Faith helps us to move out into the impossible as Arthur C. Clarke put it. It allows us to transcend current knowledge in order to find new knowledge. It gives to artists their vision, to scientists their hunches and their hypotheses, and to activists their hope for a better future. Faith speculates based on current knowledge but cannot guarantee success. It allows us to move forward in the face of uncertainty. It expands our horizons.

Superstition, by contrast, has no solid basis in current knowledge. It may even be refuted by available evidence. It may even lie beyond the reach of future verification. It propagates through our ignorance and fear. It confers a false hope in the face of uncertainty. Superstition stultifies and prevents our future advancement.

I see prayer as a commonly practiced example of a superstition. We’ve attempted to verify the efficacy of prayer on behalf of others. It’s not clear that such prayer has any effect. The example that helped me to give up my own superstition was prayer for those with amputated limbs. No one has recovered a limb, whether they were prayed for or not, without the intervention of human medicine. If prayer were effective, why are amputees left out of God’s mercy?

From what I can tell, religious faith often amounts to little more than superstition.

Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, … if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. (Matthew 21:21–22)

For with God nothing shall be impossible. (Luke 1:37)

If nothing is impossible for God, why can’t he seem to muster the same benevolence as my child? Have adult believers learned to be less compassionate in their prayers in order to cover for God’s lack of compassion?

If I suffer from a fatal illness, for the love of me, please get me some medical treatment! Feel free to pray if that makes you feel better. Dab sacred oil on my head while invoking the aid of ancient, Sumerian, storm gods if you think it will help. Dance your mind away around the spilled guts of a sacrificial chicken for all I care. Just please pause in your superstitious mutterings and circumambulations long enough to get me safely into a competent doctor’s care. Then carry on.

If I get better, then please first thank the doctors whose application of godless medical science saved my life. I certainly will. Then you can go back to your storm gods and chicken innards if you like. I’ll thank you for your love and compassion and for caring enough to seek medical treatment. Don’t expect me to feel grateful for your application of superstition which has no power to heal me, or to save the life of an innocent child who deserved to live.

I was rounding up the girls to go home from church when I was approached by the Elders Quorum President to help him give a blessing. My heart sunk. I hated giving blessings even when I believed in Mormonism, but now I didn’t believe in God let alone modern prophets of God. Those doubts were still private, and I wanted to keep them that way for a while longer. I was trying to regain my testimony for my wife’s sake. Part of trying to gain a testimony was doing my priesthood duty.

So I followed the President toward the cultural hall. Two women and several children were waiting on the stairs leading to the stage. One woman I knew from church. The other I had never seen before in my life. This other was the woman whom I was being asked to prophesy over.

Giving a blessing always followed a pattern for me. Whenever someone asked for me to give them a blessing, my mind started racing. What would I say? Would God speak through me? Had there been anything that I did that I should have repented of? What would they think of me? What did God think of me? Would God support me in trying to do my duty?

I had been taught that if I opened my mouth in faith, God would fill it. It never happened that way for me: I never felt any special inspiration. I concluded that I must not have enough faith. I begged and pleaded with God to inspire me. I begged him to make me his worthy servant. All to no avail. It was always the same: I was left to my own devices.

I had never felt a special inspiration to say anything in particular while giving blessings. It was always a shot in the dark, a guess. For all I could tell, God didn’t care whether I promised a person that they would be healed completely or whether I told them to prepare for death. I never felt a special guidance.

So I always walked a tightrope. On the one hand, I could decline to pronounce a blessing and feel like a faithless, heartless schmuck, enduring their scorn. On the other, I could speak as if I knew the mind of God with a confidence that I didn’t feel, promising the moon only to look like a fool when my promises came to nothing. I was too afraid to do either one, so I split the difference and promised only safe things. Rarely would I promise someone complete healing. Only if the person was asking to be blessed for some minor illness that was unlikely to prove fatal would I promise them that they would recover. I always counseled them to listen to their doctors.

The same went for naming my babies. Naming babies was the mental anguish of giving a blessing magnified. The public ritual of naming a newborn and giving them a blessing in front of the congregation only made things worse. I would brainstorm good things that I wanted my children to have and that I presumed Heavenly Father would like them to have too (since we both loved our children). I would pray about my ideas beforehand to see if God approved. I wouldn’t feel anything special either way, as if God were saying “Sure, whatever. Sounds good to me.” I agonized, fasted, and prayed over what I would say, and the most I got was a shrug of the divine shoulders?

We all walked up to the stage, the woman seeking a blessing sat in a chair, and we gathered around her. I asked the woman to give me her full name. I repeated it back to her to avoid any embarrassing mistakes. I put my hands on her head, the President covered my hands with his own, and everyone else folded their arms and closed their eyes.

Those Sisters (it was always Sisters) sat there expecting me to speak for God like it was the easiest thing in the world. I secretly resented when women would ask me for blessings, for putting me through this torture. I tried to forgive them by telling myself that if they really knew what it was like, they probably wouldn’t ask. I think many Mormon men don’t ask for blessings because they know what it’s like for the person giving the blessing (and deep down they know how uninspired most blessings are).

With few exceptions, blessings never seemed to do much of anything. People would get better (except for when they didn’t) in due time, just like any Gentile would. I never witnessed any miraculous cures or extraordinary instances of prophesy. I never saw the blind given sight, the deaf made to hear, a lost limb restored, or the dead raised to life. As far as I could tell, the world went on spinning regardless of whether or not someone received a blessing. Subconsciously, this made my resentment for being asked to give a blessing even greater because I felt like we could skip the pointless exercise and spare me the mental anguish.

I sent one more silent, urgent prayer that God would guide my words, and I began. “Sister X, in the name of Jesus Christ and through the authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood, we lay our hands on your head to give you a blessing of comfort and peace.”

With the easy part over, I took a deep breath. Feeling no special inspiration, I told her safe, comforting things. “Your Heavenly Father loves you.” “Your family life will improve as you attend church.” “Be diligent in your scripture study and prayer.” “Listen to your priesthood leaders.” I said whatever I thought she wanted to hear.

In this way, this blessing was different than all the previous blessings that I had given in my life. I was consciously lying to her. All the other times, I had some hope that God would come through for me and fill my mind with his divine will. This time I had lost that hope.

If I had been honest, I would have declined to go through this ritual which had become empty for me. But doing so would be to admit that I lacked faith or that I was somehow unworthy of God’s communication. And they wanted to hear comforting words. How could I refuse to give them comfort? I just wanted to do the right thing and make everyone happy.

So I did the best I could with what I had. When asked, I showed up and begged for divine guidance. Lacking that as I always did, I said what I could without overcommitting myself.

From various talks given in church by other men, I don’t think I was the only one. One man during my missionary years openly admitted in a fireside that he usually just said safe, comforting things. One stake president taught in stake priesthood meeting that we should feel no pressure to prophesy when called upon to give a blessing. It was a nice idea, but impossible for me in practice. People expected to hear some prophesy, and I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint them by admitting that I wasn’t capable of it.

I left church that day knowing that I couldn’t lie anymore. I dropped a letter in the mail to my Stake President the very next Tuesday. I am so grateful that I never have to give another blessing.

Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21. They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.

At midnight, with no sign of a spaceship in the yard, the group felt a little nervous. By 2 a.m., they were getting seriously worried. At 4:45 a.m., Mrs. Keech had a new vision: The world had been spared, she said, because of the impressive faith of her little band. “And mighty is the word of God,” she told her followers, “and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.”

The group’s mood shifted from despair to exhilaration. Many of the group’s members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.

(Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), via The Situationist)

Quite a few prophecies have failed, yet people still believe. We’ve expected Jesus to come again for two thousand years, for example. It seems like people have been saying “any day now” forever, at least since the day he died.

Why don’t we collectively say “You know what, we were wrong. Christ really isn’t coming.”? Even if Christ really is coming (the big tease), disbelief would be a reasonable reaction after two millennia of disappointment. Why does the biggest failed (so far?) prophecy in history fail to cause widespread disbelief?

One reason is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when there are two conflicting beliefs fighting it out in our minds. For example, if I believe myself to be an honest person, but I cheat on my taxes, this conflicting information will cause cognitive dissonance. I will probably do one of two things: I could either stop cheating on my taxes, or I could rationalize my dishonesty, perhaps by saying that I worked hard for my money and I deserve it.

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions — especially the wrong ones — is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways. (Ibid.)

In the case of the Second Coming, we don’t want to believe that we could be duped. “I’m not the kind of person who could fall for silly stuff like horoscopes, crystals, doomsday cults, and the like. But Christianity is different. Christianity is real. If it weren’t, I would see right through it because I’m not easily fooled.”

Personally, I have spent a lot of time in my life telling people that I knew that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, that Jesus loves us, and God has a plan for our lives. I spent two years doing this full time. I spent countless hours saying this and hearing it repeated in church services. Much of my life has been spent inside the walls of a church. I estimate that I’ve spent at least one full year of my life in church meetings. The church received 10% of my earnings before taxes, my whole life, every last penny. After committing so much time and energy to my beliefs, it was uncomfortable to think that I’d sacrificed all that for a lie.

I’m no fool, or so I like to tell myself. If my beliefs were false, then I’d have realized it a long time ago. False prophecies? You’re reading them wrong. Polygamy? It was God’s will. Racism? Talk to God ’cause I didn’t make the rules. Christianity borrowed from previous mythologies? No, the mythologies borrowed from Christianity. Contradictions in Holy Scripture? Errors in translation. Unanswered prayers? Maybe the answer was “No” or “Wait”, or maybe you weren’t faithful enough for God to speak to you.

I rationalized from morning till night. Evidence against my beliefs surrounded me. I constantly battled to preserve my self image as an intelligent, independent thinker. The truth was that I spent my intelligence in rationalization and followed like a sheep because I was too proud to admit that I didn’t see the Emperor’s clothes. I was the very thing I pretended not to be. I held on to my beliefs kicking and screaming until I was forced to see their absurdity.

I shared my nightmares with my mother. She suggested that I pray about it, asking Heavenly Father to remove the nightmares. I prayed as she suggested, and the nightmares went away. I felt comforted that God was answering my prayers.

I now sit in church meetings as an outside observer. I often ponder on what brings people to sit in church for three hours on a Sunday. There must be some real benefits to induce them. What is real about the religious experience despite the unreality of God?

Comfort is one answer. There is real comfort available in religion. I received comfort when I prayed that my nightmares would end. Mourners receive real comfort when they imagine their deceased loved ones received into a paradisaical afterlife where they in turn will meet their dead when their time comes. It is reassuring to believe that an all-powerful being is directing our lives for our good.

Community is another answer. We flock with birds of a feather. Religion brings like-minded people together on a regular basis and encourages them to become a community. Human beings are communal creatures, and religion helps to fulfill our need to feel connected with others.

Transcendent experiences are a third answer. Adherents of religions throughout the world have real experiences involving overwhelming peace and a sense of connection and transcendence. These experiences fulfill our innate need to find a greater meaning for our life than brute survival and reproduction.

Answers to our questions are yet another benefit of religion. Curious by nature, we hate not knowing the answer to a question. Real, truthful answers are hard to come by, but we can be sated with answers that have the semblance of reality. Why does the universe exist? No one rightly knows, but it’s nice to have an answer that assuages our curiosity as long as we don’t scrutinize it too closely.

Direction is the final answer that I will mention. Without goals to work toward, life becomes a tedium of recurring cycles without end. Without purpose, we languish in a meandering existence that goes nowhere in particular. If our life doesn’t serve a greater purpose, then why live at all? Religion gives us ready-made goals to work for. We don’t have to scrounge around for our own.

Religion provides real benefits irrespective of the truthfulness of its claims. The faithful often cite these benefits as evidence in favor of those claims. A placebo has no curative benefit beyond the patient’s belief therein. The benefits of religion cannot easily be ascribed to the existence of deity. Perhaps belief in something—any plausible lie—will do.

(via Pharyngula)

Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood…
Matthew 26:26–28

Did Jesus not command us to kill him? To break his body and drink his blood? He commanded us to take and bind him, scourge him, and ultimately crucify him. He went to the cross willingly so that we could find nourishment in pieces of his rent flesh and spilt blood. His corpse was the bread of life and the fountain of living waters. We locked his body in the tomb of our churches, thinking to reverence it. His truth defied the sepulcher of our reverence. He rose on the third day, free from the prison of our pallid devotion. If we look for Jesus in the tomb of our faith, we should expect to hear the answer which mocks our pride “He is not here, for he is risen.”

It is only in his death that we find salvation from error and deceit. The truth is not in our books, doctrines, myths, sacraments, beliefs, ordinances, rites, dogmas, idols, commandments, or beliefs. The truth is too large for them to contain it. It is the sweet aroma which escapes from their dead bodies. Our Jesus-shaped idols will not answer our prayers. Jesus demands that we kill him that we may gain life. He that loves Jesus’ life shall lose it. He that hates Jesus’ life shall gain eternal life.

Only one Apostle had ears to hear His words. Only one Apostle had the courage to follow the commandments of his Lord. Only his most beloved Apostle loved Jesus enough to set him free.

Kill God. Lay him on the altar. Stay not the blade that ends the innocent life. Let the burnt offering send a sweet savor up to the empty heavens. Consume the offering of Jonah’s flesh and blood. Digest him in the depths of your belly bringing health to your navel and marrow to your bones. Make his carcass live again in the temple of your own body and blood. Bid all saints to come forth from the grave and walk among the living, rejoicing in the deliverance of the tyrant Jesus crucified. Proclaim to the world “God is dead! I am become God!”

As I sought a greater connection with God through study and prayer, I learned that the history of the Mormon church isn’t what it is portrayed to be. I have encountered anti-Mormon literature throughout my life like most members of the Church. It caused me some moments of panicked doubt, but through study and the help of others, I was able to see through the spiteful lies and return to faith.

Things were different when I read Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman, currently serving as a Stake Patriarch. This book wasn’t filled with lies from the anti-Mormon crowd. It presented what the historical evidence seems to say without bias for or against the LDS church.

It became clear from this book and others that the Mormon religion wasn’t founded by a heroic, almost god-like prophet of the last days, but by a deeply flawed human being. Brother Joseph may have had experiences which led him to feel a divine vocation, but I saw little evidence that the Church was actually led by the hand of God. Joseph lived as a human being, full of pride, anger, and lust. He fell victim to his own power. He seduced young women and other men’s wives into sexual relationships through charisma and the promise of eternal salvation for themselves and their families. Only after his first affair did he mention to anyone the doctrine of polygamy. In case it didn’t come through the first time I said it, Joseph Smith was married to other men’s wives while the men were still alive and married. In a handful of cases, Joseph Smith practiced polyandry. That was news to me.

There were missteps, blunders, and doctrinal reversals at every step of early Church history. Joseph’s inept leadership culminated in Joseph and Hyrum’s assassinations and the exile of most of the Saints into the Rocky Mountains. The Saints were not strictly innocent victims as we often see portrayed by the LDS church. They provoked some of their own troubles.

I next read Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 by Thomas G. Alexander. This was another scholarly work which presented a balanced history of the Mormons in Utah during this pivotal time. The book treated many themes, but the ones that stuck with me concern:

1. the radical changes in doctrine during this time like the abandonment of the Adam-God theory which had been taught in the Temple Endowment for a time
2. the continued, secret solemnization of polygamous marriages by members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve well into the twentieth century despite public avowals to the contrary
3. the consolidation of centralized priesthood authority in the church which removed the autonomy of the Relief Society and the other auxiliary organizations (the Relief Society had been a parallel organization to the priesthood)
4. the change in emphasis from worship centered around gifts of the Spirit to attendance at the temple (this change also further reduced the autonomy of the Sisters of the Church who were probably the most fervent practitioners of the Gifts, who for example, would often heal members of Church through their spiritual gifts)
5. the nascent development of a literalist orthodoxy which changed the original, freeform, creedless Mormonism into the more authoritarian, exclusive religion we are familiar with today

I next read David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Gregory A Prince and Wm Robert Wright. This book tells the story of how Mormonism was transformed into something that is easily recognizable to modern members. It traces the continued consolidation of power and authority and the continued creation of an LDS orthodoxy. It also portrayed the machinations and politics at the highest levels of the Church which betrays the image of calm unanimity which is portrayed to the public. It only added another damning witness to the previous two books in my eyes.

At this point, I was on pretty shaky ground. I was a member of a church that I no longer recognized. I didn’t know whether to give up on Mormonism entirely or to become a fundamentalist Mormon in hopes of regaining something which was lost.

Enter the new crop of atheist authors, stage right. I never read any of Dawkins’, Harris’, or Dennet’s books, but I became familiar with their ideas through snippets of text and video on the internet.

I don’t think I’ve shared this anywhere else yet, but the following two sites were a central turning point when I became aware of how absurd a belief in God looked when observed objectively: Why Won’t God Heal Amputees and Kissing Hank’s Ass (video inspired by Kissing Hank’s Ass). The first asks a very provocative question. Had I ever heard of an amputee made whole through prayer? Why not? I thought I had a good answer to this challenging question, but as I read through that site, I realized that my answer was only a weak rationalization to preserve a belief which seemed more and more like simple superstition.

It all comes down to this: what the atheists said made sense on a level that all my religious training did not. My experiences, when I looked at them honestly, confirmed the atheists’ viewpoint much more than it confirmed the Mormon doctrines. I had never seen God or felt any special communion with Him. I never had a witness of the Holy Spirit that could be distinguished from a simple emotional response. I had never witnessed any miracles. Answers to my prayers had been sporadic and indistinguishable from natural phenomena. The leaders of the LDS church seemed like nothing more than sincere men who acted with no more insight than other intelligent managers in the business world.

My world under the burden of my religious faith had been filled with guilt, fear, and superstition. If you had told me this at the time, I would have denied it. The world was peachy keen from where I stood. I was a fish swimming in an ocean of water, ignorant of the true nature of my surroundings. I must say the following exactly as it is: the Mormon church laid a mighty awful mindfuck on me. It’s only now that I can see that.

Giving up on Mormonism, Satan, and God has made the world make sense. I was always struggling to reconcile my beliefs with what I saw in the world around me. I never dug too deeply into religious doctrines because it only ended in paradox and infinite regress. My mind is now unfettered by filial, cultural, or dogmatic constraints. I feel no obligation to believe anything that isn’t reasonable to me.

All the days of my life I had never known the pleasure of pure intellectual integrity. Now that I’ve tasted that fruit which is most precious and sweet above all that is sweet, I will not be easily persuaded to turn back to the pandemonium of the great and spacious houses of religious ignorance and pride.