I met a mormon!
So the other day, I had my first encounter with a Mormon. Mormons are pretty rare here in BC, and for most British Columbians, our main exposure to them is reading about that Mormon splinter group that lives up in the mountains and still practices polygamy, and so I’ve sort of wanted to have a chance to play with one of them for some time now. Predictably enough, it didn't go so well for him.
I was walking down the street quite close to where I live, when I was stopped by a young Mexican man in a suit and tie, wearing a name tag identifying himself as "Elder Gonzales". He told me he was looking for Spanish-speaking people to speak to, and that he was having some difficulty with this. I let him know that he was probably in the wrong neighborhood for that; we're mostly Caucasians and African immigrants in this area. Having hooked me into a conversation with his clever ice breaker, he then entered into his spiel.
"I've met a lot of people in this area who want to learn more about god."
"Funny you should say that", I replied, wise already to the nature of his sales pitch, "I've looked into the demographics of this area, and it's interesting: You've got, say, 20% Catholic, 18% Protestant, that sort of thing. But the largest group - some thirty per cent or whatever - is 'no religion'. I actually take a lot of pride in that."
"Are you an atheist", he asked me.
"I am."
"And why do you believe there's no god?"
"Why do you believe there's no Osiris?"
"Uh..."
"Why do you believe there's no Thor? Why do you believe there's no Tezcatlipoca?"
His eyes lit up at this, having something to latch onto. "I'm from Mexico, actually, and you know about Tezcatlipoca's brother, Quetzalcoatl? He was a lot like Jesus."
"In that Jesus was a giant feathered serpent?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Well, the serpent is a symbol for life..." he began, regaling me with a tale of Moses waving around a snake on a stick in some story which I was only vaguely familiar with, but which had a much different meaning for me than it did for him.
"Are you familiar with the name Asherah?" I asked him.
"No."
"She was a goddess worshipped by ancient Canaanite peoples, and in various guises, various names, like Ishtar and Astarte, throughout the middle-east in the years before the dawn of Judaism. Basically a mother-goddess and a goddess of wisdom. And in the way that a lot of gods back then had all sorts of symbols which represented them in different ways, she was symbolized by serpents and trees."
He actually seemed pretty sincerely curious about this, and I continued in earnest. "Now, you know how in the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis, the Christian god is like 'Let us create them, man and woman, in our images?' but it's not exactly clear who he's talking to? Well..." I went on to explain the case which I more or less laid out in this post over here. I was surprised and a little impressed at how receptive he was to all of this.
"So you're saying that the story changed over time," he concluded.
"Basically, yeah. The first five books of the bible are sort of a hodge-podge of different stories, different myths, all woven together into one Frankensteinian whole. The Asherah bits sort of got left in the beginning of the bible, but her name got removed. But that's where the serpent imagery comes from, and I think that's what was going on with Moses in that story you mentioned. It's not a Quetzalcoatl thing, it's an Asherah thing."
He went on to ask if I thought that anything in the bible was true. I told him that I thought that, after the first five books of the bible were woven together in the time of the Jews' exile in Babylon, they started writing their new books in ways which incorporated actual things which were going on in their lives, but mythologizing them as they went along. He then asked if I knew about all of the prophecies which were written about in these books and which were later fulfilled.
"A lot of those are what's called Pseudepigraphal writing'", I replied, "Written as though they were the words of some guy, but long after he actually died, and long after the events supposedly being prophesied. Like, imagine if I were to prophecy right here, right now, that on September 11th, 2001, a couple of planes were going to slam into the World Trade Centre. Would that make me a prophet? Of course not. You know how language evolves over the course of centuries, right? You can look at Shakespeare’s works and say 'okay, this was written in the 16th century', based upon the language being used. The same is true of ancient Hebrew. A lot of those prophecies were written in older versions of the language than were being used in the lifetimes of the guys supposedly writing them, and so we know that they're not legit."
He plainly saw that he was getting nowhere with this tactic, and shifted gears a bit, offering up that "You know, when I pray to god, my prayers are often answered. I know he's taking care of me."
"A lot of people in other religions, who worship other gods, could say exactly the same thing. Do you accept this as proof that their gods are real?"
"I think that god is merciful, and sometimes he'll look down upon them and decide to grant their prayers."
"Ah, but don't you see?" I asked, "If you're willing to accept the idea that sometimes a prayer to 'God A' can be answered by 'God B', then it seems JUST as likely, given what you're saying, that your god isn't real, and you're praying to nothing more than an empty spot in the sky, and some, say, Hindu goddess up there is like 'Oh, look at poor Elder Gonzales down there. He just has no idea, but he means so well. I'm feeling generous today. I think I'll grant his prayer.' I'm not saying," I continued, "that I believe this is the case, just that your premise does not seem to support your conclusion."
"Do you believe", he asked me, "that if there were a god, one god, that he would be the same for everybody?"
"If such an entity existed," I allowed, "then, yeah, he would have one mind, one set of experiences, of emotions, and all that. He would be a single distinct being, and would be the same to everyone to the same extent that I am the same me to everyone".
"The same being", he clarified (I guess), "unchanging, forever?"
"Well, I don't know about that", I said. "It seems that even if such a being existed, he could change over time. Perhaps be a bumbling toddler, uncertain and unsure of himself in the time of the Garden of Eden, an angry teenager around the time of the flood, a jealous, bloodthirsty, vengeful tyrant of a god throughout the rest of the Old Testament, then mellowing out in the New Testament, and then, I don't know, retiring in his old age, gradually going senile and then passing away comfortably in his sleep, surrounded by family and friends some time in the 17th century." I wish now in retrospect that I had thought to throw in a 'mid-life crisis in which he attempts to recapture his youth by becoming a baby Jesus at one point', but maybe I'll remember for next time.
"That's... a different point of view", he replied, smiling uncomfortably.
"Well, if we're entertaining the idea that such a being exists, then it seems it's fair game to entertain the idea that there's such an arc to his life."
He spent a little time trying to extol the virtues of faith, which I dismissed roundly in favour of evidence-based thinking. Peculiarly, he answered this by talking about how we can know that there's a Holy Ghost without needing evidence. I disagreed with this point. He then went on to talk about the spirit or the soul. "Don't you believe there's something inside of us that we can't see or measure, that survives after we die?"
"You know how, when the brain is damaged, the intellect is damaged as well sometimes?" I asked, "Memories, emotions, computing power, whatever? Your mind is diminished by damage to the brain, right?" He agreed that this was the case. "Well if that's the case, then doesn't it seem that if the brain is damaged ENTIRELY - as in, destroyed, killed, etc - then the mind, the intellect should similarly be destroyed?"
He evinced some confusion on this point, still trying to assert the existence of this soul, saying it was in some way separate from the functions of the brain. I replied "I just don't see that there's room for it. I don't see that it has a place. It seems to me that the brain accounts for the intellect pretty well without needing some invisible and ephemeral counterpart."
He changed tactics again around this point, talking now about the founder of his religion, Joseph Smith, with whom I was not entirely unfamiliar, though I concede that I've always viewed him as a marginal enough whack-job that he didn't deserve too much attention from me. I didn't make this point clear to Elder Gonzales, mind you, since he seemed like such a nice youngster.
He talked about the supposed oracular and prophetic powers of the man, citing a number of examples, most of which struck me as a trifle picayune, and which at any event - and I pointed this out to him - I didn't know enough about to be able to comment on with any confidence. He then went on to ask if he had all of these accurate prophecies, was this not proof of god?
"Well, again," I answered him, "It seems to me that your conclusion does not necessarily follow from your premise. Even if I did allow that the man had these oracular abilities you say he did, and that they had some supernatural source, how do we know he wasn't... say, a witch? It could be he derived his powers from witchcraft, and just lied to his followers about the god business because he knew that's what they would listen to, and that's what would win him all the followers he wanted, and by extension, all the wives he could handle?" I refrained, by a massive exertion of will, both here and throughout the rest of the conversation, from making reference to Joseph Smith being "balls-deep in bitches", because, though I thought it would be funny, I was enjoying the conversation and didn't really want to insult him.
This did lead to him trying to defend his religion's founder's polygamy, saying "In his journal, he talked about how much it hurt him to have to hurt his wife by taking other wives..."
"Well, that's what he said in his journal, which he plainly didn't mean to keep secret, or else we wouldn't be discussing it today. Maybe he wrote it there so if his wife found it..." I shrugged, grinning meaningfully.
"But it didn't benefit him to have all of those wives, it caused him nothing but trouble. Why would he want it unless god told him to take them?"
"YOU can't understand how it benefitted him," I replied, "because you're not a megalomaniac. To a megalomaniac, controlling as many people as possible is its own reward."
He expressed a little confusion as to the term, but seemed to pick it up quickly enough when I explained it. "He was able to control all of those women, and all of the men who followed him by rewarding them with women. Those he didn't like, they got no wives, because there wasn't enough to go around, and so all of those male lines were allowed to die out."
Elder Gonzales was getting pretty uncomfortable with this kind of talk. I suspect he sort of understood that I was right - modern-day Mormons aren't raised with the idea that Polygamy is something to be proud of - and so he was in the awkward position of defending something which he felt was wrong, but which paradoxically his god at one point had supposedly said was right. Naturally, I capitalized upon this.
"Of course, your church dropped that commandment from god once it became expedient to do so because you'd be unable to join the United States unless you did so. Unlike that splinter group up in the interior of BC that still practices polygamy..."
"They're no longer a part of our church" he firmly asserted.
"No, no, of course not. Because they never forsook the word of their god for the sake of political convenience, right?"
Characteristically, he shifted gears again here, deciding to discuss Joseph Smith once again, telling me about how he was gunned down by an angry mob, and had prophesied that this would happen.
"Doesn't that seem more like a keen and insightful mind to you?" I asked, "I mean I could prophecy that if I were to poke you in the eyes enough times," I pantomimed doing so, repeatedly, "You'd eventually get pretty mad at me. I don't think that predicting that the people you keep on pissing off will eventually take it out on you is necessarily supernatural."
There was some more talk of Smith's supposed oracular abilities, which I began to gather was probably one of his favourite things to talk about, coming back to the topic of his death. "You know, he had a militia that he could have used to protect himself, they were much larger than the authorities that were holding him, but he didn't, because he didn't want there to be any bloodshed."
"Hold on, wait a minute," I said, thinking this over quickly. "You're saying he prophesied that he was going to be killed by a mob, and then went ahead and pissed them off, and then didn't do what was in his power to stop them from killing him? That sounds to me a little like he created the very situation he prophesied, or at least did nothing to stop it from happening. If he had used this militia to protect himself, he would have been disproving his own prophecy and thus making a liar of himself, right?"
This really flustered the young Elder, and it was around this time that he decided that maybe he was wasting his time - or worse, allowing the seeds of doubt to be planted in his fertile imagination - and decided to cut me loose. "It was nice meeting you", he said.
"Well, I would imagine it would be!" I shouted, grinning from ear to ear.
"You have a good day", he replied, not unfriendly.
"I will endeavour to do just this! I shouted as I began to walk away. "You do the same, you hear?"
I hummed happily to myself as I resumed my journey down the street. All told, it had lasted half an hour or so, and I feel it was time well-spent.
I find it interesting, in retrospect, that he spent as much time on Joseph Smith as everything else combined, and that moreover, although he was willing to entertain my discussion of his god being a mythological figure and joshing about about him, but doing so with ol' Joe Smith didn't go down so well. I wonder if this is representative of the worldview of Mormons in general. What little I've seen of them seems to suggest this, and if so, I wonder what it says about Mormonism that the thing they're mainly excited about is the personal mythology their founder invented about himself.
Edit: I also posted this in the atheism community, where there's some decent discussion in the comments worth checking out: http://community.livejournal.com/atheism/2043912.html