someone else's beliefs by destroying what is important to others. I would appreciate the same courtesy.

I'm still trying to make sense of this, still trying to understand how belief in believing (as opposed, for example, to moral behavior) could have come to have such sway over Americans, we citizens of a nation born of Enlightenment political philosophy.